Transcript of meeting on HemisFair '68 Page: 1
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Culberson
Slaughter
Glass &
DuBose, inc. Corporate Design Consultants, Graphics, Packaging
4916 Kelvin
Houston,Texas
77005 JA6-4086
August 24, 1965
TRANSCRIPT
Allison Peery, Richard Wilson, Jim Glass
Mr. Peery:
About 1962, a few guys in San Antonio got the notion of having the World's Fair,
but more particularly, a Fair of the Americas. Their idea was "Here we sit,
half-way between the North and South, bilingual, bicultural. Our trade with
Mexico is well established in this city, our relationships with Mexico and to some
extent Central America are well established in the culturalIea or in the idea
area, but San Antonio has never really found its place in the S-4W.. as opposed
to Houston or Los Angeles or Dallas, as with a tentative hold on being a financial
center. San Antonio has a lovely physical state, an exciting historical past with
a kind of manana attitude toward life that doesn't really reflect what the people
who live here want to do; it is just that they have never really found out what they
want to do. But this idea was proposed and everybody said; 'This is it! This is
what we want to do." We want to be the place in this hemisphere where the cross
currents, the dialogue between the nations come to a point of focus in terms of trade,
in terms of sharing ideas, journalism, planning, medicine, vocational training,
whatever it might be. Now this all has to do with permanency--and it is the permanent
aspect of this venture that the town's leadership is most interested in. The Fair
is a gimmick, it is a catalyst to achieve this thing.
Our Congressman, Henry S-& Gonzales is a second generation Mexican. Incidentally, he
championed this idea immediately, and he carried the ball in terms of being the
honorary co-chairman along with our Mayor, which brings me to a second point.
San Antonio has many factions: political, economic, racial, what have you. In this
venture, all of these forces have come together. The first thing we did was raise
8 million dollars in private pledges from the private sectors of the community',
businessmen, individuals and so forth. These pledges are banked and we borrowed
against them from the banks for operating expenses. The money borrowed u up to
4 1 million dollars, which 4te our proposed pre-opening expenses. The next thing that
happened in January 1964, we passed a 30 million dollar bond issue to get the town
ready for HemisFair. Part of it, 10 million dollars, is for the new convention
center which will be on the site--a permanent thing. That bond issue passed in every
precinct of the city by a margin of 3 to 1 or more, including a margin of 4 to 1
in the very areas this thing is going, where the people knew their businesses and
homes would be taken. So the idea has really caused the community to gell behind
it and has got the full support of the community.
The next thing we did was go to the State of Texas and seek an appropriation for
the state to participate as an exhibitor with a permanent building, so that the
state could, in terms of the good neighbor commission and that sort of thing, plug
in during and after the Fair and continue to work within the general notions that we
have of this thing we call the North-South Center, or the Latin American Institute,
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Transcript of meeting on HemisFair '68, text, August 27, 1965; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth66122/m1/3/: accessed July 17, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting UT San Antonio Libraries Special Collections.