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GROUNDBREAKING 

AT  THE 

NEW  YORK  WORLD'S  FAIR 

1964-1965 


The 

Continental 

Insurance 

Companies 

May  10,  1963 


Excerpts  from  transcription  of  remarks  made  by 
officials  of  The  Continental  Insurance  Companies 
and  the  World's  Fair  at  groundbreaking  cere- 
monies for  The  Continental  Insurance  Compa- 
nies Pavilion,  New  York  World's  Fair,  Friday, 
May  10,  1963. 


MARTIN  STONE  [Director  of  Industrial  Section]: 
Ladies  and  gentlemen,  thank  you  very  much  for  coming 
to  this  groundbreaking  ceremony.  We  thank  you,  The 
Continental  Insurance  Companies,  and  the  37,000  agents 
and  13,600  employees  whom  you  represent. 

I  think  it's  significant  that  Continental  Insurance  Com- 
panies, as  official  insurers  of  the  Fair,  have  provided  us 


with  this  lovely  weather  this  morning. 

Yesterday  we  had  occasion  to  welcome  a  great  soldier, 
General  MacArthur,  here  at  the  Fair,  and  today  we  wel- 
come another  soldier  —  the  Continental  Soldier  of  The 
Continental  Insurance  Companies. 

At  this  time  I  would  like  to  introduce  Mr.  J.  Victor 
Herd,  chairman  of  The  Continental  Insurance  Companies. 
Mr.  Herd  has  been  in  the  insurance  field  all  his  adult 
life.  He  started  as  a  map  clerk  and  examiner  in  St.  Louis, 
Missouri,  and  has  climbed  through  the  ranks  to  his  pres- 
ent position.  He  is  a  director  of  many  other  companies 
including  AT&T,  Manufacturers  Hanover  Trust,  Union 
Carbide  and  IBM  World  Trade.  He  is  also  director  of 
many  charities,  among  them  the  Red  Cross,  Salvation 
Army  and  the  Heart  Fund.   I  now  present  Mr.  Herd. 


Cover:  The  facade  of  The  Continental  Insurance  Companies  Pavilion  will  be  a  strikingly  modern  shadow  box,  framing  an 
off-center  projection  screen;  an  entrance  ramp  will  be  flanked  by  soaring  80-foot  spires.  Architect  for  this  attractive 
building  is  Gordon  Powers  and  designers  are  Vandeburg-Linkletter  Associates. 


1963  New  York  World's  Fair  1964-1965  Corporation 


J.  VICTOR  HERD  [Chairman,  Continental  Insurance 
Companies]:  Mr.  Stone,  Mr.  Moses,  more  affectionately 
known  to  many  of  us  as  Bob,  friends.  I  think  perhaps 
Mr.  Stone  might  appropriately  have  included  in  his 
acknowledgements  our  46,000  stockholders.  This  must 
turn  out  to  be  a  financial  success  if  some  of  us  are  to 
hold  our  jobs,  and  based  on  what  I  have  seen  since  the 
Fair  began  to  take  shape,  I  am  sure  it's  going  to  be  the 
sort  of  thing  that  we  are  going  to  continue  to  be  proud 
of  and  be  associated  with. 

When  we  learned  that  this  whole  project  would  be 
under  the  immediate  control  and  supervision  of  Robert 
Moses,  our  officers  and  our  executive  committee  had  no 
hesitancy  whatsoever  in  taking  the  lead,  and  I  think,  Bob, 
we  were  the  first  to  subscribe  to  the  bonds.  By  doing  so, 
we  established  a  precedent  which,  I  think,  made  it  some- 
what easier  for  the  bankers  in  charge  to  convince  other 
insurance  capital  that  this  was  something  they  should  go 
along  with.  At  that  time,  I  must  confess,  we  were   in 


doubt  as  to  whether  to  enter  the  subscription  under  the 
heading  of  a  contribution,  an  asset  or  a  liability.  We  are 
sure  now  that  it  will  be  an  asset  and  probably  there  will 
be  some  spirited  bidding  for  those  bonds  long  before 
the  maturity  date  is  reached. 

Our  interest  in  the  Fair  has  undergone  some  other 
transformations.  At  the  outset,  we  realized  that  a  com- 
pany such  as  ours,  created  in  1853  as  a  creature  of  the 
State  of  New  York,  must  participate  in  this  Fair  to  retain 
its  position  of  pre-eminence  and  predominance  in  the 
economy  of  the  state  and  of  the  nation.  We  have  now 
reached  the  conviction  that  this  is  probably  one  of  the 
wisest  decisions  that  we've  ever  made,  because  I  am  sure 
and  confident  that  the  investment  in  this  project  will  give 
us  an  image,  or  a  stature,  in  world  economy  that  we  could 
not  otherwise  have  attained  at  many  times  the  cost  of 
this  investment.  We  are  very  grateful  to  all  of  you  —  the 
press,  our  directors,  the  cross-section  of  producers  and 
representatives  who  have  joined  us  here  today. 


Robert  Moses,  president  of  the  New  York  World's  Fair  Cor- 
poration (center)  shown  with  officials  of  Continental  Insurance 
Companies:  (left  to  right)  Samuel  Riker,  Jr.,  director;  J.  Victor 
Herd,  chairman;  Robert  Moses;  Newbold  Herrick,  director; 
and  Henry  E.  Coe  III,  director. 


I  told  Mr.  Moses  that  if  you  were  going  to  award 
medals  for  brevity  of  speeches  I  wanted  to  be  right  in  the 
running  for  that  award  when  that  time  comes.  With  these 
few  remarks  which  do  not  bear  too  much  resemblance  to 
the  formal  press  release  which  was  put  together  for  me 
to  read,  I  am  going  to  surrender  this  microphone  to  Mr. 
Stone.  Thank  you. 

MARTIN  STONE:  Thank  you,  Mr.  Herd.  I  am  sorry 
to  have  omitted  the  46,000  stockholders.  We'll  be  sure 
not  to  omit  them  as  potential  visitors  to  the  Fair. 

The  next  speaker  leaves  for  Europe  tomorrow.  I  now 
present  Mr.  Robert  Moses,  president  of  the  New  York 
World's  Fair. 

ROBERT  MOSES:  Mr.  Stone,  Mr.  Herd,  friends.  I'm 
one  of  those  fellows  who,  I  hope,  are  not  unique  or  un- 
usual —  who  takes  time  to  be  grateful  to  his  friends  for 
what  they've  done  for  him.  When  we  initiated  this  enter- 
prise there  was  considerable  skepticism  and  doubt.  I 
thought  it  over  pretty  carefully  before  coming  in.   I'd 


seen  something  of  the  first  world's  fair,  picked  the  site 
in  1937  when  I  was  City  Park  Commissioner,  and  pre- 
pared the  grounds  which  were  later  turned  over  to  Grover 
Whalen  who  was  president  of  the  first  world's  fair.  I 
little  thought  at  that  time  that  I'd  be  back  again  on  the 
same  grounds  on  more-or-less  the  same  errand. 

A  great  deal  has  happened  since  then.  Everything  is 
on  a  bigger  scale.  We  haven't  any  more  acreage  to  speak 
of,  only  about  100  acres  more,  and  we're  not  using  all 
the  acreage  we  have.  You  get  some  idea  of  the  scope 
when  you  consider  that  there  will  be  twice  as  much  space 
occupied  in  square  feet  as  there  was  in  the  previous  fair, 
and  roughly  ten  times  as  much  as  there  was  in  Seattle. 
Seattle  had  about  65  usable  acres ;  we  are  using  about  650 
acres. 

Now  coming  back  for  a  moment  to  those  early  doubts 
—  I  have  an  idea  that  we  have  more  critics  in  New  York 
than  we  ought  to  have,  more  than  we  are  entitled  to,  if 
you  want  to  put  it  that  way.  There  are  an  awful  lot  of 


people  who,  for  some  reason  or  other,  feel  that  they  ought 
to  advertise  all  the  deficiencies  of  this  area,  and  say  very 
little  about  the  advantages.  Others  will  take  a  certain 
amount  of  delight  in  running  down  anything  that  is  being 
done  here.  We  don't  take  them  too  seriously,  but  at  the 
beginning  of  any  enterprise  they  are  influential,  and  they 
were  in  this  case.  As  Mr.  Herd  said,  he  and  his  associates 
were  among  our  earliest  and  best  friends  —  and  they 
helped  us  at  a  time  when  we  needed  help.  They  showed 
confidence  in  us  at  a  time  when  we  needed  precisely  that. 
Now  some  of  you  have  attended  other  groundbreakings, 
and  you've  been  to  various  dinners,  luncheons  and  meet- 
ings at  which  the  objectives  of  the  Fair  were  discussed. 
I  do  want  to  say  this  —  and  I  don't  say  it  to  show  any 
lack  of  appreciation  of  what  other  entities  and  groups 
have  done  here  —  what  we're  trying  to  prove  here  is 
something  about  American  private  enterprise. 

We  have  good  state  governments  which  will  exhibit 
here.  We  have  the  Federal  Pavilion  and  the  New  York 


J.  Victor  Herd,  chairman  of  Continental  Insurance  Compa- 
nies, in  bulldozer,  and  Robert  Moses,  president  of  the  New- 
York  World's  Fair  Corporation. 


City  Pavilion  which  is  in  the  same  space  it  occupied  at 
the  last  fair.  And  of  course  we  have  the  exhibits  of  the 
foreign  nations,  some  of  them  old  and  established  and 
experienced,  and  some  of  them  very  new  and  very  in- 
experienced, very  proud,  very  sensitive  —  and  not  accus- 
tomed to  building  much  of  anything.  But  when  we're  all 
through,  the  success  of  this  Fair,  and  I  have  no  doubt 
whatever  about  this,  will  depend  more  upon  American 
industry  and  American  business  than  upon  anything  else. 
These  know  what  they  want  to  do,  what  they  want  to 
prove ;  they  know  the  image  they  want  to  project.  When 
they  decide  to  build  something  they  know  how  to  get 
people  to  design  it,  contractors  to  build  it,  how  to  get 
union  and  labor  on  the  job.  We  don't  worry  about  them, 
but  we  do  worry  about  some  of  the  others.  And  I  don't 
say  that  to  be  critical. 

We  had  an  instance  recently  where  some  of  us  had  to 
tell  one  of  the  foreign  governments  that  we  thought  they 
had  a  wonderful  plan,  a  wonderful  idea  and  a  wonderful 


concept  of  what  they  wanted  to  prove,  but  they  just 
couldn't  do  it  the  way  they  were  planning  it.  They  turned 
out  the  most  beautiful  set  of  plans  I  have  ever  seen  and 
now  they  are  all  being  done  over  again.  Part  of  it  couldn't 
be  built  here  under  existing  physical  conditions,  and  part 
of  it  couldn't  be  built  because  of  the  time  that  would  have 
been  required.  The  contractors  and  laborers  cannot  per- 
form miracles,  even  on  an  overtime  basis.  These  things 
never  happen  to  the  experienced  companies,  those  that 
have  been  in  business  a  long  time  and  know  what  to  do. 

There's  only  one  other  thing  I  have  to  say.  The  World's 
Fair  notes  are  going  to  be  paid  back  and  they  are  going  to 
be  paid  back  in  full.  We're  going  to  begin  to  pay  them 
long  before  the  Fair  is  over.  This  isn't  going  to  be  one 
of  these  thirty-five  or  thirty-six  cents  on  a  dollar  things, 
as  the  last  fair  was.  There  will  be  enough  money  left  to 
finish  Flushing  Meadow  Park  —  I'm  sure  of  that. 

I'm  sure  that  our  friends,  like  Mr.  Herd  and  his  asso- 
ciates, will  not  regret  the  confidence  they  placed  in  us. 


THE        CONTINENTAL       INSURANCE        COMPANIES 


J.  VICTOR  HERD,  Chairman  of  the  Boards  of  Directors 
NICHOLAS  DEKKER,  Vice  Chairman  of  Ihe  Boards  of  Directors 
NATHAN  H.  WENTWORTH,  President 

WORLDS   FAIR  COMMITTEE: 
DAVID  GRAY,  Vice  President,  Chairman 
HAROLD  F.  GEE,  Vice  President,  Member 
PAUL  V.  HARTELIUS,  Vice  President,  Member 
MELFORD  J.  PITRE,  Vice  President,  Member 
BRUCE  R.  ABRAMS,  Director  of  Public  Relations 


NEW        YORK        WORLD'S         FAIR        1964-1965         CORPORATION 

Flushing  52,  N.  Y.  Tel.  212-WF  4-1964 

ROBERT  MOSES,  President 

THOMAS  J.  DEEGAN,  JR.,  Chairman  of  the  Executive  Committee 

WILLIAM  E.  POTTER,  Executive  Vice  President 

CHARLES  POLETTI,  Vice  President,  International  Affairs  and  Exhibits 

STUART  CONSTABLE,  Vice  President,  Operations 

WILLIAM  BERNS,  Vice  President,  Communications  and  Public  Relations 

ERWIN  WITT,  Comptroller 

MARTIN  STONE,  Director  of  Industrial  Section 

GUY  F.  TOZZOLI,  (Port  of  New  York  Authority)  Transportation  Section 

ERNESTINE  R.  HAIG,  Secretory  of  the  Corporation  and 
Assistant  to  the  President 


WILLIAM  WHIPPLE,  JR.,  Chief  Engineer