NEW YORK: Fair Idea

Rare is the celebration or exposition which, when held, is not claimed as “my idea originally” by a camp following of crack-pate “inventors.” Rarer is the inventor who actually did have the idea and, rarer still, got paid for it.

Grover Aloysius (“Gardenia”) Whalen, New York City’s handsome Official Greeter and Police Commissioner in years gone by, now the maestro of its 1939 World’s Fair, last week sat through a curious meeting in the Fair’s administration building. Absent was George A. McAneny, the Fair’s first promoter who was demoted to chairman of the Fair corporation board to make way for President Whalen. Present was a tall, shy, greying civil engineer named Joseph F. Shadgen. By proxy Mr. McAneny had to admit that Engineer Shadgen was really the man who “originated” the Fair on its site in the Flushing, L. I. salt marshes. He it was who, after nine months of study, first went to Mr. McAneny through Edward F. (“Eddy”) Roosevelt (a distant, cosmopolite cousin) with plans for reclaiming the land, pumping up new land, dredging channels, etc. etc. When more prominent persons became interested, complained Engineer Shadgen, he had been shunted aside. A lawyer friend of Maestro Whalen’s had persuaded him to sign away his rights to the Fair idea and accept instead a $625-a-month job at which he spent ten months “sharpening pencils” before he was fired, angry and humiliated. Engineer Shadgen was now suing the Fair for $1,000,000 and charging bad faith.

Rather than let the case go to trial, Maestro Whalen last week settled with Engineer Shadgen for $45,000 cash, re-engaged him as a consultant for the Fair’s duration.

Engineer Shadgen, a fiftyish native of Luxemburg, has had his ups & downs in engineering, at one time making as high as $150,000 a year. He credits his daughter Jacqueline, now 16, with really having the Fair idea first. In 1934, when she learned that the U. S. would be 150 years old in 1939, she asked her father if anyone was planning to celebrate. When he said no, she said: “Why don’t you do it, Daddy?” That got him started. He picked the Flushing marshes because he lived near them, in Jackson Heights. He does not consider $45,000 an inordinate author’s royalty for a project costing $155,000,000.