Sometime in the mid-80s Rick Rann was sifting through items to add to his collections of Beatles, Batman, and Cubs memorabilia when he ran across a souvenir from the 1933 Century of Progress World’s Fair in Chicago. He was intrigued by the fair’s art deco logo and wondered how such an expensive spectacle could have taken place during the Depression.
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The answer was early planning. “One way they tested public sentiment was to have people join the World’s Fair Legion for $5,” he says. “When the fair opened they would get a booklet good for ten admissions. They got 118,000 people to buy it in 1927 or 1928, before the crash. After the crash, they solicited members of Chicago society like Samuel Insull to donate $1,000 each. They did a lot of creative financing.”
Rann, who’s a police officer in the western suburbs and has a stall at the Broadway Antique Market, met fellow Century of Progress fanatic Bob Conidi seven years ago, when Conidi bought some fair souvenirs from him. Conidi, who owns a printing business in Itasca and collects print-related items, got hooked on the Century of Progress ten years ago after a fellow member of the Windy City Postcard Collectors club showed him a brightly colored advertisement for a company that supplied the paint for the fair’s buildings. He has since amassed over 3,000 postcards from the fair and a mountain of trinkets.
