SPOKANE, Wash. – Expo ‘74 featured a panoply of products, including official World’s Fair spoons.
Hayden resident Becky Mumford found a pair of the commemorative Expo spoons still in their original packaging.
“I remember the day we went to Expo ‘74 and riding the gondola over the river I thought my brand new red tennis shoes were going to fall off,” Mumford said.
The spoons spotlight an underappreciated aspect of Spokane hosting a World’s Fair in the mid-’70s. Merchandising offered the opportunity for the Lilac City to increase its international footprint by selling products to visitors that would travel around the globe.
The Soviet Union participated in the event and even had its own pavilion for visitors. During an era of tension between two superpowers with fundamentally opposed visions of how to organize an economy, visitors to the Expo were greeted with the kind of broad merchandising push only a free-market system could organize.
As the city celebrates Expo ‘74 and sells new items to commemorate the event, a pair of spoons offers a unique scoop of American history. It is clear that from fundamentally reshaping downtown to putting Spokane on cutlery, 1974 was a critical year for Spokane.
