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In which we encounter an unlikely monument to a toy

by Jack Neely

Every summer I pick an especially scorching afternoon to take a sentimental stroll around the old World's Fair. On days when it's so hot it makes you dizzy, I sometimes think it's still there. I left a lot of myself on that pavement. Working crowd control that summer 17 years ago, I think I dripped sweat and dropped shreds of sunburned skin on every square foot of the place. I also left about an inch and a half of Chuck Taylor rubber on that asphalt. Sometimes I like to go back and visit it. The dust seems oddly familiar.

I remember the Foundry, of course. Ignorant of the fact it had ever been a foundry, we called it the Strohaus, and it was a brightly lit place with big beer parties and wacky polka bands every night. Hundreds of people singing together, dancing in unison, laughing without guile, drinking beer, and not even hitting each other.

"Are you from Tennessee?" someone asked me there one night as he bunny-hopped around me. "Yeh, boy!" I said, in the accent I always use to amuse Northerners. "You guys sure know how to party!" he said. I accepted the compliment because at that moment I thought maybe we did know how to party, that we had suddenly learned. I didn't know we'd forget again.

From the Foundry it's just a short stroll to the blue-aluminum city of international pavilions. Most of the ones on this side were European, sober, and very earnest, with color-coded charts about how photovoltaic cells work.

There's almost nothing left of them. The sign for the Italy pavilion somehow ended up on the front of Eddie's Auto Parts on Broadway. The long, flat metal panel is still there, but only two of the letters in Italy—the a and the y—are still up there.

Anyway, on my annual pilgrimage this month, I encountered an unexpected monument. There, beneath a big hackberry tree on the hillside near the AIDS memorial garden, a giant Rubik's Cube.

The big cube on the hillside would be big enough to stand up inside, maybe about the size of my last Fort Sanders bedroom. It's still brightly colored in blue, red, orange, yellow, green, and white, but chipping and peeling around the edges. Even in this jumbo size, it was unmistakably familiar. It was once in the Hungarian pavilion.

Hungary's participation in the fair was a little surprising to begin with. Hungary was still a Communist country in 1982; besides China, they were the only Reds at the World's Fair. That area has changed more than most of the fair site, re-landscaped and rebuilt, but as I recall, the Hungarian Pavilion was somewhere just down the hill from what's now Fort Kid.

To American pop culture, which had long since forgotten Liszt and Bartok, Rubik's Cube was the reason we respected Hungary as a nation. In designing its pavilion, Hungary seemed to accept that reality with pride. Erno Rubik, who invented it, was a Hungarian architecture professor, and in 1982, his own Cube may have been Hungary's biggest export to the West. Outside the Hungarian pavilion was a big transparent box, sort of an abstract riff on the Rubik's Cube, with some kind of colorfully amorphous sculpture inside that looked something like a dismembered heart. On this plain avenue of the Fair, where most of the pavilions offered only blue aluminum and exhibits about geothermal energy, it got your attention.

Hungary even shipped over their biggest celebrity to promote the Cube. I was working the Japan line one day when I looked over and there was Erno Rubik himself, just outside the pavilion. I recognized him from his pictures in Time magazine. Fortyish, slightly balding, with sideburns, Professor Rubik looked like a French racecar driver, circa 1970, at LeMans. Here he was in Knoxville, sitting at the base of the stylized, transparent cube, showing a knot of kids the secret of the thing.

Inside the building were the obligatory technical nods to the Fair's energy theme and a little homage to composer Bela Bartok. But what caught your eye—what every boy screamed about when he stepped through the door—was illuminated in the middle, its familiar shape and six bright colors elevated on a pedestal above the heads of the crowd, like an idol. This giant motorized Rubik's Cube. Its two outside panels rotated slowly against the middle one. (It didn't have all the movements of a real Rubik's cube, of course; it would be mighty complicated to motorize it in three dimensions.)

Jim Begalla, who's in charge of the fair site, confirms that the cube I stumbled across on the fair site is indeed the same one that once rotated inside the Hungarian pavilion. It was at the McClung Museum at UT for several years, then spent a few more years in storage beneath the seats of the Tennessee Amphitheatre. He says it's weatherized to prevent further deterioration, and unplugged.

They've recently placed another interesting World's Fair artifact, the large, ancient-looking "Korean sundial," in front of the Candy Factory. Spherical and gyroscopic, with gears and half a dozen concentric steel rings, it looks like a medieval navigational instrument. It has spent most of the last 17 years somewhere on the campus of Maryville College. Begalla and his colleagues aren't sure how it got there. Now it's back, across the lane from the Rubik's Cube. It's a little the worse for wear, as we all are: its four ornately carved wooden legs badly rotten and one of its steel shafts broken. But it's good to see it back.

I always figured that, as time went by, there'd be less and less to remind us of the 1982 World's Fair, especially as plans proceed to redevelop this park as a convention center. One day, I figured, there'd be nothing at all, and we'd forget it ever happened. Suddenly images are coming back, like heat-stroke mirages over the sun-baked asphalt.