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REYNOLDS GIRDLER: There will be no formal
speeches. We would like to call your attention at this moment
to our scientific display, including a dinosaur egg found in
the Gobi desert and part of a claw from a Tyrannosaurus Rex --
each of them good for at least an hour-and-a-half lecture by
Dr. Brown. Of course none of you needs to be introduced to Mr.
Moses, the president of the Fair. Next to him are Mr. Edward
L. Steiniger, president of Sinclair Oil Corporation, Mr. Louis
Paul Jonas, the sculptor who is actually re-creating these monsters,
and Dr. Barnum Brown, Curator Emeritus of the American Museum
of Natural History. If there are any questions that any of you
want to ask, we are all here to answer. Mr. Moses, you have been
asked to make a general statement about this exhibit.
ROBERT MOSES: We are very glad that you are
here. I don't profess to have any great knowledge of geology
and the other sciences represented here. I was, for my sins,
a member of the Board of the American Museum representing the
City of New York, not freely chosen by the Board but there perforce,
for -- I don't know -- it seems to me something like twenty-seven
years, and in that long time even the dullest mind learns something.
So I have picked up a little information along these lines.
In contrast to your exhibit portraying the
origins of oil and earth's denizens eons ago, General Motors
and Ford, and I understand, will delve into the future and transportation's
part in it. These things make a tremendous impression not only
on adults but, I don't need to tell you, on children. As proof,
we got hold of some of these green rubber dinosaur characters
here but we ran out of them very quickly. There has been a great
demand for them at the
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beaches here and all over the United States.
Well, it is a wonderful symbol.
As you probably know, when you talk to some
of us, you are talking to people who have spent a large part
of their lives on transportation and all that goes with it. Perhaps
we are rubber rather than rail people. We make no apology for
that either, but certainly companies like Sinclair are the ones
we have had to look to, to solve the transportation problems
of the United States. For a long time the people who made automobile
parts, the people who supplied the wheels and the rubber, and
the people who supplied the gasoline and oil were not particularly
interested in road problems. The manufacturers of cars, for certainly
25 or 30 years, took the view that they did not much care what
happened to a car after it came off the assembly line. They were
interested in manufacturing cars and somehow it was somebody
else's job to see that there were roads for them to run on. Some
of us spent a considerable time and effort getting them in a
mood to do something to help us build roads. Now, since then,
that has been done and the people who use the roads are paying
for them. They are the people who are taxed. They are the people
who pay for gas taxes and license plates and all that sort of
thing.
We are hopeful that everything will be done
here in this Fair, not only to promote the interest of the companies
that are doing this work, but to promote transportation mobility.
To achieve these ends, exhibits must be graphic, they must be
interesting, they must be ingenious, they must be imaginative;
otherwise they are no good. I think you have a wonderful exhibit
here which will accomplish precisely these results.
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