"A U.S. Pavilion employee remembered his doubts about the possibility of finishing the pavilion on time: 'I just remember it was a mad scramble to get it all put together. If I had $100,000 and somebody wanted to bet me that we would be open on time and ready to go, I would have bet the whole $100,000 that we would have never opened on time. But in the last two days of the scramble, they pulled it off; and, in fact, in the last hour before we opened the doors, miracles happened.'"
Rik Smith recalled, "When Nixon came out, there were people around me yelling at him -- everybody's yelling at him, and flipping him off. I can remember Nixon coming out of there with this real disgusted look on his face. And I really thought we'd been successful because of that. As it turned out, it was one of the last demonstrations against Nixon."
"Sauntering through the fairgrounds, King Cole was struck by the fact that at first almost everyone was silent: 'There was no noise, no sound. Everybody was absolutely quiet, nobody was talking. It was like watching a silent film of a very noisy thing, because you could see all these people jammed together, running around. You could see the spectacle, but there was absolutely no sound, and I stopped one family after another -- asked them why they weren't talking. They all said the same thing: 'Who can talk? We've got to look!'"