LESLIE RAGAN (1897-1972) THE TRANSPORTATION PARADE OF THE YEARS / GREAT LAKES EXPOSITION. 1936.
41x27 inches, 104x68 1/2 cm.
Condition B: repaired tears in upper left corner; staining and pin holes in margins; tape residue on verso around edges; time-staining in left image. Paper.
Although the highlight of the Great Lakes Exposition was Billy Rose's Aquacade, the Parade of the Years was an impressive railway show produced by Edward Hungerford, an author and director, who brought transportation pageants to several of America's biggest fairs in the 1930s. He began in 1927 with Baltimore's Fair of the Iron Horse, produced Wings of a Century for the Chicago World's Fair in 1933, and after Cleveland he went on to New York City for the World's Fair's famous Railroads on Parade. "The Parade of the Years was a pageant focused on transportation, from Conestoga wagons and steamboats to the actual steam engines that stood by when the first transcontinental railroad was completed. Time marched on from there to the "gas buggy" and the Wright brothers' Flyer" (https://www.cleveland.com/metro/2011/08/seventy-five_years_ago_this_su.html). The locomotive in the foreground is Henry Dreyfuss' streamlined Mercury. rare. We could find no other copies at auction.