Today we begin a new thread called On the Job, featuring some stories about work that made a difference in writers’ lives. Our friend Barbara Black starts us off recalling her job at Expo 67.

I sat in the bus heading to my new workplace, my eyes filled with tears of patriotic pride. After years of planning, digging, negotiating and innovating, Expo 67 was about to open. What an achievement! I was going to spend the summer there. I would have an ID card that would enable me skip to the front of every lineup. I would hobnob with celebrities and I would learn much about the cultures of the world.

I had had my eye on a job at Expo 67 for several years, ever since I read about the project in Maclean’s Magazine. I was living in London, but I kept abreast of developments by visiting Canada House in Trafalgar Square. When I returned to Canada and worked for The Pierre Berton Show in 1966-67, a colleague put in a good word for me with the head of public relations for the world’s fair. I moved to Montreal and arranged to live with Rosemary Speirs, whom I knew from a summer job at the University of Toronto Press. She had moved to an upper apartment on Hutchison Street and was working for the Canadian Press while she finished a PhD in labour history. Rosemary went on to an illustrious career in journalism. She died in 2022.

I started work in the spring, before the official opening. Expo’s administration building, in Cité du Havre just down the road from the Lego-like Habitat apartment complex, is now occupied by offices of the Port of Montreal. We used this preparation time to get to know our colleagues and wander at will among the pavilions that were still being built. Once a friend and I were in front of the French pavilion when we saw people fleeing. A young steer had escaped from an agricultural exhibit and was running confusedly in the street. I ducked into a phone booth until it went past.

Many of the national pavilions were designed with experimental flair, all odd angles or glassy domes. Some clearly reflected the mood of their country. The USSR pavilion was massive and deadly serious, showing off Soviet industrial and, by implication, military might. The US pavilion was criticized for being too frivolous by comparison. It was a giant, airy sphere designed by the eccentric Buckminster Fuller, and it was filled with cinematic memorabilia. The Italian, French and British pavilions were suitably stylish, but the pavilion that got the most attention was that of Czechoslovakia. The Soviet-linked country was enjoying a brief political thaw and making the most of it, showcasing contemporary art glass, puppetry and film.

Several temporary cinemas showed experimental film techniques, including the forerunner of IMAX, fragmented screens and wrap-around projection. It was at Expo that I learned about African countries I had never heard of before. I heard a steel drum band for the first time. I attended a concert by the great Maureen Forrester, singing luminous songs by Mahler. The Canadian pavilion featured indigenous art and music, something quite new to the rest of us.

Every day we had our choice of countries to eat in, so to speak. If I chose to eat in the admin building instead of on site, who knows who might be sitting at the next table? One day I recognized Norman Mailer, Malcolm Muggeridge and Marshall McLuhan in earnest conversation.

I didn’t have to work very hard. All the effort of selling the world’s fair had been done before it opened, and there was little for us to do after that. In fact, I invented a project for myself, “Expo on $5 a Day,” which was provided to visiting journalists.

I occasionally got to take celebrities around the site. One was the American author Pearl S. Buck. She had grown up the daughter of missionaries in China and wrote a touching novel, The Good Earth, based on her knowledge of the country as it was in the early 20th century. Although she was frequently denounced for championing a communist country, she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938.

By 1967 The Good Earth had been overtaken by other literary fashions and few people remembered it. Miss Buck was elderly and frail, needing to have a toilet close at hand. She came with half a dozen mixed-race young people, part of her active charity work, and a man, a former dance instructor called Harris, who later turned out to have seriously abused Miss Buck’s financial trust and the young people, too.

The Expo site was like an oasis of peace in a churning, chaotic world of almost weekly mass demonstrations for many causes — anti-Vietnam War, Quebec independence, anti-poverty, First Nations, the Black Panthers — but there were no demonstrations at Expo, only curious people learning new things, patiently lining up, talking to one another, making memories.

Many years later I had a chance to interview the senior hostess of Expo 67, whom I had not known at the time. She was about my age, the daughter of a Polish diplomat, and had been suggested as a consort to the commissioner general of the fair, Pierre Dupuy, who was unmarried at the time.

Expo 67 was treated as if it was a country, welcoming the rulers of other countries, so this lucky young lady and Pierre Dupuy together welcomed Princess Grace Kelly of Monaco, the Emperor of Japan, the President of France, the Queen of England, Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, the President of the United States, a veritable stream of distinguished figures at an almost daily rate throughout the summer. It was an extraordinary feat of hospitality that will never be repeated.