The Canadian National Exhibition

I visited the Canadian National Exhibition for the first time in 1975, when I was 13 and my family was living near Toronto.  It was the biggest thing I'd ever seen! (It was near its attendance peak then.) 

We came in on a GO train that made special stops next to the exhibition grounds.  The disc jockey Mike Cooper was trying to break a world record by staying in a Ferris wheel for the whole three weeks.  I went to a show of Scottish marching bands and a Bachmann-Turner Overdrive concert where people started lighting matches! (They had a fire truck nearby.) The big song they were playing everywhere was the Captain and Tenille's "Love Will Keep Us Together."

The food building had a special where you could buy up to 25 Pepsi drinks in these tiny cups for a penny each, attracting queues.  My brother ate a falafel for the first time, and I bought a T-shirt with French comic strip hero Asterix the Gaul.  The oil industry had an exhibit devoted to "the Big Tough Expensive Job" of searching for oil in the Arctic.  On the Midway I rode a roller coaster for the first time, and didn't like it.  I liked climbing the stairs to the top of the glass-walled Bulova Tower in the middle of the Midway. (It's a shame they tore it down in the 1980s!) There was also a flea circus, an outdoor tightrope walker and a big electric train set on display.

I moved to Toronto in 1990, but I don't visit the Ex much today. (I do it every third year or so.) Either it got smaller or I got bigger, or both.  But when I do I spend a lot of time on the Midway rides, especially the bumper cars.  And I always have to look at the butter sculptures!