The King of Expo ‘74: Urban planner’s arrival marked decade march toward Spokane’s world’s fair

When future Expo ’74 President King Cole’s family of 10 arrived in Spokane in November 1963, the welcome from the Ridpath Hotel seemed almost personal.

“My dad said – he knew this way before we did – ‘Look at that, there’s a King Cole Room here,’ ” said Mary Cole, who was 9 years old at the time.

The cocktail room on the main floor of Spokane’s downtown hotel was not named for the 41-year-old urban planner who’d moved his family sight unseen to the South Hill (it was actually an homage to a Manhattan lounge named for the nursery rhyme). But over the next 11 years, King Cole would make his own name in Spokane by herding the resources for a world’s fair that changed the city forever.

Bill Youngs, a professor of history at Eastern Washington University and author of the definitive account of Expo ’74, “The Fair and the Falls,” interviewed dozens of people involved in pulling off the world’s fair. He invoked the words of former Spokane Mayor David Rodgers in explaining King Cole’s role in the event.

“He said that Cole was the stem-winder,” Youngs said. “That’s a reference to the old days, when people had pocket watches. You had to wind them to keep going. Cole was just the one who supplied the energy.”

Nancy Cole, who was a Lilac princess during Expo ’74, thinks of her father as a shepherd for the city. The metaphor is all the more appropriate because of his background in the seminary, she said.

“He had a way of getting people to do things that they didn’t think was possible,” she said.

That started with clearing the ground for the world’s fair, a task that required convincing big businesses to move. Among them were the railroads that owned the trestles crisscrossing the heart of the city.

Beneath those trestles raged the Spokane River, what King Cole told everyone was the city’s true gem. That included his children.

“He took me down to the falls, and he would talk about the power of that volume of water. Both in terms of potential, but also how inspiring it was to be in the presence of that natural phenomenon,” said Marty Cole, who was 14 when Expo ’74 began.

King Cole’s fascination with water had been evident in his work in urban planning in San Leandro, California, before moving to Spokane, Youngs said.

“He put a lot of fountains into downtown San Leandro,” Youngs said. “In that case, he had to create the water. In Spokane, it was there.”

The Inland Northwest wasn’t new to King Cole. He’d fallen in love with the area while assigned to the Farragut Naval Training Station during World War II. He moved the eight children and his wife, Janice, to a South Hill home that seemed like a mansion to the youngsters.

“It turned out to be the best thing,” Nancy Cole said. “We all loved Spokane.”

The job of pitching the world on a fair in the middle of Eastern Washington took King Cole, who was named president of the exposition, all over the world. Sometimes his wife would go with him, but the kids remember their mom playing the part of both diplomat and head of the house, including when dad was on the road.

“She was the backbone for Dad. Dad would say this – he couldn’t do it without her,” Mary Cole said. “He wasn’t disorganized, but when it came to his personal life, he’d say, ‘Jan, where are my socks?’ ”

Among those King Cole tried to sell on the idea was the Soviet Union, which agreed to build a pavilion – the exposition’s largest foreign structure – during the height of the Cold War.

“The Soviet delegates told me they were extremely interested in Expo ’74’s environmental theme, and that since it appeared there would be no World’s Fair in 1976 in the United States, the Spokane exposition was the place to go,” King Cole told The Spokesman-Review on June 9, 1972, the day of the announcement the Russians would be participating. The frontpage story ran beneath a photograph of a beaming King Cole, a smile that appeared frequently in the news as Expo plans ratcheted up.

Mary Cole, who still lives in Spokane, said she recently watched KXLY-TV’s retrospective on Expo ’74. One of the included clips was of her father being interviewed on the eve of opening day by Ron Bair, who would go on to serve as Spokane’s mayor from 1977 to 1981.

“Ron Bair’s got the microphone, and he’s reaching up to dad, and dad is just giddy,” Mary Cole said. “He kind of hit himself on the side of the head and said, ‘I just have to wonder if this is really happening.’ ”

Expo ’74 wasn’t always certain, however, even though it was the singular focus of King Cole’s work beginning in the late 1960s. The children all recalled how disheartened their dad was when, on Aug. 31, 1971, Spokane voters narrowly rejected a $5.7 million bond that was seen as necessary to pull off the fair.

“King Cole, managing director of the Expo ’74, told newsmen that ‘for all practical purposes Expo ‘74 is over,’ ” The Spokesman-Review reported the next morning.

“When the bond failed, that was a miserable night in our house,” Nancy Cole said.

After the defeat, Janice Cole helped convince her husband to attend the Immaculate Heart Retreat Center to seek guidance on what to do next, Mary Cole said. King Cole had been training for the priesthood before leaving to join the Navy during World War II, and later took a law degree from the University of San Francisco.

“He takes about two or three days, without phones, without kids, without anything, and he had what I would call this ‘a-ha,’ or what he would call an ‘epiphany,’” Mary Cole said. “He felt like, ‘I cannot let this die.’ ”

Within three weeks, the city’s business interests and politicians made the politically difficult decision to create a business and occupation tax that provided the funding for downtown’s clearing. More importantly, the vote ensured support from the U.S. Department of Commerce for the exposition.

The Spokane City Council voted unanimously for the tax. That included Councilman Allen Stratton, husband of future state legislator Lois Stratton and father of future Spokane City Councilwoman Karen Stratton.

Lois Stratton was loaned from her job at Kaiser Aluminum to serve as King Cole’s secretary because, as Lois Stratton said in 2008, he “was having a hard time keeping a secretary.”

“When things got tense, I used to have a hard time with it,” Lois Stratton, who died in 2020, told KHQ-TV for a 40-year anniversary documentary in 2014. “I would go into his office, and he’d be sitting at his desk, with his feet up on the desk, with his rosary in his hand, just saying the rosary.”

Lois Stratton shrugs into the camera.

“He was just an amazing guy, that’s all.”

King Cole would inquire about all workers at the fair as he toured the site that summer. That included hearing about Lois Stratton’s daughter having difficulty finding a date to a high school dance.

“King heard about it, and the next thing I know, Marty called me up and took me to the dance,” Karen Stratton said.

King Cole appeared in newspapers, on TV and even in the pages of the then-new People Magazine in May 1974, sharing a laugh in the kitchen with actor Danny Kaye, who’d delivered the credo for Expo ’74 at its opening day. Marty Cole, and his sisters, remember just enjoying that summer with dad.

“There were days where he would – it was rare – he would kind of hide out at home,” Marty Cole said. “We had a big backyard, and he would just lay in a chaise lounge and sleep for a day in the sun.”

The family recognized their dad needed to recharge, and would leave him alone to do so. But he also made sure he was present, even when he was traveling before Expo ’74 to confirm support for the fair.

“No matter how busy he was, he always had time for us,” Nancy Cole said.

The fair ended just around Marty Cole’s 15th birthday. King Cole kept his promise to his kids then – he got them a dog, a German shepherd they named Max, once the fair was over. Life returned mostly to normal, which was a lot slower than things had been that crazy summer.

“We felt like Cinderella. We turned into pumpkins after October,” Mary Cole said.

Mary and Marty followed King and Janice Cole to Knoxville, where King Cole helped put together the World’s Fair Exposition in 1982. King Cole possessed unique skills that made him perfect for the work, his daughter Nancy Cole said. He commanded a room, was an honest salesperson and had a drive to make things happen.

The city named the bridge in Riverfront Park between the Lilac Bowl and the now-First Interstate Center of the Arts for King Cole in 1994. When it was rededicated in 2008, King Cole was there, along with Lois Stratton for photographs. King Cole died in 2010, and Janice Cole died seven years later.

Youngs, the EWU professor, and others have been part of a multiyear effort to put a permanent monument in Riverfront Park to honor King Cole’s legacy. The current concept, which would require the approval of Spokane’s Park Board, pairs a statue of King Cole welcoming visitors to the park near the foot bridge bearing his name with reader boards telling the history of the world’s fair.

“My hope is that the 50th anniversary celebration helps emphasize what happened,” said Youngs, who is also working on a short book of King Cole’s own words compiled from publicly available sources and his interviews with the man totaling 30 hours. “But it’ll be over in a couple of weeks.”

Donations to the effort, known as the King Cole Commemoration Project, can be made online through the Innovia Foundation, at innovia.org/stories/kccp.

The Cole children have been retelling the story of the parents and their role in bringing Expo ’74 to Spokane this summer, while also watching a city remember its World’s Fair dignitaries.

“I’m very proud of what my dad did,” Nancy Cole said. “When I was a kid, you were involved in your own life. That changed when we started having Russians, and Czechoslovakians and French people over for dinner. Mom always thought it was important to have people over for dinner.”

They all said the story of Expo is one of dreaming big, and of their dad helping to make that dream a reality. It’s a dream that people in Spokane can still enjoy today, strolling through the city’s singular urban park that was left behind.

“Part of me wishes he was here to see all this,” Mary Cole said. “I think he’s out there, very happy with what’s going on.”

Kip Hill can be reached at kiphillreporter@gmail.com.