World's Fair helped bring career changes, new place to live
The Japan pavilion featured an hourly performance.
"I was actually the 15th employee of the Worlds Fair. I left a perfectly good job at UT and people were telling me I was crazy because the fair wasn't going to happen," Cathy Ackermann says.
By GENE PATTERSON
6 News Anchor/Reporter
KNOXVILLE (WATE) -- A woman who gave up a successful job at the University of Tennessee to work for the 1982 World's Fair many said wouldn't happen proved them wrong, helping bring many of the 23 countries to Knoxville.
And a man who visited the fair as a child from Ohio says he still remembers the experience now that he calls Knoxville home.
The 1982 World's Fair in Knoxville had lots of familiar sites such as the Sunsphere, the Tennessee Amphitheater and the U.S. Pavilion, demolished in 1992.
The international pavilions drew the biggest crowds, especially China's with its terra cotta soldiers and displays of artwork.
The Japan pavilion was popular, too. It featured an hourly performance and what was an emerging technology at the time, robots. They even painted.
"I remember an exhibition hall that had toys for kids," Greg Bohlken says.
He was just six-years-old when he visited the fair with his parents and two sisters from "...Northern Ohio, near Cleveland. We came down for a family vacation and had never been to Knoxville and ended up now our whole family lives or vacations here regularly."
"It's incredible to think, you know when I was six I never thought I'd live in Knoxville and now I walk around with that dream experience," Bohlken says. "Was I really here?"
Cathy Ackermann was well entrenched in Knoxville when she became one of the first employees of the World's Fair. "I was actually the 15th employee of the Worlds Fair. I left a perfectly good job at UT and people were telling me I was crazy because the fair wasn't going to happen."
Ackermann did her part to make sure it did. She worked in international marketing, helping to negotiate participation by several of the countries.
Then Ackermann moved to corporate marketing and brought a bunch of them, too.
The relationships she developed 25 years ago allowed her to open Ackermann PR, one of the most successful PR firms in the country.
"If someone said, let's go see if China will come to Knoxville, I might say you're crazy. But at the time, anything was possible and I think that's one of the important legacies of the World's Fair for this community is just that sense of optimism and that can-do spirit that has remained," Ackermann says.