Discover Washington, Summer Before Expo '74

The code "6-73--250M" printed at the lower left of the back panel tells a precise story: June 1973, 250,000 copies. State travel offices rarely printed in quantities that large without a reason, and the reason is front and center on the cover. Washington had been named host of Expo '74, the International Exposition on the Environment, scheduled to open in Spokane on May 4, 1974. This brochure was part of the national warm-up campaign — put in gas stations, visitor centers, and hotel lobbies to prime the road-trip market before the fair drew its first crowds.

The Expo '74 logo — a stylized Möbius strip in blue and green, designed by Spokane artist Lloyd L. Carlson — had only debuted in March 1972. Carlson's form echoed the universal recycling symbol (also a Möbius strip), reinforcing the fair's environmental theme: "Celebrating Tomorrow's Fresh New Environment." The fair ultimately drew 5.6 million visitors and President Nixon appeared at the opening ceremony. What made it remarkable structurally was Spokane's size: with roughly 170,000 residents, it remains the smallest city ever to host a world's fair.

Published by Washington's Department of Commerce and Economic Development, the brochure credits Daniel J. Evans as governor. Evans served three consecutive terms from 1965 to 1977 — still the only Washington governor to do so — placing this squarely in his second term. The Travel Development Division is listed separately, with Al Hunter as director, a position whose paper trail has largely not survived in accessible archives.

The six cover photographs frame two distinct states in one: west of the Cascades, the Space Needle and a Washington State Ferry crossing open water; east of the mountains, wheat combine harvests and rodeo grandstands. In the lower-left panel, a Bavarian-style streetscape — almost certainly Leavenworth — shows the town mid-transformation. After the Great Northern Railway rerouted and the local sawmill closed in the early 1960s, Leavenworth adopted a wholesale Bavarian Alpine identity as an economic survival strategy, guided by a consulting report the chamber of commerce commissioned in 1962. By 1973 it had become a stable tourism draw, worth putting on the cover of a state brochure.