"Golden Spike Days Celebration" (1939)
An elaborate four day event called the "Golden Spike Days Celebration" was held in Omaha, NE, from April 26 to 29, 1939, to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the joining of the UP and CPRR rails and driving of the Last Spike at Promontory Summit, UT, in 1869. The center piece event of the celebration occurred on April 28 with the World Premier of the Cecil B. DeMille feature motion picture Union Pacific which took place simultaneously in the city's Omaha, Orpheum, and Paramount theaters. The film features an elaborate reenactment of the original Golden Spike ceremony (filmed in Canoga Park, CA) as the motion picture's closing scene for which DeMille borrowed the actual Golden Spike from Stanford University to be held by Dr. W.H. Harkness (Stanley Andrews) as he delivered his remarks prior to its driving to complete the railroad. (A prop spike was used for the actual hammering sequence.)
Also included as a part of the overall celebration's major attractions was the Golden Spike Historical Exposition, a large assemblage of artifacts (including the Golden Spike itself), tools, equipment, photographs, documents, and other materials from the construction of the Pacific Railroad that were put on display at Omaha's Municipal Auditorium. The four days of events drew over 250,000 people to Omaha during its run, a number roughly equivalent to the city's then population. The celebration was opened by President Franklin D. Roosevelt who inaugurated it by pressing a telegraph key at the White House in Washington, DC.
On the same day as the premier of the movie, a still standing gold-colored concrete spike called the "Golden Spike Monument" and measuring some 56 feet (17 m) in height was also unveiled at 21st Street and 9th Avenue in Council Bluffs, IA, adjacent to the UP's main yard, the location of milepost 0.0 of that road's portion of the Pacific Railroad.
Read more about this topic: Golden Spike
Famous quotes containing the words golden, spike, days and/or celebration:
“Fasten your hair with a golden pin,
And bind up every wandering tress;
I bade my heart build these poor rhymes:
It worked at them, day out, day in,
Building a sorrowful loveliness
Out of the battles of old times.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“From a hasty glance through the various tests I figure it out that I would be classified in Group B, indicating “Low Average Ability,” reserved usually for those just learning to speak the English Language and preparing for a career of holding a spike while another man hits it.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)
“The days are ever divine as to the first Aryans. They are of the least pretension and of the greatest capacity of anything that exists. They come and go like muffled and veiled figures, sent from a distant friendly party; but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Sweet weight,
in celebration of the woman I am
and of the soul of the woman I am
and of the central creature and its delight
I sing for you. I dare to live.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)