It was to be a sort of trade-off. The first three days of the Sesqui were dedicated to the Shriners. Then, as envisioned by Mayor W. Freeland Kendrick, himself an ardent Shriner, the members of this fraternal order would return to Seattle and Keokuk and Chillicothe and speak so glowingly about the great happening in Philadelphia that their friends and neighbors would be impelled to rush here forthwith.

Alas, when the Shriners went back to their homes, it was to tell - understandably - not a wondrous tale of the Sesqui but a story of unfinished buildings, unpaved roads, and mud plots where there should have been roads. All over the country, people who had planned to visit the Sesqui during their vacations made other plans. Practically nobody came rushing here.

It was a blow from which the Sesqui, held to mark 150 years of American independence, never recovered. By August, the place had begun to shape up, but all of the catch-up heroics in the world wouldn't have helped. The word was out that the Sesqui was a loser.

It was enough of a loser to put a dent of close to $9 million in the city treasury and make "Sesquicentennial" a synonym for the sort of futility previously associated only with the Phillies. From May 31 to its closing Nov. 30, it attracted a total of exactly 4,662,211 paying customers - a far piece from the 25 million anticipated. On 107 of the Sesqui's 184 days, rain fell; there was rain on 19 of 26 weekends. And some of the buildings on the exposition site in and around League Island Park in South Philadelphia never did get finished.

Even so, the Sesqui had some plusses. There was an immense structure, 970 feet long and 392 feet wide, with a floor area of 338,000 square feet, called th Palace of Liberal Arts and Manufactures, in which were displayed the newest wonders of the world. "Talking movies," still a year away from introduction in regular theaters, were shown daily here.

AN ARRAY OF MACHINES

There were machines making women's silk hosiery, photo-radio receivers and transmitters for the sending of pictures "on the air" across oceans or continents, an electric safety razor, electrical refrigeration, electric typewriters, multiple-message telegraphy and office dictating machines.

In another building, the Palace of Fine Arts, were exhibited paintings by Goya, Velasquez, Renoir and Degas, 10 tapestries from the Royal House of Spain, and precious gems valued at more than $10 million. There was the Persian Building, straight out of The Arabian Nights, and there was the India Building, modeled after the Taj Mahal.

There was the Auditorium Building, covering an area of 113,300 square feet with a frontage of 274 feet and a depth of 450 feet. The auditorium had a seating capacity of 10,000. In the auditorium was a large pipe organ built at a cost of more than $100,000 for the exposition by the Austin Organ Co. The huge instrument was dubbed the "organists' organ," inasmuch as it was designed by a committee of Philadelphia organists. One of the largest organs in the United States, it was acquired after the exposition by Philadelphia publisher Cyrus H. K. Curtis, who presented it to the University of Pennsylvania, which installed it in Irvine Auditorium on campus.

In keeping with the patriotic spirit, the Sesqui had a magnificent reproduction of High Street, Philadelphia's main thoroughfare in colonial times. On South Broad Street, just below Oregon Avenue near the main entrance to the grounds, was a mammoth reproduction of the Liberty Bell, 80 feet high and trimmed with 26,000 electric bulbs; illuminated at night, these gave off an aggregate of 500,000 candlepower, visible for miles.

There was a vast amusement area, called the Gladway. Situated in the region west of Broad Street, immediately south of Packer Avenue and north of Pattison Avenue, it had just about every form of diversion from gondolas plying a network of canals to carousels and roller coasters. If you wanted to do something really different, you went to an adjacent field and climbed aboard a two-seater biplane for a sightseeing flight.

A FAMOUS FIGHT -- IN THE RAIN

And there was "the finest stadium in the world" - Municipal Stadium - where Gene Tunney dethroned Jack Dempsey as heavy-weight boxing champion of the world in a bout fought in a driving rain before 122,000 onlookers on the night of Sept. 23, 1926. The stadium was the site of the National AAU track and field championships in July and it was the home field of a professional football team, the Philadelphia Quakers, champions of the American Football League that autumn.

Inclement weather played a recurrent role throughout the exposition. As Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg and Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover arrived for the opening ceremony, rain was falling. When President Calvin Coolidge appeared July 5 for the official Independence Day celebration, it rained. When Queen Marie of Romania visited the exposition Oct. 21, there was rain. The Sesquicentennial Pageant, a monumental production staged in the stadium, was rained out on 17 of the 33 nights it was scheduled; the star, DeWolf Hopper, was moved to pun that the show was "the raining success of America."

The root cause of the Sesqui's troubles was that city officials spent years talking about it and then tried to build an entire exposition in less than 14 months. Less than a year before the scheduled opening, City Councilman Bill Roper rose to shout that the Sesqui was a "downtown dump" that would disgrace the city. By Jan. 20, 1926, only the stadium and two exhibition halls were anywhere close to completion. But Mayor Kendrick was adamant in rejecting suggestions that the opening be postponed for a year - or even for just a month.

And so the Sesqui opened on schedule and the headlines were huge: "Sesqui Begins in Pomp and Glory," read one. On opening day there were 200,000 customers - officials had been predicting 500,000 - but the mayor, in a show of civic zeal, extrapolated this to an attendance of more than 25 million for the six-month run.