Exposition's centennial to be celebrated

For freelance radio producer Harriet Baskas, the next year's centennial celebration of the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition (AYPE) is a chance to combine what she loves best — history and sound.

She poked around the University of Washington's Special Collections and the Washington State History Museum and found sheet music written just for Seattle's first world's fair in 1909.

Now Baskas, the recipient of a Humanities Washington grant for the project to record AYPE-related history into a radio broadcast, will be among those applying for a share of some $190,000 in funding from 4Culture, a county-affiliated organization that supports the arts.

In mid-2003, 4Culture launched its preservation program.

Last year, 4Culture awarded 22 grants, averaging $4,000 each, to individuals or organizations working to preserve some form of King County history.

This year, priority is being given to projects such as Baskas', which focus on the AYPE, said Eric Taylor, Heritage Project manager.

In most cases, it's only seed money to encourage organizations to do more fundraising for their own unique historic project, Taylor said.

The centennial celebration, commemorating the fair that for the first time gave Seattle international recognition, begins in January with individual events yet to be scheduled, but will kick off during the Northwest Folklife Festival in May.

In previous years, 4Culture funding went to individuals developing Web sites, videos and oral-history projects.

The AYPE centennial's sponsors — HistoryLink.org, King County and the Museum of History & Industry, among others — are hoping that ethnic communities will plan projects linking their history to the fair, which happened at one of the most optimistic and prosperous times in Seattle and was on what is now the University of Washington campus.

AYPE brought visitors from all over and was the first fair of its kind to look to the Pacific Rim countries for participation, although some treatment of the other cultures was insensitive, the centennial's promoters say.

In her research, Baskas learned that a group of Inuits from Alaska were on exhibit at the fair, as they had been at the 1892 Chicago's World Fair, where one of them gave birth to a daughter. In Seattle, the daughter, by then 16, was voted the prettiest girl at the fair.

There are challenges in creating historic projects from events 100 years ago, especially for Baskas, who knows she won't find any old recordings to use.

Instead, she plans to record historians talking about why music might have been written for the fair, and to have someone play the actual songs, bringing a long-forgotten time back to life.

Nancy Bartley: 206-464-8522 or nbartley@seattletimes.com