King Cole, president and prime mover behind Expo ’74, is 86 now. He and his wife, Jan, have been married 60 years. They have eight children, 17 grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren. Cole’s health is a challenge – he lives with chronic pain and numbness from peripheral neuropathy – but he and Jan always make time for interview requests. Here are some of Cole’s reflections, as told to editorial board member Rebecca Nappi.

 I never thought the name King Cole shaped my destiny until I looked back. My dad predicted it. He said, “This will open a lot of doors for you when you grow up.” In a strange, comic-book sort of way, it did.

 Shortly after I arrived in November 1963, I was standing in line at the old Payless drugstore downtown waiting to pay at the cash register. Some customer had just handed back to the clerk the phone book he borrowed. The clerk looked at us all in line and said, “Look at this phone book. People are leaving this town in droves. This phone book used to be a growing thing.” I said in front of everybody, “Where’s your proof that people are leaving your town in droves? I just got here. I came because people are not leaving. God knows they’ve got a good enough case for thinking they should. But they’re sticking it out. That’s what is going to save this town. Why aren’t you on that side?”

 By the time I got here, the waterfalls were hidden from the citizens by railroad trestles and trains. I took Sen. Warren Magnuson down to look at the river. He said, “You know I took someone to look at the falls and we couldn’t find them.”

 I was in the seminary for seven years. I took seven years of Latin. Many of the languages of the countries that came to Expo were easy for me to grasp, because they were Latin-based. I learned French because it was the key language of the Bureau of International Expositions. I was going to those meetings every year before Expo. I had to protect our interest. A lot of cities were trying, and they saw little old Spokane forging ahead quietly. Some of those other cities were bombasting around. They let it be known they didn’t think we had a chance.

 For two to three years before Expo, I was gone more than I was home. I missed home. Even though it was tough on Jan, I was feeling jealous of my wife because she had the children all the time.

 My favorite Expo memory happened months before Expo opened. I had to go under train trestles to get to my office at the Paulsen Building. I went under the first trestle and under the second trestle and one morning the third trestle, the one on the fair site, was gone. And there was Mount Spokane. I had an epiphany. If everything stopped dead at that point and nothing else were to happen as far as the fair was concerned, the objective of the world’s fair was met. The mess was cleaned up.

 In 1963, the attitude here was worse than the actual situation. You can find times in every field when people start to downgrade the situation in which they are standing. And then the self-fulfilling prophecy takes over. What’s wrong with feeling better than things are instead of the other way around?

 How do you deal with the naysayers? Just treat them with love. I tried everything else.

 After the fair was over, things happened more slowly than I thought they might. My expectation was that the fair would give such a shot in the arm to the mentality of the community. We had the residual of the downtown revitalization and Riverfront Park. We still had to wait for the community to pick up the spirit. It wasn’t going backward, but it was going forward so slowly it was almost painful to watch. Now it’s picked up and how many years has it been since the fair?

 Don’t stop dreaming big. First comes the dream. Then comes the wish. After the wish comes the will. The will brings on the beginnings.

 The secret to our long marriage? She’s sitting across from me.