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This was not your average Expo 67 nut. He was not arriving on a unicycle or in a kayak.

His plan was to visit with his wife and four children as the editor of the Grafton Advocate, a newspaper supposedly servicing the one-horse Ontario town of that name but in fact invented for the occasion.

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His oldest son, who also happens to be my oldest friend, still has the stationery that was supposed to summon up press credentials and easy access. “Freedom is founded upon truth and responsibility” runs the motto.

A tribute to human ingenuity, the nonexistent Grafton Advocate said something also about the magnetic pull of Expo 67. People wanted to go. In an age of bonded families, parents wanted their children to go.

As soon as I saw an Expo preview at the movies and marveled at the models of futuristic pavilions, I desperately wanted to be there. And as a typically selfish 11-year-old, I probably never reflected much on the fact that my mechanic father and homemaker mother, after finding the money for the Grade 6 school trip, would stay at home.