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I was lucky enough to go to a brand-new middle school in the late '60s. It had a long hall that connected the classrooms (in three "houses") to the common parts of the school (the gym, cafeteria, pool, etc).

Someone's dad who worked in the computer field printed out a million periods on fan-fold computer paper, and the principal had it put up along the wall; I'm sure it was printed by an IBM 1403 chain printer. A little quick math shows that at 120 columns per line and 60 lines per page, the printout would have been 126 feet long. A little quick photogrammetry on a Google Maps image of the school gives an estimate of 139 feet for the total length of the hall, so it would have worked.

Anyway, I've never forgotten that illustration of how big a million is, and am thankful for the school administration for having put it up back then.

By the way, I happen to remember that the entire school cost $2.2M in 1968 money.

That's a great illustration. I'm a big fan of making an analogy for these unfathomable quantities. for example, I read a book by Bill Bryson called "A Brief History of Nearly Everything" (excellent book, by the way) and he had a chapter on the solar system. He used the following to describe the size of the solar system:

Most schoolroom charts show the planets coming one after the other at neighborly intervals—the outer giants actually cast shadows over each other in many illustrations—but this is a necessary deceit to get them all on the same piece of paper. Neptune in reality isn’t just a little bit beyond Jupiter, it’s way beyond Jupiter—five times farther from Jupiter than Jupiter is from us, so far out that it receives only 3 percent as much sunlight as Jupiter.

Such are the distances, in fact, that it isn’t possible, in any practical terms, to draw the solar system to scale. Even if you added lots of fold-out pages to your textbooks or used a really long sheet of poster paper, you wouldn’t come close. On a diagram of the solar system to scale, with Earth reduced to about the diameter of a pea, Jupiter would be over a thousand feet away and Pluto would be a mile and a half distant (and about the size of a bacterium, so you wouldn’t be able to see it anyway).

“By the way, I happen to remember that the entire school cost $2.2M in 1968 money.”

You could still build a couple of restrooms for that even now. The school, built to the same standard, probably forty million or so would be my first guess.