Pageantry of Holidays Is Couple’s Specialty

This Christmas season, Southern Californians will see 10 parades produced by a firm that does everything from seasonal decorating for hotels to putting on Fourth of July fireworks displays and ushering in business grand openings.

The company, Pageantry Productions of Cudahy, is one of the few professional parade producers on the West Coast.

Stepping into the dark, nondescript warehouse of Pageantry Productions is like entering a color fantasy world.

One room is Santa’s workshop with elves busy making toys while a red-faced Santa beams; in another room it is Halloween, with grim-faced scarecrows and toothy witches; in a third room the circus has arrived, with clowns and balloons and muscled men on trapezes.

The rooms in the 13,000-square-foot warehouse in a drab industrial area are designed to showcase the themes and decorating displays available from Pageantry and its owners, Bill and Ronnie Lomas. The company also has a business office in Lynwood.

Next Three Weekends Filled

“You can’t go out and find many like them,” said Lawrence Harmon, director of the Hollywood Christmas Parade, which Pageantry has produced since 1979. “They are a very specialized and unique company.”

Besides the Hollywood parade today, Pageantry Productions will be Santa’s helper for the Downey Christmas Parade on Dec. 8 and the South Gate Christmas Parade on Dec. 15.

Bill Lomas does all of the design and layout for props and displays, and works with parade committees, cities and police departments to draw up routes.

His wife, Ronnie, is mostly involved in managing the parades--seeing that there is adequate security, that the public-address system works, that judges’ stands are erected, that bands, horses and majorettes are in place and, finally, “putting it down the street.”

“What I like most is working and interacting with different people,” she said, “and seeing to it that the kids are taken care of--making sure that there is water for them to drink and restrooms waiting for them.”

Opened Trophy Shop

Bill Lomas, originally from Canada, said he got started in the business nearly 30 years ago when he settled in Lynwood and opened a trophy shop. He put on his first parade in Lynwood in 1958.

“I went out looking for potential customers and I found that parades used trophies,” he said. “But what I found they needed more was somebody to manage and put on their parades.”

Twenty-seven years later, Lomas is still directing parades, despite their being prone to mishaps. The most common problems are floats not starting and cars or people not showing up, Ronnie Lomas said. But the Lomases also have had to deal with horses collapsing and dying on the parade route.

$2 Million in Sales

“Nothing is all roses,” Bill Lomas said. “But there are no really big drawbacks in what I do. If all of the glitches went away, it would be too easy. But I do enjoy having a brainchild, putting it on paper and seeing it come right.”

Lomas said the company does more than $2 million a year in sales from its varied enterprises. Ronnie Lomas said Pageantry does more than half of the contract staging for the City of Los Angeles, including Mayor Tom Bradley’s most recent swearing-in ceremony and the visit three years ago by Queen Elizabeth II.

Bill Lomas said his goal is to produce even more spectacular events and parades.

“My goal is to do more challenging things--things that people thought couldn’t be done. We are only limited by the number of hours the two of us can work on a day and the number of ideas we can carry around in our heads,” he said.

It is work, he added, that he and his wife enjoy. “I do it because it makes people happy,” he said. “You don’t see people coming to a parade because they are sad. People want to see things that make them happy.”