The Bloom is Perennial for 1930’s Rose Queen

Holly Halsted Balthis, the 1930 queen of the Tournament of Roses, flashed a still-regal smile.

“If you can believe it, here’s the program from the parade,” she said, looking through a pile of scrapbooks scattered on a sofa in her South Laguna home.

She thumbed through the old program, pointed to a rose-bedecked float picture and proclaimed: “Here is my float, and here I am because you’ll ask me how different was the parade. The difference is they still use roses and all that, but it was simpler then. Nothing was computerized. Nothing moved but us.”

Holly Halsted Balthis, 76, holds the distinction of being the oldest living Rose Queen--an honor she never dreamed would still be a topic of conversation--and the subject of reporters’ questions--six decades later.

“I thought it was a short deal, New Year’s Day, and that’d be it,” she said. “But it’s something that stays with you all your life.”

And after 56 years, she says she feels as if she has just about said it all.

“I do because the same questions are asked,” she said, “and you think, who could be interested?”

A lot of people, judging by the traditional media coverage of the annual “Kodak’s Rose Queens Brunch,” which will be held today at Descanso Gardens in La Canada Flintridge.

More than 20 former Rose queens--including Balthis and five more of the 10 former Rose queens who live in Orange County--are scheduled to attend.

In addition to Balthis, Orange County is home to Myrta Olmsted Poulson of Laguna Hills (1932), Patricia Auman Richards of Laguna Beach (1946), Norma Christopher Winton of Corona del Mar (1947), Nancy Thorne Skinner of Newport Beach (1952), Barbara Schmidt Mulligan of Corona del Mar (1954), Joan Culver Warren of Costa Mesa (1956), Ann Mossberg Hall of Newport Beach (1957), Nancy Davis Maggio of Los Alamitos (1963) and Robin Carr Christensen of Newport Beach (1975).

For the media, the Rose Queens Brunch is an opportunity to interview and photograph the former Rose queens. For the members of this elite group, many of them old friends, it’s a chance to get together and reminisce about that shared, once-in-a-lifetime thrill of briefly being Southern California royalty.

“It was just like being Cinderella for a few weeks there,” said former queen Ann Mossberg Hall. “The public may not know it, but the Tournament of Roses supplies everything you wear during that time for appearances--all the clothing, down to handbags and shoes.”

Made Her Own Dress

In Balthis’ day, the queen’s reign was more austere. She not only did not wear a crown, she even had to supply the white satin dress she wore in the parade.

“The tournament gave me, I think, $10 to buy the satin and lace and I found a dressmaker in the neighborhood,” she recalled last week.

Balthis heads an unbroken line of Rose Queens.

Although the first queen of the Tournament of Roses, Hallie Woods McConnel, was chosen in 1905, no queen was chosen to reign over the parade on many of the subsequent years.

“It was sporadic,” said Balthis, noting that tournament officials “usually chose someone who had some national prominence or had done something for the community.”

Early queens included tennis player Mae Sutton Bundy (1908) and MGM silent film star May McAvoy Cleary (1923). In 1925, the year Balthis was graduated from Pasadena High School at age 16, the queen was Margaret Scoville, who also happened to be a previous Christmas Mother of the Year in Pasadena. In 1928, the queen was Harriet Sterling (“She was my algebra teacher,” Balthis said.)

A Continuous Line

But for the 1930 Tournament of Roses, tournament officials decided to henceforth have a continuous line of queens.

Their choice was 20-year-old Holly Halsted, a UCLA sorority girl whose mother was a native of Pasadena and whose father had come to town as a child in the 1880s.

An education major at UCLA, Holly was working full time in the tournament’s public relations department. “It was the Depression years, and I would go to school a semester and then work a semester in order to be able to continue with the education,” she said.

Unlike young women today who appear before a committee of judges, Balthis said, she did not “try out” for Rose Queen. She said she was chosen because she had worked for the tournament for several years and knew the directors and Pasadena officials.

“At first I felt overwhelmed and honored, but I think I really did it because of my dad,” she said. “He was so proud of the fact he had been an early comer to Pasadena.”

Actually, Balthis took this queen business in stride.

Chose Her Own Court

“I always had a certain degree of self-assurance; I didn’t have to take a class in self-esteem,” she said, noting that in high school she had been president of the Girls League and president of her social club. “You get used to that sort of thing, so you’re not floored by it.”

At the time, Balthis said, the queen was allowed to choose her own court to accompany her on the float. She chose her sister, Gabrielle, and five high school friends.

“I always say my biggest thrill was to round Orange Grove and Colorado and see that sea of faces,” she said. “You realized this was the day, and it didn’t rain. I think seeing my family all in the stands and wow! The big thrill, of course, is coming into the Rose Bowl on the arm of your escort. SC won that day, by the way.”

Her escort was her husband-to-be, Frank S. Balthis, a Harvard Law School student who later became an appellate court justice.

When they were married five months later, Balthis wore her white satin parade dress. Over the years, she said, “the dress finally got so bad it became a long-sleeve blouse. And then, I don’t know.”

Balthis said the former Rose queens began getting together as a group once a year back in the 1940s. The gathering, now held in the spring, “is a party for ourselves, and we welcome the new queen into the group. It’s a small, select group, and we have a great friendship, and we follow one another’s lives.”

Loyalty to Tournament

During the year, the former queens attend other Tournament of Roses functions. And then, of course, there’s the annual Rose Queens Brunch.

“We all know once you’ve been Rose Queen, that (attending the brunch) is part of it,” she said. “We all have loyalty to the Tournament of Roses.”

Balthis began thumbing through the scrapbook again. She was looking for a grain of rice that had been sent to her by a man named Rye the Rice Writer. On it, she said, he had painstakingly inscribed: Holly Halsted, Queen of the Tournament of Roses, Pasadena, California.”

She was unable to find it, but something else caught her eye.

“There I am with the captain of the USC football team. Good night!” she said. “It’s really funny. I can’t believe 56 years. . . .”

She doesn’t go through the scrapbooks often.

“No, I really don’t,” she said. “I certainly don’t live in the past--never, never. I’m always one to think about what I’m going to do next.”

She’s still involved with volunteer work and has yet to satisfy her lifelong love of travel that, so far, has taken her to 30 different countries. Last spring she visited China with her park ranger-photographer son, Frank, and his wife, Judy. Next year she plans to visit England and Scotland.

But this time of year, forward-looking or not, Holly Halsted Balthis turns her thoughts to the past, to 1930 when she rode in a rose-bedecked float down Colorado Boulevard.

“I remember there were street car tracks down Colorado, and the float had to avoid the street car tracks,” she said. “It was still Pasadena’s big day, and it was fun.

“It’s meant a lot to me in my life.”