No Primrose Path : Months of Preparation, Toil Is Secret to Successful Tournament of Roses

Standing on a Pasadena sidewalk in a bright white suit and a red tie, Tournament of Roses committee member Emmanuel Chan is a steady beacon of smiles as a flurry of tourists and float workers hit him with questions.

“How many floats are there?” they ask as he monitors a spot at the float-construction building near the Rose Bowl. “Do they have to use real flowers?”

After seven years of working on the parade as a volunteer, Chan has heard just about all the possible questions and has his answers ready--59 floats, and yes, real flowers are used.

“From the outside looking in, everything is confusion,” he said. “But really, we’re like a colony of bees--everyone knows exactly what to do.”

While most of the estimated 1 million people who will flood into Pasadena today regard the event as a one-day celebration and football orgy, it is actually a hectic yearlong effort that involves thousands of volunteers, city workers, business people and security personnel.

Work Begins Around Thanksgiving

Some workers only have to worry about New Year’s Day for a few months, such as the people in the city’s business license division, who begin to issue permits in late November to souvenir and food vendors who work along the parade route.

From Dec. 26 to New Year’s Eve, all seven members of the department, supervised by Homer Dean, work full time reviewing the more than 1,000 permit applications that come in, from an artist who wants to paint roses on peoples’ faces to a vendor selling plastic lizards on strings.

“This place can be a zoo sometimes,” Dean said.

For many other workers, planning started the day after New Year’s, 1986.

The parade is organized by the nonprofit Tournament of Roses Assn., a group made up of 850 volunteers and 10 paid staff members. The association splits with the city the estimated $800,000 in profits it takes in from Rose Bowl tickets, concessions and television revenue.

The volunteers are assigned to one of 29 committees that handle everything from the correct placement ofportable restrooms to accommodations for the hundreds of journalists from around the world who cover the parade and game.

A lot of time is spent answering questions.

“It’s like everyone in the world wakes up and

realizes there is a Rose Parade coming up,” said Kristin Mabry, a spokeswoman for the association. “One woman called from Arizona and asked how to get to Pasadena.”

After 98 years, there are few major surprises, although supervising 59 floats, 22 marching bands, 230 horses and 1 million people always poses a few new challenges.

‘Like a Big Family’

“It’s like a big family run very tightly,” Chan said. “This is the only thing you could find in the world with this type of grandeur and dedication.”

The association is aided by 226 other volunteers from a group called the Tournament of Roses Radio Amateurs.

For the past 12 years, that group has been responsible for radio communications along the 5 1/2-mile parade route and all the staging areas around the city, said Chairman Fred Edmunds.

“What you have is a lot of volunteers devoting one whole heck of a lot of their time,” he said, adding that members use their own equipment and donate their services to the association.

More than 1,100 officers from the Pasadena Police Department, the county Sheriff’s Department and the California Highway Patrol provide security and traffic patrol for both the parade and the game.

‘Whole Ball of Wax’

“We use the whole ball of wax” said Pasadena Police Sgt. Dave Harris. The department assigns all of its 200 officers, as well as its three helicopters, to the parade and game, he said.

Lt. Tom Gahry of the sheriff’s Emergency Operations Bureau said the entire procedure for the day is detailed in a six-inch-thick manual that has been carefully refined over the years.

“Basically, everything is in concrete with little changes every year,” he said.

Feeding the crowds is also no easy chore.

Mark McClure, general manager of Service America Corp., which has the food and merchandise concession for the Rose Bowl, said his company expects its 1,200 vendors to sell 40,000 hot dogs, 900 kegs of beer, 40,000 sodas, 18,000 bags of peanuts and 9,000 T-shirts during the game.

Work Is Never Done

Even after the parade and game are over, there is still much to be done.

Jim Morris, a city Public Works supervisor, said it takes 75 to 80 garbage collectors working from the moment the parade ends until the next morning to clean up the 85 tons of trash expected to be left along the parade route, at the Rose Bowl and in other areas.

Morris said that besides trash, the collectors also haul away ladders, couches, refrigerators and barbeques that people leave rather than take home.

“It really looks like a mess, like it will take a month to clean up,” he said. “But I’ve been doing this for 26 years, and we always get finished.”