It Rained on the Parade, but It Was Held Anyway

It may have been officially canceled, but there was a Tournament of Roses parade on Jan. 1, 1942. Sort of.

At exactly 9 that morning, five cars left the Valley Hunt Club on South Orange Grove Boulevard and rode the five-mile parade route to Tournament Park.

“We wanted to keep it going,” recalls Lay Leishman, who is still a Tournament of Roses official. “We had the Rose queen and her royal court in the cars and we even traveled at the usual parade speed of two miles an hour.”

It wasn’t much of a parade for Rose Queen Dolores Brubach, now Mrs. H. Eugene Chase of Claremont.

“Sure, it was disappointing,” said Chase, laughing. “As a girl I had dreamed of riding my own float in my own parade, and there we all were, crowded into four or five cars with nobody paying the slightest attention to us.”

After finishing the “parade,” the queen and her court went to the Rose Bowl where she participated in the radio halftime show of the Rose Bowl game in Durham, N.C. At the half, with Duke and Oregon State tied, 7-7, NBC radio went live to Pasadena where Brubach, announcer Ken Carpenter and Don Wilson of “The Jack Benny Show” chatted and sang “Auld Lang Syne” for the national audience.

“The thing I’ll never forget about that broadcast is that we did it from inside the Rose Bowl with the halftime score up on the scoreboard, and there was nobody else around,” Chase remembers. “But I had fun. I can’t complain. I didn’t have a real parade, but I was able to sell a lot of war bonds as the Rose queen that year and that was rewarding.”

Fifteen years later, Dolores Brubach Chase finally hitched a ride in a real Rose Parade, joining the 1905 queen, Hallie Woods McConnell, and the 1956 queen, Jo An Culver, aboard a float sponsored by the Occidental Insurance Company.

That float won the grand prize.