Pasadena Elite : Rose Parade a Way of Life for Coterie

It was nearly half-past 7, a misty October morning in Pasadena. At a side entrance to the old Wrigley Mansion, the cars began arriving--a BMW, a Jaguar, a Corvette. Men in sports coats moved quickly up the steps; one carried a box of doughnuts.

Joking and exchanging greetings, they moved to a back-room meeting table, filling two dozen chairs. An elite inner circle, these men would bring the world the 1989 Rose Parade.

For more than an hour, they dealt in wisecracks and relentless detail. Every tree in the 2-mile parade lineup area had been measured, one committee member reported. Some would have to be trimmed so that floats would fit beneath them. The gigantic Honda float--an inflatable Superman--would have to be brought in early and lined up on the only stretch of Maylin Street that could handle it.

Debate focused on the rear axle of the Casablanca Fan float. The axle would support a 33-foot-high, human-size ski-jump ramp. Would it hold up?

One committee member was not so sure. And, he warned, “If that float goes down, the parade comes to a screeching halt.”

Come Jan. 2, the 2 1/2-hour parade will draw the eyes of the nation, and much of the globe, to Pasadena.

An array of 50 television cameras on Colorado Boulevard will carry the parade to 125 million viewers in the United States and to nearly 300 million in 30 nations and territories worldwide, according to the Tournament of Roses Assn.

The Rose Parade will mark its 100th birthday this year with fanfare. It is a success story of extraordinary dimensions--the most-watched procession on Earth, the pre-eminent seasonal pageant in history.

But it is more than that. In the tree-lined suburb from which it sprang, the Rose Parade is also a way of life. It is a slice of Pasadena high society, a revered tradition maintained by an army of volunteers and passed down from one generation to the next.

The Rose Parade is Pasadena, the old-timers will tell you. The parade is the community’s yearlong obsession, its vibrant floral painting of America. It permeates the town at every level, shaping the civic image, directing the course of government, adding millions to the city’s economy.

Nearly 900 volunteers labor up to 16 months, an estimated 60,000 working hours, to plan a single Rose Parade. Their organization, the nonprofit Tournament of Roses Assn., is by far Pasadena’s premier civic group, run by wealthy business and professional men and sought after by the young and ambitious.

With 29 regular committees, plus numerous specialty committees and subcommittees, the tournament is a highly efficient machine, controlling every detail of the pageant, from the size of a float’s radiator to the composition of the shoes on the horses.

The organization grapples with the parade lineup, with roadside crowds, with the placement of TV cameras and street barricades.

It grades its own members and promotes from within. It is complex; members say it takes eight or 10 years to understand the nuances of its performance and considerably longer--two or three decades--to move up the formidable hierarchy into positions of power.

Yet the mechanism that creates the parade also includes a small band of float builders, members of their own cottage industry in Pasadena; corporate float sponsors who tend to see the parade as one colossal television commercial, and, not least of all, the city and its Police Department, which assist the tournament at every vital step.

Never on a Sunday

As each year moves toward parade day, the entire apparatus begins whirring and humming, gaining speed. And then, come rain or shine, but never on a Sunday, the procession moves onto the streets: Apparent disorder coalesces into clean, linear form.

The parade does what it always does--it touts old values, it sings and dances, it lurches on broken float wheels and overheating engines, it stops and breaks down and goes forward again, startling and dazzling and blaring.

For 5 1/2 miles on a winter morning, it explodes into public view like a star burst, and it is gone. And then it starts all over again.

The first parade was staged by the Valley Hunt Club, an affluent group of transplanted Midwesterners, on Jan. 1, 1890.

At a time before freeways, before airplanes, before the World Series and before the rise of Hollywood, they ran flower-covered carriages through the center of town. It was a new bit of culture in a land that seemed to lack it. But it also was a real-estate promotion, a celebration of the mild Pasadena winter.

Fortune seemed always to guide the nascent winter festival. At first, there was the question of identity. Charles F. Holder, the founder of the club, wanted to call it The Tournament of Oranges after the flowering orange blossoms. Another member, Francis F. Rowland, suggested they emulate a yearly floral pageant held in Nice, France, that his wife had seen.

That pageant honored the rose.

Stroke of Genius

The decision to hold the parade on New Year’s Day turned out to be a stroke of genius. After the advent of television, the nation’s snowed-in masses, home after late-night parties, found themselves with a spectacle to watch.

“The founders, almost by accident, hit on the magical combination, and it endured,” noted Harvard’s John Stilgoe, a specialist in American civilization and the visual arts. “A lot of regional festivals never amounted to anything.”

Chariot and ostrich races were held for a few years after the turn of the century. In 1913, an unlucky ostrich rider named Melville Bush drew a particularly spirited bird.

“Bush was thrown from his mount in front of the judge’s stand, and in attempting to capture the runaway bird was kicked 20 feet across the racecourse,” one newspaper recounted. “The ostrich . . . became peeved and took the aggressive, causing hundreds of spectators . . . to climb fences in the immediate vicinity of the track.”

Melville Bush survived, but the racing era did not. Tournament organizers looked for a similarly exciting, but less dangerous, sideshow to the parade. Collegiate football had been tried once, with lopsided results, in 1902, when Michigan defeated Stanford 49 to 0. Now it returned to stay.

In 1916, Washington State beat Brown, 14 to 0, and the Rose Bowl went on to become the most famous of the winter bowl games. By the time network television arrived in the early 1950s, the parade and the game were an established one-two punch capturing a huge share of the New Year’s audience.

Today, with its 100,000 paying spectators, $11-million-a-year television contract and promotional licensing fees, the 75-year-old bowl game is an enormous moneymaker, generating $12 million a year for both Big Ten and Pac-10 universities.

The parade receives no television money because it is held on public streets. But when the books are balanced each January, the two events produce $400,000 for the tournament and an equal amount for the city of Pasadena.

Image Guarded

Critics deride the tournament for its elitist heritage and for the conservatism that has led to parade grand marshals such as Lawrence Welk, Richard M. Nixon, Gerald R. Ford and the Rev. Billy Graham. Tournament members bristle at the attacks and jealously guard the parade’s image. They route interviews through a public relations firm, and they close ranks when organizational politics or lawsuits are discussed.

The Rose Parade is still their civic promotion, staged with a zeal that the founders may never have envisioned.

“They are totally, single-mindedly committed to their own success,” said former Pasadena Mayor William J. Bogaard, describing the tournament volunteers. “Everything they do is calculated . . . to contribute to their own continued pre-eminence. You have to remember they’ve been at this for 100 years. They know how to do it.”

Fall, 1987:

As one parade raced toward its target date, work was beginning on the next. About 16 months in advance, the Float Entries Committee began selecting the 60 float sponsors that would be invited to the parade of Jan. 2, 1989.

The entries--culled from nearly 150 applications--would include large companies and small, cities and service groups, newcomers and old standbys. Letters of invitation began trickling out in October, early enough to allow companies to plan their advertising budgets. Parade floats cost $100,000 to $200,000; firms typically budget them as they would magazine or newspaper ads, running the final float designs past anxious chairmen or boards of directors.

The marketing departments of major corporations began brainstorming for ideas. At first, the notions are often abstract, geared to generalized marketing strategies.

A corporate representative of American Honda, W. M. (Willie) Tokishi, was playing golf in Florida on a hole with a waterfall. A waterfall, he thought. Maybe that would make a challenging parade float.

Soon, Eastman Kodak would decide it wanted a float to show off a group of former Rose Queens--a special touch for the centennial.

Casablanca Fan would want a gigantic float, as always. Ditto for Baskin-Robbins and the Carnation Co.

Pepsi, a new parade entrant, pitched the subject to its marketing think tank in New York. The float would have to symbolize the spirit that Pepsi promotes without violating tournament rules against overt commercialism. It would have to be wild, fun-loving, expressive of the product in a subliminal way.

“We’re definitely very big into it,” said Doug Kellam of the Pepsi-Cola marketing team. “Internally, we’ll have maybe half a dozen people sitting around brainstorming. I think you’re going to see a very outrageous float.”

A second batch of invitations went out in early December--from the Music Committee to 22 marching bands, mostly from high schools across the United States. In the small, competitive world of high school bands, an invitation to the Rose Parade is the pinnacle of achievement. The credentials and videotapes of nearly 280 bands had been studied before the committee made its selections.

One invitation arrived at Auburn High School in Auburn, Wash., a school that had gone to the Rose Parade in 1984.

The trip that year, in a caravan of chartered buses, had been the first venture out of state for many of the squad’s 150 squad members, recalled the band’s director, Dean Immel.

Now, Immel again will be dealing with travel agents and fund-raisers. He knows well the headaches that lie ahead--money shortages, scheduling problems, you name it. This will be his 11th Rose Parade, both as a performer and a teacher.

“This is, without question, the biggest thing we’ve ever been involved in,” the 47-year-old band director said. “And it is every time.”

Already, a year in advance, professional float designers were trying to anticipate the desires of corporate sponsors.

The designers work directly for float builders or sell their services on a free-lance basis. By special arrangement with the tournament, they know in advance the general theme of the parade. For 1989--the parade’s centennial--that theme would embody celebration.

Independent designer Don Davidson began meeting with Baskin-Robbins. The goal: festivity in the color and spirit of ice cream. The company likes parade spectators to think Baskin-Robbins just by seeing the float, Davidson said. The talks began to revolve around an immense pink hippopotamus; its animated mouth would release balloons.

“It’s name, of course, is Bubbles,” Davidson said.

Design Stage Crucial

The design stage is considered crucial. Concept and design are often the subjects of weeks of agonizing and second-guessing. The goal of every sponsor--television exposure--hangs heavily on how the design strikes network decision-makers. If the parade lineup includes 120 floats, marching bands and equestrian units, the two-hour network telecasts in theory could offer a minute to each.

But TV air time is not allocated so equitably. Often, a year’s work is rewarded or laid waste on parade day, depending on how a float fares in the battle for air time. Floats that break down may never even reach the limelight. Just as bad is to have networks leave the float for a commercial.

Sponsors typically count each second of exposure. An ordinary entry might get 30 seconds to a minute; a spectacular float, or one of the parade’s 18 prize winners, might get double that--up to two minutes or more. Each mention of the sponsor’s name is also counted.

“To have a float go down the street and have your name mentioned once, and you’ve spent $200,000 . . . is a waste of money,” Davidson said. “You have to make sure your name is mentioned many times.”

By those measures, Davidson’s design for Casablanca Fan in 1988 was a spectacular success: a three-masted Spanish galleon, 65 feet tall, which broke the height record for a Rose Parade float. Stunt men hanging from the masts and fighting with swords on the deck were carefully choreographed so that one action scene would follow another. CBS followed it for nearly three minutes.

Now, rival designers were looking for similarly fruitful concepts for 1989.

Ben Lovejoy at Festival Artists float builders in Azusa pulled out his thesaurus, looking up synonyms for “celebration.” The word list--gala, jubilee, fanfare--was a starting point. Concepts--circus scenes, ice-skating rinks, waterfalls, airplanes--began to take shape, followed by rough sketches.

By late January, 138 such drawings were taped to the walls at Festival Artists.

Half a dozen small companies build nearly all the parade floats, hustling for big-money sponsors like so many used-car salesmen.

Now they, too, were talking with corporate representatives, making their pitches. C. E. Bent & Sons, the largest float builder, markets itself each year as solid, cost-effective, well-organized. Bent typically builds about half the parade’s floats at its warehouse in Pasadena.

Bent’s chief rival, Festival Artists, specializes in high-risk design and large-scale animation. Owner Rick Chapman would figure to build about a fourth of the floats in the 1989 parade. One repeat client would be Honda, which once commissioned Chapman to construct a massive, animated King Kong. Honda’s account representative, Willie Tokishi, had endured considerable ribbing after agreeing to that design in 1986. “A monkey, Willie?” colleagues asked him. “You want to build a giant monkey?”

But Kong was a hit, drawing substantial press coverage and cheers as it carried a blonde maiden down Colorado Boulevard.

Now Tokishi strolled through Chapman’s cluttered offices, looking at the sketches on the walls. He said he wanted a float with a waterfall.

At Tournament House--the elegant, three-story Wrigley Mansion--John H. (Jack) Biggar III, 55, the owner of a furniture company, was installed as parade president for 1989.

It was a move that was preordained nearly a decade earlier when in a closed-door, four-hour meeting, he was chosen to join the nine-member Executive Committee. Members of that elite group rise, one year at a time, one step at a time, toward the summit of the tournament power structure.

Biggar’s ascension heralded the yearly wave of reshuffling, a musical-chairs game in which some aspirations are advanced, while others are set back.

Parade Analyzed, Dissected

Committee reports were turned in; the just-completed 1988 parade was analyzed, dissected, watched in repeated replays. A few float builders were fined, one for a float that struck a freeway over-crossing, another for a driver that could not stay on the parade route. The year’s work of each tournament volunteer was graded, a vital tool in establishing assignments for the parade ahead.

The chairman of the Queen and Court Committee, Lorne Brown, sat down with Forest W. (Frosty) Foster, the tournament’s assistant executive director for administration and membership, to hand-pick volunteers for that committee.

A plum assignment, Queen and Court is awarded to highly rated members who, in all likelihood, will continue to move up the tournament ladder. The committee is also time-consuming. Brown, a lawyer, had served on it two prior years as a regular member. Each time he devoted more than 700 hours.

Members of Queen and Court select the Rose Queen and six princesses and escort them to about 90 special events during the year. Would-be committee members are evaluated as if petitioning for sainthood; even their wives are taken into account and expected to act as chaperones. Drinking around the Royal Court is taboo, and even smoking is strongly discouraged.

“You just don’t want anyone . . . who has a potential to embarrass the tournament or the girls or their parents,” said Harriman Cronk, a past tournament president. “Not too often do you put bachelors on the Queen and Court Committee, especially young ones.”

Upward movement in the organization is agonizingly slow.

Only after 11 or 12 years does a member rise from an aide to a full committeeman.

Brown, a typical case, worked 16 years, both as an aide and a committee member, before moving into one of the 29 chairmanship spots. Four to six years as a chairman may lead to selection as one of the 16 directors--a post that ambitious members may reach by age 45, or after two decades of service.

When each new director is named, a personal time clock begins ticking: He now has 10 years to be elevated to the Executive Committee, the governing body of the organization.

Members of the Executive Committee include the parade president, the past president and seven others who will move up, one by one, to the top. The one newcomer each year joins a group whose average age is 52. He enters a circle of power and prestige, and he has seven years to plan for his own year as president, to ponder his choices for the parade theme and grand marshal.

Tournament’s Ambassador

As president, he will travel the nation--even the world--serving as the ambassador of the Tournament of Roses. He will, of course, drive a tournament car and preside over any number of community events, including the announcement of the Rose Queen. He will enjoy a rank in the community far and away above the mayor of Pasadena.

“I think everyone who makes the Executive Committee thinks it’s probably one of the greatest things that ever happens in their life,” said Cronk, who did make it, and who served as president of the 1988 parade.

Most, however, fall short. The pitfalls may be anything: The committee requires, for example, that its members be married, a must for the social whirl.

Those who do not make it are moved into mandatory retirement.

W. Reid Allen, 65, who spent more than 40 years as an active tournament member, rattles off a long list of very capable, ambitious men who never reached that final rung--and who were crushed because of it.

Allen is one of them.

He still wonders whether he was overlooked because of a personality difference with one of the Executive Committee members above him or whether the deciding factor was something else, perhaps something small--like the year-end report he submitted late, years and years ago, for the Float Entries Committee.

“You feel like the world has dropped out from under you,” said Allen, who reached his honorary retirement in 1981. “But you get over it.”