Few Thorns in the Roses : Pasadena Politics: Part of Busy Parade Schedule

The Tournament of Roses Assn., the most powerful civic organization in Pasadena, wanted to flex its political muscle.

The plan was to take control of souvenir sales along the 5 1/2-mile Rose Parade route, usurping a market once controlled by small independent sidewalk sellers.

If City Hall said yes, the move would give the tournament $50,000 to $100,000 in yearly parade revenue.

As always when tournament issues are decided at City Hall, the very practice of government was thrown askew.

This time, as the proposal reached an early-April vote before the city’s Board of Directors, three of the seven members left the meeting to comply with state conflict-of-interest laws, because each had accepted substantial gifts from the tournament only a few months earlier.

The city manager also left, for the same reason.

So four board members remained, two of them veteran members of the tournament: Mayor John Crowley, who had joined the organization in 1980, and William E. Thomson Jr., who had become a tournament volunteer in 1975.

In the yearlong planning for the 1989 Rose Parade, the small drama unfolded at a time when much preparation already was under way.

At Tournament House, Rose Bowl television rights were being negotiated and committee assignments were being handed out to 870 active volunteers. New members were buying the white suits that volunteers traditionally wear on parade day. A dozen high-school bands from throughout the nation were making early travel arrangements and planning fund-raisers. Tournament president John H. (Jack) Biggar III had announced the parade theme, “Celebration 100,” and float designers and builders were feverishly at work, trying to match that theme to floats that would please high-paying corporate sponsors.

Failure at City Hall

At City Hall, however, the tournament’s power play failed. Board member William M. Paparian, an attorney, voted no, saying that to oust independent vendors was unfair and contrary to principles of free enterprise. Paparian’s objection cost the proposal the fourth vote it needed for approval.

Tournament officials were exasperated. Paparian’s own colleagues questioned him about his thinking. He left City Hall feeling as if he had screamed blasphemy.

Reflecting on it later, Paparian said, “I think it was the first time in the history of the city that anything the tournament had proposed had been rejected.”

At the float warehouses, designers and builders were after new thrills, approaches that had never been tried before.

Builder Rick Chapman made a pitch to the Carnation Co.: Build the tallest float in the parade’s 100-year history. His top designer, Ben Lovejoy, had prepared a concept, “The Tallest Show on Earth,” featuring a 67-foot giraffe.

Carnation officials bought the notion after a single presentation. Now, in less than nine months, Chapman would have to carry out its gestation.

The giraffe would be a natural show-stopper--worthy of many valuable seconds of television air time--but it would also be a massive engineering puzzle. One of the inviolate rules of building Rose Parade floats is that each must pass beneath the Foothill Freeway near the end of the route. As a result, even the most towering float must be capable of lowering to 17 feet, 4 inches.

Chapman, 45, was accustomed to high risk.

One year, for Avco Financial Services, he built a float with a human cannonball: stunt man Braun Reinhold, “The American Comet,” who was commissioned to launch himself in a series of 75-foot leaps down Colorado Boulevard.

On his first flight, however, the comet blasted off before all of his powerful elastic springs were in working order; spectators on the parade route, including KTTV announcer Bill Welsh, were sure he would never make the net.

“I thought he was going to miss completely,” Welsh recalled. “Then I thought he was going to hang himself on the edge of it. It was awfully close.”

Chapman seems to live for such gambles. He is known for spectacular creations, for floats so tardy in construction that they nearly miss the parade, for stupendous mechanical marvels that fail.

“He creates monstrosities,” said one tournament member. “At the last minute a hydraulic hose pops off and the whole thing collapses.”

Once before, Chapman had set a height record, for Honda in 1986. That float, a handstanding clown, appeared to be only the second-tallest entry until, at the last minute, his crew activated a concealed switch. The clown’s enormous feet tilted skyward and its toes reached 63 feet, overtaking its rival float and wowing TV commentators. It was a stupendous coup.

Now, however, with Carnation going for a height record, Honda was becoming something of a headache. Lovejoy had been through several frustrating meetings and numerous telephone discussions with Honda’s Willie Tokishi, trying to satisfy Tokishi’s desire for a float with a waterfall.

‘All-American’ Float

Lovejoy envisioned the waterfall at the end of a rushing water flume, set between huge tiki masks in a lush Hawaiian luau setting. Exotically clad swimmers would ride the flume, cascading into a pool.

Tokishi objected; a Hawaiian scene was not “all-American” enough for image-conscious Honda, ever-mindful of its sales market.

Lovejoy toyed with fountains--something in a World’s Fair theme--and a water slide set in a Li’l Abner motif. In quest of that all-American look, Mt. Rushmore was at one point drawn in.

Each time, he returned to the Hawaiian luau.

“It’s dynamite. It’s fantastic,” Tokishi acknowledged. “But we service the entire United States of America. We don’t service only Hawaii.”

Twenty miles away, at a rival float warehouse, Bill Lofthouse of C. E. Bent & Sons was keeping score in the battle for sponsors. Lofthouse’s high-powered operation had signed up 24 of the 45 corporate sponsors that had committed themselves to the parade, but those in the uncommitted column included some of the parade’s biggest--Pepsi, Burger King, General Motors, First Interstate Bank.

Across the crowded warehouse floor, many of Lofthouse’s creations were taking shape: elaborate angels for the Lutheran Laymen’s League, a huge pink hippopotamus for Baskin-Robbins, an animated roller-coaster float for the city of Glendale.

Building a float takes from three to seven months. Built atop truck frames, a few of which date to the 1940s, floats tend to be startling exercises in seat-of-the-pants construction.

The frames are modified year to year: A metal beam is added here, another is sliced off somewhere else. Long rods of “pencil wire” are sculpted into the shape of animals, towns and mountainsides by welders who double as artisans.

Within the elaborate superstructure lie hidden compartments for drivers, observers and, in some cases, animation technicians, who secretly work their lighted control panels.

Jury-rigging is standard practice. A steering column may end up being 20 feet long. A top-heavy float may call for concealed outriggers with metal casters. Long hydraulic tubes often curl through the skeletal frame like snakes, powering animated dragon heads or flapping eagle wings.

Across a nearly completed float is stretched metal screen or chicken wire, which is sprayed with plastic in a process known as cocooning. That covers the float with a kind of skin on which flowers are later glued or inserted in tubes.

Float builders take enormous pride in their creations--if they work.

“Yesterday’s float ends up in a landfill, but it’s art,” said Steve Serrurier, a former builder who quit because of failing profits.

The greatest change in the parade in the last two decades has been the increasing size and complexity of the floats. The flat, boxy designs of yesteryear have given way to floats so daring that many tournament members worry openly about the prospects of disaster.

Lofthouse tells story after story of breakdowns and near-tragedies. One of his floats, built for International House of Pancakes, caught fire during the 1983 parade because a giant sculpted dog was situated over the engine. The dog’s hair--pampas grass--found its way down to the manifold.

“It just went kaahoooomph !” the builder recalled.

Flames and smoke shot skyward. The dog was consumed. Horrified TV announcers speculated on whether the driver would escape. He did.

A year later, Lofthouse managed to make the best of it. He built a float with the same dog lying atop a stretcher. The story was told again and again.

The networks loved it.

“It’s all fun, and we have fun doing it,” Lofthouse said. “Somebody pays us a whole lot of money and we build these big toys.”

General Motors signed with Lofthouse.

Burger King and First Interstate went with smaller float companies.

Pepsi signed with Chapman and a videotape of Pepsi commercials--visual inspiration--arrived at Festival Artists; the soft drink company would want a blockbuster entry.

In the hometowns of the 12 high school bands invited to participate, spring fund-raisers were beginning.

In Strongsville, Ohio, population 30,000, nearly 300 students and parents met on a Saturday morning at the high school cafeteria. In 3 1/2 hours, they slapped together enough baloney, salami, ham, tomatoes and cheese to make 10,000 foot-long hoagy sandwiches to sell for $2.50 each, preordered.

The 202-member Strongsville High band hoped to become the first such band ever to represent greater Cleveland in the Rose Parade. First, though, it had to come up with $140,000. “That’s a lot of baloney,” quipped band director Ken Mehalko.

Meanwhile, in Auburn, Wash., band director Dean Immel had a chat with Al McVay, an 86-year-old Washington promoter, and latched onto a different approach: Immel’s 165 band students began selling “the Rose Parade by proxy.” A marcher would carry a slip of paper with a donor’s name on it.

The price: $10.

Fund-raising approaches vary widely. Two live pigs were raffled off, for $12,000, when Alabama’s Oak Grove High School was preparing for the 1988 parade. The year had been a busy one for that school, which also ran concessions at University of Alabama football games and huckstered 15,000 boxes of doughnuts.

Enthusiasm for Band

Situated in a tiny strip-mining town on the outskirts of Birmingham, Oak Grove High was considered one of the truly remarkable parade entrants, a school with only 950 students in kindergarten through 12th grade. Yet band director John Armstrong managed to field 164 marching musicians, nearly half the high school class, and enthusiasm was such that even kids in the fourth, fifth and sixth grades were taking up instruments and looking ahead to marching in the band.

Former tournament president Harriman Cronk, who visited the town, was astounded by the excitement he found, much of it in anticipation of the Rose Parade. “It was the biggest thing that ever happened--and that will ever happen--in Oak Grove, Ala.”

On parade day, however, the band experienced what every float sponsor fears: The two networks, NBC and CBS, cut away at exactly the same moment. TV sets across Alabama played network promotions, commercials for a Birmingham lumber company and an appliance store, and even footage of other parade entries.

“Nobody in the state got to see us,” Armstrong said bitterly.

In late April, several high-ranking tournament officials met for lunch and lobbying with Pasadena city Board of Directors member Paparian.

The tournament wanted to change Paparian’s mind about souvenir sales; gaining control over concession rights on the street would put an end to the sale of cheap merchandise that denigrated both the city and the parade, tournament representatives argued. It was the kind of appeal that parade officials could press hard--and usually they did.

“Those guys in the white suits are real control freaks,” said one longtime resident closely associated with the city, who asked not to be named. “It doesn’t surprise me at all that that would extend to what’s sold on the street.”

The tournament’s relentless pursuit of the perfect parade is carried on in such close association with the city that it consistently draws fire from critics.

Despite a few political dissidents, the town’s business is handled by a classic “good old boy” network, made up largely of city officials, business leaders and tournament members, including some who wear all three hats. Problems are worked out at places like Pasadena’s private University Club, and telephone links between City Hall and Tournament House are close enough that a phone call to one sometimes produces a response from the other.

Tournament members are some of the city’s most generous campaign contributors, even though the organization steadfastly calls itself apolitical. Jim Stivers, 67, the point man in the tournament’s dealings with City Hall, is a regular donor and is chairman of the Pasadena Center Operating Co., the city-appointed board that runs the Pasadena Civic Auditorium and Convention Center.

For many years, one of the influential figures in town was Lathrop K. (Lay) Leishman, 84, the elder statesman of the tournament and its 1939 parade president. Leishman prided himself as “the world’s greatest $25 fund-raiser,” a boast about his ability to pick up the phone, or jot notes to 100 or so friends, and bring an avalanche of small donations to any candidate or cause of his choosing.

After city board elections, it is common for Leishman to invite a new officeholder to the University Club and offer a nomination for tournament membership. Asked about the practice, Leishman said he simply cares about the town.

“I want to tell (the board members) how I see the city,” he said. “The potholes, dead trees. I want to know all those people.”

Over the years, critics have taken aim at the tournament’s practice of distributing parade tickets and Rose Bowl game tickets to elected city board members, who pass them along to donors and constituents. At one time, city board “retreats” were occasionally held at Tournament House so that parade volunteers could mix privately with elected officials.

‘Do So Much Good’

And still today, according to the critics, some elected members of government seem to have difficulty remembering which hats they wear.

City board member Rick Cole recalled when a tournament member on the city board found himself defending the parade. “How can you attack those guys? They do so much good for the city,” Cole quoted the tournament member as saying, as if the speaker had no connection with the parade at all.

“All I could do was look over . . . and see him in his white suit,” Cole said.

Yet, even detractors acknowledge that the tournament’s foremost political aim is to stage a terrific parade and football game.

Unlike similar events in other cities, the Rose Parade draws nothing from the taxpayer; it creates a cash surplus. Relationships that outsiders might see as incestuous are regarded by Pasadena’s old guard as vital to the common goal.

“The tournament . . . puts on a festival every year that happens to be the most successful in the world,” said executive director Jack French. “What’s wrong with that?”

This time, the tournament got its viewpoint across.

After lunch with Stivers and French at the University Club, Paparian agreed to support a compromise plan, turning control of street concessions over to the tournament on a one-year trial. The tournament agreed to give independent vendors a chance to participate in exchange for a share of the profits.

At a new vote in May, the revised plan was approved, 4 to 0.

At his float warehouse in Azusa, builder Rick Chapman had solved a nagging fear--that a rival builder might try to surpass his record-setting giraffe by rigging something taller.

Once again, he would resort to clever deception. Atop the head of his giraffe, he would place a cap and a hydraulically controlled feather. With the touch of a button, the feather would rise to beyond 70 feet.

So simple. He grinned.

But other problems plagued him, notably Honda and Pepsi, two top-drawer accounts. Honda’s Tokishi still had not approved a waterfall design, and it was now mid-May. Pepsi had canceled talks between Chapman and members of its New York-based think tank; instead, a new videotape was sent and Chapman was instructed to begin rethinking the marketing approach. No longer was the float going to represent Pepsi’s top-selling soft drink.

“Now,” Chapman said, “we’re thinking Slice.”

At Tournament House, the last of the committee assignments were made and the membership roster was completed. On May 31, new members entered the Rose Room for an orientation on tournament philosophy, committee structure and finances, then adjourned to the house bar for a drink.

Acceptance to the organization is considered an honor worth toasting. Only about 30 newcomers are admitted each year, from an application list several times that long.

The tournament limits its rolls to 1,400 members--870 are active in parade planning--because membership carries the right to buy or receive Rose Bowl football tickets and no more can be spared.

To join, one must be 24 to 55 years old, live or work within 15 miles of Pasadena City Hall and be nominated from within. Until the 1970s, when the civil rights and women’s movements began to chip away at old attitudes, the tournament was the archetype of the all-white, all-male social club.

Racism was simply a part of the town. Blacks were not in the social circles that produced tournament members.

A float in 1958 was canceled after a light-skinned black was chosen, inadvertently, to ride on it as “Miss Crown City,” according to members of the black community. The rider, a City Hall clerk named Joan Williams, recalled in an interview that no explanation was ever given for the float’s cancellation. But she believes she knows. “People didn’t want me on that float,” she said.

The tournament regarded women as threats to its fraternal structure.

“I think, in an organization that takes so much of a person’s time, with a mixture of people and cars and weekends . . . there’s too much chance for hanky-panky,” Leishman said. “That was my concern.”

Today, about 90 women are active volunteers, tournament officials say. No figures are kept for minorities, but the number, a small one, is believed to be growing.

“They’ve begun to make inroads into communities that were initially left out,” said John J. Kennedy, president of the Pasadena NAACP. “But it’s going to take time.”

Inside a cramped room at the float warehouse in Azusa, Chapman’s top designers, Lovejoy and Steven Metcalf, stood beside a television, watching Slice commercials. It was mid-June; the year was nearly half over, and two of Chapman’s biggest clients, Honda and Pepsi, were bogged down at the design stage.

Pepsi’s marketing decision to run its float under the Slice name would make it easier to match colors with flowers--the Pepsi blue is difficult to find.

Concept was another matter. Slice, a lesser-known product, was thought to require slightly more product identification than Pepsi. Overt commercialism is strictly prohibited, however, except for a small sponsor name on each float. And Pepsi had rejected everything the designers managed to come up with.

Lovejoy replayed the videotape.

“What do these commercials exhibit?” he asked rhetorically. “Self-confidence. ‘You’re as young as you feel.’ They’ve also got a bit of the exotic. Naturally, we’re looking at things like sports, dancing, a bit of humor. It’s much tougher with Slice.”

Meanwhile, Chapman was growing frustrated.

He tried to put pressure on Pepsi’s New York-based account representative, Doug Kellam. Who in the Pepsi bureaucracy, he wanted to know, was ultimately responsible for the float? Why weren’t any of his ideas going forward?

“If it goes all the way to the chairman, I want to meet with him on the phone--now!” Chapman said to a reporter. “I need to get into production or they’re going to have trouble having a float in the parade.”