Santa Ana Workers Snip, Glue, Dream of Rose Parade Trophy

For Tom Bay, planning Santa Ana’s Tournament of Roses Parade entry is a year-round job. But all the planning in the world can’t head off the inevitable, hectic, last-minute rush to finish decorating the float.

It is not a matter of procrastination. It’s just the nature of a business where success rests on fresh flowers and other perishables destined to wilt, fade, shrivel and die.

“It gets to be real interesting,” said Bay, a volunteer who has served as chairman of the city’s float organizing committee for 5 years. “We’re already anticipating a real crunch on New Year’s Day.”

On Monday, Bay worked with a crew of 40 volunteers on the first official day of decorating. Some sat outside, painstakingly cutting the petals from boxes and boxes of straw flowers; others worked on the float, applying the flower petals and other dried materials with the help of buckets of white glue.

Fresh flowers were to be added later in the week. Much of the Santa Ana float will be covered with fresh individual petals, which have an even shorter life span than whole fresh flowers and will be added in the last 18 hours before the parade.

“It’s mellow in here now,” said volunteer crew supervisor Carey Mills. “It starts slowly and builds into panic.”

“It’ll be down to the wire,” added Bay, “but we’ll get it done.”

A burst of floral fireworks on the Santa Ana float marks the 100th birthday of Orange County (which happens to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the Tournament of Roses).

The words “Orange County,” however, were stricken from the float design because of strict tournament rules on sponsorship.

Bay said the words could have been put back on the float if the city would have re-registered it as a co-sponsored entry, but that idea was rejected. “It is not a co-sponsored float,” Bay said.

The city paid for the $80,000 float, and the money to feed and transport the volunteers and give them sweat shirts was raised privately. But “it is a salute to Orange County,” Bay emphasized, and it is touted as such in press materials.

The work on the float began in January with an overview of the previous year’s effort. It continued with fund raising, design reviews and the organization of volunteer crews.

The float was designed and built by C.E. Bent & Son, the largest builder of Rose Parade floats, but the decorating is up to Bay’s volunteer crews. Some prep work is done throughout December, but the real work takes place in the last week before the parade, with buses bringing in two shifts of volunteer workers daily.

Santa Ana’s volunteers are working in the Rosemont Pavilion near the Rose Bowl, in a huge room crammed with floats depicting a giant marching band, huge butterflies, giraffes, camels, a 20-foot koala, cartoon-style ducks and a set of Gargantuan bowling pins.

In the nearby Brookside Pavilion, Girl Scouts from the San Fernando Valley are decorating a float from Newport Beach-based Pacific Mutual and its family of subsidiaries, Pacific Financial Cos. The corporate-sponsored float is the only other entry from Orange County.

Depicting two elephants and a larger-than-life panther and leopard from a procession in the opera “Aida,” the float is a salute to the performing arts.

Back at the Rosemont Pavilion, Kathy Leek of Newport Beach, Susan Linn of Irvine and Larry Snyder of Santa Ana sat in the sun, meticulously cutting the petals from boxes of dried flowers for the Santa Ana float.

“They told us not to sneeze when the box gets too full,” Linn said.

Inside, Quyen Hang of the Valley High School Key Club applied handfuls of black onion seed to the inside of the letter “b” in the word “Celebrate.” By Rose Parade rules, every float has to be completely covered by natural materials.

“I cut flowers in the morning,” the high school senior said. “I got tired of cutting, so I came in here to do this.”

Nearby, George Zaveson of Orange carried buckets of dried purple statice to the float. Zaveson, the king of the Santa Ana volunteers, comes to decorate every day, as he has done for several years. “It’s part of his holiday tradition,” Bay said.

“I’m retired, so I have the time to do it,” Zaveson said. He most enjoys watching the float take shape, he said. “When the thing comes out, you can say, ‘Well, I worked on that.’ ”

Santa Ana has won a major trophy with its floats each of the last 4 years; if it wins again this year, it will be the first time ever that a city-sponsored float has won 5 years in a row.

“Santa Ana has one of the finest crews in the building,” said Don Whitely of C.E. Bent & Son. “Over the past 4 or 5 years, they’ve gotten quite expert at doing this.” Whitely, a professional parade coordinator based in Atlanta, comes to Pasadena for 1 week each year to work on the Rose Parade.

“There’s some pride involved,” said Fred Mills, a volunteer crew supervisor for Bent, who has worked with the Santa Ana crew for 3 years. “It’s like a family. You see the same people year after year.”

It has been rumored that, for financial reasons, this will be Santa Ana’s last Rose Parade float, but Bay insists that no decision will be made until next month.