Rose Parade’s Enduring Legacy : Long Year of Preparation Climaxes in Happy Chaos

Late on the night of Dec. 1, a ragtag band of men in blue jeans and ball caps crowded into the shadowy warehouse at C. E. Bent & Sons float builders.

Hulking floats--circus animals, jet planes, a locomotive--loomed around them. They were attending class. The subject was driving: how to get the company’s 26 floats down the 5 1/2-mile route of the Rose Parade.

Foreman Chris Lofthouse lectured first on the rules for steering, speed, use of the clutch and the instruments. Then came the unwritten rules:

No. 1, never cut off the engine before the float passes the TV cameras; No. 2, never let Tournament of Roses officials hurry you past the cameras, even if three or four are screaming at you.

“If you find your oil pressure dropping--let’s say you’re at Green Street and not yet past the cameras--burn the motor up,” Lofthouse told the drivers. “The last thing you want is to shut the engine off. Rattle it on through the cameras. It is not worth a $2,000 motor to have the company lose a $200,000 account.”

In the yearlong effort to stage the Rose Parade, the briefing was just one of the many final steps.

Already, important groundwork was set. Floats had been designed and built. Most had been tested. Marching bands and equestrian units had been selected, some a year in advance, and high school bands throughout the country had spent months making travel arrangements and holding fund-raisers. Tournament of Roses committees had settled the order of march, planned myriad social events and chosen a Rose Queen.

Every detail was important. Elements of the pageant had to be pieced together like sections of a quilt. Every float, every band, every television camera, every VIP--even every portable restroom--had to be ready and in place at the proper time. As if to complicate the task, the calendar was packed with social events calculated to carry interest in the parade toward a peak.

Float driver Mark Bevan listened to the briefing with interest, even though he had been driving for 23 years, since getting his learner’s permit at age 15. The floats, ever bigger and more complicated, are almost frightening, he said.

Bevan’s assignment was the 55-foot Hilton float, a massive eagle trailing a spray of stars. He would be seated somewhere in the middle, scarcely six inches off the ground, covered by a canopy of chicken wire and Styrofoam and bombarded by the noise of the nearby engine. His only view would be to the side or down through the chassis to the street, where he would follow the pink line marking the parade route.

Cramped, Hot, Stuffy

Out of Bevan’s view, a good 30 feet away, would be his “eyes,” a teen-ager named Andy Pease, who would peer out from the neck of the eagle. Pease would talk to him over a radio headset.

Like most drivers, Bevan would earn about $75 for taking part in what amounted to a two-hour bumper-to-bumper traffic snarl. He would wait around all night to sit in a driver’s compartment that would be cramped and hot. If this parade was like past ones, he might well bloody his hands trying to keep the engine going--taking out kinks in a fuel line, reattaching loose electrical wires, removing flowers or discarded glue containers from the engine’s intake manifold.

“If you ask me why I do this, I have no idea,” he said.

Except maybe one: Every year, looking out the side of the float, he can see the crowd, which cannot see him. And everyone is smiling.

“ Every single person , on that entire parade route, is smiling!”

At Tournament House, the Street Committee was meeting weekly, and chairman Jim Stivers, looking tired, was answering the frequent demands of his beeper. As members filed in for another meeting, they faced a new problem because of overnight 80-m.p.h. winds that had ripped through Southern California.

Word was that Azusa float builders Tim Estes and Dick Hubbard had been especially hard hit. A portable construction tent had blown down; six floats had suffered $100,000 in damage.

Estes, whose three floats had been 90% finished, found them smashed under fallen tent supports. On one, a 30-foot puppeteer--part of a storybook scene--had suffered the equivalent of a broken back. The animated head was bent to one side.

Tournament officials quickly began scouring the country to replace the 82-by-147-foot tent. One was found in Salem, Ore., and loaded onto a truck. Within 36 hours, it arrived in Azusa. Meanwhile, Estes made plans to hire additional crew members to repair his floats. He had not had a day off since Aug. 28--and he certainly wouldn’t get one now.

At the warehouse of rival builder Rick Chapman, the day of the road test arrived for his towering giraffe float. Chapman, like Estes, was racing the clock; mechanics had worked all night loading the giraffe’s frame with controls and a V-8 engine to power the animation. At last, the giraffe’s 50-foot neck and head were in place, but they remained a latticework of metal beams and pencil steel.

“Something just leaked here,” a tournament official yelled as the massive neck was raised skyward. Concerned officials crowded around. The neck was lowered and raised again--two times, three times.

Apparently it was nothing serious.

The float lumbered up and down the street, turning corners, ducking under power lines. A tournament member lauded its hurried construction job. However, much work remained unfinished. A similar test for Superman had been postponed, and the 55-foot balloon lay half-inflated in the warehouse, awaiting cosmetic repairs on its mouth. Welders labored feverishly on other float parts.

Chapman, a notoriously late finisher, had almost missed the parade one year and he was again running true to form. “We’ve been behind since May,” he said. “We’ll probably catch up about Christmas.”

At the 12 high schools participating in the parade, fund-raising efforts were getting down to the wire.

At Auburn High School in Auburn, Wash., the tally stood at $100,000--about $30,000 short of what the band needed. Band director Dean Immel reported that 1,500 donors had signed up for the “Rose Parade by proxy,” a promotion in which band members would carry the names of their sponsors along the parade route. But at $10 each, it did not raise enough money. Immel was having to count heavily on a benefit concert and dance just before Christmas.

“We were hoping to have everything wrapped up by now,” he said.

The travel itinerary called for the band to leave Auburn High on Dec. 26 and return home hours after the parade. A 10-page booklet warned marchers to remember their extra white socks, gloves and shoelaces.

Meanwhile, in Strongsville, Ohio, Ken Mehalko’s nerves were less strained. Having planned for his band to raise $140,000, he found that the yearlong effort--including the sale of 30,000 hoagie sandwiches--had more than done the job.

“The trip is paid for,” Mehalko said happily. “We’re hoping to give the kids some spending money.”

The social season was roaring along at two, sometimes three, events a day: Tournament president Jack Biggar appeared at luncheons, breakfasts, an afternoon tea.

The Rose Queen and Royal Court showed up at the Westin Bonaventure Hotel in downtown Los Angeles to ceremoniously light thousands of white, dangling Christmas bulbs. The occasion fell between a Rotary Club luncheon and a dinner at Pasadena’s Church of the Nazarene.

Committee member Patrick Cabot, a Royal Court escort, had 2,000 miles on his tournament car--and the calendar was only half completed.

“I’ve just been running, running, running,” Cabot said. “We’ll put 4,000 miles on those cars.”

Back at Tournament House, members of the Street Committee wanted to know about Superman. The road test had been canceled a second time and was pushed back to Dec. 17.

The float seemed shrouded in rumor and mystery. One concern was whether the helium-inflated float would fly. Below the balloon would be a motorized base that would move along the street with its own floral display; that also had not been tested.

With consternation, float construction chairman Ronald Aday admitted he had not seen the float. “I don’t know if it will work or not.”

Aday went over his schedules for bringing in the floats. They traditionally arrive by convoy on the night before the parade, but Aday wanted to push back the times by several hours, allowing for last-minute repairs. Two Azusa convoys would start moving at 1:30 p.m., he reported, arriving at 8.

Jim Stivers, longtime chairman of the Street Committee, had argued against the schedule at an earlier meeting. He still thought that the times were too early, that volunteers in the formation area would not be ready for floats.

“It can’t work,” Stivers muttered. “I don’t know what to do. I tried to tell him.”

At a Tournament House meeting between committee chairmen and police, Aday’s convoy schedule came under fire again. This time, in Aday’s absence, changes were drawn in: The two Azusa convoys would move at 3 p.m. and arrive at 10. Convoys from Pasadena also were rescheduled.

Stivers seemed satisfied. “We debated this for some period of time, and this is realistic.”

Later, Aday said: “I frankly feel we could have done a little better.”

At his float warehouse, Chapman finally took the wraps off Superman. But the float took off like a lead balloon.

Under the simulated weight of floral decoration, the helium-filled figure was found to weigh 50 pounds. The discovery seemed surprising after the huge balloon had flown so readily in November, when it had first been filled. That time the amount of lift must have been exaggerated by a favorable wind, Chapman figured.

A back-up plan to keep Superman aloft with helium-filled “planets” also was considered impractical; those, too, would require floral covering and probably would add no lift.

Chapman knew--two weeks before the parade--that there was no chance his show-stopper float would fly.

He shifted quickly to a second back-up plan. The balloon would be held in the air by metal supports rising from the motorized base. If that worked, Superman still would present a striking effect, riding high on what amounted to a moving pedestal.

But the three support mounts affixed to the balloon were found to provide too little stability as it was raised and lowered. Chapman and his designers returned to a scale model, trying to see where additional mounts should go for balance.

The ravages of the windstorm extended into the week before Christmas at Estes’ float warehouse. Sections of his three badly mangled floats had been cut off and were being reworked. A dozen extra employees had been hired, and his first shift was working overtime. Stressed and bone-tired, Estes had the flu.

Bursts of delirious laughter marked his speech as he ticked off the list of his problems. The machinery in the head of his animated puppeteer had been ruined. “We had to cut off his head and reattach it . . . Ha!”

On one float, artificial trees were flattened. “But instead of hauling them away . . . Ha! . . . we had to fix them.”

Estes hoped to rest on Christmas Day. It would be his first break in three months. It seemed a long way off. “I’ve had the flu the last four days. About half my crew has the flu. We just have to keep on working. . . .”

At Auburn High School, a dance and a benefit concert raised $2,000 for the high school band. Even with that and other donations, the school was $8,000 short of the money needed.

But Immel would tolerate no rain on this parade; he would borrow against 1989 band funds. “We’re going,” Immel said. “The bus leaves Monday.”

At the float barns, the final week arrived. There was almost too little time to answer the phone. Last-minute construction problems had to be solved, then it was time for flowers--an estimated 20 million of them.

The flowering costs for some floats run more than $30,000. At C. E. Bent & Sons, two shifts of decorators--nearly 3,000 volunteers--worked each day on the firm’s 26 floats.

The task begins no sooner than the day after Christmas to assure that the flowers are fresh on parade day. Dozens of varieties had begun arriving by truck and air freight from growers who had been producing them all year.

“We’ve got roses in already,” said Bent’s Bill Walleck. “We’re in great shape.”

At rival builder Festival Artists, Chapman’s Superman float had been given four additional support mounts and was considered ready for decorating. The giraffe, the waterfall float, all were finished.

At Fiesta Floats, Estes was living in a motor home adjacent to the warehouse, scrambling day and night to get his wind-damaged floats repaired and flowered. Broken trees and the puppeteer’s head had been fixed; a model of Boston’s Old North Church had to be set in place.

Estes’ flu had subsided. He was tired, but the end was in sight. He would make it.

“No problem,” he cracked.

The convoys were about to move, and as they do, the parade begins coming together.

The coalescence is another drama unto itself, a time of organized chaos, split-second decisions and 11th-hour crises. The labors of a whole year hang precariously in the balance during one all-out, all-night scramble.

Emotions run high; virtually anything can go wrong.

Float builder Bill Lofthouse recalled one time, well past midnight and just hours before the parade, when his multimillion-dollar caravan of floats was moving toward the formation area.

Suddenly a wheel snapped off one of the float axles. The float and several traveling behind it screeched to a stop. The one-of-a-kind wheel was crushed into the shape of an egg.

“It was one of those fluke, strange things,” Lofthouse recalled.

He raced back to his warehouse, where he took the wheel to a 25-foot-high viewing platform and dropped it, hoping somehow to bang it back into shape.

“It bounced and rolled all over the place,” the float builder recalled. “But it worked.” Less than an hour later, the convoy rolled on.

Split-Second Timing

Arriving at the 16-block-long formation area, the convoys enter what resembles a military outpost. Hundreds of tournament volunteers--144 from the formation area committee alone--direct traffic and patrol barricades.

Floats are required to be in place by 3 a.m., and soon afterward a judging is held in the glow of floodlights. Often the floats are still being worked on; some need flowers, others may need repairs to mechanical equipment.

Later, bands and equestrian units are placed in position.

The chairman of parade operations, armed with a stopwatch, times each entrant as it moves onto the route. His goal is to get the entire parade past the television cameras within two hours.

A year with five breakdowns is considered a decent year, as far as floats go.

One notorious accident involved a Casablanca Fan float that became snagged on a light pole in 1983 as it turned the corner onto Colorado Boulevard. It stopped the parade for 18 minutes. For 100 years, however, the parade has come up roses. The parade has survived the Depression, two world wars and the radical ‘60s. It has survived detractors, the collapse of a grandstand in 1926 and the rise of the Doo-Dah parade.

As much as anyone, perhaps, 71-year-old tournament member Robert L. Hemmings has looked hard at the parade’s past and its future.

‘Launch a ... Missile’

Hemmings can see a day when there will no longer be a Tournament of Roses Parade. He quotes Ecclesiastes--to everything a season. Decline, obsolescence are inevitable. It happens to all nations, all events.

But meanwhile: “What will it be like in the Space Age?” Hemmings asked eagerly. “There have got to be new departures, new innovations. I can envision that maybe one day we’ll launch a space missile from one of the floats. That’s outlandish thinking, I know--really extreme. But why not?”