Putting It in Perspective--It Comes Up Roses

Let us acknowledge first off that this isn’t Europe. This is Southern California. And around here, anything that endures for 100 years without having fallen into the La Brea Tar Pits is regarded as a big deal, something approaching the eternal. Almost like a freeway.

And for 100 New Years now (minus 1942, when they canceled out of concern that the folks who had just bombed Pearl Harbor might have the same designs on Pasadena), the Tournament of Roses has trundled out its parade, an increasingly elaborate, increasingly expensive, and now internationally watched 5.5-mile-long block party, an only-in-America extravaganza of rolling floral fantasies, wholesomely nubile women, marching bands and prancing horses, and all of it basted in California’s best export, winter sunshine.

If it isn’t the winter solstice celebration at Stonehenge--and it most assuredly is not--it will do. But for perspective, some historical highlights of Rose Parades past:

But never a Marshal Dillon

The grand marshals have included three astronauts, one dummy (Charlie McCarthy, with his boss Edgar Bergen), military men (Omar Bradley, Eddie Rickenbacker and, in 1928, a Civil War drummer); men from movies (John Wayne) and sports (Arnold Palmer); the White House emeritus list (Herbert Hoover, Gerald R. Ford) and war heroes, such as a corporal who carried his wounded arm in a makeshift sling--a diaper. Eisenhower was penciled in three times, and backed out twice--once because of war in Korea, once for inaugural chores. When they finally got him to Pasadena in 1964, the man who headed the Allied invasion of Europe got trapped in a bathroom for 15 minutes. Under the heading “by popular demand”: The only marshals to serve twice are Bob Hope, Richard M. Nixon and Shirley Temple Black. Future marshals: Why not Ronald Reagan, who announced the parade for CBS in 1965?

Tiara and thermal underwear a must

There was a time when female students who failed to show up for mandatory gym-class tryouts for Rose Queen at Pasadena City College got an automatic F that day. It took a while to get it right. There was a queen and 24 princesses in 1906, then king and queen in 1913 and 1914. Queen Sally Stanton officially opened the Pasadena Freeway in December, 1940. May McAvoy, 1923 queen and a Paramount starlet, groused, “I got on this so-called float at one end of Colorado Avenue and got off at the other. That was my entire reign.” In 1982, two male students showed up for queen and court tryouts. “None of the girls would talk to me,” Matt Stadtler said. “They thought I was trying to hit on them.”

” . . . Right here in River City”

And to think in 1949 the police’s worst problems were pesky kids with peashooters, popping vendors’ balloons. Arrests for drunkenness and disorderly conduct have surged into the hundreds over the years, many now from drugs. In 1949, seven parade-goers died from heart attacks, and several others have since. An hour into the 1976 parade, a 4.2 earthquake rippled along the route, barely noticed. In 1926, before strict inspection codes, a grandstand collapsed, halting the parade for an hour. Seven people died and the builder went to San Quentin. There are bomb threats now and again. And violence blotted the Rose Parade on the last day of 1972, when a man was stabbed to death--the event’s first homicide. In a cluster of years after that, six more were killed, one of them a Glendale teen-ager after he asked some rowdies outside his RV to keep the noise down.

Is this one of those word problems?

Forget angels on pinheads. How many people can mash together along Colorado Boulevard? For almost two decades, parade officials and Pasadena police have stuck to their side arms, declaring staunchly that at least a million people are out there. In January, 1980, after a flyover, police fixed the number at 1,406,038. Pure blather, say others--that figure is as inflated as the balloons in that East Coast parade. It is a conundrum that has occupied, among others, Cal Tech Ph.D.s and armchair mathematicians who argue that only 400,000 or 500,000 people may fit along the route. Factor in little children, lawn chairs, weather (parkas take up more room than sweaters), even the amount of trash left behind: 40 tons divided by 1.4 million people means about an ounce of litter per person. A policeman once remarked of the sages, “Hey, they can’t even predict an earthquake, right? So who are they to tell us how many people are at the parade?”

Cherchez la femme, and good luck

1893: Equestriennes were first permitted to wear divided skirts, and therefore ride astride. Controversy erupts. 1911: One float in a post-parade event mocks suffragettes. The crowd guffaws. 1933: Mary Pickford, America’s film sweetheart, is the first woman grand marshal. In 100 years, there would be five--Pickford, Shirley Temple (twice), songstress Kate Smith, humorist Erma Bombeck and--with her husband Roy Rogers--singing cowgirl Dale Evans. She always rode astride.

Man is a political animal, except in Pasadena on New Year’s Day

The Rose Parade embraces many lofty themes--children, sports, brotherhood, fairy tales, music--but never unpleasantness. You will not see a float about famine or Chernobyl. During the Spanish-American War and World War I, anxious parade officials telegrammed both Presidents McKinley and Wilson to ask whether the show should go on. The Presidents, probably with some puzzlement, said sure. Military glory, however, has been a suitable topic. 1941’s prize winner was a floral battleship, and a 1946 float depicted the blood-bought flag-raising on Iwo Jima in sweet peas and delphiniums. A 1920 float by the Women’s Christian Temperance Union gloated “Victory”: Prohibition took effect that day. Not that the parade has been controversy-free. Earl Warren, former California governor and Supreme Court chief justice, was picketed in 1965 by civil rights demonstrators. In 1972, aboard the Los Angeles float, Miss Watts raised her fist in a black power salute.

Laugh, clown, laugh

To you who have wondered why it is you see Bob Hope, not Robin Williams, as grand marshal: In Pasadena, they take their fun seriously. If fun is to be poked, let it come from the inside, like 1974, when cartoonist Charles Schulz was grand marshal and his “Peanuts” strip that day featured Lucy telling Linus that the grand marshal “wasn’t anyone you ever heard of.” Or 1980, when--according to a centennial book about the parade--grand marshal and dog-chow spokesman Lorne Greene opened his box meal at the Kiwanis’ kickoff luncheon and found a can of dog food put there by Kiwanian wags. In 1911 and 1912, the “Komical Knights of the Karnival” followed the main event with the likes of the Soft Pedal Band, which made no noise, and the Pasadoughnut Fire Department. Inspired in part by that, the annual Doo Dah parade made its counterculture debut in 1978. Ten years later, to the surprise and dismay of some Rose Parade honchos, Doo Dah is a fixture--and a hit.

The subject is always roses

Except for the snickering that it is corny hokum, or shamelessly commercialized, or American feel-good boosterism in a starving world, the parade has skated fragrantly above criticism. The first of jillions of words of press coverage started in 1890 with a Pasadena newspaper’s breathless 117-word sentence beginning “The sun was just warm enough to temper the cool, bracing air. . . . “ Since then reporters and broadcasters have worn out thesauruses for superlatives and synonyms for “thrilling” and “gorgeous.” (After more than 80 years as a favored adjective, “gay” was dropped from the parade glossary. If you don’t know why, reread the political section above.)

Even real news could not obliterate it. In 1959, on New Year’s Day, fire destroyed scores of homes in Bel-Air, and Fidel Castro routed Batista and took over Cuba. And there was the Rose Parade on Page 1.