The 1989 Tournament of Roses Parade : Mechanic Crew’s ‘Fearless Leader’ Helps Keep the Floats Afloat

Bobby Grossman is a 55-year-old truck mechanic who spends most of his time running a family-owned garage in Pasadena.

But from Sunday evening to the early morning hours of Monday he wore another title: Rose Parade trouble-shooter, responsible for making sure that the mechanical guts of those complex Tournament of Roses floats would do what they were supposed to.

Grossman is one of seven paid float mechanics who look after every phase of their construction, but he’s developed a particularly strong reputation as an indispensable part of last-minute parade preparations, a man who can make things happen.

“I may be the leader,” said the parade’s chief float mechanic, Michael J. Hoffman, “but he’s the fearless leader.”

As Slice’s “Hawaiian Luau” float failed to move at the start of Monday’s parade, Grossman was summoned once again to fill the role of emergency repairman. Riding a motor scooter, he raced to the far end of the float lineup area, where the prize-winning entry was stranded with a broken steering mechanism.

The float featured a 30-foot-long water flume with a waterfall and was carrying 2,000 gallons of water taken from a roadside fire hydrant.

Grossman this time was unable to solve the problem. But his mechanic’s expertise enabled parade officials to know that the float could not be fixed.

Grossman’s theory was that a piece of the steering mechanism had been unable to handle the added weight of the water. After finishing his inspection, he told float builder Rick Chapman that tournament officials were going to take “Hawaiian Luau” out of the lineup and tow it to the post-parade display area.

“That’s the end of the parade,” he said.

The moment was the end of a long, otherwise uneventful night for the parade veteran, who studies each float months ahead of time.

By 6 p.m. Sunday, as the streets near the parade route began to fill up with spectators, Grossman took charge of moving the 29 floats stored in two areas across the street from the Rose Bowl to the formation area south of Colorado Boulevard.

As the drivers jockeyed the massive floats through the parking lots and onto Seco Street, Grossman raced back and forth among them, helping builders make last-minute adjustments to engines, check headsets and install tow bars.

While the parade’s float construction regulations appeared to limit the difficulties in Monday’s pre-parade lineup, a number of minor problems flared up throughout the night.

For instance, during a convoy of floats bound from a warehouse in Azusa, both the Carnation and Security Pacific National Bank entries developed problems with casters, small wheels that distribute the weight of the heavy floats. But those snags in the convoy’s progress were solved within minutes.

“It’s the small things that foul people up,” Grossman said.

Take Lawry’s prehistoric float, which began rattling loudly as the driver started the engine.

Grossman reached into the engine area and turned a valve on the fuel pump. The noise stopped immediately as fuel began to flow.

“When (participants) get excited, they don’t think of the easy, the simple things,” he said.

“It’s what I do. I look for things that can go wrong (with the floats) and I fix ‘em.”

“He’s really a great guy,” said Charisma Float builder Ross Young, whose company designed and built Burger King’s “Education Is the Solution” float. “The builders respect him because he knows what he’s doing. He’s been doing this for so long.”

Grossman, a Pasadena native, caught the parade bug when he was 14. Although he had no driver’s license, he helped his father drive a float for the City of San Francisco--a stylized trolley car.

He hasn’t missed a parade since, and has been a Tournament of Roses member since 1972. “Doing float work is something that gets in your blood,” he said.

Grossman has been involved in various Tournament of Roses committees--this year, he sat on the Coronation Committee--but he is always counted on to make sure the float designs are up to parade specifications and completed on time.

He and the other float mechanics begin their job of oversight in early spring, after builders and sponsors have agreed on which artist’s renderings will become reality.

“Artists. They can draw gorgeous pictures,” Grossman said. “But you can’t necessarily make a float the way the picture shows. . . . We go over everything” from inspecting the reusable chassis for possible stress overload to ensuring that the floats will adhere to the tournament’s strict dimensions.

As recently as last week, Grossman was still inspecting a hinge that would lower the height of the Old North Church steeple on the Rand McNally float that celebrated Paul Revere’s ride. The floats, although allowed to rise to heights over 50 feet, must be engineered to collapse to 17 feet, 4 inches--just under the height of the Foothill Freeway overpass on Sierra Madre Boulevard.