Route Is a 5 1/2-Mile Party With Heaters and Champagne

On the night, and morning, before the Tournament of Roses, Susan Clark unlocked her doors and invited strangers--with loaded guns--into her home along the parade route and went blissfully off to bed.

The visitors were police officers and sheriff’s deputies assigned to maintain order. And for the past two years, they have had an open invitation to help themselves to Clark’s coffee and doughnuts.

Peace officers too, Clark reasons, should get in on the fun and games of the Tournament of Roses parade.

For a reporter taking note of the scene in Pasadena, her generosity was but one sign that the “Fun ‘n’ Games” theme of this year’s spectacle manifested itself--among spectators and participants--long before the first float turned the corner from the staging area onto Colorado Boulevard.

For example:

At the stroke of midnight, “we popped champagne and threw confetti and marshmallows at cars passing by. I can’t believe I’m here,” said Joyce Deibert, a nurse from Philadelphia, who had grown up watching the parade on television.

As 1991 came into being, a stranger came up and startled 17-year-old Erin Zane of Valencia with a kiss. She had been busy keeping warm in the 30-something-degree temperatures, bundled up in two layers of underwear, thermals, a turtleneck, a T-shirt, two sweat shirts and a jacket.

“I had no pillow last night,” said her friend Mark Jaffe, 16, of Beverly Hills. “I slept with my head on the cement and there were ashes on the curb. It’s not the cleanest of sidewalks.”

Indeed, as dawn broke, it looked as though a parade had already passed.

With no public trash cans in sight, people made do. One well-trampled sidewalk nook on the south side of Colorado was heaped with plastic cups, apples, crushed bagels, flyers on an alleged fugitive Pope, empty beer, champagne and vodka bottles, discarded Danish, cigarette butts and an unblemished grapefruit.

Conditions were distinctly more civilized in the camp of Warren and Ginger Dale, who were hosts to a Glendale youth group.

Their toes cooked in front of propane heaters. The parade menu included three kinds of quiche, fried potato wedges, vegetarian sausage, fresh fruit and freshly brewed coffee, both caf and decaf. Steaming platters kept it all warm. The Dales said their group began staking a niche on Colorado Boulevard on Saturday night.

Teddy Lieu, 16, of Norwalk, also arrived early--about 11 a.m. Monday--and immediately began cleaning out his savings, about a dollar at a time.

By the time the parade rolled past, he had spent $80. The first $45 went for spray cans of party string. Then he treated his high school buddies to Asian fast food and paid for a couple of movies at a Colorado Boulevard theater.

He finally sprung for some incense that a street vendor was selling because, he said, “It was a great deal, 24 sticks for a dollar!” He selected the rose fragrance, of course. He needed no consolation as his aromatic investment burned in the chilly air. After all, he said, “I still have $20.”

As revelers whooped it up along Colorado, float workers over on Orange Grove Boulevard pinned it down, glued it in place and tested it out.

And, for the most part, it worked.

But for half an hour, the brakes jammed on the Elks float, titled “In the Center Ring.”

“This thing has been working for months,” decorator Joe Merenda moaned.

Unlike most floats, the Elks entry was horse-powered, which Merenda had figured would minimize the potential for mechanical disaster.

Then there was Carnation’s “Purple People Eater” float, which ran aground over a curb, even though it was being steered by a train engineer with 16 years of float-driving experience. As the monstrous entry edged free, a tree limb swept off 20 white carnations.

The performers on the “School’s Out” entry from the La-Z-Boy Chair Co., which featured athletes swinging from a rope into a pond, were shivering after a trial run. The float’s water heater had broken down.

A gnarly bellybutton appeared in the stomach of a 40-foot basketball player aboard the ITT/Sheraton float. Decorators plugged it with carnations.

The fixes were not just for show, as float judges made their last rounds well before the full moon gave way to dawn.

All the while, float workers, such as Dan Froelich, stood a lookout for what imperils floats the most: the curious spectator.

“They all want to say, ‘I touched a rose float,’ ” Froelich said, exasperated.

But spectator Vicki Lehman saw the issue differently.

“Many, many years ago, one flower fell off a float,” she said. “I ran out and grabbed it. I didn’t pull it off the float.”

No matter, she said, she had to deal with the humiliation of being ordered over a loudspeaker to return the bloom.

Just after midnight, a white-haired woman in an expensive fur approached the First Interstate entry, “The Magic of Reading,” reached under the tail of a flower-covered elephant figure, plucked a honeysuckle blossom and ate it.

The woman had selected one of the few items on the float that is not usually eaten. The bumps on the alligator’s back were avocados, limes and squash. Flax and onion seed provided the shading for the wolves’ faces.

Just up the street, as the parade was getting set to roll, someone forgot to lower a parasol atop the Rand McNally float, “Are We There Yet?” The oversized shade from the entry depicting an old-time auto excursion smashed the traffic signal at Orange Grove and California Boulevard.

Undaunted, one worker showed the kind of spirit that makes the parade a success.

“We’ve already hit it,” he shouted to the float driver. “You might as well keep going.”

And it did. . . .

Minutes later, for the 102nd year, the famous procession rolled, marched and pranced off down the boulevards, passing Bonnie Cannon, a Victorville clerk who, with her two children, had braved the chilly night for the chance to see it all.

“Last night,” she said, “it was so cold, we were thinking, ‘Are we going to do this again?’

“But the floats are so beautiful. . . . “