Despite Missteps, Float Manages to Turn the Corner

The parade’s tallest float--and its biggest cliffhanger--was an 83-foot tower of giant clowns from which bungee jumpers leaped.

But for several touch-and-go hours Friday morning, it appeared the huge rolling tower would not even make it to Pasadena.

Two blocks from the Azusa work yard where it was built by Festival Artists, the clowns got stuck for more than three hours, trying to negotiate a 90-degree turn on a narrow street.

Then, one of the 50,000-pound float’s casters sank into a soft spot of asphalt in Arcadia, stalling it for another hour.

At 6 a.m., a worried-looking Ben Lovejoy, who designed the float for Nestle USA, paced a side street off Orange Grove Boulevard. “You have to remember, a float’s just a prototype,” he said. “It’s a thing that’s never been built before. You’re going to have problems.”

Shortly afterward, Lovejoy and Festival Artists owner Rick Chapman got word that the float had limped onto Orange Grove Boulevard, seven hours late and just in time to win the Judges’ Special Trophy for best showmanship in the parade.

Still, their problems were not over.

As the float rolled onto Colorado Boulevard and as stuntman Terry Ferges made his first bungee jump, the float’s retrieval system blew out, leaving him dangling for several minutes on national television.

The hydraulic system had blown a gasket, said fellow stuntman George Hery, leaving about 200 gallons of hydraulic fluid on the street.

Fortunately, the jumpers had ropes with them. With Chapman’s assistance, they fashioned a pulley system to draw the jumpers back to the top of the tower. “There were some nice improvisations,” Hery said. “It was pretty exciting there for a while.”

The perils of the Nestle float on Friday illustrate Chapman’s contention that, even with the best planning, things can go wrong in the peculiar float business.

An advance team had scouted the 12-mile route from Azusa to the parade’s start weeks before the float set out from the work yard, he said.

But the turn from 1st Street in Azusa onto Vernon Avenue was “a hell of a turn,” Chapman said.

Both the height and length dimensions of the float--which when laid flat is 122 feet long--are records for the Rose Parade.

Workers eventually had to jack up the float, which is covered by almost 250,000 blooms, and push it sideways to get it around the corner onto Vernon Avenue.