Truce Removes Thorns From Rose Parade : Diversity: Tournament officials and activists praise agreement to add minorities and women to executive committee. New members will have full voting rights but shorter terms.

Riding an extraordinary wave of good will Tuesday, Pasadena civic leaders hailed a decision to bring minorities and women into the top leadership of the Tournament of Roses as a historic gesture to bridge racial and gender gaps.

“The doomsayers are saying that diversity won’t work, that our problem in Southern California is that we just can’t get along,” Mayor Rick Cole said. “Today, we have proved them wrong.”

The tournament, which stages the annual Rose Parade and Rose Bowl football game on New Year’s Day, announced the appointment of five new members to its executive committee, including two African Americans, a Latino and an Asian American. Two of the appointees are women.

The committee, whose membership has been white and male for its entire 99-year history, is the top leadership group of the organization. Its members make important policy and operations decisions, including how to spend millions of dollars to stage the Rose Parade.

The five new appointees are Linda Klausner, a riding instructor; Don J. Wilson, a Los Angeles City College dean; Ly-Ping Wu, a hotel management consultant; Gerald Freeny, an employee of the state Department of Insurance, and Ralph Gutierrez, a Pasadena City College professor. Wilson and Freeny are African American and Gutierrez is Latino.

In an apparent compromise between the protesters and tournament old-timers--who often had to work for decades to earn top leadership positions--new appointees will serve a maximum of two years before making way for other appointees, according to a tournament spokeswoman. The other eight committee members can serve up to nine years.

In addition, although the newcomers will have full voting rights, they will not immediately be in the succession for the organization’s presidency, the spokeswoman said, although the committee could change that policy.

The agreement to integrate the tournament committee culminates two years of negotiations, concessions and occasional hostilities between the tournament and representatives of Pasadena’s black community.

City officials and community leaders who participated in a monthlong mediation process said Tuesday that they had to overcome “a lot of raw emotional feeling,” as Cole put it, to reconcile the two sides.

But at a news conference Tuesday at Tournament House on South Orange Grove Boulevard, where protesters had disrupted traffic and held a candlelight vigil last month, leaders of the tournament and the Coalition Against Racism triumphantly joined hands to celebrate the agreement.

The coalition, led by Brotherhood Crusade President Danny Bakewell and Pasadena developer Jim Morris, had threatened to disrupt this year’s Rose Parade with a “counter-parade” unless minorities and women were added to the tournament’s top leadership.

“There’s no need to carry out the action,” an ebullient Bakewell said Tuesday. “We want to acknowledge our support of this year’s parade.”

“We have turned the corner,” a visibly relieved tournament President Michael E. Ward said.

The protests and threats had begun to divert the tournament from its primary task, Ward said. “We have 30 days to put that parade down the street,” he said. “It’s time to get on with it.”

Later, at ceremonies at City Hall, Ward urged several hundred tournament volunteers to support the “new direction.” He said that the organization in the last two years had been “stripped naked, scrutinized and accused of every injustice ever perpetrated in the history of mankind.”

But he described Tuesday as “a healing day in Pasadena’s history,” partly because of the “symbolic impact this action will have in sending Pasadena’s message of ‘bringing people together’ throughout the world this New Year’s Day and every year for another 100 years.”

The volunteers responded with relief that the Jan. 1 parade, the city’s 105th, appears to be on a more peaceful course.

“The important thing right now is a reduction of our stress level,” tournament volunteer Dale Lewis said.

The announcement was preceded by a month of delicate behind-the-scenes negotiations, with Cole and Vice Mayor Kathryn Nack convening a group of community leaders.

“It was our view that this was not getting any better,” Cole said, “and the price was going to be very damaging, not just to the tournament and its critics, but to the entire city.”

Bakewell and Morris were not only leading demonstrations, but they had threatened disruptions that would be broadcast worldwide on New Year’s Day and were pressing float sponsors to withdraw support for the pageant.

At the same time, the tournament appeared to be hardening its position, citing its many concessions to minorities--including shepherding them into the organization’s general membership in unprecedented numbers and appointing them to positions of responsibility.

Protesters dismissed all of those moves as tokenism, saying that the tournament should appoint women and minorities to the committee, where the true power rests.

It was Cole, Nack and their group of community leaders who proposed the expansion of the committee in separate meetings with tournament officials and with the Coalition Against Racism.

Los Angeles attorney Stan Sanders, who participated at the request of Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, said tournament officials required some persuading.

“They were almost there,” Sanders said. “They simply needed to cross the Rubicon.”

He said that the militancy of Bakewell, Morris and their supporters was a decisive factor in getting tournament officials to agree to the proposal. “It was important in the timing of the decision--now, rather than 1994 or 1995,” Sanders said.

The committee approved the agreement last week and, on Monday, the tournament’s board of directors, a 49-member body of senior volunteers and former tournament leaders, unanimously approved the plan in concept.

The finely balanced agreement, which negotiators were reportedly tinkering with up to a few minutes before the news conference, allows the tournament to appoint some committee members solely on the basis of seniority and merit, while appointing others in the interests of diversity, Ward said.

The agreement “allows all members an opportunity to serve for one or two years at the highest levels of the organization,” Ward said.

The New Appointees The Tournament of Roses has added five members to its executive committee, the volunteer organization’s top leadership group. The new members, who will serve maximum terms of two years, include two African Americans, a Latino and an Asian American. Two are women. The new members are:

GERALD FREENY * Age: 33

* Position: Employee of state Department of Insurance.

* Background: A Pasadena native, he has served as a tournament volunteer for six years. He has also done volunteer work for the Urban League, the United Way and various church projects, as well as with the Black Support Group at Cal State L.A., which helps recruit black students. RALPH GUTIERREZ * Age: 61

* Position: Associate professor of engineering and technology at Pasadena City College and job development coordinator for the El Monte Union High School District.

* Background: A resident of El Monte, he has served as a tournament volunteer for 10 years. He also is a past member of the Rio Hondo Community College Board of Education.

LINDA KLAUSNER * Age: 49

* Position: Instructor in English-style riding and a horse trainer at a Sun Valley riding center.

* Background: A 16-year volunteer with the tournament, she has also worked with the American Red Cross, the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts.

DON WILSON * Age: 61

* Position: Dean of student services and academic affairs at Los Angeles City College, where he is also a political science professor.

* Background: A graduate of UC Berkeley, where he was a linebacker on the football team, he has been a tournament volunteer for 25 years. He holds a Ph.D. from UCLA in administrative and policy studies.

LY-PING WU * Age: 43

* Position: Former general manager of the Pasadena Hilton, now a hotel management consultant.

* Background: Born in Taiwan and a graduate of the University of Houston, she has been a tournament member for two years and is also on the board of the Rotary Club of Pasadena.

NOTE: The other members of the executive committee are President Michael E. Ward, Past-President Gary K. Hayward, Lorne J. Brown, Kenneth H. Burrows, Gareth A. Dorn, W.H. Griest Jr., William S. Johnstone Jr. and Dick E. Ratliff.