Smokey Turns 50 : Rose Parade: Fire prevention message is particularly graphic this year, as depicted on the Sierra Madre float being built in shadow of scorched mountainsides.

For years, firefighting Smokey Bear has appeared on Rose Parade floats to promote his message of “only YOU can prevent forest fires.”

But the importance of fire prevention, U.S. Forest Service officials say, has never been so graphic as it will be on the first day of 1994, Smokey’s 50th anniversary year.

A 17-foot-tall, flowered likeness of Smokey will glide along Pasadena’s Colorado Boulevard against the barren, dirt-brown backdrop of the fire-ravaged San Gabriel Mountains, where every rainfall now poses the threat of destructive mudslides cascading onto neighborhoods below.

A wildfire, one of several striking Southern California in October, destroyed 123 houses in the Pasadena and Altadena foothills. It burned 5,700 acres, most of them in the Angeles National Forest. Ashes and smoke from the fire drifted down around the construction site of this year’s Smokey float, housed in a Sierra Madre warehouse barely two miles from the blaze.

Although nearly 2,000 Sierra Madre residents had to evacuate, firefighters stopped the fire just short of its sweeping from the mountains into the tiny town of 11,000 people. The all-volunteer Sierra Madre Rose Float Assn. is constructing the float whose theme, spelled out in flowers, will honor “Fifty Years of Fire Prevention.”

State and federal agencies, such as the California Department of Forestry and the Forest Service, whose mascot is Smokey, are providing financial and additional volunteer help to build the float.

“Smokey’s a very fitting theme for those of us who were in the path of the fire,” said Dorothy Hobiack, 70, a volunteer on the float’s flower committee and a temporary evacuee on one night of the fire.

Like those in a handful of other Southern California communities, the Sierra Madre float group for 77 years has made its own homespun entry in the parade, which these days is dominated by mega-floats paid for by corporate sponsors and built by professionals.

This is the first time Smokey has been part of the Sierra Madre presentation, traditionally among the lowest budgeted of float operations.

The involvement of Smokey will mean a boon of $40,000 in federal and state funds to the float-making efforts. The donation represents nearly twice what Sierra Madre normally spends after staging fund-raising drives, bake sales and rummage sales. Besides the Forest Service and the state Department of Forestry, the two other large financial backers are the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and the National Park Service.

Months before the October fires, government officials decided they wanted to support in a big way a Smokey Bear entry in honor of his 50th anniversary, said Rich Hawkins, an Angeles National Forest official who was in charge of Forest Service firefighters during the October fire in the San Gabriels.

The burned mountainsides, Hawkins said, will make a stunning illustration to the worldwide television audience “that the need for fire prevention is greater than ever.”

In 1959, the first time Smokey appeared in the Rose Parade, the timing was also poignant because a fire in the Santa Monica Mountains was still burning. Eventually, it destroyed 81 houses and an expanse of forest.

But the 1994 parade will be the first time the San Gabriels have been so visibly and badly burned in the parade’s 105-year history.

In reality, Hawkins said, “Smokey probably couldn’t have stopped that fire,” which started Oct. 27 when a transient Chinese refugee built a campfire to keep warm and accidentally set ablaze the mountainside above Pasadena.

“Smokey can’t deal with the Chinese immigrant that probably has never heard of Smokey” and the dangers of building a campfire in the bone-dry chaparral on a night Santa Ana winds are howling, he said.

But Smokey’s message--since its origin in 1944 after Walt Disney’s Bambi was replaced with a bear to spread the message of fire prevention--can effectively point out the dangers of children playing with matches.

As an example of the need for that message, he said, in the Sierra Madre area itself, half of the major brush fires of modern times were caused by children playing with matches.

There are more subtle biological implications of Smokey Bear’s warnings, Forest Service officials say, and these have specific resonance for the Angeles National Forest and its environs.

Because of the havoc fire and flood had wrought in the San Gabriel Mountains during the 19th Century, the Angeles was created in 1893 as one of America’s first national forests. Farmers, ranchers and residents all along the foothills had demanded that something be done to protect the mountain watershed which provided rainwater runoff to feed the underground drinking water supply for the region.

The rule of thumb, Hawkins said, is that if a wildfire happens three times within a decade in the San Gabriels, the ecosystem starts to break down.

That means the chaparral won’t grow back. Instead, it will be replaced by grasses which can’t hold the rocky, crumbling earth sufficiently to prevent erosion that can eventually plague those living in the foothills.

Decades ago, erosion from the fire-scorched San Gabriels caused rivers of boulders and mud to flow almost as far south as the Rose Parade route in the center of Pasadena.

“So we can’t afford to have that area burn again any time soon,” Hawkins said, echoing what Smokey--named after a burned cub rescued from a New Mexico forest fire--has been saying for years.