Profile : Volunteer Sniffs Out a Rosy Deal : Parade Aide Sees ‘a Chance to Be Involved With the Community’

Beverley Radloff picks up the 80-gallon drum and dumps it in the middle of Room P-26, sending some 25 fifth- and sixth-grade students scrambling to sort thousands of small, green plastic flower vials that are headed for the Rose Parade.

Crunch. “Oops!”

Snap. “Don’t walk in the middle!”

Vial casualties everywhere.

Radloff, principal at Atherwood School in Simi Valley, says it takes the enthusiastic students about 25 minutes to sort a barrel’s worth of vials into groups based on size. Atherwood students, from kindergarten through sixth grade, sort the contents of eight drums in all during the last week before winter break.

All this pre-parade activity was instigated by Radloff, who has volunteered for the Rose Parade for the past 15 years.

“I went down with my son 15 years ago, when he was 7, just to glue some flowers on,” she said. Radloff hasn’t missed a year since and is now responsible for all the vialed flowers for 10 of this year’s 23 floats.

“We get every kind of flower you can think of, from all parts of the world,” she said. Flowers come from Africa, South America, Holland, Columbia, to name a few--each variety requires a vial of specific size. It is Radloff’s job to see that the tens of thousands of flowers get uncrated, tallied, cut, put to drink, vialed and sent to the correct float.

But the weather and the state of the flowers on arrival in Pasadena make it anything but an exact science.

“We’ve had some scary years,” she said with a chuckle. “One year, the flowers were all like little bullets, another year practically rotten.”

Before Christmas, Radloff gets a list of which flowers are needed for which floats. She loads all the information on a computer, categorizing by kind, color and height. “There’s a lot of math involved in this,” she pointed out for those students who might think that she’s just frittering away her vacation.

Radloff’s work starts promptly at 8 the morning after Christmas and continues until the job is done. “Some days, we’re there until 10 at night,” she reported.

She gets lots of assistance during the three to four days she spends at the Rose Palace, a tent on Raymond Avenue in Pasadena. The usual number of volunteers is between 10 and 20, but Radloff has had as many as 60 people working to meet the deadline.

“We get volunteers from everywhere,” she said. “We’ve had people from Sweden and Scandinavia. Business executives stop by after work to help. We get hearing-impaired students from CSUN. There’s something for everyone to do.”

Radloff particularly remembers a girl from Bakersfield who was confined to a wheelchair. “We just wrapped her in plastic so she wouldn’t get wet from the flowers and put her to work,” she said.

Before they are done, the volunteers will have processed up to 150,000 flowers, the biggest percentage of them roses. “One of the rules is that every float has to have some roses,” Radloff said.

Because she usually wears military fatigues for the cold and messy job, Radloff has come to be known as “Sarge” to the team of volunteers who pass through the Rose Palace.

Her team is usually done with its work by today, giving the float crews plenty of time to finish their work before all the scaffolding comes down for the first judging Friday.

Radloff’s husband, Herman, has had to play a strictly behind-the-scenes role in her adventures.

“He’s allergic to flowers,” Radloff said with a laugh. “But when I get home at night, he does all the computer work. All I want to do when I get home is sit in a tub of hot water up to my nose.”

After her work is done, Radloff sticks around to help with any last-minute or unexpected problems. But then she vanishes--never actually attending the parade.

“Every year, I curl up New Year’s morning in my jammies, with my fuzzy slippers and my waffle and watch it on TV,” she said.

Every year--except this one, that is. One of her goals all along has been to ride a float as an observer. A few weeks ago, she finally got the call.

“I’ll be right here, under the outrigger,” Radloff said, pointing to a picture of the Hawaii float. “There’s a little lookout window. I can see forward and right. The other observer can see forward and left. I get to yell out things like ‘Prepare to stop.’ ” She chuckles just thinking about it.

The vial-sorting Atherwood students share her enthusiasm.

Said 12-year-old Aaron Behar: “When we watch the parade, I can say, ‘I helped make that float.’ ”