At 90, Santa Ana Woman Still Takes Time to See Roses

It wasn’t just another day in the sun watching the passing parade for 90-year-old Margarete Stillwell.

The 1994 Tournament of Roses Parade marked the 30th year in a row that Stillwell, of Santa Ana, has made it to Colorado Boulevard.

“The parade today was wonderful,” Stillwell said afterward. “Of all the parades I’ve seen, I liked this one the best.”

She paused, then added: “But every year I say the same thing. Each year it seems to be bigger and better.”

As has been the case for decades, Stillwell was accompanied by her daughter, Nancy Turecek, of Mission Beach in San Diego, and two of Turecek’s former college roommates. The undeterred nonagenarian set out from her home about 4:30 a.m. to rendezvous with her daughter’s friends in Pasadena, where they walked four blocks to find seats along the parade route.

The early hour and exercise didn’t seem to bother Stillwell, whose first trip to the Rose Parade was in the mid-1950s.

“A person is as old as you feel,” she said. “I don’t feel 90.” She allowed, however, that “sometimes I feel 50 or 60--I’ll be honest with you.”

Stillwell said she doesn’t travel quite as often as she used to, but she still manages to visit the coastline in season.

“I go down to the beach in the summertime,” Stillwell said. “I go in the ocean and in the bay swimming.”

“There are not too many old people going swimming in the ocean or the bay either.”

Stillwell has found nothing to match Pasadena’s annual parade of roses. “I like the bands,” Stillwell said. “I’m up in years, and I like to see the young people.

“It’s fun watching the people. Some are running, some are walking looking for a place” to view the parade. “Everybody has a very excited look on their face, because they will see something great.”

Stillwell is helping pass on the tradition, having years ago introduced the parade to her granddaughter, Anna Turecek, 15, who was along for the event again Saturday.

“We had ringside seats--the premier seats,” said Deanna Passchier, one of Stillwell’s daughter’s roommates at the University of Redlands in 1960.

The group normally sits near the beginning of the parade, said Caroline Vassallo, the other former college chum at whose Pasadena home the women gather before walking to Colorado Boulevard.

Vassallo even has a memento of the event in her back yard--the metal frame of a tree once covered with flowers on a California Institute of Technology float. The 10-foot-tall metal tree now serves as a topiary frame for a winding vine.

But the greatest mementos of all are the memories, according to Stillwell.

One year, she recalled, it rained all night. And when her group arrived at the parade route “all the people who had been here were wet and went home.”

“We got a beautiful spot that year,” Stillwell said.