BURBANK : Work to Begin on Rose Parade Float

Now that the castle is gone, it’s just a question of where to put the waves and the sailboats, said organizers of Burbank’s entry for the 1995 Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena.

“It’ll be a challenge,” said Ted Winston, chairman of the Burbank Tournament of Roses Float Assn. construction committee. “I think it’ll be a lot of fun to put together.”

The Burbank association chose “Reach for the Wind” as the theme for this year’s float entry. It features three sailboats in a race, and porpoises and a sea turtle will follow. The last remnants of the 1994 entry that featured a castle were dismantled last week.

In the next couple of weeks, volunteers will start putting up the skeleton that will be used to support an arrangement of flowers representing the waves of the sea, Winston said. From there, they will decide where to put the sailboats.

Wind on the day of the parade is a minor concern, Winston admitted. Real sailboats could use the wind, but if strong Santa Ana winds hit during the parade, “We’d probably be in trouble--but most everyone else in the parade would be in trouble too,” Winston said.

Burbank is one of only a handful of parade entrants that build their floats entirely by volunteers. An artist’s rendering of the float was presented Tuesday night to the Burbank City Council.

Winston said the float designers had considered having the sailboats rock back and forth like real boats.

“But we realized that if we had people rocking back and forth for the entire course of the parade, it would make them sick,” he said, joking that the idea was killed despite a suggestion that it would make the float more realistic.

Instead, they are working on making the porpoises and sea turtle rock and move.

“It always amazes me how each year the float is so different,” said Pat Gunn, treasurer for the Burbank Tournament of Roses Assn.

The float will sail down the streets of Pasadena for only one day, but the work on it takes all year. The tearing down of last year’s float began in January after it had been on display in a local park for about a week. The work culminates in a frantic effort using hundreds of volunteers between Christmas and New Year’s Day to cover the float with flowers.

Winston said he has about seven volunteer welders for the steel frame and is seeking more.