Still Blooming

The one about Ike still breaks them up.

It was 1964 and former President Dwight D. Eisenhower had been selected to serve as grand marshal of the Rose Parade. Following the same instructions given to every marshal, Ike made a quick restroom stop before the parade began.

“And wouldn’t you know it, he locked himself in that bathroom,” laughed Jack Klein, 77, pointing to a walnut restroom door at the Tournament House in Pasadena. “They had to break the door down to let him out. The parade started 20 minutes late that year.”

Klein and his cronies have been chuckling about that one ever since. But that’s nothing. After their decades of devoted servitude, the members of the tournament’s senior citizen Auxiliary Committee have thousands of such tales to tell--funny and tragic stories that they’ve collected in their committee work and along the parade route.

Faced with a mandatory retirement age of 65, mature tournament volunteers formed an auxiliary committee a few years ago to ensure that their stories still get told. Some members have long since retired from their workaday jobs, but the volunteer tournament gig is harder to give up.

“I’ll do this as long as I’m alive and can walk around,” said Bob Johnson, 75, who has been with the tournament for 30 years.

Although they’re not staying up all night on the New Year’s Eve street committees anymore, the auxiliary members play an important part in the Tournament of Roses. They know just about everything and everyone--and everything about everyone--ever related to the Rose Parade and the game. So in addition to helping out with odds and ends, they stick around to offer their expertise.

“They realized they were wasting a lot of talent by putting us out to pasture,” said Jerry Vessely, 79, who has volunteered for 45 years. “Now we help out with other committees.”

Three or four of the seniors take over the phones every year for a few hours, allowing the tournament staff to enjoy an officewide Christmas luncheon, far away from the incessant ringing.

The three men assigned to answer the phones last week said the tournament’s voicemail system is wired to pick up most of the calls, so they will be slightly less swamped this year. As for the calls they did pick up, the men gave several inquiring minds historically accurate, detailed answers--but many more received a rehearsed, “The staff is at their annual luncheon, but you can try calling back at 2 o’clock.”

“They get the oldest and most decrepit people to do this,” joked Austin Weston, 71, amid the ringing.

Monkeying around two phone lines in the tournament’s main office, Klein, Weston and Al Gerrie, 65, traded guffaws and waxed nostalgic.

“I remember one year when I was a child and my father was a chairman in the post parade,” Gerrie said, recalling a story that made headlines in the 1940s. “The parade ended over there at the Willard School, and there was a lady who went into the restroom and wouldn’t come out. She said she had never seen anything so beautiful [as the parade] in all her life. She had taken off all her clothes, and she said she wanted to meet her maker.”

The men laughed over that one and traded more war stories between phone calls.

There was the parade in 1969, in which Grand Marshal Bob Hope hopped out of his overheated car and started to push it. And then there was the parade float that featured a dozen live elephants. Also, who could forget all the hoops that people had to jump through with former President Gerald Ford’s Secret Service agents.

And, oh yeah, Weston remembered: “Did you hear about Eisenhower?”