Family That Bands Together Winds Up Leading the Parade

No family is perfect. Just ask your children. But trying to attain some level close to perfection is an honorable challenge that consumes much of our time.

Married with children, married without, single, living in a group home or breaking bread with a significant other, most of us are affected by being a part of a family. It might be just you and your siblings, or you and your grandmother. However you define yours, family counts.

Now try to imagine this one: getting a national award just for being a great family.

That’s what will happen to the Lynn and Dick Gast family of Mission Viejo at the Abiding Savior Lutheran Church in Lake Forest on Sunday. Jennifer, 16, Mandy, 14, and Rebecca, 12, share in the honor. It’s called the Aquila Award, sponsored annually by Concordia Publishing House in St. Louis, Mo., which specializes in religious publications.

This is the first time the award has ever gone to an entire family. I figured any folks being honored just for knowing how to live with each other are worth a closer look.

The Gasts, I discovered, are leaders among those behind-the-scenes people who make the floats look so beautiful at the annual Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena. Their work is primarily on the Lutheran Hour Ministries entry (which won “best expression of theme” this year).

But the Lutherans are so well organized at this labor-intensive effort that they farm themselves out to work on more than a dozen other floats. In this way, they raise money to keep their own Lutheran float going. This is its 46th consecutive year in the parade; the annual cost is about $100,000.

Lynn Gast heads the Petal Pushers, the 5,000-member volunteer group that works on these floats. Dick Gast is chairman of the Lutheran Hour float committee. Their children have been working on floats since 1990--Jennifer this year even became a crew chief, and Mandy became a “detail decorator” (fingernails, faces on some of the floats), a spot usually reserved for adults.

It all started by a fluke: In 1985, the Gasts’ first year in California, the family was homesick for its native Wisconsin at Christmastime. Then a baby-sitter had to stand them up on New Year’s Eve. Everyone in the family was cranky that night. As Dick Gast tells it:

“I told Lynn, “Let’s all get in the car and head to Pasadena to watch them build the floats. You and the kids will sleep all the way there and by the time we get there you will all feel better.’ ”

By accident, they wound up on the working floor instead of the catwalk for visitors. Dick Gast suggested: “Let’s just stay until someone throws us out.” Instead, they were embraced by float workers, and it’s been in their blood ever since.

The first few years, they were just volunteers--first float decorators and later shift supervisors. But in 1990, Dick and Lynn took on their current roles. They showed me some of the stained-glass window replicas from this year’s Lutheran float, spectacular pieces made of sweet rice, corn husks, onion seeds and flower petals.

It was fascinating to hear them explain how such a major endeavor is organized. But what is most interesting to me is that they’ve done it all these years as a family.

The daughters attend conventions nationwide with their parents to help raise money for the Lutheran float. While most volunteers work on one or two floats, the two younger Gast girls work on a dozen. They get handed off from float to float for jobs that require a smaller person to squeeze in and fix a certain section.

“We got into this mainly because it was something we could do as a family,” Lynn Gast said.

The parents have special reason to be proud of their girls: All three are “A” students. (Mandy was her class valedictorian last year.) They’re on swimming and tennis teams, active in Girl Scouts and groups at their church, and the girls say they love the Petal Pushers.

The award they’ll get Sunday came as a surprise to all of them. They didn’t even know they had been nominated by the national Lutheran Layman’s League.

“The key,” suggests Lynn Gast, “is that we really like our children. And they like us. If any one of us has a project, all the others pitch in.”

A Little World Fixing: There’s going to be a lot of family bonding by members of Temple Bat Yahm in Newport Beach Sunday. Neighboring communities will be the beneficiaries.

Nearly 400 of the synagogue’s members--most going as families--will spread out after a brunch to perform “mitzvot,” which I’m told by Sorrell Wayne is Hebrew for “commandments to do good deeds.”

The day is called “Mitzvah Day,” said Wayne, who is chair of the temple’s social justice committee.

The mitzvot volunteers will join with 10 area groups to help with graffiti removal, beautification and tree planting. There’s even a project for preschoolers; they’re going to spend the afternoon singing songs at a senior citizens center.

“We’ve got 65 people who will be cleaning up the Back Bay, so pray for us that it doesn’t rain,” Wayne said.

There’s another Hebrew phrase she taught me: “tikun olam.” It means “repair the world.”

“Tikun olam is an important role for all of us in the Jewish faith,” she said. “We hope this becomes an annual thing.”

Mickey’s Millennium: It was clear at Tuesday’s Disney shareholders meeting at the Pond of Anaheim that company Chairman Michael Eisner’s eye for 2000 and beyond--”Mickey’s Millennium,” he calls it--will be on the international market.

Tokyo Disneyland is already the company’s most attended theme park. Eisner’s global intent was clear when he said: “I hope that someday visitors will come here from other countries and their children will ask: ‘Are there any Disneylands in America too?’ ”

Wrap-Up: If you have teen children, do they like being around you? Mandy Gast informed me: “Most of my friends like to spend minimal time with their parents. But not me.”

It must be a delight (and relief) to Lynn and Dick Gast to hear her say: “My two best friends are probably my sisters.”

Mandy represents the children’s view that the float decoration craze has been great for all of them.

“It’s fun to do, mainly because it’s something we do together,” she told me.

There’s an award-winning family idea right there--almost perfect.

Jerry Hicks’ column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Readers may reach Hicks by calling the Times Orange County Edition at (714) 966-7823 or by fax to (714) 966-7711, or e-mail to jerry.hicks@latimes.com