On Parade: A Mirror of the Southland
As people across the world tune to the Tournament of Roses today, they will see an event that has mirrored--and at times propelled--the growth of Southern California from its dusty youth in the orange groves to maturity as an urban giant.
Where once rose-covered horses and buggies wobbled along dirt ruts to amuse hometown crowds, ever-larger and more elaborate mechanized floats now entertain millions.
Today’s Rose Parade in Pasadena will be a freeze frame of the times: a corporate-branded display of technology and entertainment for the banner year 2000.
The grand marshal is Roy E. Disney, scion of the legendary Hollywood family. A Stealth bomber will buzz the crowd. And more than 50 steel behemoths, some with hydraulics and microchips, will rumble down Colorado Boulevard, broadcast live on the Internet for the parade’s 111th incarnation.
If all goes as planned, the procession will include a rolling space city and a walking logo of 2,000 people--meant to commemorate the new year before the message morphs into an advertisement for Walt Disney Co.’s latest animation release.
But for all its change, the Tournament of Roses is a tradition that has stayed true to its founders’ intention: to celebrate and flaunt Southern California’s warm climate against the striking backdrop of the San Gabriel Mountains. Despite showers Friday, today’s forecast calls for partly cloudy skies with temperatures reaching the mid- to upper 60s.
“It’s the intersection of a sales pitch and the true natural gifts of this region,” said Donald Waldie, author of “Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir” and a frequent commentator on the region. “The Tournament of Roses is a perfect example of what Southern California always wanted to be about.”
The parade has reflected the rise of automobiles, television and spectator sports. Its list of grand marshals reads like a marquee of the 20th century: Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Earl Warren, John Glenn, Kermit the Frog, Edgar Bergen and his sidekick, dummy Charlie McCarthy.
And while the spectacle has become a New Year’s Day tradition for the nation, some say it has also served as a psychological link for an area described as myriad suburbs in search of a city.
“It reminds us, when we are choking a bit on smog, caught in gridlock, and watching suburbia cover much of the natural landscape, why we have affection for this place,” said Waldie.
Yet for all its good feelings, the tournament has had its critics, who say the event hasn’t changed fast enough in one important aspect.
They claim that the volunteer Pasadena Tournament of Roses Assn., which runs the bowl game and parade, is stuck in the 1950s: white, male, Republican, elitist, all-powerful, and lacking any self-irony.
The debate flared into a firestorm in 1991, when then-Pasadena City Councilman Rick Cole attacked the association’s decision to pick a descendant of Christopher Columbus as grand marshal.
Cole lashed out at “a bastion of aging white men” who chose for the New Year’s Day symbol a figure linked with “greed, slavery and murder.”
Becoming More Diverse
The reaction was shocking, said Cole, now Azusa’s city manager. He made international headlines in papers like El Pais, the daily in Madrid, and faced calls for his resignation and became a virtual “antichrist” in Pasadena, he said.
Cole now says he has a different opinion: that most association members have a zealous respect for the parade, and the group has made strides toward being diverse.
Added Bill Flinn, the association’s chief operating officer: “We have tournament members who are attorneys and gas station owners, teachers and janitors.”
Of the 935 members, 43% are women, he said. Statistics show that the majority--75%--are still white, but 11% are African American, 8% are Latino and 5% are Asian American. By contrast, Pasadena’s 134,000 population is 53% minority.
No one could have guessed that such international scrutiny would attend the parade, which was started with an elite group of fox hunters to boost property values.
In 1889, Pasadena resident Charles Holder returned from France with the idea of a Mediterranean-style parade. Southern California was still a quiet outpost by the sea, isolated by rugged mountains and harsh deserts.
“Let’s have a festival and tell the world about our paradise,” Holder reportedly told the Valley Hunt Club.
Holder’s pitch fell on eager ears. Although the railroads had brought thousands of settlers, the land boom had sputtered and local businessmen were looking for a way to lure people West again.
Their idea was to showcase the sunshine and oranges in the dead of winter, as well as the foothill air that many thought healthful enough to cure anything from tuberculosis to constipation.
So residents in Pasadena--then about 4,000 people living in an exclusive resort town--decorated some carriages with orange blossoms and roses and held a parade on Jan. 1, 1890, on a lot off Colorado Boulevard. About 2,000 people showed up and the event made $229 in profit.
Five years later, the Tournament of Roses Assn. was formed and large Eastern newspapers began to cover the parade.
But flowers wouldn’t be enough. To draw further attention, association officials in 1902 took a chance on an obscure sporting event called football. They invited a visiting team from the Midwest, primarily because much of the region’s population came from the middle states. On what is now the Caltech campus, the University of Michigan played Stanford, routing the Palo Alto team 49-0.
Besides the lopsided score, the sheer logistics of staging the game proved to be a problem. It took two weeks for the Michigan team just to get to Pasadena. Tournament officials abandoned the experiment for a while.
Football wouldn’t come back until 1916, when things had changed drastically. The sport was becoming popular. In 1922, the association built one of Pasadena’s landmarks: a horseshoe-shaped stadium in an arroyo that housed both squatters and the town dump.
The stage had been set. Football and flowers. The economy was humming. Health and sun and the outdoors were becoming obsessions. Babe Ruth and Jack Dempsey were national icons.
But, as one association member would recall, that 1922 game introducing the new Rose Bowl “wasn’t all roses.” There were no toilets, so trenches had to be dug and covered with tents. And in a true sign of what the car culture would bring to Los Angeles, the Penn State team arrived an hour late . . . because it was stuck in traffic.
They lost to USC, 14-3.
Eventually, the annual games drew radio coverage. Parade floats, meanwhile, became more elaborate, featuring patterns made out of flower petals instead of whole flowers. Selection of the Rose Queen--a tradition that began in 1905--became more competitive.
“You see this fascination with youth and beauty in the parade,” said Bill Deverell, a Caltech history professor who studies early Los Angeles.
And of course, where there is youth and beauty, Hollywood isn’t far behind. As the nascent film industry went from silent films to talkies, helping to keep a nation occupied through the Great Depression, it found a showcase in Pasadena. The 1930s ushered in the era of movie stars as grand marshals: Mary Pickford, Harold Lloyd and Shirley Temple.
World War II had its impact on the parade as well. In 1942, less than a month after Pearl Harbor, the event was canceled because of fears it would draw Japanese bombing. As a gesture of continuity, however, members at that time drove their cars down the empty route on New Year’s Day.
The turning point for the parade’s visibility came in 1947, when the parade became one of television’s earliest broadcasts.
For the next half-century, the new medium would transform the New Year’s Day affair as millions of viewers watched a hometown affair--and companies realized the cheap publicity they could garner from the event.
Stan Chambers, who has been covering the parade for KTLA-TV since 1949, recalled how the station milked more hours out of the parade by filming the floats at the beginning and the end of the route.
“There’s no doubt that television revolutionized the parade,” he said.
It became enormously popular, but its conservative bent during the revolutionary 1960s made at least one high-profile participant uncomfortable. Linda Strother McKnight, the 1968 Rose Queen, admitted years later that she didn’t feel comfortable telling her classmates at UC Berkeley that she was tournament royalty.
“I was afraid they would make me stand in front of my social science class and throw things at me,” she once said.
Trying to Find Grand Marshals
Even potential grand marshals have been reluctant on occasion, particularly because they’re expected to make a round of community gatherings during the Christmas holidays, said the chairman of the association’s football committee.
“Sometimes you get turned down 100 times,” said Harriman L. Cronk, a stockbroker who was association president in 1988. He should know: In 1988, the first choice for marshal backed out, leaving Cronk to “scramble” for a replacement. “Thankfully, Gregory Peck agreed to step in.”
This year, there is some grumbling that the parade is becoming too commercial.
The walking human logo leading the procession, which will say “Celebration 2000,” will change into the words “Fantasia 2000” to promote the new Disney movie premiering at the Pasadena Auditorium a block away. Disney is the parent company of ABC, the association’s largest source of income through its $19-million annual Rose Bowl game television contract. After paying off the teams and other expenses last year, the association netted $390,488. That’s 1,700 times more than the first event did in 1890.
Officials concede that there have been changes--that floats, for example, can now advertise products, though they must also be entertaining and wholesome.
The same kind of consideration goes into corporate underwriting of the Rose Bowl game, they said. Last year, for the first time, the contest became known as the Rose Bowl “presented by AT&T.;”
“We have been very careful with regards to commercialism at the Rose Bowl,” said Bill Leishman, an honorary director of the association whose grandfather built the stadium.
“It is not the ‘Weed Eater Bowl,’ ” he said, “but . . . some look at that as the nose under the tent.”
Some say that parade and bowl officials, as they have for 111 years, are simply adapting to the times in a nation taken with brand name coffee and designer clothes.
“They didn’t start it as a religious procession, after all,” Cole, the former councilman, said of the Rose Parade. “We’re talking about America here. We’re all wearing Nike swooshes on our caps.”
ROSE BOWL SUSPENSE
Stanford star receiver Troy Walters, who was supposed to be out, might play today. D1
