The Sun’s the Same, but the Float Folks Have Changed

It was always a sales job, a PR job, from the very first.

The Tournament of Roses--the parade, the athletics--was never meant to be just some Pasadena block party. It was a mission to convert the world to this demi-Eden of ours, to the gospel of Southern California.

A historian named Charles Frederick Holder began the parade crusade when he stood before the gentlemen of the Valley Hunt Club in Pasadena and waved some news clippings detailing the miseries of New York in that blizzard year of 1888. The club members were not considering sending blankets or rations. They were going to show those Easterners the error of their ways.

“Gentlemen,” intoned Holder, “in New York, people are buried in snow. Here, our flowers are blooming and our oranges are about to bear. Let’s have a festival and tell the world about our paradise.”

So the boosterfest had itself a grand marshal: Pasadena, the blueblood suburb that knew it had style, it had breeding, but most of all it had weather.

Today’s promises to be, oh yawn, another dream parade. Sunlight will gild the bands and floats and spectators, but even better, there will be people stuck in airports from Boston to Little Rock, smelling ripe in the same clothes they put on two days before, watching the Rose Parade on cocktail-lounge TVs and wondering why they keep putting up with winter when God made Southern California.

If there is a genteel way to thumb one’s nose at the East Coast, the Rose Parade has mastered it--packaged it, marketed it and sold it. One hundred twelve years of Southern California Inc.

But read the fine print, there in the annual report. Only the sunshine is unchanged.

*

*

There’s an MBA in it for some student who charts the fortunes of Southern California by the parade floats. For as the floats go, so goes the region’s economy.

Amid the service clubs and equestrians and bands, like chocolate chips in a cookie, are the floats--the parade pay dirt, the moments the TV anchors linger on and the TV cameras caress.

Corporate floats were first permitted in 1935, and to read their names now is to be reacquainted with ghosts of local enterprise: Helms Bakeries (gone), the Hotel Huntington (bought by the Ritz Carlton chain), Gay’s Lion Farm in El Monte (defunct). The great citrus ventures, like Sunkist and the National Orange Show, fielded floats in the boastful age when L.A. was the most productive agricultural county in the nation. So, too, groceries and banks, since swallowed up: Market Basket, bought by Safeway, Security Pacific, bought out by B of A.

This year brings us floats from Heinz, the pickle concern out of Pittsburgh . . . Glade, the air freshener owned by the same Wisconsin firm that makes Raid and Drano . . . and Target, the chain out of Minneapolis, which leads me to suspect sweet deals to get the company brass out of the snow for a week.

And it was like a marketplace massacre last year, when Walt Disney’s nephew was grand marshal and Disney’s “float” was 2,000 people spelling out “Fantasia 2000.” Universal was so ticked that it canceled its own float and stayed home.

Now we come to 2001--and Los Angeles as a corporate client state.

This year, when Los Angeles is no longer home to any Fortune 500 company, 10 of the parade’s corporate floats are sponsored by regional businesses--a sprinkler manufacturer, a home-loan outfit, a theme restaurant. Eleven are courtesy of national or even foreign companies. The global economy comes to Colorado Boulevard.

One float belongs to Boeing, the Seattle aerospace company that bought out McDonnell Douglas and wiped from the letterhead a company that started an airplane empire in 1920 in the back of a Santa Monica barbershop.

And one float belongs to BP, British Petroleum, which this year got a last federal blessing on its takeover of Arco, once the largest industrial employer in Southern California.

Both are trying mighty hard to show themselves to be good California corporate citizens, thanks to that nice Rose Parade. But the last Fortune 500 company to leave these precincts was my old master, Times Mirror, taken over by Tribune Co. out of Chicago.

The Times never sponsored a float; it hardly needed to, when its fatuous coverage of the parade’s early decades was worth a fleet of floats.

But maybe the examples of Boeing and BP will be noted in Tribune Tower, as the wind blows off the lake these days. And maybe Tribune’s executives, like the pickle people, could see the use of a harmless civic gesture like a parade float.

As for me, after years of standing on Colorado Boulevard and covering the floats, I’d be glad to put my feet up and ride on one.

*

Columnist Patt Morrison’s e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com.