The Long, Hard Trek to Rose Parade Victory

It’s dawn on a fall Saturday and Tim Estes, tired and grumpy, has been at work for two hours.

He is putting one of America’s longest and least-known winning streaks at risk.

The Rain Bird float, Estes’ best hope for extending his victory run, will soon travel down a quiet street in Duarte, the critical final inspection before it glides down Colorado Boulevard in the 2003 Rose Parade.

Suddenly, Estes snaps at two neighborhood children who have climbed onto the float (“Don’t you know you’re not insured?”) then apologizes to their father. “I’m sorry to yell. But this is no low-pressure thing.”

For two straight years, the Rain Bird float has earned the Sweepstakes Trophy as the most beautiful in the world’s most-watched parade. (No sponsor has won three straight in a generation.) Estes’ streak is even longer. For the last nine years, floats built by his Fiesta Parade Floats have taken the top prize.

“This is a dynasty greater than the New York Yankees,” says Greg Lewis, a Pacific Palisades flower broker. “And it’s Tim who really holds it together.”

Winning the top prize takes 15 months, a big budget and a crazy-quilt team of eccentric talents, some of whom seem to delight in tormenting the boss.

Each brings a strange genius, a love of the parade and a willingness to sacrifice financial self-interest.

Among the players are a sponsor insistent on victory, a designer who won’t go anywhere without his parrot, and a florist who exploits the artistic possibilities of walnuts.

Estes, a burly man who wears shorts and chews unlighted cigars, builds 13 floats out of a small warehouse just off the Foothill Freeway in Duarte. He considers it a good year when he can pay his insurance premium ($120,000 and rising fast), make the college tuition for his twin daughters, and take home a $75,000 profit on annual revenue of $2.5 million.

“Whatever the challenges, Tim never stifles us in any innovative or creative way,” says Jim Hynd, the floral director and part owner of Fiesta. “We always go to the max and go for the home run. And he is willing to suffer the personalities and the consequences.”

*

In early spring, Estes studies a design of a water system for the Rain Bird float.

“If it works ...,” he says, scratching his head.

“If you want to get paid, it better.”

Arthur Ludwick, senior vice president and a member of the owning family of Rain Bird Corp., is weighing in.

Founded in 1933 by Orton Englehart, the inventor of a new kind of lawn sprinkler, and his friend Clem LaFetra, the Glendora-based company is said to be the world’s largest manufacturer of irrigation equipment. The LaFetra family has kept the firm private and its profile low, but Ludwick, who married Clem LaFetra’s daughter, is not so shy.

“If I had my life to live over again,” the diminutive executive says, “I’d be Mickey Rooney.”

In early 1996, Ludwick applied to the Tournament of Roses for a spot in the parade, seeing it as a way to identify Rain Bird with environmental protection. The tournament, eager to have a large local company on board, accepted Rain Bird, which paid the $4,000 entry fee. And Ludwick hired Estes, insisting that the float feature animals (preferably endangered) and illustrate Rain Bird’s trademark: “Intelligent Use of Water.”

That first year Ludwick discovered that he couldn’t justify the expense of a float purely as advertising. But his employees and Glendora city officials loved the attention. And he reveled in the competition for prizes.

So Rain Bird, as a perk, began taking golf course superintendents and other key customers to the parade. The firm started an employee contest to name the Rain Bird entry and put employees in charge of decorating, shipping pieces to company facilities in Arizona and Alabama so everyone could participate.

Rain Bird workers can recite the company’s record: four Sweepstakes in six years. Last spring, the company flew its entire international sales staff to Pasadena to celebrate the 2002 award at the Doubletree Hotel.

The success has put Rain Bird on the elite list of perennial prize winners -- along with Honda, Kodak and a few others -- that are unofficially guaranteed a spot near the front of the parade. (Other floats rotate position year to year.)

That status reflects budget; Rain Bird’s is one of the parade’s $300,000 super-floats. Most corporate float sponsors spend only half that.

“I’ve got a ferociously obnoxious, encrusted personality,” says Ludwick. “And, as I’ve told Tim many times, I’m only happy when we win.”

To satisfy that thirst for victory, Estes starts by calling Raul Rodriguez.

The son of a Navy mechanic, Rodriguez grew up in East Los Angeles and was 14 when he designed his first Rose Parade float, for the city of Whittier. He is a designer for hire, in demand in Hollywood (he’s done stuff for Disney) and Las Vegas (the signature facade of the Flamingo Hilton).

But he has built his career around the less lucrative Rose Parade, dreaming up float concepts for Estes and two other builders.

“I’ve always had this obligation to imagine things,” he says. “And Tim gives me freedom.”

Rain Bird’s is the first of 19 floats he’ll design for the 2003 parade. Working from a studio in the rear of his Hancock Park home, he stops to brew coffee, greet artist friends who constantly drop by, tend a house full of artwork and chat with his bird, a rare ruby macaw named Little Foot.

Each year, Rodriguez -- and his bird -- ride on one of his designs.

“It isn’t a real world that Raul lives in,” says Hynd, the floral designer. “He’s never grown up.”

Rodriguez begins trying out concepts for Rain Bird’s 2003 float in October 2001. One has a rain forest theme, another a galloping horse, and a third involves a giant tree with a bear.

At a meeting with Rain Bird in February, however, the reaction is cool.

Is it possible, the company’s public relations firm asks, to build a living float?

A float whose flowers have not been glued on but are still growing on their way down Colorado Boulevard?

After a long pause, Hynd says such a concept is possible but would severely limit the kinds of flowers -- and thus the variety of colors. Few things will grow on a cold January morning.

As they talk, Rodriguez sketches furiously. Egyptian images -- then other African ones -- come into his head. Rather than a living float, he thinks, what about showing a scene where water brought life to a dry landscape?

Back at home, he blocks in a few shapes. And soon he draws elephants, giraffes, a zebra and birds playing by a stream with small waterfalls -- matching Rain Bird’s “use of water” message. He makes a couple of the elephants babies, to mesh with the tournament’s theme of youth and dreams.

Rain Bird jettisons the “living float” and approves Rodriguez’s.

“Water Wonderland” will be the winning entry in the company naming contest.

Estes takes Rodriguez’s rendering and has an employee, Frank Garcia, make a three-dimensional Styrofoam model, which is placed on the warehouse floor where the float will take shape.

“Tim,” says Rodriguez, “can build anything.”

*

“Tim,” comes a shout from a worker in the Fiesta float barn, “when are we going to throw out” the rabbits?

Building a float begins with recycling. Estes keeps a few old float pieces from previous parades (dinosaurs peered over the surrounding Duarte neighborhood this year as a result). Estes’ crew has stripped the 2002 Rain Bird float down to the chassis, which will be used on the 2003 model.

“This is a tough business,” says Estes. “You have to save when you can.”

Estes, 47, bought Fiesta from its founding family in 1988. He had been building floats since he was 8 but had never been an owner. He has struggled financially -- late payments by a float sponsor nearly bankrupted him -- but prospered artistically.

The owner of the Fiesta warehouse, or float barn in parade parlance, is the Tournament of Roses. As it does for other builders, the tournament heavily subsidizes the rent. Although the builders are independent companies, in practice they serve at the pleasure of the parade.

In building Rain Bird’s float, Estes must abide by the tournament’s voluminous rules. First he must earn approval for Rodriguez’s design. And in April, Estes appears before the Design Variance Committee, the tournament’s answer to a zoning board.

Estes, in shorts and baseball cap, takes a seat at the end of the table in the tournament conference room, with the committee -- made up of parade volunteers in coats and tie -- on the other end.

“This certainly is a very Republican float,” he says, pointing out the elephants.

That gets a chuckle. So Estes begins asking for a series of exemptions from tournament rules. There will be taped music (that’s common, but needs committee approval). And the float’s giraffe and acacia trees will soar 32 feet, far above the 17-foot-4-inch clearance where the parade passes under the Foothill Freeway. Estes explains that he will design the giraffe and trees to bend so they can squeeze under the overpass.

Then there is the water. Water figures prominently in the nightmares of parade officials -- specifically, a float so heavy with water its brakes fail and it slams into the crowd.

Estes is pestered with questions about generators and water pumps. Will the elephants spray the crowd with water from their trunks? “Only if they see a white-suited individual,” Estes jokes, a reference to the uniform of tournament volunteers.

After 20 minutes, the hearing is over. His variance arrives in the mail the following week.

With Estes now working six-day weeks, the building begins. There are eight months to go.

Fiesta has 24 full-time employees -- more than any other builder -- and some parade officials think Estes a soft touch when it comes to his payroll. His foreman was his best man. His art director is a junior high classmate. In addition to the Rose Parade, Estes must find other work -- a Boise parade, decorations for a Japanese shopping mall -- to keep his crew busy.

“It’s important to Tim to have an experienced, talented crew that is loyal to him -- that’s how you get the best floats,” says Hynd. “We might make more money by subcontracting more work and having fewer people, but Tim won’t do that.”

Estes’ crew starts by welding a massive steel frame onto the chassis. A man named Jim Femino specializes in doing the “rod work”: the metal sculpturing for individual pieces, from elephants to birds. Lupe Bejarano, an employee of 14 years, covers the float in wire mesh. Holes in the wire are filled with a white, fibrous substance during a process called “cocooning.”

Finally, a polyurethane foam is sprayed over the float, creating a coat 2 or 3 inches thick, into which water vials for flowers may be stabbed. Estes installs the Chevrolet engine, handles the engineering work and endlessly tinkers, sometimes to the annoyance of his crew.

His chief concern with the Rain Bird float is water. In particular, he worries that the extra weight could blow a front tire, leading to the towing of the float (and an automatic fine by the tournament). Working from a drafting board in a tiny room next to his office, he sketches a system that will handle more than 1,500 gallons of water, five waterfalls and 24 high-pressure misting nozzles.

Even before construction is complete, Estes must shepherd the float through the first of two road tests. The test takes place at dawn on a Saturday, so roads around the Fiesta barn can be closed with minimal inconvenience.

Tom McEntire, a Tournament of Roses mechanic, watches as the float performs a series of turns flawlessly, but detects a disturbing “putt-putt” from the engine and tells Estes the engine needs to purr.

“McEntire, you’ve got way too much time on your hands,” Estes says sharply.

“Tim,” the mechanic replies, “I just live to give you hell.”

As it turns out, new spark plugs seem to do the trick.

*

Shortly after the road test, floral director Hynd begins work after the building crew has gone home for the night, climbing over floats with a tape measure and note pad. “Sometimes I just stare at the float for a while and think,” he says.

Rose Parade floats must be covered entirely in flowers or other vegetation, dried or fresh, and Hynd has created many of the decorating techniques used in modern floats.

He was the first to turn straw flowers into confetti, the first to employ dehydrated vegetables. (Dehydrated carrots will grace Rain Bird’s giraffe). But his most significant advance may have come in skin tones.

Flower petals were long used to represent skin, but they often changed color -- leaving the impression that the faces on Rose Parade floats were forever battling acne. Hynd discovered that walnut shells -- when ground to different consistencies -- can create six skin tones.

Hynd has achieved even more subtle shades by rigging a cement mixer at Fiesta to blend materials from cinnamon to onion seeds.

Hynd is allergic to many of these materials; every innovation seems to add to things that trigger his allergies. Still, he walks through dusty produce markets for inspiration. “I look at the world a little differently from most people,” he says. “I see things -- coral in the sea, cauliflower in the supermarket -- and wonder, how can I use this?”

Estes recalls how, “one time, Jim and I were at a client meeting in Maryland. We’re driving around, and Jim sees a tree he’d never seen before. So he pulls off a branch and packs it in a suitcase to take home.”

After months of thinking and a week of measuring and planning, Hynd retreats into his office and produces a plan for all 990 square feet of the float’s surface area, using a form first developed by the military for building airplanes.

Hynd will use thousands of vibrant yellow giant oncidium orchids to create the acacia trees. Giraffes will be done in millet seed, palm fiber and seaweed, elephants in mosses, a zebra in onion seed (black) and sweet rice (white). To create the feeling of aridity in the landscape, Hynd orders orange Mercedes roses from a farm in Israel, one of the few places where they are available.

But before the flowers arrive, the Rain Bird float must pass the “T2,” the tournament’s final test.

*

“Turn it on,” says Estes, still grumpy as the sun comes up.

For the first time on this late fall Saturday, the Rain Bird float springs to life in public. The waterfalls run, the water recycled through large tanks as Ludwick wished. The elephants frolic and spray water out of their trunks, just as Estes had promised the Design Variance Committee. The giraffe tilts its head toward an acacia tree, just as Rodriguez drew it up. Estes, tinkering to the last, added a sound effect, an air compressor, to mimic the noise of an elephant giving off spray.

By 7 a.m., the street next to Fiesta is filled with several teams of Tournament of Roses volunteers.

The two directly responsible for floats are headed by a pair of brothers, Joe and John Delgatto.

Lurking quietly are two representatives of the Judging Committee. They carry tape measures to make sure the float meets all the qualifications for prizes. (It does.) They won’t return to the Fiesta warehouse until after Christmas, along with the three judges, an Alabama florist, a New York parade organizer and a North Carolina commercial designer. The judges will announce prizes on New Year’s Day.

“Fire! Fire! Fire!”

A yell from John Delgatto’s team breaks the silence. But there is no blaze. This is a test of Estes’ handpicked crew, “his lucky drivers,” three longtime friends who guide the float down the route.

By tournament rule, they must evacuate the float in 45 seconds. They scramble off in 20.

The clipboard-toting volunteers report only one missing item, No. 526 on their list: The capacity of the fuel tank is not clearly labeled.

The animation of the elephants is good, says John Delgatto in the post-inspection meeting in Fiesta’s warehouse. “Looks like another prize winner,” Joe Delgatto whispers to Estes.

The float is off to the decorating tent.

Rain Bird has been cleared to defend its title.