Rose Queens Have Come a Long Way Since 1930

Pasadena’s New Year’s Day parade was a simple affair when Holly Halsted Balthis reigned as queen of the 1930 Tournament of Roses.

Nowadays the Rose Queen and her court are driven to hundreds of events and receive lavish designer wardrobes, beauty makeovers, etiquette training, speech coaching, dry-cleaning, portraiture and teeth whitening on the scale of a Hollywood production.

But 70-plus years ago, Balthis helped decorate the float on which she would ride, using asparagus ferns and home-grown roses. She was given all of $10 to buy lengths of lace and eggshell satin and to hire a dressmaker to make her dress. That was it -- no frills. She wore no crown atop her bobbed brown hair, which she styled herself for the big morning. Eventually, her parade dress became her bridal gown.

But Balthis doesn’t begrudge the modern perquisites. “It’s great what the girls get today,” she said. “I’m all for it.”

Rose Queens were an on-and-off thing: Some early parades had them, some didn’t. Not until Balthis reigned on New Year’s Day 1930 did there begin an unbroken line of Rose Queens. Balthis, now 94, also holds the distinction of being the oldest living Rose Queen.

She was born Holly Halsted in Pasadena in 1908, in a house at the same fashionable Granite Drive address where actress-pop singer Jennifer Lopez’s new eatery, Madre’s, now stands. Before that, the address was known to Pasadenans as that of the Chronicle restaurant, which was built on the site of Balthis’ parents’ Craftsman cottage.

“My grandparents owned a fish market at the corner of Fair Oaks and Colorado,” she said. “That was when Old Town was new.”

An education major at UCLA, Balthis was working full time in the Tournament of Roses’ public relations department when the honor came her way.

“It was the Depression years, and I would go to school a semester and then work a semester in order to be able to continue with my education,” she said. “I made $135 per month, which was a really good salary then. We shared an office with the Pasadena Chamber of Commerce, across the street from the Green Hotel.”

Unlike young women today, who compete by the hundreds and appear before a committee of judges, she did not try out for Rose Queen. “I was chosen because I worked for the tournament for several years and knew the directors and Pasadena officials.”

Until Balthis was chosen, there had been no queen since 1914, and before that, only in 1905 and 1906. Clearly, it was a much more casual process than it is today.

“I was allowed to choose my own court to accompany me on the float,” she said. She picked her sister, 15-year-old Gabrielle, and five high school friends.

These were gentler days before world TV broadcasts of the parade. Because she was familiar with the event, Balthis handled all her own publicity. She arranged for her sister and friends to pose for photos with her in a Dodge convertible alongside a pond at the exclusive Raymond Hotel. (All that’s left today is its gatehouse, which is a restaurant.)

“Then all of us stood inside a large jigsaw puzzle of the United States at Pasadena’s Brookside Park. I had been with the tournament for so long that all this was like second nature to me,” she said. “Oh, we’ve come a long way, baby, since those days.”

Balthis was 22, older than more recent teenage queens, a college student and knowledgeable about the parade. Self-assured since high school, when she had been elected president of the Girls League and president of her social club, she took this queen business in stride.

On parade-day morning, Balthis’ proud father put his daughters into his old Hudson and drove them to the beginning of the parade route. The Rose Queen’s biggest thrill atop the rose-festooned float came when it rounded Orange Grove and Colorado and sailed past the cheering multitudes.

“But the big thrill, of course, is going to the Rose Bowl on the arm of your escort,” she said.

Her escort turned out to be her fiance, Frank S. Balthis, a Harvard Law School student. He had been sending her special-delivery letters every Sunday for three years. Thirty-one years after they were married, he became an appellate court justice.

That afternoon, USC’s “Thundering Herd” beat the previously undefeated University of Pittsburgh team, 47-14. Much of the nation tuned the radio to the Rose Bowl game, narrated by legendary sports broadcasters Ted Husing and Graham McNamee, the Vin Scullys of their day.

The Rose Bowl stadium where Balthis presided was only 7 years old. It had been the inspiration of William L. Leishman, president of the Tournament of Roses when it was built and a friend of Balthis.

Until 1923, the New Year’s Day game was played at Tournament Park, now part of the Caltech campus. But in 1922, after spectators pushed over a wooden fence that surrounded the field and rushed inside, Leishman and architect Myron Hunt decided the place was no longer usable.

He and Hunt took tournament and Pasadena city officials on a tour of the Arroyo Seco dump, which was filled with boulders and trash. He waxed lyrical about its potential as the site for a sports stadium.

As Balthis remembered it, Harlan Hall, a reporter for the Pasadena Star-News “and quite a character, was on loan to the tournament as a publicist.” He said, “Since we have a Rose Parade, we should call this the Rose Bowl. And that’s what they did.”

The Rose Bowl is football’s anchor, a link to its history. The Four Horsemen played there, coached by Knute Rockne, in Notre Dame’s only Rose Bowl appearance (1925; Notre Dame defeated Stanford, 27-10).

The Rose Bowl is where, in 1929, California center Roy Riegels famously ran 65 yards the wrong way, setting up a safety that cost Cal an 8-7 loss to Georgia Tech.

It’s where USC’s Doyle Nave completed a pass to Al Krueger to beat Duke, 7-3, in 1939, in one of college football’s greatest finishes. Those seven points were the only ones scored against Duke that entire season.

The Rose Bowl did not become a Big Ten-Pacific coast match until 1947. The Rose Parade itself began in 1890, and the football games in 1902, when Stanford faced the University of Michigan. Before then, accompanying athletic events had included polo and tug-of-war. By the third quarter, Stanford surrendered, trailing 49-0. The next year, the Tournament of Roses reverted to polo. Later, it tried chariot races. Football didn’t return until 1916.

In 1930, before the last rose petal was swept from the streets of Pasadena, Balthis took off her finery and went back to an ordinary, comfortable life. She dressed up again in her satin parade dress with a gardenia corsage when her fiance took her dancing at the Cocoanut Grove nightclub in the Ambassador Hotel. “It was so romantic,” she said, with all those palm trees with faux monkeys in them.

Five months later, they were married. The bride wore her $10 parade dress. That dress had multiple uses and wearings: “Eventually my dress became a long-sleeved blouse because it got so bad, and I can’t remember what happened to it.”

Hearth and home remained the focus of her life. She spent many hours in volunteer work and helping her husband, who died in 1978. They were married 47 years and have a son, Frank Jr. Today she lives in the same south Laguna Beach house that she shared with her husband for many years.

Many of the Rose Queens who followed her received hundreds of fan letters, especially from soldiers during World War II. Balthis remembers only one -- from a man she called Rye the Rice Writer. “He painstakingly inscribed my name, date and the words ‘Tournament of Roses’ on a grain of rice and sent it to me from back East. He kept it up for several years and then stopped.”

In June 1986, Balthis was asked to help kick off Pasadena’s 100th birthday celebration by riding on a float. But when she heard the float was a wagon drawn by mules, she set the committee all atwitter by refusing. She didn’t want to ride in a mule cart.

The matter was submitted to Pasadena’s Centennial Parade Committee. Meetings were held, discussions took place and negotiations were conducted. Someone even suggested trying to pull the wool over her eyes by covering the mules with a lot of flowers and calling them ponies, but someone else doubted that would work.

At last, Balthis agreed to clamber aboard the elegantly decorated hay wagon for a mule-powered ride, drawn by the Smiser Mules -- “very lovely animals who live in San Marino,” parade coordinator Shirley Mannings said at the time.

Rose Queens didn’t receive crowns until 1931, the year after Balthis’ reign. So in January 1990, when she rode on a float with 41 other former monarchs in the 100th Rose Parade, she had to borrow rhinestone headgear. “I felt like Cinderella with borrowed finery,” she said.

That December, 60 years after her reign, she got her very own crown.

The crowns of every Rose Queen since 1931 have been retained as property of the Tournament of Roses Assn. All are kept in a locked display case at the Tournament House. Only Balthis has been permitted to keep her crown, because it was given to her by Eastman Kodak Co., sponsor of the annual Rose Queen reunion.

Monday, the grande dame of all Rose Queens will show up once again for the reunion brunch in Pasadena. Her successors affectionately call her their “Queen Mum.”