A Withering End to Moment in Sun

This is how Rose Parade floats die: Slowly. Ignominiously. Sometimes, even violently.

When a 17-foot-tall dancer at the back of the Korean Centennial float hit a tree and bobbled a bit, no one even winced as they guided the float back to its Duarte barn from the parade route. After months of planning to achieve the perfect complexion, a colonial drummer boy on another float rode away with a severed nose. By Saturday, the boy had been decapitated, his head mounted atop a pike inside the float warehouse.

“We just get them to the building,” said John Griffith, head mechanic for Fiesta Parade Floats. “If something breaks or falls off, who cares?”

The float convoy home -- dubbed the “crash-’em-up derby” by builders -- was an unceremonious letdown from the floats’ midnight arrival at the parade route days earlier. Then, a phalanx of white-suited escorts helped to ensure that not a petal fell, not a seed dropped. For their ragtag funeral procession, late-model wagons and jeeps towed the floats, and in the process, heads snapped, wings broke and roses tumbled.

In the next few weeks, all of the 54 formerly vibrant floats will be disassembled, some auctioned for charity, others picked apart by a Cal State L.A. administrative assistant known as the “potpourri lady.” But most of the floats, which cost up to $300,000 to build and require thousands of hours of handiwork, end up in trash or recycling bins.

A Rose Parade float is built for fleeting moments of glory: 30 seconds on national television, a 5 1/2-mile drive before thousands of cheering fans. They are not, however, meant to survive the aftermath: two days in the sun for post-parade viewing, a sometimes speedy trip home and weeks of sitting idle while weary float builders try to catch up on sleep.

The proud builders of La Canada Flintridge’s entry showed off their prizewinning float Saturday along a city street as their 20,000 red “carns” (float-speak for carnations) shriveled in 80-degree warmth. The animated girl riding the float was becoming a nude as her purple dress of mums turned brown and fell fast.

Some float builders, like the Downey Rose Parade Assn., have a pluck-for-profit fund-raising tradition, allowing residents to buy the float flowers before they turn to mulch. For three days after its trip home, the Downey float sits in an Embassy Suites parking lot, where people gather roses, orchids, tulips and daisies for $5 a bunch. One year they made $8,500.

“We’ve had people actually buy the cabbage,” said the group’s president, Mike Prokop.

For Peggy Neiman, yesterday’s float is tomorrow’s potpourri. She has been collecting flowers off Fiesta floats for 26 years.

Each year, Neiman takes vacation days from work to gather the stems, which she dries on her patio. She doesn’t sell the potpourri, but instead distributes it to friends who helped her collect the petals.

“This is my hobby,” she said, as assistants wielding black trash bags plucked roses off a colorful float behind her. “I live to do this.”

Recycling is integral to the float-building process. The Fiesta warehouse was littered with remnants of former floats: a dinosaur here, an old engine there.

After floats are taken apart, often with blowtorches and sledgehammers to speed the process, certain components, such as flower vials, float chassis and animated parts, are saved for future trips down Colorado Boulevard.

Other parts are kept just for posterity. Fiesta President Tim Estes arranged last year to have a woodchuck from an “Alice in Wonderland”-themed float shipped to the office of FTD chairman Robert L. Norton, who had fallen in love with the creature. This year, La Canada Flintridge will give a hat worn by a child firefighter on its float to a local fire chief. He’ll keep it in his den.

Bill Lofthouse of Phoenix Decorating Co. said that after removing the “more delicate and volatile” parts of his floats -- gas tanks, sound systems and moving parts -- he often sells parts of his floats to East Coast float designers who will use them in other parades.

This year, said Lofthouse, he’d already gotten three calls about the airplane piloted by Stuart Little atop the Automobile Club of Southern California float. It will take Lofthouse and his employees nearly three months to completely tear apart the 25 floats they built for the parade. But last week, the company’s Pasadena warehouse, which was packed with floats, had already begun to let off the familiar stench of a bouquet of flowers left in a vase too long.

Christopher Lofthouse said that after years of float-building, he has one important caveat about how to take apart a float: Remove the potatoes as soon as the parade is over.

The tubers, often used to replicate cobblestones on floats, let off a particularly overpowering odor as they begin to rot.