Bill Lofthouse, a primary builder of Rose Parade floats who over more than a half-century helped expand the boundaries of the once-boxy creations through elaborate animation and such simple materials as sesame seeds, has died. He was 68.
Lofthouse died July 5 at his son's home in Arcadia after a short bout with pancreatic cancer, said Larry Palmer, a spokesman for Phoenix Decorating Co., Lofthouse's float-building business.
"Somebody pays us a whole lot of money, and we build these big toys," Lofthouse told The Times in 1988. "It's all fun, and we have fun doing it."
One of several commercial builders, Phoenix often produces about half of the parade's approximately 50 floats.
After hearing a Rose Parade broadcaster comment that TV cameras lingered longer on floats that incorporated movement, Lofthouse made animation integral to his floats.
He once acknowledged that clients, who now spend $85,000 to $400,000 on what amounts to a lavish motorized advertisement, "weren't in it for the flowers."
Primitive animation in the 1960s -- two kids inside a float using sticks to make a character's eyelids flutter -- gave way to computers that could be programmed to move a dragon's head 42 ways.
"Bill was always looking for the newest thing, the biggest and the best thing that would make the crowd go 'Wow,' " Palmer said. "He always wanted people to wonder: 'How did they do that?' "
Courting the spectacular supplied entertaining stories.
During the 1983 parade, Lofthouse's float for the International House of Pancakes caught fire when the hair -- made of pampas grass -- of a giant sculpted dog found its way into the engine's manifold. Flames and smoke shot skyward as the dog was consumed. Horrified TV announcers speculated about whether the driver would escape. (He did.)
The next year, Lofthouse capitalized on the news value of the near-tragedy by building a float with the same dog lying atop a stretcher.
When a unique wheel snapped off one float's axle hours before the parade was to start, Lofthouse relied on instinct to fix it. He banged the now egg-shaped wheel back into shape by dropping it from a 25-foot-high platform.
In a parade that requires every surface to be covered with organic material, Lofthouse pushed to broaden the concept beyond flowers.
"He reinterpreted what qualified as 'organic material.' Rice, beans, sesame seeds, seaweed, spices . . . allowed him to get additional textures and details," Palmer said. "He pioneered doing portraits with such materials."
