Parade Floats

Elvis isn't looking too hot these days. He's kind of shredded and peeling, all bloated 1,400 pounds of him. There's a gaping space between his glazed eyes. The King's nose is so chewed up you'd think he belonged in the original Memphis, a churning urn from the Valley of those other Kings.

A special potpourri made from leftover roses from Rose Parade floats won't be sold anywhere near Colorado Boulevard. All 5,000 packs of the Tournament of Roses Potpourri, made from nine floats, will be available this February at home and garden shows on the East Coast, where they're expected to be a hot seller. Proceeds from the $10-a-bag sales will go to the Children's Miracle Network, a group dedicated to providing better health care to children.

Economic concerns have caused a few companies to cancel plans to send floats to the 102nd annual Tournament of Roses Parade, but others have jumped in to fill their places, event organizers and float builders say. "You always manage to fill the parade, but you may fill it with a different caliber of float," said Bill Lofthouse, co-owner and president of Bent Parade Floats in Pasadena, the largest local float building firm.

An errant metallic balloon, apparently released during New Year's revelry, knocked out power to more than 8,000 homes and businesses in the South Pasadena area early Monday, authorities said. "Somebody let go of one of those metallic balloons, which crossed a power line and caused a transformer to blow," San Marino Police Lt. Joseph Payne said. More than 8,000 Southern California Edison customers were without electricity between 1:30 and 2:30 a.m.

After a decade of Rose Parade floats, Edison International announced Saturday that it has withdrawn from the 2002 drive down Pasadena's Colorado Boulevard because of financial instability. The decision by the parent company of Southern California Edison, the state's second-largest utility, was made public on the heels of Friday's bankruptcy filing by Pacific Gas & Electric Co.

"Hey! Glue Man!" The eyes of South Pasadena's teenage float decorators turn toward a Santa Claus look-alike emerging from a glue-white 1988 Nissan pickup. Soon, the man is surrounded and showered with hugs and kisses before he can break free and pose his favorite question: Is everything sticking together? Bob Dickey, an 80-year-old who appears two decades younger, is the Rose Parade's glue consultant.

Who'd pay $10 for a used lightbulb? Disneyland is aiming to find out with a charity fund-raiser connected to the Main Street Electrical Parade, which is set to flicker out this fall after 25 seasons. Rather than scrap the half-million-plus lightbulbs on the parade floats, Disneyland brass came up with the bright idea of hawking them to raise money for local children's causes. Disneyland President Paul Pressler is expected to announce the fund-raiser tonight at the park, just prior to the 8:45 p.

For a few brief hours, the Rose Parade floats delight millions around the world who tune in or turn out to see the floral spectacles. Then many of those floats are destroyed. But not all. In this small town in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley just 100 miles west of Washington, float builder Earl C. Hargrove Jr. has opened one of the state's fastest-growing tourist attractions: an airplane hangar-size showcase for award-winning parade floats, many of them from the Rose Parade.

As the 1998 Tournament of Roses Parade approaches, dozens of volunteers at Fiesta Parade Floats Co. in Duarte attend to traditional, if tedious, tasks like trimming the petals off dried flowers and using tweezers to pick bits of straw out of boxes full of lentil beans.