Parade Floats

Even as the Los Angeles City Council adopted a hiring freeze to deal with a looming budget crisis, members reluctantly agreed Wednesday to spend $175,000 on building a float for the Tournament of Roses Parade.Council members voted 11 to 3 to approve the project after they were told that work on the float was nearly complete. "We were too far along to stop it," said Councilman Greig Smith, who voted for the expenditure. Still, he called the float an "extravagance."

It's one thing to have to pass a test drive, proving that your 76-foot-long Rose Parade float can make a right turn, stop, go and retract from 28 feet to 17 feet in seconds. That's all about mechanics. Problems can be solved in the shop. It's another thing to get 30 excited Cerritos high school musicians, with their trombones and flutes in tow, to sit still on it and pretend they are playing their instruments. That's all about behavior. Problems? Well, everyone has pledged to be good.

It was, by the participants' later admission, an offensive, racist stunt. Three white city employees smeared on blackface, donned Afro wigs and rode on a Labor Day parade float titled "Black to the Future." The two off-duty firefighters and an off-duty police officer threw pieces of watermelon and fried chicken into the crowd, and one reenacted the killing of a Texas black man who was dragged to death behind a truck.

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.

"How much time do you want to try to get on camera?" Joe Monaly, the front-seat observer of the Eastman Kodak float, called out through his headset. Scrunched inside a plywood and steel cockpit, the float's driver, Mark Bevan, grinned. "As much as we can soak them for," he said. To every float operator, the row of TV cameras on Colorado Boulevard after the turn from Orange Grove Boulevard is the most important stretch of the Rose Parade.

"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.

During these days between Christmas and the New Year, thousands of people line up on Raymond Avenue in Pasadena to tour the Rose Palace parade float barn -- and unwittingly to witness what may be the end of an era. The Rose Palace, a city-owned facility, is the only place in Pasadena where floats are still built. It may prove to be the last.

Jim Femino has spent 49 New Year's mornings on Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena. And yet, he's never seen the Rose Parade with his own eyes. He isn't blind. On Wednesday, Femino will once again crawl through a tiny, flower-decorated door and take his seat only eight inches off the pavement. After a brief nap, he will try to navigate -- from the darkness deep inside the city of Torrance's float -- a history-making trip down the 5 1/2-mile parade route.