By Eliza PARTIKA

Excitement reigned at this year’s Tournament of Roses Parade as almost 800,000 people poured on to Colorado Boulevard to witness the decorated floats make their way through Pasadena. At 5 a.m., volunteers helped to line up the floats on Orange Grove Boulevard in front of the Tournament House. Many spectators waited for the parade to start bundled up in lawn chairs, sleeping bags and tents or staking out their spot in the bleachers, donning winter wear and Rose Parade gear. Locals featured prominently in this year’s parade – Burbank, La Cañada, South Pasadena, Sierra Madre and Downey won the Animator, Crown City Innovator, Fantasy, Golden State, Founder and Mayor’s awards, respectively. 

Float scores were based on “creative design, floral craftsmanship, artistic merit, computerized animation, thematic interpretation, floral and color presentation and dramatic impact,” according to the Tournament of Roses website. The floats with the highest scores in all categories received awards during float assessments.

Ernest Koeppen, president of the La Cañada Tournament of Roses Association (LCFTRA), said winning the Crown City Innovator Award gives him a trifecta of awards as president: his first the Mayor’s Award given for community; the Golden State Award, representing his home California; and lastly, Crown City Innovator, for the cutting-edge technology used in this year’s float with special recognition for the way decorating teams ground roses and other dry materials to create Mars. 

“We’ve gone from a little bit to a little bit bigger, and now we can think bigger. I keep saying, ‘Think big, think big, big things will happen.’ So we thought huge and big things happened,” Koeppen said. 

Erik C. Andersen, a member of the Burbank Tournament of Roses Association, designed that city’s float, Having a Lava-Fun, 34 years ago. He told the CV Weekly it was incredible to see his design in the parade and to win an award for animation. 

“It was incredible seeing all those smiles on the kids’ faces. This achievement is thanks to the incredible talent of our construction and decoration teams, along with the dedicated volunteers who worked tirelessly to bring my vision to life. Without them it would have remained just a drawing on paper. It took 34 years to see my design float down Colorado Boulevard and I couldn’t be prouder,” said Andersen. 

Attendees flocked to the Rose Bowl Stadium days before the parade to observe volunteers adding the final touches to the professional floats for Kaiser Permanente, the UPS Store, Boys & Girls Club, and Explore Louisiana, among others. Pasadena City College hosted each band performing in the parade at BandFest, a pre-parade showcase of the sets they performed in the parade.

Crescenta Valley High School (CVHS) graduate Nicole Stephan had the honor of performing this year in the Pasadena City College Tournament of Roses Honor Band. The Honor Band stood out in its uplifting performance of a set that included old-time favorites like “Saturday in the Park” by Chicago and “When the Saints Come Marching In” to reflect the parade theme of Best Day Ever. 

For Stephan, who is a senior at CVHS, this year’s Rose Parade – her third playing cymbals for the Honor Band – is bittersweet. 

“It’s really cool when you know that you are representing your school. It’s a huge honor to represent CV in a way that not other CV kids can do. The long lasting friendships I’ve created these past three years I know won’t go away. It’s something I will have that not many people will ever have. The feeling you have on the [January 1st] is something not many [high schoolers] get to experience,” Stephan said. 

Band director Kyle Luck said he is proud of his band, composed of 221 PCC Lancer Band students and select high school students from across Southern California, for their hard work and preparation, from their auditions to their practice march through Dodger Stadium, and finally to the parade. A former Tournament Honor Band member himself, Luck said it’s his goal for students to come away proud of what they accomplished and with memories they will carry with them for life. 

“What it is to be excellent, that’s what I want them to learn – what it is to achieve excellence. I can still recall the first time I went around TV Corner in 1983 on January 1, and I had no idea what to expect. And then the two years I did it after that – each one had its own differences and there are things that I can still recall from that experience. I want to make sure that my students have the best experience possible so they can enjoy the parade,” Luck said. 

For self-made floats like LCFTRA’s Rover Rendezvous, the days before the parade are a dash to the finish line punctuated by the love and care volunteers put into their work, adding the last details before parading their creations for thousands to see. 

Volunteer Kevin Maloney took other volunteers painstakingly through the process of cutting stems and laying out flowers to put in vials that will be transferred to the float. But this year, his favorite contribution is the meticulous layers of petals he placed one at a time to create the Mars alien skins, made of black bean and split peas. 

“I’m a Lego person,” he said. “So this is me, this is what I like. It takes four to five hours, and I can just sit here and work on it.”

A total of 1300 volunteers showed up to help decorate LCFTRA’s float on Dec. 23 and by Dec. 28 the float was finished and ready to make the journey to Pasadena.  

Parliamentarian Samantha Babroff, a 20-year volunteer, said, “I love being in the community. I grew up in La Cañada. I have a lot of friends I see one time a year here under the bridge, so it’s nice to see people I’ve known since I was 13. Now I’m seeing their kids grow up. It’s such a unique experience to be here.”

Babroff and other volunteers were excited to show off the innovations on the float, like the partial electric battery and the Mars rover and helicopter replicas. 

Longtime volunteers like Evan Jacobs, whose family has participated in float building for over 40 years, said it feels good as an all-volunteer organization to be up against professional floats. 

“You can only build the same float so many times before you have to start changing something. And we changed so much. [My favorite part] was watching the drone fly for the little it did down TV Corner; knowing [we did that] was pretty cool.”

Jan Jansen, a volunteer who used his work with Mee Fog Systems to inform the fog machine that smoked behind the crashed rocket, said it is the team’s closeness, creativity and organization that allows LCFTRA floats to get better each year. 

“The discipline is incredible, it’s a family. It’s things like that that make this fun,” Jansen said.

Volunteers arrived in La Cañada from around the country to assist with decorating. One volunteer, Hayley Witwer, said she travels from New York each year after learning online of LCFTRA’s need for volunteers. She told the CV Weekly it’s the detailed, small work in a tight-knit community that keeps her coming back. 

“Maybe ignorance is bliss, but when I first came out, I thought I had sure never done this, but I had done some small needlework [projects],” Witwer said. “It’s really neat being a part of something that’s tiny, a one-foot or two-foot part of something huge.”