The Rose Parade, Pasadena, CA
The Southland’s annual pat on its own back routinely draws 1 million spectators

By Patrick Totty

I grew up in Los Angeles in a neighborhood four miles from downtown Pasadena. Once I became a teenager, one of my great goals was to be allowed to join my friends in sleeping overnight on New Year’s Eve somewhere along Pasadena’s main drag, Colorado Blvd.

Our ostensible reason for doing this was “to get a good spot” for viewing Pasadena’s world-famous Rose Parade, a spectacular concatenation of floats, bands, pretty girls and horse flesh that marched, clopped and rolled over a five-mile route under almost always balmy, cloudless skies.

Our real reason, of course, was to experience the simple joy of a night away from home on our own. That we would be doing it beside several hundred thousand other people, half of them teens, made it that much more attractive.

Being so young, we believed that if we walked endlessly up and down Colorado Blvd., we would run into “it,” that elusive night or even life-transforming experience – the girl of our dreams, some fascinating street performance or happening, an exciting clash between drunks and police. 

Of course, these things rarely came to pass. Usually our evening’s highlight would be a few moments of adrenalin-powered hooting and screaming at midnight as New Year’s Day arrived, followed by the realization that we had worn ourselves out with our interminable rambling. We’d finally find a patch of sidewalk (the grassy spots having long been taken) and then stretch out in our flimsy sleeping bags to await sunup.

We never really slept in those early morning hours. Our rest was more like an extended catnap. As quiet finally descended over the 500,000 people sleeping along the boulevard, the only sounds would be occasional terminal “Yee-hahs” from drunks finally going down for the night, a firecracker or two and the hum of police car tires rolling slowly past.

Even catnapping teens could sense the approach of dawn and the excitement it would bring. Sometime before 6 a.m. my buddies and I would leap up and walk west to Orange Grove Blvd., the palm tree-lined street of mansions and fancy garden apartments where the floats would line up before the parade’s start.

You could get up close to the floats as long as you obeyed the unwritten rule to never touch them. The Tournament of Rose’s exhaustive guidelines decreed that every square inch of the floats had to be decorated by strictly natural plant materials – flowers, stems, bark, seeds, grass, leaves and logs. This eliminated crepe, cellophane, cardboard, plastic and any other manmade material.

(The floats’ innards were another matter – they were built on steel chassis, equipped with car wheels, engines and steering gears, then topped with chicken wire and plaster frames. In a way, the floats imitated human bodies: Their beauty was on the outside. As for their inner workings. . .yuck.)

Those painstakingly applied decorations, the product of tens of thousands of man hours of volunteer labor, could be bruised or discolored by the slightest touch, however respectful. So, we would close in on the floats, sniffing at their flowers and oohing at their designs, ostentatiously keeping our hands behind our backs to show that we were trustworthy youths.

Best of all, we got to flirt with the eye-candy girls who were already in place on the floats, bundled in the morning chill under blankets or great coats, wearing heavy socks and boots, and holding fast to big mugs of coffee. Later, their protection would come off, to be replaced by high heels or to reveal beautiful party dresses. But until then, the girls were ours to hover around and try to impress, or at least amuse.

Then it would begin, promptly at 8 a.m., with majorettes carrying a wide banner down the street, announcing to the world that, dang it, the heart of winter, January 1, could actually be a sunny, 70-degree day, awash in flowers and color, with snow safely banished to the 6,000-foot peaks of the nearby San Gabriel Mountains. “Take that, New York!” we used to think to ourselves. “You get to greet the new year, but we get to show how good it’s going to be.”

So, despite our tiredness, the foolproof rush of good feelings that this parade produced each year would buoy us up. The scent of blooms, the smiles of the float girls, the gleaming silver saddles and proud faces of the equestrians, the exuberance of the college and high school bands as they marched under the network TV cameras, the sweet air of a rare smogless day – how could we not finally realize this was the “it” we’d tromped around looking for all night long? 

Of course there are far more comfortable ways than overnight camping to view the Rose Parade. Travel agents sell packages that include plane fare, accommodations at good area hotels and transportation to one of the viewing stands along the parade route.

The parade itself, while it can be the focal point of a New Year’s visit to the Southland, is not the only thing worth doing in Pasadena. The Norton Simon Museum on Colorado Blvd. is a major regional cultural treasure, as is the Huntington Library in San Marino, only five miles distant from the parade route.

Pasadena’s Old Town section, which years ago served as the 1920s setting for Redford and Newman’s classic 1973 movie, The Sting, has blossomed into one of America’s premier pedestrian walks. It, along with Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade and Westwood Village’s always energetic pedestrian scene, have given Southern California sites that rival Miami’s South Beach, New York’s Fifth Avenue and Chicago’s North Michigan Avenue as great walking places.

A useful URL: http://www.tournamentofroses.com/