Petals, Glue Make Floats Blossom : Volunteers Hustle to Finish Parade Entries

With lavender gladiola petals and yellow mums, Julie Graves of Mission Viejo had been hard at work in Rosemead on the underside of a larger-than-life toucan figure and on the bright stripes of simulated serape.

A few miles away, Santa Ana teacher Diane Cox had stripped purple flowers of their petals, glued marigolds onto a mock-up of a surfer’s car and made bouquets of orchids and roses to adorn the side of a comically designed freeway scene.

It was the last-minute flurry of petals and glue for this morning’s Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena. The parade, with the theme “A Celebration of Laughter,” sports two entries from Orange County.

The efforts of Cox and about 1,000 other Santa Ana volunteers produced “Friday on the Freeway,” Santa Ana’s whimsical float showing the humorous side of a Southern California traffic jam.

Anniversary Celebration

Graves, along with about 200 other students from six Mission Viejo-area high schools and 50 parents, decorated “Mission Viejo, California Fiesta,” a float depicting a birthday party celebrating the community’s 20th anniversary.

The two floats were built with 450,000 blossoms and a burst of energy during the last few days of 1985, workers said. Mission Viejo and Santa Ana transported busloads of volunteers in around-the-clock shifts to the San Gabriel Valley assembly sites to transform the bare float frames into floral spectacles.

“It’s a real agreeable way to spend your holiday,” said Cox, on her Christmas break from teaching fourth and fifth grade at Santa Ana’s Diamond School. “It’s a good way to support your community and I think it’s a fun way to get to know people better.”

“It’s neat to see how it grows,” said Graves, 15, a sophomore at Mission Viejo High School, of her float, being assembled in Rosemead before its nighttime journey to the Pasadena parade route. “Afterwards you can look at it and say: ‘I did that.’ ”

The Mission Viejo float features about 125,000 blooms--carnations, poinsettias, dendrobium orchids, gladiolas, strawflowers, and other blossoms--on floral replicas of a birthday cake, pinata , serape and an oversized toucan bird. Topping off the float will be the homecoming queens of the six area high schools--Kim McCartney of Silverado, Kathy Hagerty of Mission Viejo, Lawnee Olson of Capistrano Valley, Tiffani Moore of El Toro, Jennifer Rodie of Laguna Hills and Stacey Rice of Trabuco Hills.

“I really like it,” said Graves of the float. “It’s colorful. This one makes you kind of happy and really cheery. It’s a really good use of flowers.”

Tenth Entry

Mission Viejo’s entry was designed by Fiesta Floats of Temple City for an undisclosed price. It was financed by the community’s activities committee, which held fund-raisers and sought donations from local businessmen. This is the 10th year Mission Viejo has entered a float in the Rose Parade, and each year Julie and her mother, Norma Graves, a chaperon, have worked on it.

“It’s different each time, the flowers and the designs and the people,” said Julie Graves. Added her mother: “I enjoy it. It gets into your blood.”

School rivalry was set aside as the student volunteers from the six campuses worked together to decorate the float, said Jo Schetter of the Mission Viejo activities committee, shouting above the enthusiastic din of her group. UCLA’s cheerleaders had just passed through the float assembly area, and the high school students had responded with their own cheer, she said.

“The kids are extremely excited. They’re working diligently, but every time there’s an opportunity to cheer, they give the Mission cheer,” Schetter said.

Santa Ana’s float--an $80,000 effort designed by C.E. Bent & Son of Pasadena--is a lighthearted look at a Friday afternoon traffic jam, featuring a skateboard rider, a broken-down chicken truck, cars of tourists and a low-rider.

“We think there are a lot of people who will be watching this on TV who maybe haven’t heard of Santa Ana, but they’ll have heard of our freeways,” said Dori Kopacz, manager of the city’s Visitor and Cultural Events Center. But the float’s theme is not a negative comment on the local transportation problems, she said. “It’s real comical, and we can laugh at ourselves, “ she said.

In addition to promoting the city of Santa Ana to the estimated 125 million parade viewers worldwide, the float is also “promoting community pride, the local spirit,” she said. Funds were raised by a float committee that solicited corporate donations, sold pins and held fund-raisers, she said.

Barriers Break Down

Applying the 325,000 blossoms of 14 varieties onto Santa Ana’s float was more fun than work, Kopacz said. At first the volunteers--from schools, civic groups and senior citizen organizations--were “a little stiff with each other,” but the barriers soon broke down, she said.

Riding back to Santa Ana on the city-supplied bus at about 1 a.m. one recent morning, a group of volunteers passed the time singing songs, just like on a field trip, she said. And when a chicken truck--not too unlike one on the float--rumbled past, “We all broke up,” she said.

Volunteer Cox said that when she lived in Kansas she used to watch the parade on television. “I imagine every Midwesterner sees the Rose Parade on New Year’s Day and thinks: ‘That’s the place to be.’ ”

Cox probably won’t be along the parade route during the float’s debut in Pasadena this morning, though. She said she plans to be home, watching the parade on television and pointing out to family and friends the sections of the floral display that she worked on. “I’ll be showing everybody,” she said with pride.

Most of the Mission Viejo students who assembled the community’s float will be on the parade sidelines this morning, said Norma Graves. She doesn’t know their exact location, but all the spectators around them will know, she said.

“You can hear them cheering,” Graves said. “They take so much pride in that float, when it goes by, you’ll know where they are.”