Float rider once was found, now is lost

Man rode in parade in 1940 and turned up at a party, but someone misplaced his card.Missed connection: Saw you at Newport Beach’s Let’s Do Launch event last month, you’re in your 70s and you have a great story about riding on Newport’s Rose Parade float in 1940. Would love to talk to you again.

City officials haven’t gone to the length of taking out a personal ad, but as they plan for the Jan. 2 debut of their centennial-themed Rose Parade float, they are looking for a man who was on the city’s float 65 years ago.

“We were looking for any of the riders, but we didn’t know any of their names,” said Janis Dinwiddie, a consultant working with the city on plans for the centennial, which is officially Sept. 1, 2006.

It’s hard to tell from the fuzzy black and white photo, but it appears the 1940 float had four young riders. It consisted of four small sailboats on a base with a sort of wave at the back, and a seagull.

That float, sponsored by what was then called the Newport Harbor Chamber of Commerce, was elementary by today’s standards. Dinwiddie believes it was built by mounting the actual boats -- 10- to 12-foot sailboats called snowbirds -- on the float platform and covering everything with flowers.

The city had put out feelers to longtime Newport residents to see if they knew who was on that float. By coincidence, at the city’s Oct. 2 centennial kick-off, a man who had been on the earlier float struck up a conversation with someone at a city merchandise booth.

The man remembered riding the float as “the highlight of his life,” and he still has the outfit he wore then, Dinwiddie said.

And then, a simple mistake: The man gave someone his card. It got misplaced. And no one remembers his name.

“All we have is a grainy photograph,” Dinwiddie said. “We’d love to reconnect with this gentleman and any of the other three that were on the float at the time.”

And that’s not the end of it. The city is also looking for other float memorabilia, its appetite whetted by discovery of a postcard of a 1939 float that apparently carried several Balboa beauty queens.

A city employee found the postcard for sale online while organizing an eBay auction of a seat on the city’s float and promptly bought the piece of city history for $9.

City recreation director and acting centennial guru Marie Knight said they don’t know who the seller of the float postcard is, but “I can’t wait to get it. That’s the first time that we’ve found anything that was related” to that float.

Now the stars are aligning to create a once-in-a-lifetime experience for the eight or nine people who will ride on the city’s 2006 float. Today at 2 p.m. the city closes entries in the opportunity drawing for one float seat, and the eBay auction of another seat closes at 5 p.m.

And it’s possible that 65 years from now, at least one little girl will recount to her friends and family how she rode on Newport Beach’s Rose Parade float in 2006. Bruce Hezlep on Wednesday asked his daughter, Tess, if she’d like to be on the float. Then he called the city and made the $25,000 donation that reserves a seat.

Hezlep has lived in Newport Beach since 1968, but he lived in Pasadena as a kid and marched in the Rose Parade when he played the cymbals in his junior high school band.

For another $10,000, Hezlep secured a seat for himself, but he’s more interested in creating a memory for his daughter.

“She’s 8 years old, so she’ll remember this for the rest of her life,” he said.

* ALICIA ROBINSON covers government and politics. She may be reached at (714) 966-4626 or by e-mail at alicia.robinson@latimes.com.

20051110ippqshkn(LA)One of Newport’s Rose Parade floats