Like a life-size ant colony, volunteers descended upon Rosemont Pavilion in Pasadena this week, working in assembly stations to place and perfect every petal on floats for the 2024 Rose Parade. It was a last-minute decorating frenzy in which armies of volunteers will push through the weekend, decorating all manner of float, not just in Pasadena but the in the big float barns in Irwindale and Azusa.
The floats have taken on new and more vibrant forms this week as floral décor — everything from fruits and vegetables to seeds and, of course, roses and other flowers — has covered more and more of the once bare and skeletal frames.
Deco Week, as it’s called by float builders and volunteers, draws thousands of helpers from near and far each year as the floats take their final shape before the parade on New Year’s Day.
Anna Marie Larrabure traveled from Rancho Cucamonga on Friday, Dec. 29, to help decorate the float designed and built by Cal Poly University Pomona and San Luis Obispo students. She spent over two hours painstakingly gluing tiny black onion seeds onto the Cal Poly sign for the float, “Shock N’ Roll: Powering the Musical Current.”
“It’s fun when you get to actually climb onto the float to decorate,” said Larrabure, a Cal Poly Pomona alumna and 12-year parade veteran, “whether it’s putting onion seeds on or citrus” as other volunteers had done.
The creativity that powers Deco Week has pulled Cal Poly Pomona alumna Michele Gendreau back to help decorate 44 floats over the years.
“It is kind of like brain candy,” said Gendreau, who is deco adviser for Cal Poly’s 2024 float. “I don’t need to do it all year long. It feeds my passion of creativity in a very brief amount of time and it sucks you in.”
Gendreau, who traveled from Santa Clarita to Pasadena to help with float decorating, said the excitement of the work leaves her exhausted by the end of the week. But like other alumni, she keeps coming back for more, helping out any way she can and sometimes serving as a motivator to cheer current students on.
“My favorite part is seeing their pride. When they realize that their vision came to life and not in the same way they thought,” Gendreau said. “It’s kind of an ‘aha!’ moment they have and it’s really exciting when you see the students light up.”
Andrew Martin, a Cal Poly San Luis Obispo alumni and float veteran since 1987, traveled from Chicago to visit family and work on the 2024 float. Wearing a white jumpsuit Friday, he carefully used a credit card to fan delicate purple flowers away from seeds on the float.
“This brings back great memories as we actually built the float in the same barn when I was working on it in the ’90s,” Martin said. “Seeing all the pieces come together is a lot of fun.”
In addition to working on past Cal Poly floats, Martin was a driver for several years for Cal Poly, and professionally as well. Friday, he displayed his driver’s patches proudly on the jumpsuit he says are the “dress whites” drivers wear the day of the parade.
The excitement of workers Friday spilled outside the float warehouse and into a makeshift courtyard where hundreds of volunteers sorted, cut and placed thousands of flowers into water vials.
Jessie Larmon traveled from Santa Clarita with her Girl Scout troop on Friday, jumping in to help decorate various floats, including the Michigan float. Larmon has 15 years of float decorating under her belt and now brings the troop to make memories.
“I have a couple of Scouts on flowers and even one up on the scaffolding. They get community service hours and they just really enjoy it,” Larmon said while overseeing a tray of yellow roses that Troop 6252 was placing in vials. “We always end the day with a trip to Bob’s Big Boy in Burbank.
“Honestly, it feels good to touch the floats and to work on them,” Larmon added. “It is something that a lot people don’t know … that you can just be any old person and go down and volunteer.”
East of Pasadena, giant float barns at the headquarters of longtime float builders Fiesta Parade Floats and Phoenix Decorating Co. revved up like the float factories that they are.
Volunteers spanned generations, and from around the country.
There was Nancy Hartman, 90, from Richmond, Ind. Her two daughters, Holly Lemar and Heidi Hartman, brought her to Fiesta Floats as part of a “bucket list” trip.
She was at it early Friday morning, donning a a red sweater depicting a bedazzled sprig of holly, scissors in hand, cutting dried, golden Strawflowers into confetti-sized pieces, to be used on the floats.
Asked why she likes the parade she’s watched from afar for so long: “It’s something truly American.”
“Look at all these wonderful people that are volunteering. It’s hard to believe,” she said.
Her favorite part of the whole experience? “Being with my daughters.”
Many were just awed by the flower power happening inside the big warehouses, where for weeks many of the Rose Parade floats have been parked, readying for the westward journey to Pasadena.
“When you see the floats, you don’t really see everything in detail, but to actually be here behind the scenes and volunteering and putting the seeds on the floats and everything, and you’re like, that’s actually flower seeds, or this type of seed, or those are all flowers, or one of the floats over there, the rocks are potatoes … So that’s really cool,” said Elise Turner, 24, of Los Angeles, who was working on the Louisiana float.
Mayor Timothy Baudier, mayor of Harahan, Louis., was there to support his state’s entry in the parade.
“The ornateness, the perfection in it has just been, it’s incredible,” he said.
Freelance writer Collin Blinder contributed to this story.
