Parades and Town Festivals

Contents

1. Processions in the ancient city
2. The American civic parade
3. Commerce joins the parade
4. Decoration Day becomes Memorial Day
5. The Valley Hunt Club and the first Tournament
6. From carriages to professional floats
7. The parade’s size today
8. Fiesta Days in La Cañada Flintridge
9. A short glossary

Mike Kobeissi takes part in La Cañada Flintridge Chamber of Commerce events, and the Chamber hosts the town’s Memorial Day weekend Fiesta Days, the local entry in a very old line of civic celebration.

In outline the line runs like this. Classical Athens marched in the procession of the Panathenaic festival. Medieval cities staged royal entries and carnival processions. American towns of the nineteenth century paraded on the Fourth of July and Washington’s Birthday.¹ Pasadena’s Valley Hunt Club formed in 1888 and decorated its carriages with flowers on New Year’s Day 1890.⁵ The Tournament of Roses Association took over in 1895.⁷ A department store parade began in New York in 1924.¹ In 1973 La Cañada Flintridge started Fiesta Days, and after the city incorporated in 1976 the celebration moved to Memorial Day weekend.⁴³ The sections below take those dates in order.

Processions in the ancient city

An encyclopedia entry on parades, treats processions, pageants and parades as one of the oldest ways a community makes its bonds visible.¹ Athens showed its unity in the Panathenaic procession carved in the Parthenon frieze, and the Greek word for procession passed through Latin into the English word pomp. The first processions were religious, but the form later carried royal entries, popular festivals and, from the early twentieth century, commercial events.¹

The American civic parade

In the growing cities of nineteenth century America, the same entry explains, parades took a distinctive form inspired by military marches. Each group, whether national, occupational or moral, formed its own marching unit, and unlike many European processions the parade had no plot or destination; the point was to show identities to the crowd along the curb.¹ In small towns the procession was more domestic, with families at its center and everybody taking part.¹

Commerce joins the parade

Around 1900, merchants and politicians found a shared interest in parades built around the consumer. Department stores replaced older ragamuffin parades with spectacles of abundance, and the Thanksgiving parade a New York store began in 1924 drew more than a million people along its route during the Depression, its giant balloons of comic figures a new kind of float.¹ The entry notes a change in the role of children, who moved from marchers and chanters to the parade’s most courted spectators.¹

Decoration Day becomes Memorial Day

The holiday on which many foothill parades now fall began after the Civil War as Decoration Day, when small Northern towns decorated soldiers’ graves with flowers and flags, the Crescenta Valley Weekly recounts. Southern towns kept a different date until after World War I, when the last Monday in May was chosen nationally, and Congress made Memorial Day official in 1971.⁴

Figure

The Tournament of Roses in its early decades

1. 01
   1890The Valley Hunt Club stages a parade of flower decked carriages and games; about 2,000 people attend.
2. 02
   1895The Tournament of Roses Association is formed and raises $595 for the next year's parade.
3. 03
   1901Motorized vehicles are admitted, kept at the rear so they do not frighten horses.
4. 04
   1905Hallie Woods reigns as the first Rose Queen.
5. 05
   1920Every float in the parade is motorized.

The Valley Hunt Club and the first Tournament

The region’s best known parade began as a private outing. PBS SoCal traces it to the Valley Hunt Club, founded in 1888 by the naturalist Charles F. Holder and other recent arrivals from the East.⁵ Inspired by the battle of flowers at the carnival in Nice, Holder and Francis Rowland proposed a winter pageant to show off Pasadena’s climate after a land boom had collapsed.⁵ On January 1, 1890, members drove carriages decked with flowers from their own gardens to a field for foot races, tug of war and a tourney of rings.⁵⁶ Counts of the crowd differ: the California State Library gives about 2,000, while PBS SoCal cites contemporary estimates of more than 8,000.⁶⁵

From carriages to professional floats

By 1891 the first marching band, from Monrovia, led decorated buggies along Colorado Boulevard, according to a Los Angeles Magazine map history.⁹ In 1895 the event had grown too large for the club, and the Tournament of Roses itself records that an association was formed to run it.⁷ A football game was added in 1902, gave way to chariot races, and returned for good in 1916. Early games on the town lot came to include ostrich races and a race between a camel and an elephant, which the elephant won. Today most floats are built by professional companies over nearly a year, a few still by volunteers from their sponsoring communities, and the association’s 935 volunteers, known for their white suits, run the day.⁷

The parade’s size today

An EBSCO research starter puts attendance at roughly a million people a year since the late 1960s, with tens of millions more watching on television.⁸ The California State Library gives a lower figure of 700,000 in person.⁶ The route now runs about five and a half miles with nearly fifty floats.⁹

Figure

The Rose Parade by the numbers

people attending in person each year since the late 1960s

About 1 million

length of the parade in 1920

2.5 miles

blossoms estimated on the 1920 floats

1.5 million

blossoms said to cover the Association's own float in 1935

250,000

Fiesta Days in La Cañada Flintridge

The town’s own festival began in 1973 as a celebration of the area’s Spanish heritage during the week of Cinco de Mayo. After cityhood it became a multiday Memorial Day weekend event that added a remembrance for veterans, and the Chamber of Commerce runs it with the city, the Crescenta Valley Weekly reported in 2019.³ The weekend includes a breakfast and vintage car show, a family film and a picnic at Lanterman House, and on Monday a Memorial Day service and a parade down Foothill Boulevard. The local Tournament of Roses association, which builds a float each year, holds an open house the same weekend.³⁴ The National Trust for Historic Preservation, writing about Main Street festivals, argues that events like these strengthen communities, draw visitors and bring business to historic downtowns.² Many are run by the same people who fill the town’s service clubs, and the trade they bring downtown is the subject of shopping local.

A short glossary

Float. A decorated platform in a parade; in Pasadena, decorated with natural materials rather than artificial flowers. Battle of Flowers. The Riviera flower festival that Holder saw in 1886 and adapted.⁸ Tourney of rings. An old Spanish game of spearing hanging rings at a gallop, which gave the Tournament its name.⁶ Marching unit. One group’s section of a civic parade. Decoration Day. The older name for Memorial Day. White Suiters. The Tournament’s volunteers. Festivals tell visitors about a town’s habits, not about any one house, and weighing a particular home is a task for advisors the reader has chosen.