BATTLE GROUND — Without a queen bee, the whole project seemed iffy, but sufficient worker bees showed up to keep things buzzing along. Then a bona fide queen bee named Amy Strickland materialized, wielding management skills and some artistic spark, too.
“I’m very creative, and I just thought, this would be right up my alley,” Strickland said. “It sounded fun, and I knew they needed help.”
After Strickland came some guys who could handle the welding and construction side of the project. They were the final missing piece, according to longtime volunteer Louise Tucker.
“The decorating crew has been pretty much the same” for years, Tucker said. “We needed new construction people, and we got some guys who were interested in seeing this happen. Like a lot of volunteer things, it seems like it’s starting to fade away, then it comes back again.”
The result: Battle Ground’s homemade Rose Festival Grand Floral Parade float will go forth this year — but go mini. About half the size of previous Battle Ground floats, it’ll cruise the streets of downtown Portland on a repurposed golf cart. The Battle Ground Rose Festival Princesses that used to ride along and wave will have to walk.
That’s not ideal, and it’s a far cry from the grandiose spectacles of the past, but at least Battle Ground is still floating along. If it wasn’t, several longtime volunteers told The Columbian during a visit to the float workshop on Monday, a continuous tradition that began in 1955 would have been broken.
You simply can’t have that, Rich Rubin said. What you can have instead, he and his fellow volunteers learned, is a smaller float. This past winter, when Rose Festival officials heard that Battle Ground’s grand 63-year tradition was in jeopardy, they paid a personal visit to the Flex Building, which the local float group rents from the city’s Public Works department. They urged the float group to think outside its usual big box — and try getting into a smaller one. Mini-floats are a growing category in the Rose Festival’s Grand Floral Parade, according to volunteer Shirley Stowell, as overall float construction costs climb and volunteers dwindle. Battle Ground isn’t alone in facing those problems, she said, but most other floats are built by commercial contractors.
Battle Ground’s bottom line appears to be a gender and job-distribution imbalance of sorts. There’s no shortage of ladies of a certain age who gladly devote many hours per week to decorating. When The Columbian stopped by, a whole group of them was busy adding finishing touches out of 100 percent organic material (that’s a cardinal rule) like bird seed and colored coconut to their mini-float, which depicts a beehive and a bunch of happy bumble bees.
“I run all over town buying things for it,” said Barbara Rowe. “Then I dream about it at night.”
“The old ladies keep coming back. These are the best friends I ever made. We have a great time,” said Mary Goodnight. “But we were out of guys to build it. If they don’t build it, we can’t decorate it.”
A handful of guys eventually stepped up to do that work. Most are retirees, but there’s at least one 20-something welder who keeps pitching in — and reportedly commenting that his peers are really missing out on something fun and pro-community, according to Goodnight.
This year marks the first time the float driver will be visible and part of the decoration, rather than hidden below deck, watching and steering via hidden cameras and screens, Rubin said. Instead of an isolated pilot in a capsule, this year you’ll have a beekeeper sporting a beekeeping hat and protective veil.
A typical budget for this project in a typical year would be between $12,000 and $15,000, Tucker said, but this time it’ll be probably wind up about one-third of that. There was no annual ROSE (Royal Order of Selected Enthusiasts) fund-raising push this time, she added, but this coming fall it’s a must.
Everybody is glad to have saved the tradition with a mini-float this year, they said, but next year everyone wants to graduate from a golf cart and go big again. Visit battlegroundrosefloat.com to find out how you can help.
“It’s a smaller scale this year,” Strickland said. “We want to go back to larger, and we need additional volunteers and board members to get it organized.”
The float always gets a free ride from Battle Ground to Portland thanks to a flatbed truck provided by Clark Public Utilities, Stowell said. It usually crawls down the freeway in the dead of night for as little traffic disruption as possible, sometimes with police escort. (Rubin said he remembers one year when the float was a gigantic pink elephant taking a shower, traversing local streets while the bars were still open; he suspects it was spied by many people who declared they’d had enough, he joked.)
This year’s departure is scheduled for very early on parade morning, Stowell said. It may be a happy, miniaturized beehive, she said, but she still expects to get shivers of pride and joy while watching it go, same as any other year.
“When this thing pulls out into the street, I know we’ve created something to be proud of,” she said.
