Fixin’ To Float ‘Rock Around The Clock’ Float Will Join 200 Other Entries For This Year’s Lilac Parade

Remember, now, what it was like to be a child at a parade.

Maybe you sat atop a parent’s shoulders. Maybe you lounged in a grandparent’s lap.

Or maybe you just bumped elbows with a gaggle of kids your own age, fighting to see any or all of the following: Uniformed bands, drum majorettes, fire engines, prancing horses, classic cars, palm-waving politicians, men in funny hats driving teeny little autos, jugglers on unicycles, the occasional implement of war and, of course, the floats.

Most of all, the floats.

Whatever else a parade has to offer, floats typically are the highlight. Floats are to parades what clowns are to circuses.

Scrub the makeup off a clown and you have an average human being. Pull the frame off a float and you might have, say, a ‘74 Pinto.

In fact, the chassis for the Lilac Festival’s official float for its own Armed Forces Torchlight Parade, which begins Saturday at 7:45 p.m., comes from a Ford Pinto.

Either a ‘73 or ‘74 model, Beth Raol can’t remember.

Raol is the vice president of floats for the Lilac Festival’s 59th parade. So that’s why, some seven days, six hours and 15 minutes before parade time, she is standing in a well-lit warehouse in a cul-de-sac off East Pacific Avenue.

She and a half-dozen or so volunteer workers are busy painting, welding, stapling and otherwise helping to do a final assembly on the official float.

Their hope is that when it joins the other 200 entries (including 50-odd floats in all) wending their way through downtown Spokane, it will live up to the parade’s ‘50s-era theme - “Rock Around the Clock.”

It should. For atop this steel and wooden frame a pair of mechanized teenage mannequins will dance under a giant clock. Meanwhile, miniature models of every kind of car from a ‘56 Thunderbird to a pink Cadillac will cruise toward a simulated drive-in movie theater that is screening revolving likenesses of James Dean, Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, scenes of downtown Spokane and the Lilac Festival logo.

And that’s not all. In a display towed behind the float proper, the 50th anniversary of Fairchild Air Force Base will be commemorated. At the other end, Lilac Princess Brianne Adams, an 18-year-old senior from Shadle Park High School, will stand on the prow and smile brightly at the passing crowd.

At least that’s the vision. On this afternoon, though, the float is still just a bare frame surrounded by a bunch of scattered pieces.

“We’re usually well-finished by now,” Raol explains. “But this year we got a late start.”

Like the rest of the Inland Northwest, the float committee suffered at the hands of a particularly harsh winter. Matters were complicated even more when the committee moved from its traditional construction site, a Washington Water Power building near Riverfront Park, to this oversize garage owned by Larson Demolition.

Part of the move coincided with ice storm ‘96. “When we moved into this building, we didn’t have heat,” Raol says.

Still, since February, when work began in earnest, some 25-odd volunteers (buoyed by a core group of six) have worked on a relay basis. And the grand float design, the rough plans of which are posted on one wall, is beginning to take shape.

Each part gets special attention. “The jalopy is a dream car,” says Wilma Engstrom, referring to one of the six model autos that are a principal part of the float’s drive-in-theater concept. “The fellow working on it said that it’s the car that got him in trouble in high school.”

Relax. It’s not what you think.

“Actually, it’s because he sat in all his classes and drew the pictures instead of paying attention,” said Engstrom, a nurse in her real life who spends two nights a week and most Saturdays working on the float. “It’s the car that he always wanted.”

The task Raol, Engstrom and the rest of the all-volunteer work force has undertaken is immense. Unlike many larger cities, Spokane’s Lilac Festival doesn’t hire a professional company to build its official floats. That’s why last year’s float, according to Raol’s estimate, cost only $3,500 - as much as 10 times less than a professionally made model.

For that money, the float committee has to build a vehicle that conforms to a specific size (no more than 13 feet tall, 30 feet long and 14 feet wide), illustrates a specific theme and demonstrates creativity.

All entries abide by the same rules, and most of the smaller communities depend just as much as the Lilac Festival float committee does on volunteer work and donations by local individuals and businesses.

Floats from Freeman, for example, have won the Lilac Festival’s Grand Sweepstakes Award for the past three years. Nancy McCathern, a Freeman High School teacher, credits that success to community support.

“I think we have a wonderful group of volunteers, young and old alike, who come together every year to put time and effort into the float,” McCathern says. “We rebuild it from scratch every year.”

The Lilac Festival Association’s own float for 1996, which Raol calls “The Luau Boy,” is a case in point. The float is a giant polyurethane model of a reclining baby-fat boy drinking from a coconut. She credits Jon Edwards, a jewelry maker by trade, for making it work.

“His eye winks, his hand moves his hat up and down, his little toe moves back and forth, there’s a little bird that moves its head and tail and there’s two clams and a crab,” says Raol. “Jon is the person behind all of that. He just figures out a way for it to work.”

Edwards, a bear of a man with a childlike sense of shyness, constructs his mechanical creations with whatever he can find, including cast-off windshield wipers, electrical motors and assorted items off hardware-store shelves that only he can see a use for.

Edwards’ ingenuity was responsible for the drive-in’s revolving screen.

“It’s funny,” Edwards says, “I go into Eagle and they come up and say, ‘Can I help you?’ and I say, ‘No, no, I can’t begin to explain what I need.’ I never buy anything and actually use it for what its purpose is. Once in a while I’ll tell them what I’m doing, and they’ll just scratch their heads.”

But if the pressure of having to build a float essentially from scratch - a procedure that the committee does on an annual basis - seems tough, these workers aren’t showing it. Tunes from the ‘50s by such artists as Patsy Cline and Bobby Vinton play in the background; a plate of cookies rests on a table near the front door.

“The tradition down here is to listen to a lot of music and have lots of chocolate chip cookies,” Raol says with a laugh. “Since people volunteer a lot of hours, we try to keep it fun.”

The work is half of the reward. The other half comes on parade night.

“We do it for the kids,” says Raol, who will be at the vehicle’s wheel on Saturday night. “It’s pretty awesome when they’re sitting along the sidelines and you drive down the street. They think it’s so great.”

Of course they do. They always have.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo Graphic: Lilac on parade

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: The 59th annual Lilac Festival Armed Forces Torchlight Parade begins at 7:45 p.m. Saturday in downtown Spokane. See today’s Weekend section for a schedule of festival events, including Sunday’s open house at Fairchild Air Force Base.