Long before Instagram bred the invasive FOMO strain, many a home-bound, snowbound Victorian envisioned warmer, winter climes, mostly by way of personal memories (if they had been fortunate enough to travel), letters from friends on sunny holidays (those actually fortunate enough to travel), or by literature-fueled imagination, reading tomes like Treasure Island or Winged Life in the Tropics by the sooty fireside. The idea of bare legs and sandy toes was never further away than in Victorian Boston, Brooklyn or Bar Harbor. Enter ... Professor Charles Frederick Holder with a vicarious cure for the truest, icy-bluest, winter doldrums.
On a, presumably, clear and sunny, winter's day, far away from the sleet and soot of 1890 New England, the Valley Hunt Club of Pasadena, California had a brilliant, if not somewhat braggadocious, idea: to share their geographic good fortune with all those snowbound schlubs back East. "In New York," Prof. Holder, leader of Valley Hunt Club observed, people are buried in sonw ... Here our flowers are blooming and our oranges are about to bear. Let's hold a festival to tell the world about our paradise." It's a little like tagging a friend recovering from an appendectomy, with selfies of you in Paris. It might be meant to brighten someone's day; yet, it could be seen as insensitive. Either way, it was certainly meant as a generous gesture at the time and the Tournament of Roses parade was born.
Of course, from 1890 until the 1920s, the only way to truly experience the parade in all its floral and scent-laden goodness, was to travel to California. If that wasn't possible, one waited weeks for newspapers to print images taken by their reporters. Even by 1925, when wire photos were the next best thing to being there (similar to a fax, with light photons sent via telegraph or radio current), one still waited a week for transmission, and even then, the glorious, blue skies and vibrant flora of a SoCal winter were lost to the muddy graininess of black-and-white images. Horse-drawn carriages, motor cars and the earliest of floats were laden with local flowers, foliage, fruits and the bubbly festivity that can only be bred in California. Happy cows and people come from California. Witness.
Thank goodness for continued technology. On New Year’s Day, 1940, television first aired via an experimental television station based in Los Angeles: W6XAO. In 1947, another new station, licensed as W6XYZ/KTLA (local channel 5) covered the Rose Parade via television, for the first time ever. One year later, on January 1st, 1948, the old, experimental station, W6XAO, returned and was eventually licensed as KNXT/KCBS. By 1948, two more Los Angeles stations alighted: KFI-TV, eventually licensed as KHJ-TV/KCAL-TV (local channel 9): and KLAC-TV, eventually licensed as KCOP (local channel 13). Both new stations joined parade coverage on New Year’s Day, 1949. Getting in just under the wire, a third station popped up on-air: KTTV (local channel 11 and home turf to TMZ). The 1949 Tournament of Roses Parade was KTTV's very first on-air program. In 1950, one more station-tent was added to the parade-coverage: KNBH, later licensed as KRCA/KNBC. In 1951, KECA-TV, later KABC-TV, added the Rose Parade to their New Year's line-up.
Also, sometime in the 1960s, football was added to the Rose Parade festivities, I guess. Whatever.
If you grew up watching the Rose Parade on KTLA, chances are good your childhood memories of any given January 1st include hosts Stephanie Edwards and Bob Eubanks. The Bob and Stephanie show was synonymous with New Year's Day, hosting from 1982-2016. Since their retirement, and for the noted future due to freshly inked deals this December 2019, Leeza Gibbons and Mark Steines have proved perky, affable replacements. If you're watching the 2020 coverage on NBC, your hosts will be the ever-ebullient and optimistic Hoda Kotb and Al Roker.
Accuweather predicts January 1, 2020 in Pasadena, California to be sunny, clear and sixty-two degrees. To that end, Prof. Charles F. Holder was correct. Our flowers are blooming and our oranges are about to bear, whilst a lot of the country can't get out of their driveways. Wherever you are, in the U.S., or around the world, whether you love a blue sky and turquoise sea, or prefer a rainy and grey, proper winter landscape, you can't mistake the televised views of Pasadena, Colorado Blvd. and The Norton Simon Museum sitting stately on the sidelines. The parade does shamelessly boast all our beauteous, blooming, Technicolor, SoCal flowers and fruits of winter, not to mention all the happy, peppy people of The Tournament of Roses. Even for those, for whom the Rose Parade is a bit old-hat, boring and played even, jaded or not, it makes a person happy. It warms your soul, wherever and however you watch it; it infuses your spirit with a brisk, bright start to an optimistic New Year, eEven if only by watching Tilman, the snowboarding/skateboarding bulldog.
Happy New Year's, kittens! May your 2020 be brilliant, lucrative and plentiful with love and light!
