Weather, pandemic not enough to derail Downey Rose Float

Alexis Givens, 12, designed the Downey Rose Float Association’s 2022 float. (Photo by Alex Dominguez)

DOWNEY – It is officially crunch time for the Downey Rose Float Association, as they race to finish their entry for Saturday’s annual Pasadena Tournament of Roses Parade.

The theme of this year’s event is “Dream. Believe. Achieve.” Downey’s entry is called “Reading: It’s an Adventure,” and will include three giant pop-up books, featuring a submarine voyage, a wild jungle, and a rocket blasting off into space.

The concept came from a drawing authored by Alexis Givens, who at 12-years-old, is the youngest in Downey Rose Float history to have her submission selected.

“I had no idea I was going to submit an entry at first; I didn’t even know we were going to the meeting before that night,” said Givens. “This was a one-time thing, like, a first-time thing. I’ve never done anything like that before.”

President Jeremy Clifton expressed a lot of pride in Givens.

“Generally speaking, we have either people who have done it for years, and years, and years, or professional artists,” said Clifton. “To have a kid’s basic stick figure drawing come to life is something that she’ll take with her the rest of her life and have good memories about it.”

Givens’s first drawing was similar to the float’s now middle section, originally featuring lions, tigers, and bears. Some fine tuning along with float designers made it what it is now, adding the underwater and space elements.

“I always think of a jungle adventure when I think of adventure,” said Givens. “Me and [Construction Chair] Kelley Roberts came up with a better and new design to go from the depths of the sea to the limits of space, because if you dream it and believe it, you can achieve anything.”

Roberts said that each book on the float will have some kind of animation or special effect, or both.

“It will be simple animation that you would see in a typical pop-up book,” said Roberts. “If you pull something on a pop-up book, it moves, or you turn it or you slide it, a little something moves; that little quirkiness. That’s what we tried to do.”

According to Floral Designer Danielle Storey, parade viewers can expect to see lots of roses, orchids, vegetables and fruits, more plants than usual, and “lots of popping colors.”

Volunteers spent this week preparing Downey’s float for the Tournament of Roses Parade on New Year’s Day. (Photo by Alex Dominguez)

“Probably in the flower realm, we probably at least have 12,000 stems of roses,” said Storey.

Givens said that seeing her concept come to life is “an amazing feeling.”

“I love my city; it’s an amazing community,” said Givens.

Givens served as Little Miss Downey in 2020, and will be one of the riders on the float along with Miss Teen Downey Sarah Sarofeem, Junior Miss Downey Allie Hanks, Danielle Storey, and Pam Chambers.

After a traffic accident caused extensive damage to the float site’s security fence and several props just a few weeks ago, “Decoration week” – which officially began Dec. 26 – also got off to a bit of a rocky start.

As of Monday, Downey Rose Float had not seen the number of volunteers that they usually do, which Clifton and Roberts agreed was likely due to the winter storm that was rolling through, and the rapidly rising number of Covid-19 cases.

Downey Rose Float has been following several safety protocols this week, including screening volunteers and requiring proof of vaccination or negative Covid-19 test.

Still, despite its hectic and somewhat nail-biting nature, the final days before the parade also brought a sense of normalcy for many of the organization’s volunteers.

“People have been stuck at home, haven’t been able to get out and see each other,” said Clifton. “A lot of these people we see every year, year after year after year. We watch their kids grow up. We watch them get older, we watch them get married.”

“Believe it or not, a year makes a big difference.”