by Paul R. Spitzzeri
Today’s Tournament of Roses parade was the first in two decades to be held amid rain, but nearly 40 floats, and almost 20 marching bands and 17 teams of equestrians thrilled chilled spectators down the 5 1/2 mile route in Pasadena for today’s 137th edition of the tradition that has made the Crown City internationally famous.
This post takes us back 119 years to the 18th tournament in 1907 with a real photo postcard of the Queen’s Caravan as a centerpiece of the parade, held when horse-drawn vehicles were still heavily in use but with the automobile becoming more common. Moreover, the Tournament was very much that, with chariot races, field games and other activities following the parade, instead of the Rose Bowl football game—though there was a 1902 gridiron contest that was then abandoned and not revived until 1916 (today, the top-ranked and undefeated Indiana Hoosiers crushed the #9 Alabama Crimson Tide, 38-3, and heads to the College Football Playoff semifinal against Oregon.)
From 1905 to 1930, the Tournament queen was often an adult woman, sometimes married, and, occasionally, had some celebrity. For example, the 1908 queen was tennis champion May Sutton, while actor May McAvoy held the title in 1923 and, two years later, Miss America and future actor Fay Lanphier presided. There were 14 years during that era when there were no queens (just once, in 1913, there was a king), but, from 1930, queens and their court members are between the ages of 17 and 21.
The 1907 queen, after the first two monarchs being Pasadena High School students, was Joan Meta Hadenfeldt Woodbury (1873-1969), a San Francisco native and daughter of a jewelry importer. She was a queen at events six times in her life, dating to 1884 when she was Queen of the May at the famous Woodward Gardens in her hometown, and also did some theatrical work and vaudeville. In 1904, she married Maine native Elmer F. Woodbury, who became a part-owner of the hotels Maryland and La Casa Grande in Pomona.
The photo featured here shows a float drawn by six decorated horses with attendants in white knee-length costumes with broad belts and fanciful headgear with rounded striped brims. Etched on the negative was “FLORAL PARADE PASADENA JAN, 1ST 0 7,” while inscribed below in ink is “The Queen’s Caravan, Purple and Yellow.” The vehicle has a gent in a suit standing with the reins in his hands, while the monarch and her attendants sit beneath floral parasols in graduated levels, with a compartment at the top, where Woodbury was placed.
She later remembered that “my husband and I designed the float” and that the $7,000 entry “was beautiful.” There was also a ball at the Hotel Green after the event, with 3,000 persons in attendance and she recalled that the renowned Irish opera tenor Tom Karl sang with a chorus of fifty and she was presented with a diamond-encrusted gold medal in recognition of her serving as queen.
That color palette was represented, it was stated, in purple bougainvillea and gold chrysanthemums (see below, however, on this latter), but, of course, the inscriber of the card had to identify this because photos were black-and-white. Woodbury remained active with the Past Queens Association, attending every event until 1968, when it was cancelled. She died the following year and was the oldest surviving Tournament monarch. Her only child was the actor Joan Woodbury, who had an extensive career, mainly in the decade between the mid-1930s and the end of World War II.
In its coverage of the Tournament, the Los Angeles Express of New Year’s Day 1907 reported,
More than 25,000 people gathered this afternoon at Tournament park to witness the sports. Not until the parade reached the park and had draw near the judges’ stand, before which sat the splendidly robed queen, did it become known just which of the different entries had carried off the prizes. Then, as the parade slowly passed in review before her majesty, the handsome pennants, in color signifying the rank accorded by the judges, were bestowed.
The paper mentioned the ball noted above with significant coverage, including the centrality of the queen’s throne, and added “it is no exaggeration to say that with this even fairly under way the management of Pasadena’s annual flower festival will breathe a great sigh of relief.” This was because “the Tournament has widened from year to year until it includes so many details and necessitates so much work that in spite of the pleasure resultant from a magnificent festival magnificently carried out, the end thereof is approached with immense satisfaction.
The paper had short pieces about entries, including those of schools and students, hardware dealers, real estate agents, decorators and painters and bankers. Under the heading of “Rose Queen’s Equipage More Beautiful Than A Royal State Coach,” it observed that, “probably the most gorgeous of all the blooming pageant was the state coach of the queen of the tournament and her [22] ladies in waiting.” The float was then described in some detail:
The vehicle was lavishly decked with the queen’s own colors of yellow and purple, purple bougainvilleas and yellow begonias. Even the blankets and collars of the horses were of these flowers and colors.
The canopy of the coach was made of these flowers, and from each side hung yellow banners. Separate canopies covered each couple of ladies, and above the queen was suspended a reproduction of the crown she wore on her head.
At each horse’s head walked an attendant dressed as an East Indian, while six mounted outriders guarded the coach . . .
The ladies in waiting were gowned in yellow and wore court veils of gauze, with a cluster of Prince of Wales ostrich tips in their hair.
Also of interest in the coverage of the Express was an article about Charles Frederick Holder (1851-1915), a former curator at the American Museum of Natural History who migrated to Pasadena in 1885 and was the founding president of the Tournament association, serving from 1890 to 1892. The piece noted that, when Holder, who was also an avid sportsman, was also heading the prominent Valley Hunt Club, “he sought serious support for the holding of an outdoor entertainment upon the approaching New Year’s day, such an event being the feature of many clubs, east and west.”
Dr. Francis F. Rowland, a recent transplant to the Crown City from Philadelphia, took part in a “Rose Tree Hunt” in the City of Brotherly Love and took his experiences from that event to assist Holder in the plans for the Pasadena Tournament. The article continued that “grounds for the first tournament were chosen in North Los Robles avenue, near the Santa Fe railway crossing, and here were held the sports,” including foot races, horse and greyhound races, horse lassoing and bronco busting, tug-of-war and “Spanish riding,” while the parade “with a long line of decorated vehicles” was an important part of the event.
The account added that the attendance was such that it as quickly agreed to make the Tournament an annual one, though the Valley Hunt Club relinquished responsibility for its management after 1895 because of the growing scale and the Board of Trade managed the event for two years. In 1898, the Tournament of Roses Association was established and it remains the operating entity nearly 130 years later.
In its number of the 2nd, the Los Angeles Herald declared that “PASADENA IS TRANSFORMED INTO [A] BOWER OF BEAUTY” with a “RIOT OF COLOR [THAT] DAZZLES [THE] EYES OF TOURISTS” as “Flower Gardens Glide Through [the] Crown City.” It bears noting that Pasadena and much of greater Los Angeles was a winter destination for persons fleeing the frigidity of other parts of he country.
As with this year, rain threatened to put a damper on the festivities, but the paper, with no small amount of purple prose, informed its readers that,
Sending its rays down the broad avenues of Pasadena, illuminating the upland lawns and terraces, bringing out the riot of color that floated from every pole, post and building, El Sol greeted the world yesterday morning and proclaimed the Tournament of Roses.
A fleecy speck of silver peeped over Mount Wilson’s towering peak at the preparations already in full swing, and the silver moon, full and round, but sorrowful, still hung in the western heavens and watched the hurrying crowds come from every hamlet, village, town and city in Southern California to greet Pasadena in her floral festival.
Never did beauty, richness of color and such masses of flowers grace a tournament as were features of the great pageant that ushered in the new year to the 70,000 people lining the streets of Pasadena. And the foothill maiden never was so beautiful as in her gorgeous array. It only needed the golden sun that so seldom deserts Southern California to transplant one in fairyland.
This breathless description continued and it added that “the several contrary conditions,” not specified, “that caused the parade of last year to become broken did not occur to furnish cause for a single complaint.” The grand marshal was Dr. Ralph Skillen, who came to Pasadena in 1880 at age seven and was trained as a dentist, though he owned, with his father, a confectionery—and who was marshal in 1908 and 1911, as well.
The parade was described in detail and, when it came to Woodbury’s turn, the Herald commented that, “garbed in costumes of the time and fashion of Louis XIV, and with the purple trimmings of royalty, the occupants of the royal float were fittingly arrayed to hold the high position which their prominence in the parade of so many exquisite turnouts and equipages required.”
In addition to what was mentioned above, this account remarked on the use of smilax and pampas grass for the queen’s compartment, while white satin ribbons with matching tassels were used, as well, and these repeated at smaller scale for the canopies covering the ladies-in-waiting. The paper added that,
No words can describe the picture in which the harmony of the color effect and the beauty of the queen and her maids combined to produce. It was a complete reproduction of the splendor of the French courts of early days and all the pomp and grandeur of continental royal courts was preserved in the effects which harmonized in every detail.
The monarch’s costume was also described in minute detail, including her “magnificent gown of white satin,” distinguished from purported French antecedents by the use of California poppies on the front panel and sleeve straps, while there was also a ruff were jewels, accounted “beautiful beyond description.” A red velvet train, with trimmings of ermine and gold lace and ‘a crown of wonderful jewels and a wand adorned with white satin ribbons and surmounted with a gold tip, completed the costume.”
Details were also given for the clothing wore by the queen’s court, including the half-dozen men who accompanied the horses and the pages riding abroad the float and the description ended with the remark that the float was at the head of “a most beautiful pageant of flower-decked vehicles and beautiful occupants.”
As did the Express, the Herald reviewed entries and their themes and décor, including a school that used a Chinese theme, another from local clothiers that represented a “horn of plenty,” the High School’s “Masque of Folly,” and a lumber dealers’ entry that was called “odd indeed” because of its float-length sign reading “Lumber”—perhaps this seemed overly commercial and, thereby, uncouth.
A Catholic school presented “Uncle Sam and all his children in a tropical jungle,” which seemed to intimate pride in American imperialism, while “novelty class” floats included one with Shetland ponies, another based on a prospector that drew much attention, and one from Pacific Creamery, said to be “the most unique” and for which “a negro boy drove the little float,” though it was not explained what significance this had with the theme.
When it came to illustrations of the Tournament, as well as employing the most perfumed expressions of the English language, the Los Angeles Times, per usual, was not to be outdone, with its Roy B. Wheeler exclaiming,
Beauty and rampant color reigned in Pasadena yesterday for the eighteenth New Year’s Day [offering of the tournament, not ever!] For nearly two decades the city of homes has greeted the new year with a pageant of flowers—a river of colors that pours through her streets, like an offering to the gods who fashioned the throne on which the Crown City sits—a visible and tangible sort of New Year’s resolve that so far as possible the ugly things of this world shall be put down.
Opalescent and lambent, this liquid jewel went its way yesterday under a cloudless sky, between the throngs which gathered to pay homage to the beauty of the fair Southland. From end to end it was beauty itself—beauty made by man with Nature’s help, taking its course from the beauties unadorned by Nature alone. Color was rampant—if there was one thing that marked this tournament from the others which have preceded, it was the riot and abundance of color. To the eye of an eagle, it must have seemed a flashing opal among the lush green fields, new awakened by the rains from their brown and fulvid autumn coat.
The reverie continued unabated as Wheeler employed the full arsenal of his variable, voluble vocabulary, describing how “old King Winter” was “gathering his forces in sullen rebellion, determined to mar the triumph of the conqueror,” King Sol, and remarking that “the old year went out in windy screechings,” while the infant new year “showed his baby might by beating down the howlings.”
As for Mount San Antonio, or Baldy, it was the “ambassador of winter” even as “the warming sun came” on the first day of 1907, “to view his home country” amid a broad blue sky in which “every fleecy atom of cloud had been blown away, frightened by the guerilla dash of the wintry winds.” Wheeler, finally, observed, after this lengthy prelude, that “this was the setting for the Tournament of Roses—a gorgeous setting, nowhere else in this world to be seen.”
The journalist echoed what others said about the parade growing in scale, as “color was rampant” and “the parade was a succession of flashing jewels, made into a long, winding mosaic.” The result was that “the Crown City has been building herself a throne on which to sit among the cities of the land” and that this place of prominence “is like an inverted pyramid—every stone that is builded into it is larger and better than the one before.”
More flights of fancy followed, including Wheeler’s breathless rendering of the Queen’s caravan in which “the gorgeous East has been laid in fee here” and “the ladies of the court added that always surpassing touch, independent of color—feminine loveliness.” Asserting that the monarch should have been crowned an empress, the writer commented that “there was dignity in the float—purple and gold may sound flashy, but blended and softened as they were, with the ladies of the court in row upon row leading the eye up to the throne where Mrs. Woodbury sat in splendor, the Queen’s float was a wholly satisfying things.”
Harry C. Carr, who made a name for himself with the Times for his in-depth reporting from San Francisco after the terrible earthquake and fire of April 1906 and who on to manage the editorial page and pen his column, “The Lancer,” covered the sports aspect in his inimitable style, remarking to readers,
There weren’t any stub-tailed horses and there weren’t any red ribbons on the whips; but the crowds at Tournament Park in Pasadena yesterday saw the only typically western horse show that has ever been held there.
It had the New York horse shows beaten to a whisper. It came about unconsciously, for they didn’t mean it to be a horse show. Yet people would come across the continent to see another such.
The hero of the show was a dare-devil vaquero—clad not in bearskin chaps and flapping sombrero—but in a pair of white tights, a Roman toga and a classic fillet by way of a hat.
The race that drew the most attention was, unsurprisingly, the chariot contest, won by P.B. Michel. The bronco busting was won by “a vicious little wretch with long, shaggy black hair and sprawling hoofs and red ratty eyes” and his “fiendish” contortions were such that the horse would “pitch like a ship in a heavy sea; whirl and buck and buck and whirl.”
Tent pegging was a new event, in which riders spurred their steeds at full speed and used lances to dislodge the pegs, hammered low to the ground—this sounds like a modern version of the carera del gallo, or rooster pull, of the pre-American days in California. Carr also covered horse races and then reserved the end of his piece for the thrills of the chariot contests and he asserted that, when it came to the final, “there is no doubt in the world that this chariot race was the most splendid ever seen.” Another Carr comment was that,
Even the lovely Queen of the Roses and her peachy court of stunning girls fell upon a soda pop boy and drank up his wares with charming unconventionality before the eyes of the filled tribunes.
We’ll look to mine the Museum’s collection for more Tournament of Roses items of interest next year, though whether with “charming unconventionality” or not will have to be seen!