Battle Ground’s float family reunited for annual parade entry

• What: Rose Festival Grand Floral Parade, featuring 10 entries from Clark County among 95 total. Marching bands, floral floats and many other special entries.

• When: 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday.

• Where: Starts at Veterans Memorial Coliseum, 300 N. Winning St., heads down Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. and across the Burnside Bridge, wiggles through Southwest Portland and ends at Lincoln High School.

• Cost: Reserved indoor and outdoor seating is available at the Coliseum from $15-$30.

• Information: http://rosefestival.org or http://battlegroundrosefloat.com

“These guys have become my second family, my float family,” said Adeena Wade, at 20 the newest and youngest member of the float’s board of directors.

Speaking of elbow grease, Wade was tapped to play the crucially industrious Rosie the Riveter in this year’s Living History festival program. Wade has portrayed one particular fictionalized Rosie — Rose Wade from Battle Ground — at Portland grade schools this spring. (She’ll sign autographs at the Festival’s CityFair from 2 to 4 p.m. Sunday at Governor Tom McCall Waterfont Park in Portland.)

“We like young people coming in, of course. We need that,” said decor co-chairwoman Pat Stanfield, who added that the whole float-building scene “is very social. You bond with people, and they become your really good friends.”

‘Frankenfloat’

This year’s parade theme is “A Bloomin’ Good Time,” which Battle Ground’s float makers have illustrated with an arthropodal power trio: an ant on saxophone, a ladybug on drums and a caterpillar on guitar. Each will get a solo, Rubin said. (You know how rock stars are.)

The ladybug’s mechanical arms got a test run while The Columbian was visiting recently, and we can promise you that she is impressive to watch as well as to hear.

If the arms fall off, Rubin said, they’ll be rapidly reattached. In fact, that’s part of the glee this float family displays; while the project costs something like $14,000 a year, there’s always an element of barely controlled homemade chaos, of steering, literally, in between bloopers. This thing isn’t exactly a finely tuned Mercedes.

Rubin said he likes to call it the “Frankenfloat,” because the 35-foot metal frame is welded together from smaller ones, and the mechanical equipment that does the actual driving has been amputated from the corpses of cars that date back decades.

In years past, the float’s steering has seized, leaving it only able to turn left. It has scraped bay-door frames and gotten tangled in power lines. And hidden cameras have failed, leaving hidden drivers totally in the dark.

Yes, two pilots are stowed in there, behind ingenious fold-down doors, in the belly of the beast, where it’s hot and noisy and dark, Rubin said. One watches the monitor and steers while the other works the electronics and animations: the music, the grooving insects, the signature Battle Ground bee that takes off and lands on its own little pad of petals.

So “don’t panic, but I can’t see” is exactly what you don’t want to hear the pilot whisper over the intercom, according to Austin Alling, but that’s what he heard one time. Fortunately, Alling was on the exterior walking team that escorts the float — and keeps children away from the undercarriage — so disaster was averted that year.

Besides, the parade route is always marked by a pink stripe for this very reason. If all else fails, the driver can always just watch the street.