Since 2003, Bobby Eldridge has made the trip to Pasadena, California, to work on Tournament of Roses Parade floats.

About three years ago, he developed a group of 10 people — including himself — from around the country to handle the floral application of a couple of floats.

The long hours put in by the team for four days leading up to the New Year’s Day parade have continued to result in recognition.

For the 135th annual parade Jan. 1, the Kaiser Permanente float won the Presidents Award for the most outstanding use and presentation of flowers, and The UPS Store float earned the Bob Hope Humor Award for the most whimsical and amusing float.

Eldridge, a Crothersville native who owns Prestigious Affairs in Seymour and Brownstown Greenhouse and Gifts in Brownstown, has won numerous awards over the years, and he said Fiesta Parade Floats typically gives his team the two largest floats each year.

“We’ve got a well-oiled machine,” he said, noting members of the team are from Indiana, Kentucky, Arkansas, Michigan, Florida and California. “We’re from everywhere, but we’re kind of like a floral family. We stay in touch and we communicate throughout the year, too. We have the best floral family in the world. Even though we are apart, we are always there for each other.”

For the third year in a row, the team included another Jackson County resident, Blake Hackman of Brownstown, who is the agriculture teacher and FFA adviser at Brownstown Central High School.

“We handpicked our team,” Eldridge said. “It’s really great because we work well together and we treat each other with respect and we’re all kind of in this together, so there’s not one of us that is more important than the other. If it’s sweeping the floor or designing flowers, they are all just as important.”

Eldridge said they know which designer can do each part based upon their abilities.

“You always work on their strong points and things they do well,” he said. “You don’t ever want to put somebody in a position where they are not going to be successful, so with our design team, we know who has what abilities and to what extent. Again, no one job is more important than the other.”

While the team is only in California for the last week of the year, planning begins well before then.

The parade theme and grand marshal are announced in late January, and then seven months before the parade, Fiesta Parade Floats begins the building process.

Eldridge said the structures are made of pencil wire, which is formed, shaped, colored with a screen and then cocooned.

“The cocooning is like spray foam insulation that you would spray into a house that expands,” he said. “Once they get the screen on, they do a light coat of that, and then that creates the actual form.”

Once that’s done, it’s time for the fresh application by Eldridge and his team. He said they receive the concept for each float around the beginning of November, and they communicate with each other and their liaison in California to bring that to life.

“This year, it was a little bit more difficult to get product, so they brought another person on to do calculations,” Eldridge said.

The team has a short amount of time to execute its plans, but it’s all worth it in the end when they receive awards.

“The fresh application has to be done in a four-day span,” Eldridge said. “It’s just long hours, long days. The last day, 30th going into the 31st, we were there for 36 hours straight to get completion. That was the longest day.”

The 2024 parade theme was “Celebrating a World of Music: The Universal Language.”

Kaiser Permanente’s 18th annual float entry, “Symphony of You,” embodied the theme by bringing everyone together through music and represented the many ways the people employed by the health care company work together harmoniously to care for members, according to mykp.kp.org.

At the center of the float, a member was depicted, standing with outstretched arms and dancing along to the music. She was surrounded by photos representing life moments and the caregivers who have helped along the way.

The float also featured members, care providers and employees standing on a winding piano path that represented the unique notes of every member’s individual journey and how Kaiser Permanente synchronizes its care and services with the rhythm of life.

Also, the Los Angeles Philharmonic performed a special piece of music that conveyed the emotion of an individual’s journey as diverse cultural groups from across Kaiser Permanente danced and walked alongside the float.

The 55-foot-long float feature more than 6,000 coral and hot pink roses and more than 2,000 green roses. The framed photos of key moments in the member’s life were made of rice and onion seed, and the conductor was made using several spices to achieve her tones. Other flowers and materials used included an assortment of tulips, chrysanthemums, orchids, lilies, gerbera daisies, statice and straw flowers.

“We did some really unique color blocking with the products that we used on that one,” Eldridge said. “We made the cobblestone wall out of potatoes, and it was perfect, but it was laborious. The whole deck of that particular float had five different varieties in an ombré from peach to hot pink, so it went from peach to orange and it faded into these different colors to hot pink in the back, so it was really beautiful seeing that ombré from front to back.”

There were other groupings of colors on the float.

“There’s so much power in color,” Eldridge said. “On each side, there were trough bins, and we did different hues of purple, and we just kept all of our colors together. The visual impact of the colors being color blocked, I think it was much prettier than if we were polka-dotted or mixed up.”

Since he’s in the floral business, Eldridge said he was most proud to receive an award based on best use of flowers.

“When you get an award for the best application of using fresh product, that’s a pretty big deal for us,” he said. “We have creative souls, and we’re very artistic. We’re artistic souls creating beautiful things, and that’s what we do out there, too.”

Eldridge has worked on The UPS Store float in previous years.

This year, the company spotlighted its Start Small, Grow Big program with Junior Achievement USA through a float themed around “The Beat of Achievement,” featuring a giant musical crocodile surrounded by rockin’ flamingos and birds, all covered with flowers, according to ups.com.

Eldridge said there were nearly 25 points of animation on the float, including a 35-foot-tall crocodile, 13-foot-tall flamingos, trees and a parrot.

“It had lots and lots of tropical flowers on it,” he said.

With another Rose Parade experience behind him, Eldridge looks forward to continuing to work with the premier float builder Fiesta.

Each year, the Tournament of Roses selects three judges to grant float awards based on float design, floral presentation and entertainment value. Overall, 23 awards are handed out.

This year, all five Fiesta float entries won an award.

“We usually do pretty good because our clients that we have out there, they understand that it is a floral parade, and we use lots of flowers,” he said. “There are a lot of other builders that will do a less-expensive float that uses lots more seeds and those types of natural applications and not necessarily flowers, and so we are known for using a huge amount of flowers in the floats because it is the rose flower parade.”