Business & Tech

Kit-Cat Clock Adding to Its Legacy with Rose Parade Float

The Fountain Valley-based California Clock Co. is making a statement—both with its float and with the flowers used to create it.

Five years ago, the Fountain Valley-based California Clock Co. celebrated its 75th anniversary by taking a road trip along historic Route 66. This year, the company's celebrating its 80th anniversary on something that travels a bit slower.

The company, known around the world for its iconic Kit-Cat Clock, will have its own float in today's Tournament of Roses Parade. The float will feature eight dancers and its own skateboard ramp, complete with professional skaters who will ride the ramp as the float makes its way down the parade route. But the most amazing thing about the company's float might be the flowers used to make it—95 percent of which were grown right here in California.

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When Woody Young, president of California Clock Co., set out to start the process of entering a float in the parade, he discovered something that made him very unhappy: 80 percent of the flowers used on a typical Rose Parade float were grown outside of the U.S., on farms subsidized by our government.

"I said, 'I can't have that,'" Young said. "We're an American company. We go out of our way to be American-made. To have foreign flowers on our float would be anathema to me."

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So Young set out to break the cycle, contacting the California Cut Flower Commission, where he met Mike Mellano, a San Diego grower with Orange County roots who will represent the commission on the float.

"For 30 or 40 years since I've been doing this, I've wanted to have California flowers," Mellano said. "I was so glad to find out there was interest in doing that. We're very happy and very grateful that [Young] chose to do this. The Rose Parade in its original form was a way to showcase American flowers, so we're very happy with this. It's just a great thing."

Joining Young and Mellano on the Kit-Cat float will be dancers chosen through a nationwide casting call to Kat-Cat retailers across the country, among them two sisters from Florida, the winners of the Dancing With the Stars youth competition, and an American student studying in Mexico, where she does charity work in local orphanages.

Young said that having a float in the parade ranks near the top of the company's accomplishments, and that he hopes the Kit-Cat float will represent the same sort of joy the company has always sought to bring the world with its clocks.

"It's a timeless piece because of what it does," Young said. "It was born out of the depression, when people needed a smile. It was designed to do that. It's more than a timepiece. The animation and the smile on the clock is what people really buy it for. It brings their own smile out in them. Our float represents the best of american flowers. We just hope that people will have a lot of fun and enjoy the float as it goes by. Being part of the Tournament of Roses has been just a great privilege."


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