Float builders share fruits of labor

By CAROL SOUTH
Special to the Grand Traverse Herald

July 09, 2008 04:56 pm

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After months of focused activity, tonight marks the debut of their handiwork for 28 area float teams.

Thursday evening's National Cherry Festival Junior Royale Parade is the culmination of months of planning and work to build, paint and decorate the floats, created in the spirit of this year's theme of the Magic Tree House books.

Each school team selected one of this series of books by Mary Pope Osborne earlier this spring. The book's theme became the foundation for the float with designs limited only by the builders' imagination and the logistics of towing, size constraints and budget.

Float-building teams are grounded in the families of the National Cherry Festival prince and princess. These parents corral helpers and donations, organize and lead the work, line up a trailer, tow vehicle and workspace while attending to myriad details over three fast-paced months.

In May, the team from Eastern Elementary School began with the basics: how do you do this?

"One mom did some research online about how to build floats," said Kirsten Schmitt, mother of the prince, Samuel. "And luckily one of the dads was in construction so he had an idea how to build the structure and another dad was an artist so he had an idea how to use chicken wire and paper mache."

About five to six families, including that of princess Mari Mast, helped consistently to build a float based on the Osborne book "Night of the Ninjas." The team met a couple of times per week, with parents creating age-appropriate tasks for one concentrated session.

With all the hours put in by so many families, building a float is a labor of love honoring a long-standing Traverse City tradition. The floats will also be in Saturday's Cherry Royale Parade so the effort extends to two showings.

"Any time you have on weekends or evenings you go over there and build on it," said Schmitt, who likened the process to a part-time job. "Once you get towards the end you see it coming together and once it's done, it's a huge relief and you're so excited to be in it."

Sometimes, after so many months of effort, it's hard to be done.

"I keep thinking of last-minute changes and there's some cleaning to do," said Dania Cannon, mother of the Willow Hill prince, Jake.

The Cannons and the parents of the school's princess, Emma Cartwright, created a team of a dozen families to make their complex float based on the book "Stage Fright on a Summer Night."

"It's been fun, but it is hard work," said Cannon. "A little stressful: some nights I would wake up in the middle of the night with an idea or worried I was forgetting something and I'd say, 'I can't believe I'm dreaming about a float."

The book's plot is set in Shakespeare's time and, beyond a London backdrop, the team concentrated on recreating the time-traveling tree house central to the series. In this case they created a ten-foot tall cherry tree, which will be mounted on the float just before the parade.

The Cannons, who built the tree and tree house at their home, created a mini-parade of their own when transporting them to their teams' float central behind The Copy Shop.

"It was very funny to watch my husband driving an old pick up truck down the road with four grown men in the back of it hanging on for dear life holding onto the tree with the tree house built right into it," said Dania Cannon. "Everybody knew exactly what he was doing, they were honking and cheering."

Taking a simpler approach, the team at Traverse City Christian Elementary School decided to focus on one element of their book, "Dinosaurs Before Dark." They built a large dinosaur holding cherries in its mouth, the structure looming over the whole float. A bench with large cherries as the back was added last week as a seat for the prince and princess.

"We decided to do one thing and do it really big," said Heidi Treece, whose son, Hayden, is the school's prince.

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