Charles Frederick Holder battled giant tuna in the Pacific with just a fishing rod and uncovered ancient artifacts in Mexico, but perhaps most importantly, he advocated putting flowers on horse-drawn carriages and calling it a parade.
The history of the Rose Parade is a little muddy, but everyone agrees Holder, a California transplant and one of Pasadena’s biggest fans in the 1800s, played a role in the annual New Year’s Day celebration’s foundation.
“In New York, people are buried in snow,” Holder announced at Valley Hunt Club meeting prior to the first parade, according to the Tournament of Roses. “Here our flowers are blooming and our oranges are about to bear. Let’s hold a festival to tell the world about our paradise.”
Holder and other members of the Valley Hunt Club, an upscale group of fox hunters turned social society, likely got the idea after visiting Nice, France’s centuries old Bataille de Fleurs, the Battle of Flowers, according to Bill Flinn, the Tournament of Roses’ executive director.
“That’s where they got the idea that they could do that here,” he said.
The first mid-winter festival in 1890, the precursor to the Tournament of Roses, predated electricity and paved streets in Pasadena. But it capitalized heavily on the abundance of flowers and fruits available while the East Coast and Midwest were blanketed in snow. The Valley Hunt Club’s members invited their east coast neighbors to highlight the city as a destination, and perhaps, to brag just a bit.
“In today’s world, we’d be saying he was a pretty good marketer,” Flinn said.
Born in Massachusetts in 1951, Holder was fascinated by bird and marine life even as a boy, according to a 1915 obituary in Science Magazine. Holder died that year in an automobile crash.
The East Coast native became an assistant curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City at the age of 20 and later moved to California in the mid-1880s. Here, the zoologist fell in love with the climate and Pasadena.
In 1888, he authored a love letter to the city in the form of a book titled “All about Pasadena and its vicinity.” Holder’s book described Pasadena and California as “the true land of flowers.”
Holder is known as a preservationist and as an advocate for sportsmanship in hunting and fishing. He was disgusted by hunters who recklessly slaughtered animals, according to Science’s obituary.
Holder was inducted into the International Game Fish Association in 1998, which described him as a pioneer in big game fishing.
“Though there is some controversy over whether Holder was actually the first man to catch a tuna on rod and reel, it is certain that Holder was the first to use the event for the advancement of game fishing,” the association’s hall of fame website states. Accounts at the time claimed Holder caught the 183 pound tuna “after battling it for four hours over four miles.” He later founded the Tuna Club on Catalina Island.
Holder wrote about many of his accomplishments in Scientific American. Titles include “The Bird Giants,” “Photographing a Devil Fish;” “Remarkable Phosphorescent Animals,” and “The Esperanza Stone.”
The last work came after Holder was part of an archaeological discovery in Yaqui, Mexico in 1909 that uncovered the Esperanza Stone, a 8-foot long stone with inscriptions that some attributed to mysticism.
The 1910 piece was the last article for Scientific American, according to a listing on their website. Holder died five years later.
Today, Charles Holder is listed as Tournament of Roses’ first president in 1890, though the organization didn’t officially form until 1895.
“By 1894, the Valley Hunt Club said this thing is getting too big for us to do it and that’s why the next year, in 1895, the Tournament of Roses Association was born,” Flinn said.
The earliest festivals featured ostrich races, relays and even a race between a camel and an elephant, Flinn said. The first football game occurred in 1902 at Tournament Par with the Michigan Wolverines crushing Stanford University 49-0. The uneven match-up made western teams hesitant to play against the more established east coast teams and football didn’t return until 1916, according to Flinn.
Over time, the parade evolved with the society, Flinn noted. As motorized vehicles, radio, television and the Internet came about, the Parade shifted with the world. The Rose Parade has included cowboys, the Jackson Five, and the Space Race. Ronald Reagan even served as a commentator.
Now, most of the floats are mechanized behemoths — sometimes breathing fire — run by computers.
“It has really mirrored what is going on in our society, it is constantly evolving, constantly changing,” Flinn said. “It is not the Tournament of Roses of the 1890s, and yet it is.”