Putting the Petal to the Metal : Rose Parade: Floats designed by Raul Rodriguez have won more than 180 awards in the past 17 years.

A lot of people have big, flowery dreams, but not too many can translate them into reality.

Then there is Raul Rodriguez. He has a dream about a bird or a horse and, a year or so later, watches it roll down Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena, eight stories high, clad in exotic flowers.

Rodriguez, 46, who Tournament of Roses officials say is one of the most successful float designers in the 103-year history of the Rose Parade, has been doing this sort of thing for more than 30 years--so long he cannot quite explain how he does it.

He travels a lot. He researches historical eras. He dreams.

“I keep a pad beside the bed,” said Rodriguez, whose closely clipped black beard gives him the look of a Roman aristocrat. “Many times I wake up and scribble things.”

Once again, Rodriguez cleaned up on parade awards this year. Rodriguez-designed floats captured nine of 19 awards. They included Rand McNally’s “The Dream of Discovery,” with a huge, carnation-draped Queen Isabella gesturing at a globe and nodding toward Christopher Columbus, played by Rodriguez himself. The float won the Theme Trophy.

It was not even his best year. He won 10 awards in 1982, and has taken more than 180 in 17 years as a full-time float designer. His floats have won 11 Sweepstakes trophies, for best in the parade--though this year he lost that one to a C. E. Bent and Sons’ float for General Motors, a dinosaur designed by Craig Gibbons, Chris Lofthouse and Scott Lamb.

“Raul has a wonderful sense of shape and color,” said Rick Chapman, president of Festival Artists/Floatmasters, for whom Rodriguez this year designed three award-winners, including a huge Chinese phoenix and an Indonesian rain forest scene. “Color is what the parade is all about.”

Pasadena interior decorator Edward Turrentine, one of the three float judges, attributes part of Rodriguez’s success to his experience. “Besides being so terrifically talented, he’s been doing it for so many years,” Turrentine said. “He knows so much about what could go wrong.”

Rodriguez got his start as a 15-year-old at Santa Fe High School, where he entered a contest sponsored by the Whittier Chamber of Commerce to design the city’s Rose Parade float.

The teen-ager employed the now-familiar Rodriguez approach, combining research with vision. He dug out the poem “Snowbound,” by John Greenleaf Whittier, the city’s namesake, and drew a romantic winter scene, with wind-blown clouds of snow-white petals. Not only did he win the contest, but his “Snowbound” float won first in its category in the parade.

The oldest of three children of a sheet-metal worker and a department store supervisor, Rodriguez was always encouraged to be creative. “My mother wouldn’t erase the drawings I did on the dining room wall,” he said a few days after his 1992 Rose Parade triumphs. “I always knew I’d have a career in the art field. I thought I’d be an illustrator of some type.”

Rodriguez’s Hancock Park home, a Mediterranean-style house with a sloping lawn, offers a quick tip-off that an artist lives there. There are extraordinary Christmas decorations in front, elegant sleighs, a reindeer and a hedge-leaping horse.

After graduating from Cal State Long Beach, he worked briefly for the Walt Disney Co., then for several lighting designers. In 1978, Rodriguez designed the front lighting for the Flamingo Hilton Hotel. Its neon explosion of pink feathers and marquee that lights up the entrance like high noon make it one of Las Vegas’ most striking displays.

“Caesars Palace had all of Rometo work with, but all I had was a silly pink bird,” Rodriguez said. “I thought: What could be better than a burst of pink feathers?”

He also designed the 22-story clown on the front of Circus Circus in Reno and the tower of red neon on the front of Westwood’s Crest Theater.

For the past four years, Rodriguez has run his firm out of his house, contracting with the float builders for his designs as well as doing casino lighting and store designs. The finished floats can cost up to $250,000 each.

Rodriguez likes big statements. “It’s easier for me to design an entire hotel than to sit here and try to noodle somebody’s business card,” he said.

But floats are his first love. Those rolling extravaganzas are as much an art form as oil paintings or bronze sculptures, he said, though they have special challenges.

“So many things get left to chance,” he said. “The weather might wipe out blue cornflowers, so you have to think of something to replace them. A few years ago, Santa Ana winds kicked up and toppled a 19-ton circus tent on seven of my floats. Suddenly, a lot of people who thought they’d have time off for Christmas were working 24 hours a day.”

The secret to successful float-designing is having talented people to build them, Rodriguez said. He cites in particular Jim Hynd, floral director for Fiesta Parade Floats, who translated Rodriguez’s lush design for Dr Pepper’s “The Travels of Dr. Doolittle” into a mosaic of orchids, carnations and pampas grass. The float won the President’s Trophy for floral excellence.

Floats are fragile and ephemeral. After a trip down Colorado Boulevard, they are viewed for another day, then are dismantled.

“It doesn’t bother me at all,” said Rodriguez. “Life is moments of beauty. Everything is temporary.”