Creating floats is labor of love for builders

It started out as a welded structure covered with plywood and wafer board. But next week it will dazzle the crowd as a colorful, animated depiction of the meeting of the transcontinental railroad.

The "Pioneer Courage Linked a Nation" float is one of several floats that will appear in the Bountiful Handcart Days Parade July 20. The evening parade will be the float's second of three parade performances this year.

"You build a float and the more you can show it off the better it is," said Mark Zaugg, chairman of the float's building committee. "You put so much work into these that it's good to show them off more than once."

The float was built mainly for the Days of '47 Parade in Salt Lake City, but was part of the Centerville July Fourth Parade and will be in the Handcart Days Parade as well. It was designed by Lester Lee, an art teacher at Woods Cross High School.

The float carries two animated trains: one coming out of a mountain and the other crossing a desert. The cartoon-like trains meet in the middle and shake hands.

Zaugg said they are equipped with a lot of mechanical workings that help their wheels, headlights, hands and faces come to life. The float builders used several different items to piece the float together, including Styrofoam, waferboard, glue, PVC pipe and more.

"We spent a lot of time buying things on eBay, picking up things we could put on the float," he added.

The 12-foot-wide, 31-foot-long float started out as just a base that Zaugg was given by the LDS Church in May. "We took that and made some modifications to it so it would fit our design," Zaugg said. The transcontinental railroad float was built by members of the LDS Bountiful Utah South Stake.

Helen Westlund of West Bountiful is in charge of the floats for the Bountiful Handcart Days Parade. She said a lot of the floats in that parade are built by average people, not professional designers or decorators.

"I am so impressed by all the float builders," she said. "It's a huge undertaking."

Westlund said the average float costs between $5,000 and $10,000 to build. Many of the float builders have been working on their floats since February. "The thing that really makes me appreciate it is that everybody works so hard," Westlund said.

Bountiful residents Debbie and Jay Beauregard were co-chairmen in building a float for their stake. Their float themed "Land Speed Pioneers" was also built for the Days of '47 Parade, but it was showcased in Centerville's July Fourth Parade and will be in Bountiful's Handcart Days Parade, too.

It depicts a scene where a tortoise is driving the Mormon Meteor, a racecar that set 81 land and endurance speed records on the Bonneville Salt Flats in the 1930s and 1940s.