As I write, it's New Year's Eve 2025, and the weather is conducive to staying indoors. Why not search for a bit of lost Tournament of Roses Parade equine history?
People almost always focus on the flower-covered floats in the annual New Year's parade in Pasadena, and rightly so. But equestrian units have always been a big part of the parade as well.
It isn't uncommon for the same equestrian to take part in several Rose Parades over the years, even if they appear with different horses. Such is the case of Venice Ada Hess (1889-1930), who lived in Pasadena.
Miss Venice Hess, as she was often called in the local papers, was more than the average turn-of-the-20th-century young woman. Like many girls, she studied art and music. But her interests demonstrate she was not content to be an average female.
Newspapers all over the country carried the story in 1909, when the 19-year-old Venice completed a course for auto mechanics and became the first licensed professional chauffeur in California.
Michael E. James' 2oo5 book The Conspiracy of the Good : Civil Rights and the Struggle for Community in Two American Cities, 1875-2000 contains the story of Labor Day events in Pasadena in 1909. The day's events included a "Ladies Nail Driving Contest," a "Fifty Yard Dash for Young Ladies," and a "Ladies Baseball Throwing Contest." All three were won by Venice Hess.
In 1911, Venice played a cornet solo, "God Save Our Country," at a women's suffrage event in Pasadena attended by close to 1000 people. Later in life, she invented a lawn sprinkler and applied for a patent.
We first see Venice reported as a Rose Parade participant in 1908. Note that she's riding astride, rather than sidesaddle.
In 1909, Venice dressed as a herald playing a horn while riding an unnamed gray horse wearing flowers. We see her in the photograph at the top of this post, and below. (The Los Angeles Times misspelled her first name "Veince" in its photo coverage of the parade.)
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| Los Angeles Times, January 2, 1909 |
The 1911 Tournament of Roses Parade saw Venice winning a prize for portraying "California," riding a gray horse and driving a dark horse. She carried a golden cornucopia filled with flowers.
Next we see another example of horses that are obviously not purebred Arabian horses, being referred to as such. In 1913, the people lining Colorado Boulevard on New Year's Day saw Venice driving "a gaily decorated chariot" in the Tournament of Roses Parade. "In the garb of Minerva [the Roman goddess of wisdom, the arts, intellect, and other things], this entrant, with a wealth of golden hair and delicate beauty, made a striking figure. The chariot, drawing by a span of pure-blooded Arabian horses, which showed careful grooming and training, was gaily decorated with hundreds of rose buds and flowers."
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| Pasadena Star, 1/1/1913 |
It's important to remember that, during this era before most Americans had ever seen a "pure-blooded Arabian horse" in person, many kinds of horses were wrongly identified as "Arabians" in circuses, parades, and theatrical events. That was the case here, because a photograph from a 1913 Tournament of Roses publication shows us that Venice's chariot horses had spots on their hindquarters like blanket Appaloosas.
There were only about a dozen living registered purebred Arabians in California in 1913, and these spotted horses were not among them. If they were part-Arabian, to the best of my knowledge no record of their names or parentage exists.
Venice's later life seems to have been not entirely happy. Newspaper accounts and online genealogy websites show that she married a musician whose life was a series of ups and downs, including several legal battles. The 1920 census shows that she had three children within four years, and apparently separated from her husband in the late 1920s. Her health seems to have failed, since she died at age 40 as an "inmate" of the Pisgah Home, a sanitarium operated by a religious community that emphasized service to the poor and social action, in Highland Park.
I choose to remember Venice in her heyday, dressed in costumes made by her mother, decked out in fresh flowers along with her horses, making those earlier years of the Tournament of Roses Parade that much more special.
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Many thanks to equine historian extraordinaire Dolores "Dee" Adkins for showing me a photo of Venice Hess on horseback, which started my search for information for this post.
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