Throngs of Illini fans turn Rose blue, orange
By: Lex Peterson
Monday, January 02, 1984
PASADENA, Calif. — A few hundred hard souls started camping out on South Orange Grove Boulevard on New Year's Eve holding down — with their blanket-wrapped bodies *mdash; the best five blocks of the Rose Bowl parade route.
But most of the action in Illiniland West, as 1983 turned into 1984, was at the bars, buffet lines and dance floors that sprung up at the four major tour hotels that began, midweek, to turn into a crush of orange and blue.
Although no one can calculate the precice number of University of Illinois followers that headed to sunny California, Louis Liay, executive director of the UI Alumni Association, fixes it at 25,000.
A dozen of them, an irregular phalanyx of the Quarterback Club, met in front of Gucci's on Beverly Hills Rodeo Drive — that's "roe-day-o," you know — for an ILL-INI chant.
"People on the street just kind of looked at us like we were strange," said Karyl Wackerlind.
Under the Tournament of Roses Association "never on Sunday" tradition, New Year's Eve revelers and the Fighting Illini had a day's grace for R & R.
But the transplanted Illini family and a hefty portion of the estimated 11,000 California UI alumni were expected to overflow the Century Plaza Hotel Sunday for an Illini pow-wow, yet another excuse to rally 'round the old school.
The Los Angeles Times, a rather gray lady of a major newspaper, is calling the fan invasion the "most incredible Big Ten migration in recent memory," besting the "impressive" show of Iowa Hawkeye support two bowls ago.
The Big Ten Club of Southern California Thursday sponsored the traditional Big Ten Dinner of Champions at the Hollywood Palladium; it, like virtually all else associated with this 70th football contest (95th parade), was a sellout. And that at $33 a crack for chicken Kiev and electronic harp music. Of course, Bob Hope did show up.
The UI Alumni Club of Los Angeles has faced an overwhelming response to its receptions — held from San Diego to Orange County. "The response has been beyond our wildest expectations," said Allen hoffman, club president.
Saturday the group gathered in the parking lot at Citrus College in Azusa for a Marching Illini band practice and tailgate party.
New Year's Eve at the Huntington-Sheraton featured three separate parties, whos participants kept mingling. The Big Ten and Pacific-10 conferences hosted a reception, dinner and dance for several hundred.
On hand was an old UI face, Ernest Morris — a former aide to former UI Chancellor William Gerberding — who now is an aide to University of Washington President Gerberding.
Also on hand was Ruck Steger, Rose Bowl participant in 1947 and a former member of the UI Board of Trustees.
Two other parties, one for football staff and families, the other for team, friends and families, kept flowing into each other and each of them flowed into the Pac-10 and Big Ten affair, until Commissioner Wayne Duke ordered a "private party" sign mounted on glass doors.
The Pow-Wow and New Year's Eve wrapped up a few days crammed with sightseeing. There were alumni (and other) trips to Disneyland, the Howard Hughes plane Spruce Goose, Chinatown and float-building sites.
The official officials' party, the president, chancellor and board of trustees, also were obligated for a "few words" at lunches and dinners, some of their own devising, such as a champagne brunch Sunday for big-money UI Foundation donors.