2003 Year in Review

Winning Wheels Christmas Float

The Winning Wheels Float in the Prophetstown Parade.

The reindeer is riding on a lawn mower driven by Lyle Armstrong of Lyndon.

The painting on the back of the Winning Wheels float was done by their secretary.

A highlight of the Prophetstown and Morrison Christmas parades is always the Winning Wheels’ float. This year is no exception. They won grand prize in Prophetstown last week and will “wow” the crowds in Morrison on December 4. Their theme this year is “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer and the Island of Misfit Toys”. The theme is based on a 2001 movie sequel to the original 1960’s “Rudolph” movie.

Winning Wheels and Lyndon Progress Center staff members met at the end of September to decide on a theme. Then the staff volunteered their time two to three evenings per week (for a total of 18 nights) and also some weekends to put the idea into reality. The float is built at the Lyndon Progress Center is built from scratch starting with a bare hayrack. (The Lyndon Progress Center is for Developmental Training and Vocational Training programs.)

“Some people think we buy our floats and that’s the biggest complement,” according to Lyle Armstrong. He is a maintenance employee and Captain of the Lyndon Fire Department. Armstrong has worked on most of the 14 floats Winning Wheels has built. This year he is the driver of a lawn mower disguised with snow. He manually rocks Rudolph back and forth on top of the tractor by means of a lever. Saturday Armstrong and Jake Lanphere, another maintenance employee, scrambled to get Rudolph in place before the Prophetstown parade.

Lamphere plays the Abominable Snowman in a rented white polar bear costume and a mask he made himself from a clay cast. The Snowman jumps up from inside the float and touches the star to light the Christmas tree. According to Lamphere, “All the work was worth it when I jumped out of the float and saw the amazed looks and smiling faces of the children.”

Al Gapinski, president of the handicapped and rehabilitation facilities, is a huge supporter of the float. “The float means something to him,” according to Armstrong. Gapinski not only foots the bill for the supplies to build the float but he will be inside the float shooting CO2 and confetti for snow.

Winning Wheels was on a downward spin when Gapinski took over the company. The float was his way of showing the community that their image was changing. This may be the last year for the float because the volunteers are harder to come by.

The centerpiece is a huge bag of misfit toys. It looks like a big black bag but you can see inside through luminescent holes showing the misfit toys. The bag has black lights within and they use Fabric Scrim (a gauze drapery fabric) to line the holes. The idea came from a Quad Cities float. Employee, Joyce Gladhill, and her husband Cal helped every night with the toys.

The centerpiece of the float but hardest part seemed to be Rudolph. They covered cardboard and glue with 5 cases of expanding insulation foam and then cut and sanded it to make the shape. The outside is covered with sawdust and of course Rudolph has a glowing nose.

Lamphere and Armstrong have 8000 watts worth of generating power to light all the rope lights and Christmas lights that cover the float. At the Prophetstown parade one of their two generators went down and they barely made it through the parade without all the lights going down.

In order to come to the Morrison parade, they remove parts of the float, load the mower onto a trailer and they pull the hayrack to Morrison. Once here it will take them about a half hour to put it all back together.

According to Lamphere and Armstrong, the best part of all the work they put in is the free meal the Progress Center cook, Elaine Burian, makes them before the parade.

To learn more about Winning Wheels Click Here

by Barb Benson, theCity1.com
November 25, 2003