Parade Floats: Bostein Tea Party

Wednesday, June 26, 2007

Bostein Tea Party

Some years, the club decided to build floats that expressed their Yooper interpretation of historic events and characters. In 1976, the club won second place with their “Bostein Tea Party” entry. Mick Hoefferle offers a short description:

“The Bostein Tea Party was a good one. We built a great big boat. We were good at boats and trains. Everybody brought leftover paint. Stanley (Domitrovich) was the artist. He did all the lettering. We sided it with mill paper, tougher than hell. We had a big ship. In fact we had a fork, because the masts were so high, we had to push up the power lines to get underneath. We pulled it with a lawn mower. It was a big-ass boat. We started coming down the hall by the Holiday (gas station), we had to get out and slow it down. Yeh, and we threw off the tea boxes. We had people dressed up as Indians and Pilgrims. It was fun.”

As mentioned, both the Hank for President and Bostein Tea Party floats involved pre-choreographed skits, which added a theatrical flare to the floats which were both a backdrop to the human drama and a center stage, like a multi-media sculpture in the spotlight.