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'I Should Know Better Than to Tempt Fate,' Nolan Finley Says After Parade Mishap

November 26, 2015, 2:04 PM by  Alan Stamm


The waterfowl on wheels about a half-hour before Thursday's mishap. (Photo from Vine by Robin Johnston)

First, the good news: No serious injury resulted from a Detroit News float mishap Thursday morning on Woodward while Nolan Finley was at the controls.

The editorial page editor was driving -- well, trying to drive -- an ungainly float sponsored by the paper in the Thanksgiving Parade. Shortly after 11 a.m., it lost power and later drifted onto a curb, jostling four beauty pageant contestants waving from a top platform and reportedly hitting a spectator.

The bonnet-wearing waterfowl on wheels soon continued down Woodward with towing assistance.

"Mother Goose died on my watch, and I’m extremely thankful no one else did," he writes in a column posted about two and a half hours later.

Just as we moved in front of the Fox Theater, the engine quit. . . . Steam started pouring out of the radiator. Mother Goose had popped a hose. . . .

A decision was made to move it manually along the rest of the route, and that’s when things went bad. I was asked to shift to neutral. The float began moving. I assumed it was being towed, so I took my hands off the steering wheel, which without the engine was of little use anyway. . . .

It turns out the float was being pushed, not pulled, and without me steering it veered into the curb. At least one man -- I’m told he was in a wheelchair -- was struck by the front of the float. Parade officials assure me that although he was taken to the hospital, he was shaken up but not seriously hurt.


Rookie float operator Nolan Finley tweeted this selfie from the driver's seat Thursday morning.

Now the ironic part: "Give Mother Goose a wide berth at parade" it says atop an earlier Finley column about his driver's education prep. Tempting fate, he dared to write:

I’ll be deep inside the Mother Goose float, doing my best to keep it headed in the right direction without damaging either it or the hundreds of thousands of spectators who’ll line the route. . . .

“Mother Goose? Wow!,” exclaimed Tony Michaels, CEO of the Parade Company, when he looked at my assignment. “That’s the hardest float to drive. Good luck.” . . .

Although the parade is all fun and games, driving a float isn’t. My instructor stresses the many ways in which a float could go rogue and kill children. It focuses your attention.

[Don] Morris [director of operations] has a more direct concern:

“You’ll have four beauty queens sitting on top of the float,” he says. “Any sudden moves and they come toppling down.”

That didn't happen, fortunately, though Twitter followers couldn't be sure when a News social media producer posted a shaky video at 11:19 a.m. that looked chaotic.

Two minutes later came an imprudent tweet, joking about what wasn't funny to the man who got shaken up:

It took another 16 minutes for The News to tweet: "The float malfunctioned and lost power."

At 11:44 a.m., 25 minutes after the first alarm, this was posted and the ill-considered tease was retracted:  

In another irony, a spectator posted this at 10:39 a.m., alluding to Finley's self-mocking column:

Finley is self-effacing and apologetic in his holiday afternoon explanation. "I should know better than to tempt fate," he writes, acknowledging that his earlier column is "not so funny now."

He expresses hope that the lone victim is "released in time to enjoy Thanksgiving dinner with his family."

I apologize to him for my part of the communications breakdown that caused Mother Goose to derail. . . .

Next year, I’m going to ask that we sponsor a ballon. What’s the worst that could happen? Forget I asked.


Read more:  The Detroit News


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