Fremont High grad floats through the Rose Parade
He helps Cal Poly entry get the cow over the moon
When the cow jumped over the moon in this year’s Rose Parade, it was held aloft by a frame that a Cupertino native helped build.
Dave Lanfranconi, a 2017 graduate of Fremont High School in Sunnyvale, was on a team of engineering students from Cal-poly San Luis Opisbo that worked on the Stargrazers float for the New Year’s Day parade in Pasadena. The float, inspired by the nursery rhyme “Hey Diddle, Diddle,” features a 600-lb. cow jumping over a 15-foot moon, held aloft by a jetpack made of metal milk cans and other farm materials and helped along by the cat, dog, dish and spoon from said rhyme. The float also depicts other stages of building: One cow tests a jetpack while another is building one.
Lanfranconi, 22, a senior in mechanical engineering, was set to drive the SLO float down Colorado Boulevard the morning of Jan. 1. Stargrazers marks the third float he’s built with his fellow students; it would have been the fourth except that last year’s parade was cancelled due to the pandemic. Students started designing the float, Cal-poly’s 73rd entry in the Rose Parade, in spring 2020.
“Our team has been working on and refining this design for two years now, and I think all that hard work has really paid off,” Regina Chapuis, president of the Cal-poly team in San Luis Obispo, said in a statement. “Much like how these cows are prototyping different jetpacks for their big jump, we have been prototyping different iterations of this float before settling on this final design.”
The float build “is an extremely diverse and welcoming program with students from many different majors and backgrounds, and they all are like a huge family, extremely welcoming and inviting, and a fun program to be in all around,” Lanfranconi said in a pre-parade interview. “The numerous social events and gatherings made it feel more like a connected group rather than just a club focused on their project and work only.”
Lanfranconi expects to graduate in June, and will likely use some of his floatbuilding skills during his career.
“I will be going into the robotics sector, as that is an area that has always interested me greatly,” he said.
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