20-MULE TEAM WAGONS REFURBISHED FOR PARADES.

Byline: Charles F. Bostwick Daily News Staff Writer

When 20 mules in harness tugged a set of 115-year-old borax wagons through the main gate of U.S. Borax's Boron refinery, employees stopped work and stepped outdoors and onto roofs to watch.

One hundred ten years after they last plodded across the inhospitable desert from Death Valley to Mojave, Valencia-based U.S. Borax is reviving its 20-mule team for a last trip - the 1999 Pasadena Tournament of Roses, after a dress rehearsal in the Twenty-Mule Team Days parade Oct. 3 in Boron.

``It sounds a little corny, but when we had them hooked up and ran them through the desert, watching them go by I had the same kind of gut feeling as when the National Anthem is played,'' said Borax executive Preston Chiaro, who came up with the idea. ``I guess it's a company thing.''

Last moved by mule power in 1981 at the Bishop Mule Days celebration, the wagons had been stored for years in a Boron plant warehouse - inaccessible to the public - until they were brought out last year to grace the plant's new visitor center.

The wagons - two 7,800-pound borax wagons with 7-foot-tall wheels and a 1,200-gallon water wagon - were among five sets built in 1883 in Mojave.

From 1883 to 1888, the five sets of wagons and their mule teams - each commanded by a teamster and a swamper - hauled borax 165 miles through the Panamint Mountains and across the Mojave Desert to the railroad in Mojave.

The borax came from the Harmony Borax Works operated by Pacific Coast Borax - U.S. Borax's predecessor - in Death Valley, where crude borax could be scraped off a dry lake bed.

The idea of hitching together standard eight-mule and 12-mule teams into a single 100-foot-long 20-mule team - actually 18 mules and two draft horses - came from the local superintendent, J.W.S. Perry, and a young mule skinner, Ed Stiles.

One team of 20 mules could carry more than two smaller teams, officials said.

``If 10 can haul one, 20 can haul four. That's what they found. They got more than the additive effect,'' Chiaro said.

Because the string was so long, getting around sharp corners meant teaching three pairs of mules a special skill: hopping over the chain linking them to the wagons and pulling at an angle away from the curve.

Schooled by Bishop pack outfitter Bobby Tanner, who also drove the last outing in 1981, the mules must perform the same feat Jan. 1 to turn onto Colorado Boulevard for the Rose Parade.

The Death Valley trips ended when the Harmony borax deposits played out and Pacific Coast moved its operations north to Ryan and built a railroad there. The 20-mule teams continued working until the turn of the century, hauling borax from Calico to the railroad at Daggett, Chiaro said.

Since then, they've played a promotional role for Borax, walking in Woodrow Wilson's second inaugural parade in 1917 and once before in the Rose Parade, and hauling the first ceremonial load of borax in 1958 when the Boron mine went from underground to open pit.

Chiaro suggested putting them on the street one last time after the wagons - harnessed to 20 fiberglass mules - proved a hit in Sacramento when the California Manufacturing Association named Borax Chief Executive Officer Ian L. White-Thomson its Manufacturer of the Year.

For the ceremony, the wagons and mules were hoisted by a crane to a second-floor convention center balcony.

Because White-Thomson is retiring after 38 years, Chiaro suggested fixing up the wagons to withstand travel, finding some real mules to pull them and putting them and White-Thomson in the Boron parade.

``We thought it would be a perfect tribute to him to bring them out one last time,'' said Chiaro, senior vice president of operations and technology for U.S. Borax and a former general manager of the Boron plant.

While preparations were going on for the Boron parade, Borax officials got a call from a Tournament of Roses equestrian committee member, who asked if they were agreeable to putting the 20-mule team in the Rose Parade a second time.

The borax wagons, fitted temporarily with boat seats, will carry Tournament of Roses President Dick Ratliff and four generations of his family. Chiaro and White-Thomson will ride horses beside the wagons; the pair will get riding lessons from the Tanner, who is training the mules.

Plant utility maintenance workers are doing much of the work on the wagons, including repainting them their signature powder-blue color, using paint specially mixed for the project.

But the company also turned to an Arizona wagonwright named Richard Newkirk, whose name they got from the Gene Autry Museum of Western Heritage. Newkirk, in turn, engaged Amish wheelwrights in Pennsylvania to help rebuild the water-wagon wheels.

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2 Photos

PHOTO (1--Color in SAC and AV Editions only) Mules are hooked up to 115-year-old wagons for a first trial run through the U.S. Borax plant in Boron.

(2--Color--Ran in AV Edition only) U.S. Borax employees Dave Katzennaier, left, and David Cable work on one of the 20-mule team wagons being refurbished.

Jeff Goldwater/Daily News