GILROY—Caryl Simpson, the dynamo Gilroy businesswoman who designed t-shirts while living in a log cabin, accidentally created a gourmet food company that went global and was the guts and gumption behind the city’s iconic downtown garlic mural, died May 29 after a four-month battle with cancer. She was 67.
“Everything has kind of dimmed. She brought amazing color to the world for a lot of people,” said her daughter, Heather Simpson-Bluhm of Hollister.
“We’ve lost a person who gave the world an amazing gift of food and an appreciation for good food and art and gardening.”
Simpson also is survived by a son, Ted, of San Jose, and his wife, Janda, and Heather’s husband, Greg, and their daughter, Hannah Caryl.
Born in Columbus, Georgia on June 21, 1947, Caryl Lee Simpson was what her daughter described as an Army brat who moved about with her family in the United States and abroad, including Germany and Asia.
The family settled long enough in Monterey County near Ft. Ord for Simpson to attend junior and senior high schools in there before going off to college in San Jose and San Francisco.
In the 1970s, Simpson, a single mother of two, bought a piece of property off Hecker Pass Highway in Gilroy and built a log cabin with a garage studio for a fledgling t-shirt screening business that supplied garments to high school sports programs, banks and others.
Soon, she was in such demand as a graphic artist and designer that she moved her business into the city as a full-fledged advertising agency with graphic design and screen-printing services, according to her daughter.
Married and divorced twice, Simpson devoted herself to her children and her businesses, which ultimately included the popular Garlic Festival Store and Gallery, where she sold gourmet foods and cooking equipment and insisted on filling an entire wall with art for sale, much of it by local artists.
“She was a single mom for much of our lives,” said her daughter. “She worked hard to raise us and make sure we did all our school work and also were exposed to things outside Gilroy, to travel and the big city.
“’Can’t’ wasn’t an option for her, it didn’t matter that she was a woman, it didn’t matter than she was a single mom; it was like, ‘I can do whatever I want to do’, and that is what she always taught us.”
When Gilroy decided to launch its homage to garlic, Simpson signed on and her booth became a popular mainstay of the Gilroy Garlic festival.
Known for her quick wit and keenly honed sense of what is right, she even locked horns with festival organizers early on when she was sued for using the name “Garlic Festival.” Simpson prevailed.
Her enthusiasm for promoting Gilroy through garlic became so infectious that downtown merchants and others rallied behind her idea to create a huge mural to celebrate the history of garlic in Gilroy. After a local artist designed the mural, Simpson imported muralists from Italy to render the work on a wall at the corner of Fifth Street and Monterey Road. Last year, twenty years after the original work was painted, she brought the same muralist back to give it a fresh coat.
“She called it ‘Gilroy’s postcard to the world,’” her daughter said, “she was always all about promoting Gilroy for the festival and the garlic.”
A artist, creative cook and Renaissance women who was always eager to explore, Simpson also founded Garlic Festival Foods, a 30-year-old firm that sells gourmet cooking items all over the world, including a cookbook she authored and published when she could not find a publisher. It has sold in the thousands.
The gourmet food line was an accident, her daughter said.
It started when Simpson concocted a huge batch of seasoning for a friend to take to a Bay Area zucchini festival in the 1980s. It was a big hit.
That recipe became her signature gourmet condiment, Garli Garni, and when Simpson put it on the market it took off, leading to a line of foods and seasonings sold worldwide.
Billed as ‘The flavors that made Gilroy famous,” the line includes seasonings, sauces, mustards, garlic, salsas, olives and more.
Simpson also was among California’s first certified olive oil tasters and served for years on the state’s olive oil board.
Along with way, she established and ran Café Aromas just south of Gilroy, where she also ultimately moved into a spacious home filled with a collection of eclectic, curious and always joyful art, and a beautiful garden where she enjoyed hosting parties for friends.
Simpson loved beauty and friendship and, when she died, her family asked that, in lieu of flowers, people honor and remember her by planting a tree, smiling at a stranger or performing a random act of kindness. A memorial “party” will be held in July to celebrate Simpson’s life.
Simpson was diagnosed in January and by April, after chemo treatments failed to halt the disease, she was told she was terminal.
“We were shocked,” her daughter said. “We were kind of lead to believe she was going to beat it, that was our attitude all along.”
