There has been a pleasant buzz of anticipation in Gilroy all
week long, as the town prepared to host our world famous food
festival. A huge fraction of the town volunteers in some capacity
or another. The Chamber of Commerce pours beer. The swim team picks
up garbage. When I first moved to Gilroy, 20 years ago, I twice
attended the Garlic Festival as a paying customer. The food was
great, the beer was Bud, the music and the craft fair were fun. But
then I discovered that I could get free admission, a free lunch,
and a free T shirt just for volunteering, and I have volunteered
ever since.
There has been a pleasant buzz of anticipation in Gilroy all week long, as the town prepared to host our world famous food festival. A huge fraction of the town volunteers in some capacity or another. The Chamber of Commerce pours beer. The swim team picks up garbage. When I first moved to Gilroy, 20 years ago, I twice attended the Garlic Festival as a paying customer. The food was great, the beer was Bud, the music and the craft fair were fun. But then I discovered that I could get free admission, a free lunch, and a free T shirt just for volunteering, and I have volunteered ever since.
Of course, one has to find the right job. The secret of volunteer work is that there is always more work to do than there are people to do it or time to do it in. So a volunteer can always find something fun to do that suits her talents. The first job I tried was gate. It was okay, but kind of boring: just checking volunteers in. The second job I tried was with the Chamber, serving beer. It would have been all right if I had actually been pouring and serving. Unfortunately, I was assigned to check identification.
Many people say, “I can’t remember names, but I never forget a face.” I am the opposite. I can remember names, but it takes several repetitions or a long association before I can reliably remember faces. And I swiftly found that, as far as I was concerned, very few people looked like their driver’s license pictures. Fortunately, there was a cop seated on a stool behind me, and I referred all doubtful cases to her. But that was the last time I tried to volunteer in the beer booth.
The third time was the charm. I landed a job dishing out garlic ice cream with Con Agra. Rickii Zuniga from Con Agra is usually my supervisor, and she remembers how garlic ice cream was first invented 27 years ago, back when the plant was Gentry. Gentry was owned by Foremost McKesson, which owned diverse food processing interests, including a dairy. At a meeting of the board of directors, Gene Blatman, Jim Stein, and Rod Coffman discussed what product Gentry could offer at the then-fledgling Garlic Festival. They wanted something that would showcase the company’s various products.
Given the garlic and the dairy, they decided to try garlic ice cream. They experimented with strawberry first, but it didn’t taste good. Then they tried chocolate, but it had too much of a bite. Finally they settled on vanilla. Rosemary Torres was at that time a lab technician with Gentry. (She is now a honcho with Con Agra.) She remembers that they borrowed their first pedal operated ice cream machine from Foremost McKesson research and development center in Dublin, and set up very informally on the grass. Rickii herself has been perfecting the formula and the process since the beginning, and now we have quite an operation.
In our booth we have two soft ice cream machines.
Each machine has a volunteer who fills the cones. There is a trick to it: done perfectly, the ice cream looks like a garlic bulb perched on an ice cream cone. The cone filler hands the cones to another volunteer, the shuttler, who hands the cones to a third volunteer, who hands the cones out the window to the public.
During lulls, when no one is lined up, the volunteer at the window can bark to passers-by, “GET your FREE GARlic ICE cream!” When we are fully staffed, we have six volunteers dishing out ice cream bucket-brigade style, plus Rickii in the back mixing the recipe and pouring it into the machine. When we are not fully staffed, the cone filler hands cones directly to the window volunteer.
It’s always lively and friendly, and the public loves getting something for free. How does it taste? Well, it tastes like vanilla ice cream, and it tastes like garlic. I always eat one cone. Kids sometimes come back for seconds or thirds. Available three days per year only, at the Gilroy Garlic Festival.
