As a rookie reporter in the Garlic Capital, I didn’t know what
to expect at my first Garlic Festival. The past eight months in
Gilroy gave me an inkling
– three days, 120,000 visitors, 4,000 volunteers, and nearly a
quarter million dollars for local charities.
But those are just numbers. In the week leading up to the
festival, I was at sea.
As a rookie reporter in the Garlic Capital, I didn’t know what to expect at my first Garlic Festival. The past eight months in Gilroy gave me an inkling – three days, 120,000 visitors, 4,000 volunteers, and nearly a quarter million dollars for local charities.
But those are just numbers. In the week leading up to the festival, I was at sea. Where was this mysterious center of the food universe known as Gourmet Alley? What’s the big deal about Shaboom? Why was everyone talking about a bobblehead doll as if it was a real person? And why was I beginning to panic that it would sell out before I had a chance to get one?
As a festival-goer, reporter, and volunteer beer-pourer for the Gilroy Chamber of Commerce, I would get a chance to answer many of these questions.
The first lesson I learned is that you can’t understand Gourmet Alley by eating a combo plate or watching the flame-up cooks. You need to venture inside the big tent where scores of volunteers spend the entire day stirring vats of sauce, manning the pepper-steak production line, and prepping the garlic bread that accompanies each dish.
Dean Raymond, a cross-country and track coach at Live Oak High School in Morgan Hill, has worked the festival for 20 years.
He was among the first volunteers I met in Gourmet Alley. While the calamari cooks out front dodged four-foot high flames before a crowd of visitors, Raymond had the less glamorous job of prepping the garlic-packed marinara sauce. The process involves standing over a 20-gallon vat of sauce for two hours.
Raymond, who had been at work all morning, had not lost his sense of humor when asked for the ingredients.
“I could tell you what’s in it,” he said, “but then I’d have to kill you.”
High spirits also prevailed at the chamber beer stand, where I spent Saturday afternoon doling out beers to volunteers. I heard some war stories about the festival’s beginning 27 years ago, the rowdier nineties when beer flowed a little too freely and a food scare four years ago that left volunteers scrambling to replace 20,000 pounds of beef for the pepper steaks.
On the music scene, I joined in on the mass hysteria over Shaboom. Even after two decades at the festival, the band continues to pack young and old into the amphitheater with its covers of ’50s-era rock and roll.
The party vibe continued after hours this year at Happy Dog Pizza Company, off Fifth Street. The year-old venue was so packed Saturday night that bouncers were turning people away by 11pm – even after transforming the downstairs dining area into a second dance floor.
And of course there is the Beanie Baby-esque craze over Herbie. In the days before the festival, visitors and volunteers alike plot how many garlic-bulb-headed dolls they will buy. Hundreds storm the Garlic Mercantile tents on Friday and Saturday mornings and the doll – limited to a supply of 3,000 – sells out within hours.
The Garlic Festival has come and gone, and I realize that my newbie impressions just scratch the surface of the stories that unfolded over a single weekend in Gilroy, and the tireless efforts that made them possible.
But as I sit here gazing into the eyes of my first ever Herbie bobblehead doll, I realize something else – I too have been bitten by the Garlic Festival bug.
