Dozens of vacant, white plastic booths with mosquito-net windows
wait under the sun for Garlic Festival vendors and their smelly
goods. The elaborate cook-off stage awaits its chefs. The bleachers
their hungry spectators. But it’s only Wednesday afternoon.
By Chris Bone staff writer
Gilroy – Dozens of vacant, white plastic booths with mosquito-net windows wait under the sun for Garlic Festival vendors and their smelly goods. The elaborate cook-off stage awaits its chefs. The bleachers their hungry spectators. But it’s only Wednesday afternoon.
Favorable weather conditions and a hard-working, well-organized volunteer corps have ensured steady progress at Christmas Hill Park, where the hot smell of grass will mix with the hum of cherry-pickers and trucks until the festival opens.
“We have a well-oiled machine here,” said Barabra DeLorenzo, the festival’s chair of the cook-off stage, referring to the volunteers and committee members who return each year to make the festival “run like clockwork.”
Gilroy High School soccer players had already assembled picnic tables and hay bale rest spots yesterday afternoon, and wrestlers – or “trash kids,” as festival President Judy Lazarus affectionately called them – had sprinkled dozens of sturdy cardboard trash barrels throughout the park.
“No matter how many cans you have, people still just throw their trash on the ground,” Lazarus said with a sigh as she gazed at a mine-field of trash cans in front of her. “But it will look clean like this Saturday and Sunday morning thanks to the Gilroy Gators,” she said, referring to a swim team of kids who clean up the grounds at 7pm each evening after the gala.
The only reported delays Wednesday came from moving the volunteer rest area and the children’s spot to the north side of Gourmet Alley on Miller Avenue close to where Lazarus has lived for the past 21 years. She said the new sites have slowed volunteers in charge of electricity and water who must sometimes break new ground.
Steve Ashford is one such utilities man.
The 14-year resident of Gilroy stood with his arms akimbo, staring down at a pile of retired telephone poles he and fellow volunteer Rick Chaloupka erected as posts for shade netting near Gourmet Alley.
The two men do this by rigging the massive logs to “booms,” or cherry-pickers, and then dropping them into four- to five-foot holes dug throughout the park. Before they started, the park looked like a giant gofer colony, and the smell of unearthed dirt lingered in the air.
“Whatever needs to be driven, we drive it,” Ashford said. “A lot of the equipment was already here Sunday, so we’re ahead of schedule.”
One new utilities endeavor at the festival this year involves installing a semi-permanent plumbing system to provide hot and cold water to the vendors and to pump their waste into a tank for septic companies to drain throughout the day.
Vic Lase has volunteered since 1980 on behalf of the Gilroy Alliance Club and sat in the shade yesterday, rewiring a water pump for the new subterranean system that “we can just plug into in the future,” he said.
While Lase worked among the new pipes’ small trenches, seven workers across the field struggled to assemble the steel skeleton of the Got Milk? half-pipe.
“It takes longer because we have to make sure it’s perfect,” said Luis Bonilla of ASA Entertainment, a company in Venice Beach that sets up ramps for bikers and skateboarders.
Bonilla said the park’s uneven ground required his meticulous attention when positioning cinder blocks and tweaking the skeleton of the hundred or so car jacks that support the “vert” ramp. “But we’ll finish tomorrow,” he said.
On the other side of the park, Brian Bowe, the festival’s executive director, stopped his golf cart near the new kids’ area to chat with a volunteer about some misplaced trellises.
“Since some things have moved around, the fencing contractors and other vendors are asking questions,” Bowe said, “but that’s nothing when it comes to setting up an event across 20 acres.”
Abraham Cacho and his group of workers from Stages Unlimited are central to the festival’s success because they’re building the cook-off’s much-anticipated, tennis-court-size stage of brand new cooktops, ovens and sinks.
Cacho said he hadn’t experienced any delays so far, but despite all the sweat he pours into the festival, he said he’s never actually been.
“I’d like to, sure,” Cacho said, “but we just set it up. We’ve been doing it everyday,” he added, grasping a tape measurer as he rubbed sweat from his brow.
Nearby Brian Jones and John Locey fought the heat under the green ConAgra Foods carnival tent, preparing to represent their employer by answering any question event-goers have about garlic.
“For a Wednesday afternoon, things are moving along fine,” said Locey, who was president of the Garlic Festival in 1986.
Although Jones and Locey jumped on their prep work, Lazarus said the arts and crafts vendors don’t use the white booths ringing the fair, so they will set up their own kiosks today.
“The arts and crafts people are very good with setting up because that’s what they do,” Lazarus said of the itinerant vendors who have a certain rhythm since they go from fair to fair throughout the country,” but Thursday is still crazy down around here.”
Chris Bone covers City hall of The Dispatch. Reach him at 847-7216.
