The year 1985 was lucky number seven for the Gilroy Garlic
Festival, and the event attracted a crowd of 137,000 guests to the
grounds at Christmas Hill Park.
The year 1985 was lucky number seven for the Gilroy Garlic Festival, and the event attracted a crowd of 137,000 guests to the grounds at Christmas Hill Park.
“In the beginning, every year was trying to outdo the year before,” said Leonard Hale, the owner of Diamond Advertising in Gilroy and former city councilman, who served as festival president in 1985. “Every year everyone was working hard to outdo their predecessors, getting people more excited about it and creating a better festival.”
That year, the festival quit having hot-air balloon rides because, with the large crowds of guests, there simply was no room for the attraction, he remembers. But 1985 brought another entertainment.
“That was the first year we brought the Great Garlic Cook-off onto the festival grounds,” Hale said. “It was part of the festival and people wanted to see them cooking.”
Previously, the cooking had been done at the cafeteria at Gilroy High School several days before the festival weekend. The famous cook-off has become a beloved institution for festival visitors who enjoy watching the tension build as the culinary competitors create their concoctions and the judges taste-test each bite with savory scrutiny.
The festival began to gain national and international exposure with camera crews coming from as far away as Germany and Japan to videotape it for their audiences, Hale remembers. During the 1985 festival, the media exposure was unending during the event’s three days.
“We did a lot of television talk shows and stuff like that,” he said. “Someone was on the talk shows all the time. … National Geographic came and did a bunch of pictures and stuff but we never got into the magazine.”
The 1985 festival also got exposure on a TV variety show produced by Dick Clark Productions. The star of the show was filmed running backwards on the garlic run. When tape was run in reverse, it showed him running ahead as everyone else went the other way to hilarious effect.
One problem with the festival in 1985 was learning to deal with the flow of traffic for the thousands of guests, Hale remembers. The festival board had decided to end the event on a high note by having the best bands play late Sunday afternoon and this caused a highly-congested traffic jam of guests.
“We realized that was a little tricky,” Hale recalls. “Everyone who wanted to get out of the festival went against people going to the amphitheater. There was just not enough room.”
But the problems of those early years provided learning experiences that made the festival a much smoother-running experience now, he said.
“When you do one thing, there’s other problems unforeseen that come up,” he said. “Get rid of one problem and another one comes up.”
Hale started out his Garlic Festival involvement in the parking lot the first year when organizers contracted with the Gilroy Jaycees to do parking.
“That was a tough job,” he said, describing how dusty and hot it could get in the parking fields. “And then you see some of the people doing it now and they weren’t even around the first year …
“When I was the chairman of the parking committee, parking took care of both the traffic and the parking. We got everyone that could help. The highway patrol put their five or six people there to help out. But it just became overwhelming for everyone. So we turned to the Highway Patrol in Sacramento and wrote a contract for CHP officers to deal with traffic.”
And with grass drying in the hot July sun, there was always a fire in the parking lot. People would drop cigarettes or automobile catalytic converters would ignite the grass. One year, the weeds started to combust around cars parked over them and the fire spread quickly burning a few autos.
“We replaced a little bit of wiring and fixed up a couple of cars, it was nothing major,” Hale said. “From that time on we had a fire truck in the parking lot.”
Hale has seen many changes in the festival over the years, but the biggest component that makes it a success – the enthusiasm of the volunteers – has never changed.
“One of the things that’s really unique about the Garlic Festival is the volunteers,” he said. “They do it, and they do it for the love of the festival, for the love of the community and to have fun. I don’t think you can pay us enough to do that for a living. It’s an incredible amount of time and effort and sunburn and windburn.”
