You can’t eat it, smell it or braid it, but in the nearly quarter century since its creation it has become an iconic symbol of the city that garlic put on the international map.
Yet the designer of the sprawling downtown mural that boldly proclaims Gilroy, Garlic Capital of the World, has gone largely unheralded and long ago lost track of his original drawings for the colorful, bucolic image of garlic farming that has adorned everything from postcards to websites since it was painted by a visiting Italian muralist in 1993.
That changed this week when former Gilroyan Martin Roberson, a 53-year-old San Jose tattoo artist and owner of Lucky Tattoo, was presented in front of the artwork with a framed original of one of his drawings for the mural – and perhaps the only one that exists.
Heather Simpson-Bluhm presented it. She is the daughter of Caryl Simpson, the mural’s patron, who died after a short battle with cancer in June 2015 at the age of 67.
Roberson said he still recalls being hired by the neophyte businesswoman Simpson while a Gilroy High School student, and designing t-shirts for her silk-screen printing company.
He’d lost touch with the family but after her death sent her children a poignant note explaining all she meant to him. He and his wife, Lori, and Simpson-Bluhm, 48, and her brother, Ted, 46, have since rekindled their friendship and have become close friends.
Roberson even created a tattoo for each that honors their mom, according to Simpson-Bluhm.
She and her husband, Greg, have a daughter, Hannah Caryl, 13, who is Simpson’s only grandchild.
“She was everything to my mom,” said Simpson-Bluhm, who remains active in the company her mother founded.
Roberson said Simpson taught him all he knows about running a business and really launched his successful career as an artist – not to mention her contributions to the city.
“A lot of people don’t realize how much she did for Gilroy, the downtown association would not have happened if it was not for her, she spearheaded the whole thing,” said Roberson, who still fondly recalls a downtown replete with mom and pop drug and a hardware stores, all the fading trapping of bustling, small-town America.
“She was trying to help everyone, all the small businesses,” he said of Simpson’s efforts, which sometimes put her at odds with the folks.
After she started her own condiment company and named it Garlic Festival Foods, she was even sued by the Gilroy Garlic Festival Association, which owns and runs the popular annual event that draws around 100,000 visitors a year to the city.
Simpson won—and the enormously and still growing company she founded still boasts the Internet address of www.garlicfestival.com.
“She was tough as nails but had a big heart,” Roberson said of his mentor, who also was an accomplished artist, designer, corporate executive, gardener, author, restaurateur, food product developer and even served on the California Olive Oil Commission.
“She was a pretty dynamic force during her time in Gilroy and she wasn’t afraid of a fight,” her daughter said.
“While it did make her some enemies, it earned her a lot of champions, too; she put her money where her mouth was, she actually bought real estate downtown, fixed it up, put that mural downtown and created a good, iconic brand this is all about what the festival is all about,” Simpson-Bluhm said.
After working for Simpson for a while, Roberson turned to cooking. He became chef and cooked for some of the city’s most popular eateries of that era, including Station 55, Sandrinos and Harvest Time, now the Milias Restaurant.
It was during that time that Simpson started her gourmet condiment company and he helped write a few of her recipes, Roberson said.
Then one day she asked him if he could pull together a design because she had this idea for a mural about garlic that would pay homage to the history of farming the so-called stinking rose in Gilroy.
At the time, Roberson was living out in the country, in a home with his parents surrounded by working farm fields.
“That is actually where I got the idea, because it was kind of like watching the circle of life, you’d see people out there picking the vegetables and the garlic early in the morning and the train that takes it to everywhere else in the United States,” Roberson recalled.
That human aspect, he said, “is what I felt was the most important part of it rather than just showing the commercial side.”
And out in those fields the garlic would be placed in huge wooden bins, just as it’s done now, bins adorned with growers’ names, such as Joseph Gubser.
Roberson picked up on that idea and included the names and a train in his design
“Caryl said it was a great idea, and that is where it came from,” Roberson said.
His original design did not include the vampire that peeks out from the lower left hand corner of the mural, that came later, he said, and is completely appropriate to the overarching theme and garlic folklore.
Simpson owned the building and inside ran an eclectically decorated gourmet food shop and art gallery called the Garlic Festival Store & Gallery at the corner of Fifth Street and Monterey Road.
She was a dynamic and charismatic businesswoman who created the popular Garli Garni condiment, founded a nationally-known gourmet condiment company called Garlic Festival Foods, now in its 31st year and its booth a staple of the Gilroy Garlic Festival, and came up with the idea for the mural in the early 1990s.
Then she convinced a short list of merchants and city boosters to pay for it to be painted on the huge south wall of her building, overlooking a small municipal parking lot.
The rest is Garlic City history.
“She envisioned it as Gilroy’s postcard to the world, I think she was really proud of it, said Simpson-Bluhm, 43.
Her mother, she said, realized early that the success of the garlic festival and the mystique that wafted around the bulb and its cloves gave Gilroy, “on a silver platter,” the magic ingredient with which to market the city to the world.
With the Gilroy Garlic Festival that begins its three-day run today now in its 39th year, with the city awash in garlic souvenirs, hats and t-shirts year-round, with growers and other businesses built on that mystique and dependent on garlic and its lovers, and with even McDonalds getting into the act with its Gilroy Garlic Fries, it seems Caryl Simpson’s vision was right on the mark.
“I like (the) concept of crediting her with a great legacy, she did a lot of positive things,” for the city, said Joan Buchanan of the Gilroy Downtown Business Association.
The mural, Buchanan said, is “A natural” for Gilroy.
With Buchanan at the helm, the merchants group raised about $13,000 in 2013 and had the mural repaired, touched up and coated with a protective shield after 20 years of sun and rain had caused some peeling and faded its once vibrant colors.
And Simpson, who by that time had moved out of the building, was right there to help; she contacted her muralist friend, Gianni Martino, in Italy and brought him and an assistant over to reprise and repair his original work while she put them up in her Aromas home.
The results are spectacular, according to Buchanan.
“Tourists stop there almost daily to take pictures,” she said.
