GILROY
– The Garlic Festival has room for everyone – even a nerd.
GILROY – The Garlic Festival has room for everyone – even a nerd.
Enter Ric Heinzen, 2001 president of Gilroy’s festival.
Heinzen, an engineer and owner of ACS, a Gilroy firm making electrical controls, gave out pocket protectors to all the other festival officials to help build camaraderie. If he caught them without the pocket protector, he’d tell them they were “out of uniform” and not playing their nerdy roles.
“We didn’t have slide rules, but everyone was given a pocket protector with a pen and screwdriver in it,” he said.
But Heinzen wasn’t always taking on the nerd role as an engineer; he once was just another boy growing up around the stinky herb that makes Gilroy famous.
“My mother wanted her boys to work in the summer; we moved to Gilroy in 1962,” Heinzen remembered. “On Fifth Street and Miller, all there was were old prune trees and garlic fields. She took us during the summer months and we topped garlic and worked in the fields. It was part of our summer routine for three summers before I turned 16 and could get a real job.”
Heinzen learned some valuable skills working in the garlic fields, and the poster for one year’s Garlic Festival reminds him of those days.
“We were working for Joseph Gubser garlic, the original garlic king before Christopher Ranch came in. I hoed garlic fields, and when the committee selected the poster, it had a bucket of garlic with the Gavilan Hills in the background,” he said. “It brought me back to my youth. I still use it at a greeting card today. Yeah, it made it special for me.”
Heinzen never forgot those days, and in Gubser’s honor he brought his old boss’ widowed wife with him to the 2001 festival as a guest of honor.
“I always respected her husband,” he said. “He was a good businessman.”
But the engineer also had to be quick on his feet and make some tough decisions during his year running the show.
He felt the heat in Gourmet Alley on the the opening Friday morning, and that heat wasn’t just from the coal barbeque pits.
The beef used for the famous peppersteak sandwiches – a beloved traditional dish of the alley – smelled, well, “funny,” Heinzen said.
“When Gourmet Alley opened, it really became an issue because from their point of view, it was bad meat,” Heinzen remembers. “To be ready to open and find out you have 17,000 or 18,000 pounds of meat you can’t serve, it’s a stressful situation.”
A butcher volunteer said the meat was still good and not a safety hazard, but Heinzen was concerned about how the situation might damage the reputation of the festival.
“It’s the perception that people will have that it’s not good,” he said.
Heinzen and other volunteers raced to local supermarkets and bought as much beef as they could to replace the beef for Friday’s crowds. More meat was shipped in from the Bay Area for the remaining two days. The integrity of the Garlic Festival was not only preserved, it was enhanced.
Bookending the festival with another stressful situation, on Sunday night as the festival came to a close, Heinzen looked up to see a helicopter with a search light circling the park. He soon learned a man and his girlfriend had had a fight in the Vineyard Stage area and the man tried to run her over with his car.
But despite these incidents, the festival went off fairly smoothly and guests and volunteers alike enjoyed themselves, Heinzen said.
The big seller in the merchandise booths was large weather vanes, and people lined up for hours to buy them. And the milk industry’s “Got Milk?” extreme skateboard exhibition drew large crowds throughout the three days.
“It is a time when everyone comes together to have a good time,” he said. “Everyone gets a really satisfied feeling of what you’ve worked on and what others have worked on. It’s the culmination of six to eight months of planning.”
Heinzen received some criticism for raising prices of the dishes in Gourmet Alley, but he stresses this action was necessary to make the culinary heart of the festival profitable. He had looked at the cost of ingredients for Gourmet Alley dishes on a computer program that Sysco, a supplier of food, had, and he decided changes were necessary.
“The festival is a business and people have to consider that aspect of it,” he said. “I learned that the festival has its own momentum. The changes are best in small steps. You have to make changes over a period of two to three years. … It’s got to be fun and benefit the community.
But the board of directors need to look at it in an analytical way and see if it meets our mission statement.”
The focus of the festival must always be on providing good food and quality entertainment for guests, he said. And Gourmet Alley must be kept sacred. That’s why Heinzen decided not to use the odorous meat on the opening day.
“… The focus of the food festival has to be on food,” he said. “Gourmet Alley is our signature of the festival. People come for the food. Without Gourmet Alley, we’d look a lot like other festivals.”
