Seek return of satellite events, which were part of Fest founder
Rudy Melone’s vision
Gilroy – A string of local events once heralded Gilroy’s annual Garlic Festival and whipped up community spirit weeks before the headline event took place at July’s end. While a few vestiges remain, those “satellite” events have largely faded away, taking with them some of the festival’s spirit, according to a few long-time volunteers.
Over the years, the city has seen bike and road races, golf and tennis tournaments, and a barn dance once held at Christopher Ranch. In addition to generating Garlic Festival excitement, the events helped raise charity dollars before the headline event, where volunteers can direct their hourly “wages” to a local nonprofit group of their choice.
“You would look forward to all these events building up into a climax with the festival,” said Jon Vickroy, a Morgan Hill resident who has volunteered in 25 of the 27 annual festivals. “The other thing about it was that it helped advertise the festival in a whole bunch of other mediums.”
Vickroy, who has spent the last 14 years as a “pyro” chef sautéing calamari and shrimp in Gourmet Alley, the festival’s big tent food hub, said the satellite events were part of the vision of festival founder Rudy Melone.
“His thinking was to get a variety of people involved in the festival,” said Vickroy, who served for several years as chairman for the Tour de Garlique, a bike race held in San Juan Bautista that ended in 2001.
Joann Kessler, assistant executive director of the Garlic Festival Association, said that “In their heyday, they were well-attended and really successful events. But toward the end, a lot of different groups were doing 5 and 10k runs and bike tours. They weren’t the novelty that they were when we did them in the early days.”
The Garlic Festival Association began spinning off the events in the mid-’90s, either discontinuing them or handing them over to other local organizations. The Gilroy Police Officer’s Association took over the golf tournament, while the local tennis club was a natural heir for the festival’s tennis tournament. The barn dance, which was the last satellite event to fold, shut down for lack of an appropriate location, according to Kessler.
“It just wasn’t fair to them to impact their warehouse (during harvest season),” Kessler said. “It was a really good event, but sometimes you just need to make some changes. We had a committee looking at new locations and logistically nothing was going to make sense.”
Jeff Martin, a former festival president and longtime volunteer, said the events, which cut into organizers’ focus on the festival itself, eventually ran their course.
“It was a distraction but well worth it when people were really participating,” he said. “It got harder to get people out there on the tennis courts, or in the bike race. They were kind of passed forward to people who could breathe some life into them.”
Kessler pointed out that not all events have fallen by the wayside, including the annual Garlic Queen pageant, and the festival’s more recent involvement in the July Fun Run, a hot rod show held on Monterey Street in downtown Gilroy.
The festival has played a small but distinct role at the fun run since it got involved in 2002, according to Kessler.
“We contributed quite a bit of money to offset the cost of entertainment and had a food booth,” she said. “This year we had the sausage sandwich, pasta con pesto, garlic bread – so it gives the flavor and smells of the festival in downtown Gilroy two weeks prior to the festival. It has been a great event for us.”
Yet others would like to see the association resurrect satellite events in the run-up to the festival.
Steve Janisch, head “pyro” chef at Gourmet Alley for more than a decade, once also served as chairman for the annual golf tournament at Gilroy Golf Course. While acknowledging the financial and organizational demands of the Garlic Festival, an event that draws more than 100,000 visitors a year, he said he would like to see a return of the satellite events.
“I would agree that there was a certain buildup leading up to the actual festival itself,” Janisch said, referring to the satellite events. “Certainly a lot of people did get behind it and it was obviously very community based. … if there was a way to bring some of them back and they were successful, that would only be a good thing.”
