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
ready for their hungry spectators.
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 ready for their hungry spectators.
Favorable weather conditions and a hard-working, well-organized volunteer corps have ensured steady progress at Christmas Hill Park, where the festival begins today at 10am.
“We have a well-oiled machine here,” said Barbara 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.
The volunteer rest area and the children’s spot have been moved 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 Gilroy resident 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.
Luis Bonilla of ASA Entertainment, a company in Venice Beach that sets up ramps for bikes and skateboards, said the park’s 20 acres of 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.
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.
Abraham Cacho and his group of workers from Stages Unlimited are central to the festival’s success because they built the cook-off’s much-anticipated, tennis-court-size stage of brand new cooktops, ovens and sinks.
GILROY GARLIC FESTIVAL
- What: A celebration of all things garlic
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Where: Christmas Hill Park, 7100 Miller Ave., Gilroy
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When: July 27-29, 10am-7pm
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Cost: $12 Adults; $6 seniors 60 and older and children 6-12; free for children younger than 6
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Details: 842-1625 or
www.gilroygarlicfestival.com
- Weather: High-80s to low-90s with mostly sunny skies
