His giant hands first dug into Gilroy soil more than 60 years
ago. Prunes are what he first planted, but garlic has always been
his passion.
Gilroy – His giant hands first dug into Gilroy soil more than 60 years ago.
Prunes are what he first planted, but garlic has always been his passion.
Val Filice’s love for the stinking bulb has infused itself into every part of his life, from the fried potatoes and Italian sausage he cooked up for neighborhood kids to the mouth-watering calamari that helped earn Gilroy international fame as the Garlic Capital.
Sprinkle in a booming laugh, an old-world love of simple pleasures and a stature that dwarfs the average man, and you have the makings of a Gilroy legend.
But you’d never know it from talking to Filice, who, as he fights a losing battle with pancreatic cancer, downplays his accomplishments with a modesty that has become part of his mystique.
“It seems to me that life has been a dream. It’s gone by so fast,” Filice, 80, said in a Sept. 26 interview. “I haven’t done so much. I wanted to do so much more. I hoped I could have more time, but it doesn’t seem like I will.”
Doctors diagnosed Filice with a terminal case of cancer this summer, not long after he ushered in the 29th annual Gilroy Garlic Festival, an event he helped found in 1979. Filice, who became bed-ridden the day after that interview, said at the time he could have as little as a month or two to live.
“I’m not afraid to die,” Filice said. “I’ve seen hundreds go through it. You just do.”
And in the meantime, he said, “where there’s life, there’s spirit.”
‘Without volunteers, you have nothing’
Over the last half century, Filice has proven himself the quintessential giving spirit, using his culinary skills to drum up money for community causes and corralling countless friends and family to lend a charitable hand.
“Volunteers are the number one item in doing anything in life,” Filice said. “Without volunteers, you have nothing.”
Under his watchful eye, a team of cooks at St. Joseph’s Family Center churns out dozens of turkeys on Thanksgiving and pots of corned beef and cabbage on St. Patrick’s day, all to feed roughly 300 poor and homeless people. Children at St. Mary Catholic School have plenty of baseball bats and basketballs, thanks to an annual spaghetti dinner Filice started more than 20 years ago. And Gourmet Alley, the massive food operation at the heart of the city’s namesake event, hums along each July with the help of more than a thousand volunteers. Filice’s garlic calamari has remained Gourmet Alley’s enduring favorite ever since he cooked up the dish at the first Garlic Festival.
“There are some people that just find their comfort level in certain places, and I think for Val, it’s in the kitchen,” said David Cox, executive director for St. Joseph’s Family Center. “He’s laughing, he’s smiling. I never saw him measure a thing. He goes by taste and what he knows. He’s just a great big spirit. He’s a big man and he has a big heart to match.”
A Lifelong Gilroyan
Val Filice was born in Gilroy on June 4, 1927 – the son of Angelina and Antonio Filice. His parents, originally from Cosenza, Italy, moved to California to escape the sweatshops of New York. Filice grew up the son of a farmer and ultimately took on the career when his father’s death, in 1947, forced him to cut short his education at San Jose State University.
Not long after returning he met his wife Elsie, who gave him two children — Bob and Valerie.
“She was beautiful,” Filice said of Elsie, reflecting on his wife of 49 years. “I knew her before I left for college, and we met again when I came at a card party.”
A few months after that meeting, Filice said he took her out to a local restaurant and proposed by hiding a ring under her coffee cup.
“She lifted it up and the ring was there,” he said, adding that she died 10 years ago. “I think about her every day.”
Filice may have had one great love in life, but he has managed to charm countless others. In recent years, the man affectionately called “Valentino” by friends has often popped in at St. Joseph’s food pantry to pay compliments to the ladies and even waltz a few around the gym, often before strapping on an apron to cook a meal for the homeless.
“He just knew how to make you feel like a lady. He was a real, true gentleman,” said Jacqui Merriman, 63, who ran the St. Joseph’s food pantry from 1997 to 2005. She said Filice and her father’s close friend, Joe Peralta, worked tirelessly when called upon.
“Val and Joe — they would start early in the morning, peeling the potatoes and the onions,” she said. “They were always kidding each other about having cook-offs. And then the of course all the work he put into the Garlic Festival.”
A Founding Father
The Filice legend is intimately bound with the founding of the Garlic Festival, now a part of Gilroy lore. The story goes that, at the urging of a news reporter, former Gavilan College president Rudy Melone took up what then was a radical idea: a food festival centered around garlic. Local farmer Don Christopher provided the garlic, and Filice offered up recipes that became the festival’s core menu — calamari, scampi, Italian sausage, pepper steak and pasta con pesto, to name a few over the years.
“Val is of course an icon of the festival,” said Brian Bowe, head of the nonprofit Garlic Festival Association. “He is so passionate about the Garlic Festival. I really just admire his love for this event. One of the things he said to me recently was to make sure we always take care of the volunteers. … He lead by example. There’s no doubt about it.”
Filice and his son Bob, now 51, cooked up the first round of calamari at the Garlic Festival 29 years ago. And although they handed down the operation to other volunteers, Val Filice, surrounded by an entourage of Garlic Fest beauty pageant winners, still performs the ceremonial lighting of the first flame in Gourmet Alley.
Bob Filice said people should not be fooled by the cameras and glitz.
“He’s a very modest man,” Filice said. “Even though it may look the other way, he does not like being in the limelight. He loves donating his time. … His number one, real excitement and charge in life is helping people that need help, especially kids.”
Alan Heinzen was just a middle school football player in 1964 when he and his buddies wound up in Filice’s kitchen for the first time.
“He brought us all over and fed us everything he had,” Heinzen said. “I think it was potatoes and Italian sausage, and man was it great. We thought we were in heaven.”
Heinzen, who served as head of Gourmet Alley last year, and his brother Rick went on to follow in the Filice mold, helping local causes with countless hours of their own time and donations from their respective engineering and manufacturing businesses.
In all their efforts over the years, Heinzen said, there has always been one constant.
“If there was a barbecue fundraiser for Little League, Val would be there cooking,” Heinzen said. “It’s like he smelled it in the air and just showed up to help.”
And while Filice may be too modest to speak about his legacy, residents say he has cultivated the volunteer spirit for Gilroy’s future.
For more than a decade, he has trained a cadre of cooks to help them perfect the calamari, scampi and other recipes that have helped make the Garlic Festival an international success. From his garden oasis at the end of a cul de sac by Gilroy High School, he has held annual safety meetings in the run-up to the festival for his team of pyro-chefs, who dodge eight-foot flames as they cook before adoring crowds each July.
Filice was like a second father for Ken Fry, 63, who has cooked at charity events beside the Garlic Fest founder for nearly 30 years. They cook at the yearly Italian Festival in Reno (which Filice also helped found), and have gone as far as Hawaii and Florida for festivals and fundraisers.
Filice is hard pressed to choose a favorite recipe — he leans toward garlic bread as a universal favorite — but his main ingredient is hardly a secret.
“I always tell people, ‘How can you cook without garlic? You’re not cooking,'” said Filice, who laments the influx of Chinese garlic. For him, California garlic approaches a religion — he talks about the smell, the meat, the fullness.
“He’ll talk about all the flavors, the texture — your mouth will be watering,” Fry said. He said Filice has never sacrificed taste for quantity, though he has never turned away a hungry person.
“People always ask how he can feed all those people,” Fry said. “He says, ‘Just give me a bigger pot, and I’ll do what needs to be done.'”
As the stories and accolades pile up in his father’s final days, Bob Filice said he’s finally understanding the magnitude of his father’s contributions.
“You listen to everybody coming to talk to him,” he said. “You see the really big circle of friends that he has. I’m very proud to be his son.”
In late September, as he reflected on his life in Gilroy and beyond, Filice marveled at the places that his lifelong passion for one ingredient has led.
“Life is so beautiful,” Filice said. “One little thing can grow into so many beautiful things.”
