Longtime volunteers, publishers put together a coffee table book
By Staff Reports
Larry and J. Chris Mickartz have a long history with the Garlic Festival. J. Chris was on the first planning committee in 1979. Larry got recruited to work the second festival in 1980 and went on to committee chair and they served on the board throughout the 1980s. It was then they first met.
But J. Chris and Larry met again while working the festival in 1996 and got married in 1997.
They just celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary. Their first issue of Gilroy Today featured the Garlic Festival and every year until they sold the magazine in 2019, they ran a special on the festival.
About 2012 they began gathering material for a book on the festival to be released with the 35th festival in 2013. But that did not work out, obviously. With COVID-19, the mass shooting in 2019, and the sale of gmhTODAY, the time was right to try again. They gathered material from friends, photographers and contacts.
The Gilroy Dispatch archives at the Gilroy Museum and online were a treasure trove. The Gilroy Garlic Festival Association eventually gave them access to more than 100,000 slides from past festivals. They digitalized a few thousand and ended up with about 2,000 photos that are in the book.
The book itself is 248 pages with at least four pages for each year’s festival. There are additional pages on the founders (Rudy Melone, Val Filice and Don Christopher) and a host of other people and events throughout the 40-plus years of the festival.
Back in 1978, Melone, then president of Gavilan College, read a newspaper article about a small town in France that hosted an annual garlic festival and claimed to be the “Garlic Capital of the World.” Nonsense, he thought. Gilroy’s garlic production and processing were far greater. In fact, Christopher Ranch was then (and still is) the largest shipper of garlic in the world. So Melone set about trying to convince Christopher Ranch owner Don Christopher, along with other local farmers and businesses, to celebrate the hometown crop. They enrolled local farmer and chef, Filice, to prepare a few garlicky dishes and share them at a Rotary Club luncheon as a proof of concept.
It is a table top book 9 x1 2 inches hardbound with a jacket cover. They are taking orders for presale at $65. When available in late August-early September, it will sell locally at $75. ggfplaybook.com.
They have scheduled a release party for Sept. 12 at the Milias Restaurant.
