Hot weather, debut of Mardi the Mushroom mascot, keeps event lively
By Marty Cheek
Photo by Marty Cheek
Alivia Irvine (left), 5, and Trinity Lucero, 8, learn about mushrooms at the Rotary Club of Morgan Hill’s mushroom education booth.
Even though he doesn’t care much for mushrooms, Matt Wrede, a 12-year-old Charter School student, ironically had the duty of guiding mascot Mardi the Mushroom around the record crowds of 80,000 people who attended the fun fungi festival Memorial Day weekend.
“I just don’t think they taste good,” Wrede said about Santa Clara County’s most produced agricultural product. “I don’t even like them on pizza.”
Despite Wrede’s reservations about consuming the fungus that drew people from as far away as Albuquerque to Morgan Hill to visit this year’s Mardi Gras, he admitted he enjoys attending the annual event, saying, “It’s fun because of all the rides and stuff.”
This year marked the 35th annual Mushroom Mardi Gras, Morgan Hill’s biggest spring event which last year raised $50,000 that was given to local students in scholarship money. Founder Brad Spencer was on hand to help as a member of the board of directors and said he was pleased with the turn out. He recalled the birth of the idea came nearly four decades ago when he and his wife – self-admitted “festival junkies” – visited the Dickens Christmas Fair in South San Francisco and saw the large number of people who attended. As the fire chief for Morgan Hill, Spencer saw an opportunity to hold a mushroom festival to raise capitol improvement funds for the local fire department. That first Mushroom Mardi Gras in October 1980, a crowd of 30,000 visited the now-gone Hill Country resort to ride in hot air balloons and listen to the Kingston Trio, the featured act. The festival’s location bounced around a few places – including Community Park – before settling downtown.
Photo by Marty Cheek
Morgan Hill residents Mary Seehafer and Tim Hennessey share a Mansmith steak sandwich at the Mardi Gras.
“It’s wonderful. I’m really excited to see how it’s grown,” he said. “And what I’m hearing from a lot of the people that are here is ‘Wow! Everyone is working together. Everyone is on the same side.’ I think everyone is working here because they know where this money is going. How are you going to argue with scholarships?”
The Mardi Gras’s party atmosphere, good food, live music, nearly 300 vendor booths and amusement rides helps attendees have a fun time as they learn about the edible fungus, said Emily Bettencourt, a representative of the Western Mushroom Association that partnered with the Rotary Club of Morgan Hill at its education booth on Depot Street.
“It’s really important to show how mushrooms are grown because you can’t walk by a field of mushrooms,” she said. “They’re grown in climate-controlled buildings and they’re grown year round.”
Six farms in the county employing about 500 workers produce 800,000 pounds of mushrooms every week, she said. California ranks No. 2 in the nation behind Pennsylvania for mushroom production. About half a century ago, growers from the Keystone State came to California and started building mushroom farms in Santa Clara and Monterey counties, thus giving birth to a new agricultural industry.
Unlike other agricultural products, mushrooms don’t need natural sunlight to grow and so can be produced inside large warehouse-like buildings, she said. “And they’re high in Vitamin D,” she said in describing their nutritional benefits. “They’re the only food that has naturally-produced Vitamin D. They’re also high in potassium and gluten free.”
Photo by Marty Cheek
Erica Clarkson, visiting the Mardi Gras from Belmont, dances with Morgan Hill resident Maya Delacruz, age 6.
The good weather and Radio Disney celebrity Leo Howard help raise this year’s Mardi Gras attendance by 10,000 over last year’s number, said Sunday Minnich, the festival’s executive director.
Photo by Marty Cheek
(Left)Acrobatic stilt-walker pair Tangeled Threads entertain the crowd at this year’s Mushroom Mardi Gras festival.
“We consider it a huge success,” she said. “We had record-breaking crowds. We’re actually up in all of our sales this year. I don’t have actual numbers yet because they’re still counting but I know they’re up from last year. Definitely, there were more vendors.”
The only significant problem at this year’s festival was heat exhaustion experienced by several people from the hot temperature, but volunteer paramedics from CalFire were on hand to quickly help festival guests facing this safety issue so no one was really hurt, she said. She described the crowd as “mellow” with no arrests or police incidents. Many people came from out of town, Minnich said.
The debut of the new Mardi the Mushroom mascot was the big hit of the warm weekend, she said.
“I drove him around in the cart a couple of times because it was so hot and people kept stopping us and taking pictures with their kids,” Minnich said. “I talked to some people and they said it was their first time here and they were having a lot of fun and that it’s a great festival. I didn’t see anyone who wasn’t having a lot of fun.”
