The Bigger Picture. . . with Marty Cheek: Blame ‘Herbie’ the Gilroy Garlic Festival mascot for turning me into a columnist
Published in the July 27-August 10, 2016 issue of Gilroy Life
By Marty Cheek
Marty Cheek
About 15 or so years ago when I worked as a reporter for the Gilroy Dispatch, I joined a team covering the Gilroy Garlic Festival weekend. In the planning meeting, the editor made an off-hand comment that the newspaper’s coverage of the world’s most famous food festival hardly changed year after year. And so he announced a contest for the most original story. The prize was $50.
Being competitive is my nature. I decided to win the cash. I considered various angles for festival-based news stories. None seemed to work. Then the light bulb in my brain turned on: why not write a garlic festival story from the perspective of a garlic clove?
I arranged with a nice festival board member to get myself into the costume of Herbie the Garlic, the festival’s mascot. In a dressing room, I slithered my upper torso into a paper mache garlic clove painted with large eyes and a big, blissful smile and stepped out into the festival.
As a teenage boy led me around the crowds, I felt like a celebrity. People kept coming up for a photo with me as Herbie. A video crew from Europe taped me waving my gloved garlic clove hands. The eyes of a toddler in a stroller bulged at seeing what no doubt in his mind was a giant clove monster. He cried in terror. People kept asking me if it was hot inside the costume. Surprisingly, I told them, the shade inside made it much cooler than the broiling sun outside.
My comical experiences as Herbie was published as a column on the front page of the Gilroy Dispatch. Many readers told the editor they enjoyed the column’s small-town humor, so the editor offered me the opportunity to write a regular column. My dream since high school was to be a humor columnist. I didn’t hesitate and took on the new writing role.
Looking for an off-beat angle to write a garlic festival column for this issue of Gilroy Life, I found on a webpage for Forbes magazine news about a study released in November that said eating garlic might actually make men more attractive to women. Researchers in the United Kingdom and the Czech Republic published their findings in a report with the vapid title “Consumption of garlic positively affects hedonic perception of axillary body odor.”
The researchers gave 42 men garlic either infused in bread and cheese or in the form of capsules. They then gathered their body sweat with pads worn for 12 hours. These pads were sniffed by 82 women who evaluated their odor for pleasantness, appeal and intensity. They found something about garlic in male body odor is attractive to the opposite sex. No one knows why, but the scientists speculated that maybe the health-boosting benefits of garlic might make itself apparent in the body scent.
Reading about the study reminded me of a comic novel I wrote a decade or so ago that was based in Gilroy titled “Tie the Knot.” It poked fun at high-end weddings and the complex process of getting married in the modern world. Think of it as if Kurt Vonnegut wrote a romance novel centering around the Gilroy garlic industry.
Let’s just say “Tie the Knot” really reeked. The novel stank beyond any garlic bulb grown by Christopher Ranch. The story starts off with a shy teenage boy at Gilroy High School who is attracted to a snobbish girl from a rich family. She mocks and belittles him because he works at Bonfante Gardens by walking around the theme park dressed as a giant garlic clove to entertain visitors. He’s a bit of a geek and the only car that he can afford to drive is a dilapidated 1980 Dodge Omni (the car I drove when I was in high school). After graduating high school, he goes off to Gavilan Community College. One day in his chemistry class he accidentally finds a substance in garlic that when spread over male bald spots reignites the dead follicles to produce a healthy head of hair. A side-effect is that it is also a powerful aphrodisiac.
My hero’s discovery makes him a world-famous billionaire. With his new-found wealth he buys the Bonfante Gardens theme park where he once worked and renames it Garlic Gardens. The high school girl who once spurred him now sees him as a mate and maneuvers him into proposing. The rest of the story involves him undergoing a painful process of planning an over-the-top wedding. Spoiler: a moment before the wedding vows are said, the hero sees his would-be bride for the unpleasant woman she really is and proposes in front of everyone to his true love, a woman who works at the Garlic World produce stand on U.S. 101. They get married at the Cook-Off stage at the Gilroy Garlic Festival. A friend dressed as Herbie the Garlic Clove helps them tie the knot.
Now you know the story of my accidentally becoming a Bigger Picture columnist. Herbie the Garlic Clove can ultimately be blamed for these endeavors in the pages of Gilroy Life. And he also served as the inspiration for a really bad novel I wrote a decade ago — and I sincerely hope will never ever see the light of publication.