Feasting to Footraces, Strawberry Festival Offers a Juicy Lineup

Strawberry-lovers from all over the Southland will converge this weekend on Channel Islands Harbor in Oxnard to sample man’s attempts to improve on perfection.

Organizers of the California Strawberry Festival expect more than 60,000 visitors to feast on such delicacies as strawberry tamales, strawberry pizza and strawberry cotton candy.

Artisans’ Wares

By the time the festival gates close Sunday, vendors in 26 booths plan to have sold more than 50,000 pounds of the juicy fruit that brought nearly $91 million into Ventura County last year.

“For a person who loves strawberries,” said Tsujio Kato, chairman of the six-year-old festival, “this is the place to be this weekend.”

People with other interests won’t go begging, either.

For the competitive, organizers have planned the traditional selection of beauty contests, footraces and strawberry shortcake-eating contests. There’s even a strawberry-stemming contest.

Shoppers will find 176 artisans selling such items as paper jewelry, kaleidoscopes made of leaves and crystals and Japanese watercolors on rice paper.

Meanwhile, a nonstop lineup of bands will offer music lovers a sampling of jazz, blues, rock, bluegrass and Latin music. Performers include singer and songwriter Johnny Rivers, whose hits include “Swayin’ to the Music,” and the Roberts-Meisner Band, featuring former Eagles member Randy Meisner, and Rick Roberts, the lead singer from Firefall, whose hits include “You Are the Woman.”

About 400 volunteers will help out with the celebration, some having worked during the past 12 months to plan it.

Service Groups

As in the past, most of the booths and many of the events will be operated by service groups that use proceeds to help fund their activities throughout the year.

Organizers also will make a familiar request: “Don’t try to park near festival grounds,” Kato said.

Instead, festival-goers are being asked to leave their cars in any of three public parking lots and to take shuttle buses to the event. The festival is being held at the harbor’s Vintage Marina area, which is a short distance south of the shops at Harbor Landing at Channel Islands and Harbor boulevards.

Free shuttles will leave regularly from Oxnard College in Oxnard, the Naval Construction Battalion Center in Port Hueneme and the Ventura County Government Center in Ventura.

This year as last, there will be an admission charge: $3 for adults, $1 for children and senior citizens.

Beauty Queens

But the festival that is credited with changing Oxnard’s title from California’s Lima Bean Capital to its Strawberry Capital will not be without innovation.

While beauty queens from such domestic hotbeds of strawberry production as Plant City, W. Va., and Buckhannon, Fla., have participated before in Oxnard’s event, a foreign beauty queen has never been invited. An appearance by a 19-year-old Japanese college student will change that. Hisako Hazu, who in February was crowned Miss Shizuoka City in a ceremony attended by Oxnard Mayor Nao Takasugi as part of a radio-station promotion, will be on hand at festival activities throughout the weekend.

A pancake breakfast hosted by the Channel Islands Rotary Club will kick off activities both mornings at 10 a.m. Also offered both days is the strawberry shortcake-eating contest, in which participants will win prizes for eating the dessert as quickly at they can in heats between 2 and 3 p.m.

Saturday’s highlights include a strawberry blond competition, which pits male and female red-headed festival-goers from three age groups--children, teen-agers and adults--in beauty pageants that begin at 11 a.m. Two hours later, local waiters balancing trays loaded with dishes will wind through obstacle courses in a waiters’ race. Rivers performs from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m.

Sunday’s offerings include a 10K race, beginning at 8 a.m., and a 2K “fun run” beginning at 8:15 a.m., both starting from Sunset Lane and Harbor Boulevard. The berry-stemming contest winds up competitive events at 4 p.m. The Roberts-Meisner Band will perform between 4:30 and 6:30 p.m.