Strawberry Festival Marked by Changes

Organizers of this weekend’s Strawberry Festival in Oxnard have canceled the Strawberry Blonde contest, added paved parking for improved access for the disabled and doubled their contribution to an Oxnard College literacy program.

These are the major changes in the 10-year-old festival, which will feature foods like strawberry pizza, big-name musical entertainment and a range of other activities running from tart tossing to shortcake eating.

The key changes, festival planners say, are not entirely in response to complaints from Latino farm workers and disabled festival-goers, who in past years have felt ignored. Rather, officials said, they are more in line with the festival’s year-round commitment to community service.

Nonetheless, the alterations coincide with an absence of organized protests at the California Strawberry Festival, to be held Saturday and Sunday at College Park, in honor of Ventura County’s second largest cash crop.

Festival Manager Bill Garlock said he is delighted that festival-goers won’t have to cross picket lines this year to get to the festivities. About 70,000 people annually attend the event.

“This is pleasing,” he said. “I think it means there is a clearer understanding on everybody’s part as to the contribution of the festival and its rightful place in the community.”

But Garlock stressed that the changes were not in response to past controversy.

“This is not a means of atonement or appeasement,” he said. “Some of the issues raised last year had to do with things like housing, health care, education. This is a two-day event. The festival is not a social service organization.”

Last year, Latino farm workers complained that their role in Ventura County’s strawberry industry was being overlooked by festival planners. Some argued that the festival’s Strawberry Blonde pageant excluded them.

“I think they were wise enough to know that if they were going to sell tickets to Latinos, that Strawberry Blonde contest had to go,” said Carlos Aguilera, president of La Colonia Neighborhood Council and an organizer of last year’s picket.

Garlock, however, said the contest was canceled because the festival committee determined that “there was really nothing for (the winner) to do after the festival.”

This year, the festival will be represented by the winner of November’s Miss Oxnard Pageant.

Likewise, Garlock said the festival’s recent $10,000 donation to an Oxnard College program for primarily Spanish-speaking students had nothing to do with last year’s events. In 1992, the festival donated $5,000.

“Before anybody ever even raised the question of the Strawberry Festival vis-a-vis farm workers, we were applying to sponsor a literacy program for the kids of farm workers,” Garlock said. “The whole process began long before this issue was ever brought up.”

Improvements in access for disabled festival-goers, Garlock said, had also been looked into prior to last year’s festival, but were indeed spurred on by the complaints. One of those complaints went all the way to the courts.

Disabled Oxnard resident Linda Lee Galbraith, a board member of the Independent Living Resource Center, filed a lawsuit against Oxnard, contending that injuries she suffered at last year’s festival were a result of her falling in an unpaved parking area. Galbraith had lost a leg in a 1982 traffic accident.

Garlock said the festival this year will feature a separate, ramped ticket line, aluminum ramps dispersed throughout the festival grounds, and relocation of some of the arts and crafts booths from grass to a paved surface.

Perhaps the most significant change, he said, is the addition of a paved parking facility. The festival will use a basketball court at Channel Islands High School as a parking lot for disabled festival-goers.

“Three years ago, we moved to College Park. The first year out there, we didn’t have one complaint. Last year, five or six people complained,” Garlock said. “I think it’s going to be an improved situation.”

Galbraith agreed. “If those things are going in, it will be a major improvement,” she said.

She does not plan to attend the festival, however. “I’m never, ever going to go again,” she said.

“It’s a two-day shindig,” Garlock said. “There’s only so much we can do.”