New Orange Theme Juices Up Fillmore’s Berry-Battered Festival

The inaugural Fillmore Orange Festival turned out to be no lemon Saturday as thousands of people squeezed as much fun as possible out of the day.

They took train rides to an orange grove. They competed in orange-tossing and seed-spitting contests. They drank orange juice and ate orangewood-barbecued chicken with orange sauce and orange rice.

“I think this is great,” said Fillmore resident Ellen Finley, clad in an orange Fillmore T-shirt and wearing tiny oranges dangling from earrings she had just purchased at one of the more than 60 arts and crafts stalls. “The last May Festival wasn’t very good. . . . There’s more stalls [here], more booths, it’s better organized.”

Those kinds of comments should please organizers, who revamped the small-town fiesta after years of seeing the 83-year-old May Festival’s vital juices sucked away by Oxnard’s larger strawberry gala.

Organizers changed the name, pushed the event back one week to avoid the competition with Oxnard and gave it a fruity focus appropriate for a town ringed with miles of orange groves. The hope is that the citrus celebration will become a regional attraction.

After all, as boosters trying to attract tourists to the area are quick to point out, a national magazine recently dubbed the Santa Clara Valley the last great citrus-scape in Southern California. Residents want to capitalize on such favorable press, although the rural region must carefully monitor its growth, said Finley, a former Orange County resident who watched a strip mall rise on a former Fillmore orange grove in the last year.

“I saw them disappear there, and now I’m seeing them disappear here and it’s very sad,” she said.

In a way, the festival has returned the town to its roots. The May Festival began in 1913 with local growers bringing their produce into town, said Hank Carrillo, the Fillmore Chamber of Commerce’s former executive director.

Despite unseasonably cloudy skies and gusty winds that didn’t quite provide a tropical atmosphere, the gamble of holding the town’s annual blowout on busy Memorial Day weekend seemed appealing to many.

“I know it’s going over very well with people who were reluctant for us to change the name,” Carrillo said. “There appears to be more people . . . than last year. So far we’re very happy.”

Some vendors even inquired early Saturday about where they could sign up to attend next year, he said.

Robert Tufts, a salesman hawking an environmentally friendly cleaner called Orange TKO--”The oil from the peel of an orange”--was among those encouraged by the crowds.

Nevermind the company that manufactures the stuff is based in Calgary, Alberta, a city on the Canadian prairie better known for its rodeo than oranges. Nevermind that oranges in the cleaner come from Brazil and Florida, notwithstanding the Sunkist boxes festival organizers had placed at the booth.

“We were at the Riverside orange festival [recently],” he said. “We did $2,000 worth of business in two days.”

While oranges weren’t quite as omnipresent as strawberries are at Oxnard’s annual event, organizers made a valiant first effort.

Business owners painted orange-themed decorations on store windows. An orange balloon seemed to bob in the breeze from every child’s hand. A crowd of about 2,000 people saw a troupe of kids from Sunshine Preschool wander the three-block-long parade route trailing wagons filled with orange trees and fruit. And singer Kayte Wolf planned to debut a song called, naturally, “Fillmore Orange Festival.”

Yet organizers showed restraint, too, choosing Fillmore Citizen of the Year Conrad Spitler as the parade’s grand marshal rather than something juicier--such as, say, someone named O.J.

“We intentionally tried to steer away from that one,” said Kevin McSweeney, one of the festival organizers.

Instead, the festival was paired with such less-contentious fare as professional bicycle races. Oranges and bicycles proved a perfect combination for cycling enthusiast Fred Moncayo, 36, of Oxnard, who is eager to see the sport grow in popularity.

“This is the ideal. Because you’ve got people here, you get a little more publicity,” he said. “[And] my mother already said to bring back a box of oranges. I’m killing two birds with one stone.”

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FYI

The Fillmore Orange Festival, 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Ends today. Most events, including the carnival, food booths and arts and crafts, are held at or near Central Park at Central Avenue and Santa Clara Street, a block off California 126. Admission is free to most events; $1 admission for carnival, ride tickets extra.