Eight decades of tradition
Lodi Grape Festival celebrates milestone anniversary Thursday
When area residents hop on the Ferris wheel, chow down on a corn dog or admire the grape murals at this year’s Lodi Grape Festival, they’ll be following in the footsteps of more than 80 years of history.
The 80th annual Grape Festival kicks off on Thursday, and while some things about the festival — and Lodi — have changed, plenty of traditions have carried on, too.
In that time, visitors have probably eaten about 1.4 million corn dogs, Grape Festival Manager Mark Armstrong said — they didn’t come on the scene until 1951.
He expects the total number of servings of cotton candy the festival has served over the decades will top a million this year.
The number of times people have ridden the Ferris wheel, the Tilt-A-Whirl and other rides over the years?
“Way too many to guess,” Armstrong said.
The first Lodi Grape Festival was held in 1934, but it harkens back to an earlier celebration: the 1907 Tokay Carnival. The earlier harvest celebration was a marketing effort by Lodi grapegrowers and other farmers, to celebrate the then-brand-new city’s role as a top producer of flame tokay grapes.
While it was a huge success, with a king and queen, a Wild West show, vaudeville performances and more, it was also expensive. The festival faded into memory until 1934.
That year, Lodi Police Chief Clarence Jackson and his Mustachio Club, a group of city leaders that included Lodi Mayor George M. Steele, decided to revive the festival.
In those early years, the festival was held under Lodi’s iconic mission-style arch on Pine Street, said Donn Thompson, the festival’s historian. There were no grape murals yet. “In the beginning, we just had boxes and bunches of grapes people displayed,” Thompson said.
But one of the directors visited a citrus festival in the Los Angeles area, and saw that they had made murals using pieces of fruit. He brought the idea back to Lodi, and the grape murals were added to the festival in the 1950s.
“Those murals take hours to build and design and take those grapes off the bunches,” Thompson said.
Grapes must be carefully cut from the vine, stem intact, to prevent them from rotting or shriveling during the four-day festival. They’re carefully painted, shined with olive oil, or otherwise treated to get a variety of textures and colors.
Other festival traditions, such as the Kiddie Parade and the Grape Queen pageant, have waned in Lodi like the tokay grapes that were the festival’s namesake.
“They used to have a wonderful parade on Saturday of the Grape Festival weekend, and all my kids were in that,” said Carol Marvel.
She’s been performing with the Lodi Community Band at the Grape Festival for at least 25 years, and has attended the festival since her family moved to Lodi in 1961. Although she no longer plays with the band due to vision trouble, she is still on the board of directors.
“We’re getting so big, we can’t get everyone on the stage anymore!” she said.
The band typically plays traditional band music and marches, with a few showtunes thrown in for good measure. Because they play on the Foster Lumber stage right inside the fair’s entrance, a lot of the folks entering the fair stop to listen.
“Bands like ours love to perform,” she said.
The festival tradition Marvel misses most is the Kiddie Parade, which ended around 2010. The parade replaced the Horribles Parade in 1937, and was even held between 1942 to 1945, when the festival was canceled. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, too many of Lodi’s men and women were overseas or involved in the war effort to take the time to plan a festival.
“I think parades are part of being a smaller city,” Marvel said.
The early festivals were held in Downtown Lodi; the festival grounds were purchased in 1948.
“It was under the arch until after the World War, and then it moved out to the Armory building,” Thompson said.
The pavilion was built on the Grape Festival Grounds in 1949, and the first festival was held there in 1950. That’s the same year that the mural of the Four Seasons was painted inside the pavilion.
“The man who painted it and his assistants painted it and left one corner blank, and during the festival they finished the painting,” Thompson said.
Because it’s been protected indoors, the mural still looks as it did in 1950, with the bright colors unfaded, he said.
It was this early post-war Grape Festival that inspired another Lodi artist, Tony Segale, for the T-shirt design he created to celebrate the festival’s 80th year.
He saw a black-and-white vintage photograph posted on the Lodi Grape Festival’s Instagram account, of 1946 Grape Queen Jane Miller. In the photo, she’s wearing a traditional German outfit and holding a basket of tokay grapes.
Segale, who also painted several signs at the Grape Festival Grounds and designed three shirts for the fair in the late 1990s and 2000, used her as a loose inspiration.
“They asked me to create a design for their 80th, so I put together three thumbnail concepts, and they chose one,” he said.
A longtime fan of the festival who tries to attend every year, he was thrilled to be included in the milestone event.
Until 1980, the Grape Queen and her court was also an integral part of the fair. The women who were selected to serve as queen and princesses walked the fair, greeting guests, and also worked throughout the year to promote Lodi grapes.
“This year, we’re having a reunion of the queens and princesses,” Thompson said. In addition to a breakfast and wine tasting session for the women, they will also be introduced to audiences at the festival on Saturday evening.
One thing about the festival that has not changed is its star power. This year, musical acts will include Daryl Worley, War and Foghat.
In the early days, celebrities were a frequent part of the fair. Comedian Joe E. Brown, who appeared in “Some Like It Hot” with Marilyn Monroe, was at the first festival in 1934.
Johnny Weissmuller, known for playing Tarzan in a series of films in the 1930s and 1940s, visited one year.
Perhaps one of the biggest stars to visit the festival was Lawrence Welk, who came in 1958. Like many Lodi residents, he was from a German-speaking community in North Dakota. His family were Germans who had immigrated from Russia.
“He knew a lot of people and had relatives here in Lodi,” Thompson said.
In 1958, he came out with his band and performed at the Grape Bowl. Anyone who bought tickets for his show also received admission into the festival. In the years following his performance, other acts that appeared on “The Lawrence Welk Show” traveled to Lodi to perform.
The Budweiser Clydesdales have also made appearances, Thompson added. They were in the grand parade, then visited the festival grounds. The directors all went out to help hold the crowd back, Thompson said.
“We were afraid someone would get stepped on!” he said. No one did. “It was a great experience,” he said. Marvel, who’s expecting her eighth great-grandchild, is glad that the Grape Festival is still going strong, even if it’s changed over the years.
“It was such fun; the kids all had such a good time,” she said. “The Grape Festival was always important.”
Her favorite tradition — after performing with the Lodi Community Band, of course — is the grape murals.
But there’s always something for everyone at the Grape Festival, she said.
“I hope it continues. I’m sure it will,” she said.