TERLINGUA — Folks from around the world are pouring into Terlingua this week for the 57th Annual Chili Cookoff — or more accurately, two dueling cookoffs that swell sunbaked South Brewster County to a population upwards of 10,000 people.
Sometimes not-so-affectionately known as “Redneck Burning Man,” both the Tolbert Chili Cookoff and the Chili Appreciation Society International (CASI) festival attract spice-loving hordes for music, revelry and copious amounts of cold beverages.
The weekend ends with numerous cases of heartburn and heartbreak — but also big checks for charitable causes, including scholarships for Terlingua CSD students and the local EMS department. “Making a positive difference in someone’s life with every pot of chili cooked” is one of CASI’s many mottos.
Perhaps distracted by high-stakes competitive chili tasting and wet T-shirt contests, many chiliheads don’t know their history — or only know an abbreviated version of the equally raucous first-annual cookoff, held on October 21, 1967.
The Tolbert Cookoff website has a truncated version of the truth: that the 1967 contest was between Austin journalist Wick Fowler and “New Yorker” H. Allen Smith. “It was supposed to settle the dispute over who knew more about chili — Texans or New Yorkers.”
Other retellings of the event simply say that it was to decide whether or not beans belong in chili, or grossly mischaracterize Smith as being from North Carolina. (In the editorial opinion of The Big Bend Sentinel, there’s also too much emphasis on food — the event was an effort by three reporters to create a fun diversion for hundreds of fellow Texas journalists.)
The hundreds of breathless articles about the spectacle published over the last five-odd decades only mention Smith as a Yankee fly-by-night, though Smith was a resident of Alpine from the famous cookoff until his death.
At the time, he was an accomplished author of over three dozen books that bounced from slot to slot on the New York Times bestseller list for most of the 1940s. He faded in popularity in the post-war years but maintained a regular presence in the columns and opinion pages of major magazines for the rest of his life.
Smith was born in McLeansboro, Illinois, in 1907, and attended school up until the eighth grade, dropping out after being caught smoking a cigarette in the boys bathroom. The teenage miscreant developed interest in writing after a short story called “Stranded on a Davenport” — about a carnal act performed on a sofa — gained notoriety amongst his peers.
At the age of 15 he started working for newspapers, writing copy for dailies in Indiana, Oklahoma and Colorado before hitting the big time at the New York World-Telegram.
Much later in life, after moving to Alpine, he became friends with the great Big Bend folklorist Elton Miles, who collected an anthology of his best work in the early 1970s. In the book’s forward, he praised Smith’s writing as both goofy and deeply-considered, taking on critiques of power and society. “Smith’s humor is democratic in its leveling of all social levels in their folly and in his uncritical allowance of the individual to make a jackass of himself if he chooses,” Miles wrote.
A bowl of red
Smith fired the first shot in the Great Chili War of 1967 with an article in Holiday magazine titled “Nobody Knows More About Chili Than I Do.” In the inflammatory (and no doubt exaggerated) essay, he describes being a kid in Decatur, Illinois, who received 10 cents a day for his lunch — which he spent on chili at a local diner.
The chunky concoction cast a spell over the young Smith, to the point that it tore his family apart. “No living man can put together a pot of chili as ambrosial, as delicately and zestfully flavorful, as the chili I make. This fact is so stern, so granitic, that it belongs in the encyclopedias, as well as in all standard histories of civilization,” he wrote.
“That is the way of us chili men,” Smith continued. “Each of us knows that his chili is light years beyond other chili in quality and singularity; each of us knows that all other chili is such vile slop that a coyote would turn his back on it.”
Smith also went so far as to take a cheap shot at Frank Tolbert, the author of the wildly popular “Tolbert’s Texas” column in the Dallas Morning News and widely considered the state’s foremost authority on chili. In 1966, Tolbert published A Bowl of Red, a masterful and totally Texan reflection on the importance of the dish.
At issue was Tolbert’s use of cornmeal. “Heaven help us one and all!” Smith wrote. “You might as well throw in some puffed rice, or a handful of shredded alfalfa, or a few Maraschino cherries.”
Little did Smith know, his adversary was planning a cookoff with a few powerful friends in the Dallas-based International Chili Appreciation Society. Tolbert was hoping that the cookoff might generate press for A Bowl of Red; his friend Carroll Shelby, legendary race car driver and the man credited with souping up the Mustang, hoped to generate press for Terlingua.
In 1966, Terlingua had a population of two — but times were changing. Shelby had just purchased 200,000 acres of mining ruins and scrubland that would eventually become Terlingua Ranch and hoped to sell off slices of it, sight unseen, to would-be investors. Some lucked into breathtaking mountain vistas; others were suckered into landlocked lots with nothing but the wind to call their own.
Tolbert had already chosen Wick Fowler, mastermind behind Wick Fowler’s Famous Two-Alarm Chili Kit, sold in stores to this day. Smith made the perfect villain. His article in Holiday had generated quite a stir, to the point that his editor mailed him a stapled-together stack of hate mail.
Texans’ complaints fit into a few general categories. The two greatest sins were ingredients (Smith’s use of bell pepper and beans were widely poo-pooed) and texture (the beef should be chunked instead of ground and the end result more stew than soup.) “His recipe wouldn’t be fit to serve to a chihuahua dog,” wrote one disgruntled reader.
Readers also quarreled about the origin of chili, which Smith claimed came to the modern-day San Antonio area in the 1720s — when the future Lone Star state was considered part of Nueva España — thanks to a group of immigrants from the Canary Islands. Some readers clung to the belief that the dish came from Mexico proper. Fowler agreed with Smith to a point, but rejected the Spanish colonial theory, arguing in A Bowl of Red that there are few historical mentions of the dish before the late 19th century, when street vendors known as “Chili Queens” ruled the plaza.
And so the first Terlingua Chili Cookoff was born. Tolbert set a date for late October, and the Texan media practically bullied what one Holiday reader called “a bull-shooting Yankee blow-hard” into attending. “The hull [sic] state seems to be in an uproar and they are accusing me of all manner of perversions,” Smith wrote to friend Dick Bradford in August 1967. “A San Antonio paper says it knows it to be a fact that I stir sugar into my martinis.”
The night before the “Great Chili Confrontation” — the name of one of Smith’s later books — private jets flew into Terlingua from Dallas and Los Angeles. The passengers promptly washed the private jet off of them by sleeping cowboy-style on the front lawn of a ranch house deep in the Christmas Mountains.
Both competitors were allowed to choose a judge, and a third allegedly impartial judge would break the tie. Fowler tapped San Antonio-based beer executive Floyd Schneider, and Smith chose local rancher and Justice of the Peace Hallie Stillwell.
Accounts vary as to how many people attended the first cookoff — estimates range from 250 people to 3000. They packed what’s now the porch of the Starlight Theatre, breathing spicy, beefy life into what was then an actual ghost town.
Both competitors came with guns slung around their hips, but the match ended with no hurt feelings. The impartial judge David Witts — self-proclaimed “Mayor of Terlingua” — took one bite of chili and had to call it quits. He said his taste buds had been burned off, and in the panic couldn’t remember which chili was which.
Trouble in paradise
At least 40 Texas newspapers reported on the Terlingua Chili Cookoff, spawning a massive cult following. Though the buzzy competition ended in a draw, Fowler took the opportunity in the Temple Daily Telegram to take a few more potshots. “The maternity ward has to warm up Smith’s formula before feeding it to newborn babies,” he told a reporter, and claimed that the citizens of Terlingua planned to make Smith their honorary village idiot. “The town is so small they can’t afford a full-time idiot,” he said.
Private correspondence between Fowler and Smith was much friendlier. After the cookoff, Smith sent Fowler a magazine clipping with a recipe for a dish called “chili con tuna” –– “Why I left [New York],” he scrawled at the top.
As the hubbub died down, Smith was beginning a new life in Alpine, where he built a Mexican-inspired house on a hill with a view of the mountains. After decades in the New York City suburbs, which were developing at a breakneck pace, he was seeking somewhere quiet he and his wife could settle into old age.
He quickly realized that small town life wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. “In and around NYC people don’t bother you,” he wrote to a friend in July 1969. “In this little town everybody bothers you.”
This may — in part — be due to his local notoriety. “Most people don’t think about books when they meet me. They just say, ‘Oh, the chili man!’” he wrote. “Forty books and just one pot of chili at Terlingua and I’m the chili man.”
Some locals quickly soured on the stranger, finding that the chili man was a pot-stirrer in more than one sense of the word. He referred to the Alpine Avalanche as the “Weekly Gut Rumble” and influenced others to do the same — which of course curried no favor with the editors. Folks assumed the fancy writer on the hill was rich and charged him extra for services, fueling a constant state of paranoia.
Two and a half years into the move, a pair of reporters from Time magazine visited Smith at his home, where they chatted for 10 hours over drinks. He assumed that what was shared in a boozy haze was off the record, but his house guests weren’t under the same impression.
On March 9, they published the following paragraph in a selection of celebrity news briefs:
Two years ago, when life in polluted New York City got to be too much for humorist H. Allen Smith, he packed up his wife and headed for Alpine, Texas. There he built a house and settled back to enjoy the good pure life. Now, Smith says, he is suffering mightily from “people pollution.” The angry humorist insists that he has never seen “such a goddamned bunch of bigoted, pious, lying, cheating bastards in all my life.”
That week’s Avalanche was dedicated to publishing angry letters about Smith’s comments. “READERS ANSWER HA’S SCURRILOUS ATTACK,” screamed a rare headline above the masthead.
“How could this Mr. Smith write anything so slanderous about the warm, friendly people of Alpine who gave him such a grand reception when he arrived there?” one reader wondered.
B.A. Johnson of San Antonio went so far as to suggest the City of Alpine should file a defamation suit for “tearing down the good reputation of a fine city and its fine people by a malicious, profane and obscene statement.”
Alpine local Walter N. Harrison was more circumspect. “Who the hell is H. Allen Smith?” he wrote.
For over a month, the “Weekly Gut Rumble” continued churning out letters to the editor. Smith never responded to the newspaper directly, and also never refuted his comments. “This was a condensation of ten hours of talk, none of which, I understood, was for publication,” he wrote in an unpublished essay. “I sometimes say that most of the people in Alpine read nothing but the eye chart in the optometrist’s office, and they consider it to have grace and flow and deep meaning, with overtones of spiritual beauty.”
Elsewhere in the Big Bend, folks seemed to be amused to see the Fighting Bucks slandered in the press. “Say, if you really want to make those pious Alpinots mad –– just tell them you are moving lock, stock and ass down to Presidio,” wrote Tex Millington. “That will turn ‘em on like pissing on an anthill on a hot day.”
Another Presidian, 74 year-old Thomas R. Scott, semi-seriously proposed a house swap so he and his wife could be closer to the hospital.
Smith even went so far as to write to outlaw writer Nelson Algren, one of the 20th century’s most prominent literary figures, about the incident after finding out about Algren’s own run-in with the Alpine rank and file. As a young man, the itinerant Algren worked odd jobs across the West and eventually ended up in Far West Texas, where he started working on a novel.
In January 1934, Algren — about to head back home to Chicago — stole a typewriter from Sul Ross State University and did five months’ hard time in the Brewster County Jail. (He would later credit the incident with sparking his interest in telling the stories of the criminal underground.)
“I am in bad odor with more than half the Anglo population and going to the post office can sometimes be a tribulation,” Smith wrote.
For his part, former rival Frank Tolbert, in his column, implored readers to “forgive the old churl.”
The great chili confrontation in the sky
Tolbert was about to deal with his own series of unfortunate events as the chili cookoff continued to grow. Annual attendance ballooned from hundreds to thousands, and then — as now — the lack of emergency services was worrying.
Between what’s now the Starlight and the Family Crisis Center is a mostly-dry waterway called Dirty Woman Creek. Drunk people seemed to be drawn to the creek like moths to a light. 1977 was a wet year, and Tolbert became concerned that enough people had fallen in when it was dry that a flash-flood could be a fatal disaster.
The flooding was one of a few reasons the chili cookoff was moved to Glen Pepper’s Arriba Terlingua (also referred to as Villa de la Mina.) There was more room to spread out, and an established concert area that saw performances from the likes of Gary P. Nunn.
The whole attitude of the event was changing — it went from a free-wheeling rivalry between friends to a regimented tournament with qualifying cookoffs and regulations. In 1972, Allen — then still an occasional guest star — implored his old friend Justice of the Peace Hallie Stillwell to arrest a caterer from Midland who allegedly planned to use wild boar meat. (It was also rumored that a woman had hired a Moroccan chef to import a pound of camel.)
Tolbert and his friend Shelby had also started to disagree about how the event should be run. The cookoff split into two factions in 1982 after Shelby sued for the title of “World Championship Chili Cookoff” and won.
Ross McSwain of the San Angelo Standard, a regular attendee, wrote in 1984 that the quality of the events took a hit. “The cookoffs were bland this year, lacking imagination and purpose,” he wrote. “Even the cooks were dull spirited, due perhaps to knowing that some of their friends and competitors were cooking and partying without them down the road.”
McSwain also noticed that the locals did not seem to relish the festival as much as the chiliheads did — for one, it was all-hands-on-deck keeping the town afloat for one hundred times the local population. Then there was the noise and the trash and the crime.
It was a double-edged sword — the cookoff also bought South Brewster County an ambulance in 1982, and Terlinguans were worried that the regular source of big-ticket necessities would take a hit in the latest chili confrontation.
“In final analysis, Terlingua is a frame of mind which cannot and should not be bought or owned by anybody,” McSwain wrote.
By the time of the great cookoff split, the two original competitors had passed away. Wick Fowler, former Vietnam War correspondent and spice purveyor, died of Lou Gehrig’s disease in September 1972.
In February 1976, H. Allen Smith was found dead in a hotel room in San Francisco. He was 68 years old.
Tellingly, his obituary in the New York Times does not mention a word about Smith’s local reputation as the “Chili Man,” instead describing him as “one of the best-known Americans in the 1940s” and as “a craftsman of the put-down.”
“I am generally classified as a humorist,” the Times quoted. “but I don’t particularly care for the designation. I prefer to think of myself as a reporter, a reporter with a humorous slant. I am funny only in the sense that the world is funny.”
But Smith no doubt died as he lived — thinking himself the best chili cook on earth. “I figured I lost because I didn’t win,” he once wrote of the first cookoff. “The result hasn’t changed my opinion a bit.”
Special thanks to Victoria Contreras. All materials cited can be found in the H. Allen Smith collection at the Archives of the Big Bend, Sul Ross State University.