1974 Terlingua Chili Cook-off ... Above (middle image) Terlingua teacher Trent Jones with baby Anna and friend Cindy Buchamon. Estimated number of people at this event was 10,000 +. Oh what fun they had and Oh what a mess they left.

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Olga and I lived directly next to the ghost town of Terlingua, so the cook off each year was literally in our back yard. The cook-off was good and bad. Good for the local economy and very bad for the environment. After the event was over the ghost town was covered in trash. As a Terlingua School class project I /we would take the students to the ghost town and with bid trash bag attempt to clean the place up. It was like bailing out the ocean with a bucket. Most of the trash collected was simply dumped down the open mine shafts that covered the area. The ghost town is covered with these open shafts. No signs to warn people of the dangers of falling in. To this day I wonder how many bodies are down at the bottom of some of those mines. Drunks that simply wondered off and disappeared.

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What first began in 1967 and organized by Texas historian and chili aficionado Wick Fowler and car manufacturer Carroll Shelby as a means to settle a storied feud between two journalists; namely Frank X. Tolbert who wrote for the Dallas Morning News, and a gentleman by the name of   H. Allen Smith who wrote a scathing article in Holiday Magazine entitled “Nobody Knows More About Chili Than I Do”.  

 

Below: From an old article I had saved 1975

 

CHILI GENESIS:

Not sure who the author is:

First Chile cook-off was in Terlingua Texas 1967.

One of the most common questions by late-corners to Terlingua in post - chili days is “How in hell did it all get started?’’

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It all got started as a kind of joke and whimsical proof of the efficacy of the practitioners of ‘‘public relations,’’ according to Bille Neale, president  of Dallas’s Point Communications, who has been in on every one of the chili­ fests  at  Terlingua.

Several members of the Chili Appreciation Society of Dallas were visiting over a bowl of red in Dallas one night in 1967 when somebody asked Tom Tierney, then a public relations man for Ford Motor Co., just what a PR man does.

Tierney replied that a good PR man could put a place like Terlingua (owned by former Terlingua service station man  David Witts, also of the CAS) on the map and offered to do so by whipping up a world championship chili  contest  at the unlikely  place.

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Dallas Morning News sage and undisputed champion Frank X. Tolbert was among the group as were Neale and the late John King, then editor of  a  Dallas  Newspaper.

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By November of that year the cadre included   racer   Carroll   Shelby,   all purpose wit H. Allen  Smith (living then and now in Alpine), and the late Wick Fowler, in whose memory recent cook-offs  have  been  conducted.

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“We figured maybe we’d attract 150 or so people," Neale, recalls, "and I think the actual count that first  year was  224  people.”

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The rest, as the saying goes, is history, with the crowds growing geometrically every year and feeder cooks-off as diverse as the Luckenbach “Hell Hath No fury” event, the “Sons of the Panetelas” at San Angelo, the San Marcos “Chilympiad” (said  to have attracted  40,000 “heads”  in 1975), and the U.S. Air Force whose official team was chosen in the cook-off at Good-fellow Air Force Base in September.

The granddaddy event, meanwhile, remains  the  cynosure  of  children.

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Estimating   crowds   is   problematical- -particularly when there are  no front or back “gates”, no tickets, no policemen to give an estimate, and nobody gives a damn about  statistics. But the 1974 crowd was conservatively estimated at 10,000 souls, and this reporter can give an estimate of the growth by the relative distance he had to park from the main drag each year.