Chili Society Was Born of an Unusual Recipe

Carroll Shelby insists that it all began as a joke. Just a bunch of hard-drinking buddies getting together in the wasteland of west Texas to have some fun and scorch their taste buds with a little chili.

They called it the World’s Championship Chili Cookoff, the name itself a mockery.

“It’s just a spoof, an adult Woodstock,” recalled Shelby, a former championship race-car driver and muscle-car designer and one of the organizers of that first event. “Chili is a state of mind.”

That was 30 years ago. The joke has since gone corporate, formally organizing in 1976 under the name International Chili Society with headquarters in Newport Beach.

And now, chili season is officially on again.

At least five of the preliminary cook-offs will be held in Orange County, including a benefit for the Salvation Army next Sunday at Old World Village in Huntington Beach. On May 3, a cook-off benefiting the Camp Cookie program--which provides camping trips to youths housed at the Orangewood Home--and ABATE--a motorcyclists’ rights group--will be held at the Swallows Inn in San Juan Capistrano. Winners will go to the state contest. And the big regional event will be held in Newport Beach next month.

These and some 150 local and regional ICS cook-offs across the nation will raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for charities, adding to the $30 million raised under the ICS banner since its inception. The winner of the Newport Beach contest will vie Oct. 4-5 for a total of $35,000 in prizes at the society’s 30th Anniversary World Championship Cookoff in Reno, Nev.

John Holz, one of the organizers of the Huntington Beach event, has entered dozens of cook-offs over the past decade, using recipes and concepts developed “over a bunch of Budweisers.”

Chili cook-offs have become part of the Orange County landscape. It’s impossible to imagine a year without their jovial community presence.

But as familiar as county residents are with the cook-offs, few know the history of how they came to be ubiquitous fund-raisers. Behind the events simmers a quarter-century of rancor over such decidedly non-jovial issues as trademark infringements, allegations of profiteering and murmurs of sabotage.

Much of the active battling is over. But scratch the surface of the chili wars and you run across feelings as hot as a fresh-picked serrano pepper.

So unsolvable have past splits been that three organizations now hold annual championship chili cook-offs. Two of them--ICS and the Chili Appreciation Society of America, a Texas-based spinoff--sanction hundreds of local and regional qualifying competitions that feed contestants into their national championships. And all three organizations can trace their roots to the original 1967 cook-off, a public relations stunt intended to help a couple of rich Californians--Shelby and the late C.V. Wood Jr., a Disney executive--unload what has been described as “200,000 acres of rocks and rattlesnakes in west Texas.”

Shelby himself--still active in Gardena-based car-related businesses and his foundation for low-income youths needing heart and kidney transplants--admits the first chili contest was a rigged spoof to help him sell the property. A grudge match in the rock patch seemed like a good idea.

It worked. Some 300 people--conveniently enough, most of them journalists--flew into the ghost town of Terlingua, a former mercury-mining enclave.

It’s hard to imagine why people would travel all that way to sleep on the ground and eat chili, but they did. Jim West, ICS executive director, thinks it has to do with the lure of chili itself.

“Chili is America’s food,” West said. “It was created by cattle-trail chuck wagons. They could cook the living daylights out of a bad cut of meat, add some chiles to it, and it would be nutritional. . . . It’s a macho food. How many guys do you know who brag about their tuna casserole?”

The cook-off story was a natural, and the media coverage went nationwide. That the contest was openly rigged added to the fun--of three judges, the first two split and the third claimed to have burned out his taste buds, and recused himself. Nothing to do but schedule a rematch for the following year.

“It was just an excuse to have a party,” West said. “Then the party became an excuse for fund-raising.”

The cook-offs chugged along merrily for a few years, even going relatively legit (judging was no longer rigged). By 1974, though, clashes among the founders led to the first rupture.

The late Dallas Morning News columnist Frank X. Tolbert, who had used the cook-offs to promote his chili book, “A Bowl of Red,” resigned from the board.

“My dad was always wanting it to be more of a festival-type thing,” said Tolbert’s daughter, Kathleen Tolbert Ryan, who lives near Dallas. “A group of people started really making it a money-making deal, and he didn’t like that.”

Shelby, who had registered the World’s Championship Chili Cookoffs as a trademark, took the name with him to Orange County, and the California-based cook-offs began in 1975 at the Tropico Gold Mine, then a sparsely populated area 90 miles northeast of Los Angeles. In typical California fashion, the crowd came straight out of Hollywood, including Joey Bishop, Robert Mitchum and Vicki Lawrence. Some 15,000 people showed up.

“By 10 o’clock there wasn’t any chili left,” West said.

Meanwhile, back in Terlingua, Tolbert and friends were busy organizing their own chili cook-off. But when they tried to call it the World’s Championship, the ICS turned to a lawyer with allegations of trademark infringement.

The Texas contingent backed off immediately and settled on calling itself the Chili Appreciation Society International, assuming the name of an informal group that dated to the ‘30s, and dubbed its competition the Terlingua International Chili Cookoff.

But a decade later, that group splintered again as Tolbert, increasingly upset over what he saw as the abandonment of the cook-off’s original party atmosphere, led his followers to a different part of the desert.

“It was just different viewpoints,” Ryan, Tolbert’s daughter, explained diplomatically. “I hate to bring up all this bad blood. We’re trying to ignore each other.”

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The Tolbert group arranged to hold its first chili cook-off in 1983 at the same time and date--high noon on the first Saturday of November--as the CASI cook-off. And they decided to hold it in Terlingua, as well, creating a showdown in which the Tolbert group accuses the CASI folks of firing the first shot.

“We had a location at Sawmill Canyon in Terlingua, and the other group demolished our road,” Ryan said. “We couldn’t even get in there. They used bulldozers, I guess.”

CASI president Ralph Hay denies his chiliheads were involved.

“That’s just a false rumor,” he said, his voice rising a bit. “When the split happened, Tolbert had picked their site out and the road did get washed out, that’s true, but there was no sabotage.”

While the two Texas groups have maintained more of the chili-purist way of partying, the ICS clearly has the hottest thing going in terms of size and money. Last October, 15,000 to 20,000 people gathered in Reno for the two-day world event.

The ICS covers its annual $200,000 budget through $30 memberships, the proceeds from the World’s Championship, and from an annual Memorial Day cook-off in Newport Beach. This year’s event will be held at 4 p.m. May 22 in the parking lot of the Newport Harbor Nautical Museum. The winner gets a berth at the World’s Championship.

ICS also sanctions local and regional cook-offs for a $350 fee, and is developing its own line of mild chili seasoning that it hopes to retail for $1.89 a package.

West admits that with all this attention to business, chili isn’t as much fun as it used to be. The competition at the cook-offs is stiffer, which makes for better chili but chillier camaraderie as contestants focus less on enjoying themselves than on winning the $25,000 champion’s check.

“I think, like everything, I can see the good and bad of it,” said West. “I have great memories of when it was a good old boys society, just a big party.”

Yet there are few regrets. The organization has grown up. A desert gathering by a bunch of chili-eating, drink-guzzling publicity hounds has evolved into a force for good in countless communities across the country.

“It’s a great feeling that this has become a very viable fund-raiser for a lot of organizations,” said West. “Everything changes. You certainly can’t just sit back and think about all the good times.”

For information on entering the Huntington Beach cook-off, call John Holz at (714) 840-6732. For the San Juan Capistrano cook-off, call the Swallows Inn at (714) 493-3188. For the Newport Beach cook-off, call the ICS at (714) 631-1780.