Chili Con Controversy

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. And the big regional event will be held in Newport Beach in May.

These and 150 local and regional International Chili Society cook-offs nationwide will raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for charities, adding to the $30 million raised under the ICS banner since its inception.

Chili cook-offs have become part of the Orange County landscape. Few residents, however, know the history of how they came to be ubiquitous fund-raisers. Behind the events simmers a quarter-century of rancor over such issues as trademark infringements, allegations of profiteering and murmurs of sabotage.

Much of the active battling is done with. 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--the International Chili Society and the Chili Appreciation Society International, a Texas-based spinoff--sanction hundreds of local and regional qualifying competitions that feed contestants into their national championships. The third, the Behind the Store Cookoff, is very informal and does not sanction regional events.

All three groups can trace their roots to the original 1967 cook-off in the ghost town of Terlingua, Texas.

“Chili is America’s food,” said Jim West, ICS executive director. “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-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 organizing the original Terlingua cook-offs.

“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, 90 miles northeast of Los Angeles. Some 15,000 people showed up, including Hollywood celebrities.

“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 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, where they hold the annual Behind the Store Cookoff.

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. In October, 15,000 to 20,000 people gathered in Reno for the two-day world event.

The International Chili Society covers its annual $200,000 budget through $30 memberships, the proceeds from the 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.

The society also sanctions local and regional cook-offs for a $350 fee, and hopes to retail a line of chili seasoning.

West concedes 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,” West said. “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,” West said. “Everything changes. You certainly can’t just sit back and think about all the good times.”