The ongoing and perhaps never-ending public feud over who makes the best chili— Texans or people who aren’t from Texas and don’t know beans about chili— has its origins in a book by a Dallas columnist and a magazine article by a New York writer. 

The book was A Bowl of Red by Dallas Morning News columnist Frank X. Tolbert, which explained to readers the wonders of Texas-style chili con carne. Most Americans in 1966, when the book was published, didn’t know a bowl of red from a bowl of any other color. 

H. Allen Smith, a popular humorist of the mid-twentieth century, penned a tongue-in cheek humor piece titled “Nobody Knows More About Chili Than I Do” for the August 1967 issue of Holiday magazine. The story included a recipe that got Tolbert’s attention but not in a good way. He used his column to deride Smith’s version of chili as a “chili-flavored, low torque, beef and veggie soup.” 

Word got back to Smith in New York. He went on record as saying the title of Tolbert’s book should be changed to “A Bowl of Slop.” 

Them was fightin’ words. Or, more accurately, marketing words. 

Tolbert and PR man Tom Tierney had already conceived the idea of staging a “World Series of Cchili” to promote Tolbert’s book, drum up some positive publicity for the Chili Appreciation Society International (CASI) and maybe sell some West Texas real estate in the process. 

Carroll Shelby of Mustang Shelby fame, offered to host the cookoff at his Terlingua Ranch, which he co-owned with Dallas attorney David Pitts. The land consisted of some 200,000 acres in and around the former quicksilver mining town of Terlingua. Shelby hoped to sell some of those acres to the people who came to that rugged, remote, mostly dry and frequently stunning landscape for the first ever World Series of Chili.

Representing Texas chili would be Wick Fowler, a journalist, former detective, chief chef of the appreciation society and the man behind the popular Wick Fowler’s Two-Alarm Chili Mix. CASI issued a formal challenge to Beverly Hills chef-to-the-stars Dave Chassen to represent that foreign chili but Chassen got sick (maybe from eating Hollywood chili) and had to beg off.

 H. Allen Smith, graciously or not, agreed to take his place.

Texan Gary Cartwright wrote about this so-called World Series of Chili for Sports Illustrated, where he described CASI as “an indefinite number of middle-aged, middle-class chili lovers” and added: “Texans for historical reasons believe that any chili that isn’t theirs is trickery. A man who orders chili with beans would probably put catsup in his coffee.”

Smith described the members of CASI as “childish, semi-rumpled Rotarian cracker-breakers, withered and pockmarked from eating that mud puddin’ Texans choose to call chili.” He called Fowler “hen-headed” and defined “fowler” as a “despoiler of little birds.” 

When all the (mostly) good natured trash talking was finished, about 200 people ending up making the trek to Terlingua by automobile and private plane to wander around Shelby’s Terlingua Ranch, drink beer and maybe sample some chili.

CASI allowed each contestant to select a judge. Fowler chose Floyd Schneider, a long-time pal and vice-president of a San Antonio brewery. H. Allen Smith surprised everybody by naming legendary Texas rancher and justice of the peace Hallie Stillwell of Alpine as his judge. (Later, CASI would learn that Smith and Stillwell were cousins.) CASI picked Pitts to serve as a third judge to cast the deciding vote in a contest designed and destined to end in a tie.

The actual cookoff was anticlimactic. Stillwell voted for her cousin Smith. Schneider went with his pal Fowler. That left bragging rights up to Pitts, who appeared to go into convulsions before declaring that his taste buds had been paralyzed and shocked by tasting one of the concoctions but, dang it, he was just too disoriented and his taste buds too traumatized to know which batch did him in. 

The organizers decided to settle the matter at a second cookoff the following year. That contest was either declared a draw or a masked bandit with a rifle grabbed the ballot box and threw it down a mineshaft. Accounts vary. 

Fifty-eight years later, the Terlingua International Chili Championship is held on the first weekend of November (Oct. 29-Nov. 1 this year) and draws thousands of people to the still remote outpost. CASI raises money for charity through the promotion of Texas red chili and sanctions more than 500 chili cook-offs around the world as qualifying events. The weekend now features two separate chill cookoffs in Terlingua…but that’s a whole nother story.