Tragedy to triumph: One family’s chili saga
As the judges at the 2016 Terlingua International Chili Championship started counting down the winners, Lisa Edmonson Stone was resigned to the disappointment of failing to place in the top 10 of what’s considered the premier chili cookoff in the country. She stopped recording the ceremony with her phone after the runner-up was announced and begrudgingly texted her husband that it wasn’t going to be her year.
Her older sister Dianne Lewis wasn’t quite as ready to call it quits on that November day. Holding Stone’s ticket tightly in her hand, the entry number printed on it slowly started to line up to the announcers’ numbers — one, zero, three, four, and after an agonizingly long dramatic pause, seven.
“I looked over and Dianne was going into convulsions,” said Stone, the newly crowned world champion of chili. “And then it all went into a blur.”
Winning a world championship and the iconic 25-pound chile pepper-shaped trophy is the envy of any competitive chili cook, but it meant more for the Edmonson sisters than any of the Terlingua judges could have possibly imagined. It pulled out a family Edmonson triumph from the ashes of tragedy.
An unsolved crime
In the 1980s, their father Dan Edmonson would cart his children, who included four daughters (Dianne, Lisa, Terry and Elaine), around to weekend chili cook-offs with the goal of qualifying for Terlingua with his “Bulls Eye Chili.” There’s a vetting process to TICC, and cooks have to accumulate enough points in other competitions to qualify.
In 1983, Dan earned his ticket, but he never made it to Brewster County. Just weeks away from the competition, he was murdered, his body found on the main University of Texas at San Antonio campus by a security guard at 1 a.m. Oct. 16. The San Antonio Police Department considers it a cold case with no suspects.
The tragedy affected the family members in too many ways to mention, and the chili pots went dormant for 24 years.
Then in 2007, youngest sister Elaine, who was only 9 when her dad died, called Lewis with a plan to preserve his memory. They would start competing in local chili cookoffs in an attempt to qualify for Terlingua and complete Dan’s quest.
“We never looked back,” Lewis said.
By 2011, five members of the family — including Lewis, Stone and Elaine — made their TICC debut.
All of the sisters have jumped into the competition fray, as well as Dan’s grandchildren, nieces, nephews and future in-laws. The competitors, traditionally all wearing the same color of shirt, currently range in age from their mid-50s down to 11-year-old great-granddaughter, Emily DeLuna.
“I wanted to originally show up and show support as a spectator and was persuaded to join in on one of the bigger cookoffs,” Stone’s daughter Amanda Stone said of her first competition. “I cooked, and I was like, ‘Oh my goodness — I’m hooked. This is going to be my life the rest of the way.’ And it has been.”
‘Gets a little tense’
The team branded itself as the “Chili Con Carnies,” a fun take on their penchant for having a good time while working an exhausting circuslike competition calendar that extends up to 30 to 40 weekends per year in the quest to all qualify for TICC.
“You see the Carnies all the time,” said Rick Powell, a member of the board of directors for the Chili Appreciation Society International. “If there’s a local cook, you can bet that they will be there.”
The family craves competition, and as much as they want to beat the fields of hundreds of other cooks, they are also gunning for each other. There isn’t any money to be won in CASI events; the proceeds go to local charities.
Because each TICC competitor must earn their own 12 points (the top 10 cooks at qualifying cookoffs all win points, with first-place winners earning four points), the system often pits sister vs. sister and sometimes even mother vs. daughter.
“It definitely gets a little tense the closer it gets to turn in,” Terry Edmonson Foresman said. “It’s a thrill when we all do well, but we all want to be first.”
Stone’s victory at Terlingua took it all to a different level.
Reigning and former TICC champions no longer have to qualify during the chili year. If she can defend her championship in the first weekend of November, she would be just the second competitor to win back-to-back at TICC.
“Anytime (Stone) shows up for a competition, it’s a big deal,” Powell said. “Everybody wants to take a shot at the reigning world champion. It’s big for the event. It’s big for the sponsors.”
It’s safe to say the Edmonson stamp on the Texas chili scene has been fulfilled.