In the late fifties Mayor Goodman was under pressure from the city fathers of Fort Stockton to do more to promote the town.  Sure, he’d convinced Pecos Pickle Company to build their new facility here in town, and that had brought a few dozen new jobs to the community.  But they were looking for something a lot bigger, and without the lingering smell of pickle juice.  Something that would put Fort Stockton on the map.

The mayor’s excuse that we didn’t have the weather or population of California that made people want to come here was shot to hell when Fort Stockton’s very own Ben Tolbert was instrumental in putting the deal together that created Six Flags Over Texas in 1961.  “It’s no hotter in Dallas – Fort Worth than it is here in summer.  We want to see some tourist dollars,” Dixon Tubbs told the mayor in front of God and everyone at a city council meeting.  

“And some tourists to eat up some of the damn pickles stored in those vats outside town,” Margaret Mayfield joined in. “I have to roll up my windows every time I drive by the place or my sinuses swell shut. I don’t have air conditioning in my Mercury Monterey. Makes for a damned uncomfortable drive back to town.”

Mayor Goodman darned sure wasn’t going to ask Ben Tolbert for any ideas. He tended to turn around and go the other way whenever he saw Ben’s ’57 Ford Skyliner parked anywhere. But the mayor did somehow get wind of a Thrill Show that might be available to come to Fort Stockton in the summer of ’62. It wasn’t Six Flags Over Texas, but it might be enough to get everyone off his back and maybe spark something bigger.

By then, the show was headlined by Chuck Chitwood, Joie’s younger cousin, who’d purchased the rights and the 1958 Corvette from Joie back in ’59 and was still touring, mainly in the south, but wherever the assurance of a big crowd could make it worth his time. Talk of men bring shot into space, movies involving a British spy with a license to kill, and rumors of Russia possibly planting nuclear bombs in Cuba, just 90 miles from the US border, had all made the Thrill Show a little less thrilling, but it was all the mayor had to work with. Calls were made. And finally returned.

“Fort Stockton?” Chuck snorted. “Ain’t that like just about to Mexico?” Mayor Goodman clarified the town’s position on the map. “I’m guessin’ it’s hotter than a sumbitch down there in the summer time. How ‘bout a Christmas show?” The mayor, facing reelection in November, said that wouldn’t work.

“What about October?” Mayor Goodman asked.

Chuck looked at his calendar and it was more empty than the look in his girlfriend’s eyes when he’d proposed. “I can squeeze you in,” he replied. “But I’m gonna need a guaranteed gate of $10,000 for me ‘n the boys, $2,500 up front to cover expense of getting the Corvette and the crew out there.” Mayor Goodman knew he could tap into the MDF (Mayoral Discretionary Fund) if he had to to come up with that kind of cash, since nobody knew about it, anyway. “Done,” he said as he hung up, leaving the other details to be worked out between the underlings of both parties.

The mayor had six months to sell the thing, and he pulled out all the stops he could. He met with every key citizen, group, and business that could have an impact on the event. To his credit, he was able to sell the thing as an event that would benefit everybody in town. It took only one meeting over breakfast at the Dairy Twin to get Rusty Hammer from the Rusty Hammer Hardware Store to donate all the lumber and materials to build all the ramps that would be used.

Mr. Harbinger, the wood shop teacher at Jim Bowie High School “Home of the Fightin’ Knives,” provided all the labor, assigning the work to the boys who needed extra credit in order to pass his class. The Eggs & Ammo and ESSO station teamed up to jointly sponsor all the fuel and concessions that would be sold in and around the National Guard Armory, which had been leased out for the entire weekend. The Naughty Pine Motel kicked in a substantial amount of cash to cover the overhead of the show and in return received the rights to promote the motel as “The Place to go for Almost as Many Thrills as the Thrill Show Itself”. The posters that were created caused quite a stir when they started being seen all over town.

Brother Bob, over at Second Baptist Church of Fort Stockton, got the congregation involved by using the 1962 Mission Outreach Fund to build a giant “Ring of Hellfire” that would erupt as the Corvette flew through, at the midway point between the ramps. The original plan had been for Brother Bob to be atop the “Ring” with the Good Book and a microphone to give a quick message just as the Corvette cleared the flames, but the Fire Marshall shot that idea down. Brother Bob had to settle for Gospel Tracts being shot out of the tailpipe of the Corvette once it successfully cleared the ring.

Kathy Sue Sunderland, assistant manager of the dairy products department at the Piggly Wiggly, was tapped to be ‘Miss Milk Jugs of 1962’ and wave the checkered flag to start the event, much to the dismay of Trixie who thought she had the position locked up early on and let her disappointment be known to anyone who’d listen. And most people had to.

The Ben Franklin donated all the poster board, crepe paper, glue, Popsicle sticks, and markers to create the 1:132 scale model of Fort Stockton that the Corvette would jump over for the grand finale, while the girls’ choir from Our Lady of Immeasurable Concern sang a version of My Little Town directed by Sister Thelma. Simon and Garfunkel, who happened to be passing through Fort Stockton while the choir was rehearsing, liked the song so much they recorded it themselves a few years later.

As the day of the big event got closer, the excitement became palpable. In fact, so many people had volunteered to be part of the support staff that it became a legitimate concern there wouldn’t be enough people to actually fill the stands at the armory. An emergency session of the Executive Board of the Town Council was called. (The Executive Board was everyone on the Town Council except Mrs. Mayfield, who nobody got along with.) It was decided to have Mayor Goodman reach out to the warden at Huntsville State Prison and see about bussing a load or two of prisoners in to handle all the positions that didn’t involve handling cash or fireworks, or being around the girls’ choir. The warden, being a distant cousin of the Goodman family, was quick to want to work out a deal, especially for a cut of the gate, but it was slow in coming to terms both parties could agree to. The last place anyone wants to be is between two Goodmans fighting over public funds. In the end, a deal was cut. It always is.

Lucinda was in charge of the Welcoming Committee that met Chuck Chitwood and the crew at the Naughty Pine as they drove into town.  That evening, after the official welcome at the motel, they all arrived at the Lucky Lady Lounge, where a huge party had been planned to kick off the event.  Special tickets had been sold for a VIP Reception upstairs, in the rooms that had one time been where the sporting girls plied their trade when Fort Stockton was a wild frontier town.

Was too much alcohol served? Probably so. Can everything that happened the following day be blamed on that? Only if you were part of the Investigating Committee from Austin that looked into the aftermath and was looking for scapegoats.

Some tried to say that the pickle brine that leaked out the backend of the truck from Pecos Pickles delivering a fresh load of Chilly Dillys is where the trouble started. Granted, it did make the track where the Corvette was launched more slippery than it should have been. Others blamed it on the ramp the boys from the JBHS wood shop class built, saying it was made at an angle that was substantially off from the plan they’d been given. In retrospect, it might not have been the best idea to give them the responsibility in the first place, seeing as how none of them could complete the magazine rack project for Mother’s Day. Others tried to pass off the problems that happened on the fact that Rusty had donated lumber and plywood he knew to be infected with South Texas Powder Post Beetle larva, which anyone knows wouldn’t support the entire weight of a Corvette, despite it being fiberglass.

But there was plenty of blame to go around.

Trixie, who helped Kathy Sue Sunderland get into her “Miss Milk Jugs-1962” two-piece bathing suit “apparently forgot” to make certain the single eye hook holding the top piece of the suit was properly secured. When Kathy Sue raised her arms to wave the checkered flag, the top’s hook came undone and took off in the wind like two massive red Solo cups blowing off a beer cooler. Chuck Chitwood, completely caught off guard by the sudden mountain views, headed out of the gate with less than his full powers of concentration focused on the ramp ahead.

The Investigating Committee from Austin could never determine for sure whether it was pilot error, the shoddy construction of the ramp, the Powder Post Beetles, or Miss Milk Jug’s wardrobe malfunction that was to blame. But the Corvette didn’t completely clear the “Ring of Hellfire” before the Second Baptist tracts shot out of the tailpipe, hit the ring, and immediately burst into flames, raining dow a hailstorm of flaming pamphlets on the scene below. Folks later said it looked like the Armageddon described in the pamphlets, though at the time they thought it was just part of the show.

The Our Lady of Immeasurable Concern Girls Choir had already begun singing My Little Town before the fire from above began falling onto the 1:132 scale model of Fort Stockton below. By the time they began the second verse, the entire miniaturized version of Fort Stockton was going up in flames behind them. The Huntsville prisoners, fearful of the girls in the choir getting burned, threw themselves on the girls to protect them from the flames. Concerned citizens in the crowd, seeing their daughters, sisters, and nieces suddenly rolling on the ground under convicted felons, con-artists, and murderers, reached for the concealed weapons in their jackets, boots, and beer coolers and began firing indiscriminately into the burning mayhem in front of them.

Chuck Chitwood, seeing an aerial view of the chaos below him, hit the landing ramp at full speed and kept going, never touching the brake pedal. He drove straight to the Naughty Pine, his crew only a few minutes behind. They elected not to return to Texas to be interviewed by the Investigating Committee from Austin.

Miraculously, not a single girl from the choir was injured, although two of them became pen pals with the inmates that had fallen on them. The Borden girl went on to marry the convict who had fallen on her and later moved to Austin where he still serves in the Texas Legislature. None of the convicts were seriously injured, although one did receive second degree burns on his back from rolling over the miniature Piggly Wiggly in the miniature Fort Stockton to put out the flames. “Second degree!” he laughed. “Story of my life.” All in all, the marksmanship of the crowd was one of the bigger embarrassments to come out of the whole episode.

Pecos Pickles saw an increase in sales, as they were credited with saving lives, the brine leaking from the delivery truck being discovered to be a fire retardant that saved the fire from reaching the parking lot where hundreds of cars could have gone up in flames.

The weekend following the Thrill Show disaster, Russian nukes were discovered in Cuba and the entire world was thought to possibly be on the precipice of annihilation, taking the pressure off city leaders to come up with any plausible answers for what had happened.  The Investigating Committee from Austin took almost a year to prepare their report.  They were scheduled to deliver the results to Governor Connelly the Monday after Thanksgiving, 1963.  That never happened.

Most surprisingly, Mayor Goodman was reelected in a landslide victory the month after the incident, vowing to punish those who’d said the Chitwood Thrill Show had been anything but a rousing success and promising a Wild West Show for the following fall to coincide with the Jim Bowie High School Homecoming game against Marfa. He asked Sister Thelma to put together a playlist of original songs for the Girl’s Choir to sing for the event. She respectfully declined, so he called a buddy with some musical experience. He began work on the project as soon as the mayor was sworn in. It eventually became famous when it was adapted for the stage as Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.