Now in its 30th year, the Magnolia Blossom Festival is not just a local little get-together in a small southwest Arkansas town. It’s far more than that — and always has been. From the jump, the event and its ensuing main event, a grilling competition deemed the World Championship Steak Cook-Off, were made to be different.
Going back to the beginning, it was not any ordinary dog-and-pony show. It was well thought out, planned to be unique, and based on already proven festival tactics. But there were also hurdles to overcome such as logistical nightmares and little to no funding at first. But even from the outset, crowds came, cookers cooked and a future president of the United States legitimized the event. All the quirks and little details of the annual May revel jumbled together into one giant celebratory weekend to produce what is still today one of the more lauded small town festivals in the south. Essentially, it was made to last.
The Blossom Festival itself was not completely born out of thin air. It sprung around Magnolia’s Sidewalk Art Show that every third weekend in May since 1952 showcased local drawings, paintings, sculptures, and photographs on the lawn of Columbia County’s historic downtown courthouse. But town officials had the foresight and desire for a larger community event.
“W.C. Blewster, the Chamber of Commerce director [in the 1970s and early 1980s], always wanted some kind of town event or festival,” said Rochelle McMahon, one of the original organizers of the Blossom Festival. “It was really his original vision.”
Lester Hutchins, who presided over the Magnolia-Columbia County Chamber of Commerce after Blewster, felt the already established downtown art show was the perfect stage to build around.
A committee was soon founded that included numerous area volunteers. In the year-plus leading up to the first festival, they went to work organizing, brainstorming, and researching what could and would work in Magnolia. There was little funding in the beginning, but the community backed the event.
“We had $100,” McMahon added. “We couldn’t really pay for anything that first year. We had to get as much as we could donated. Tyson gave us chicken to fry and musicians played for free – everyone helped out as much as they could.”
She added: “We didn’t even have power on the square the first year. If it wasn’t for the power company donating lights, we would not have been able to see at night.”
Despite the lack of abundant funds, people came, nonetheless. At the first festival on May 19-20, 1989, approximately 5,000 folks descended upon Magnolia’s square. They were primarily greeted with sounds of gospel and bluegrass music on Friday night and a slew of arts and crafts, food and live entertainment — magic shows, dance class performances, music, and more — on Saturday.
A May 1989 Banner-News recap of the “new” event described the first annual Blossom Fest as a “success” and a great complement to Sidewalk Art Show.
“We could not have asked for things to work out any better,” Hutchins told the newspaper. The chamber director later expressed how pleased he was that most of the downtown businesses saw “big sales boosts” during the event. Apparently, that was not often the case during craft shows.
The major highlights of the inaugural year included a big bass tournament held at Lake Columbia, an antique and classic car show, and a visit from a Union National Bank hot-air balloon that hovered from a cow pasture just outside of town to the local Brookshire’s parking lot for display, then across the city during the festival. A host of fallen military veterans were also honored as one of the larger events that first year.
Although the 1989 version of the festival was productive, Hutchins immediately desired to expand its scope to draw more spectators to Magnolia. In 1990, the event was boosted to another level with the addition of the now-renowned steak cook-off that offered the winner the title of “world champion.” The first place team would also be presented with a trophy cup handed out by an Arkansas governor who in just two years would become elected the 42nd president of the United States.
“We knew we needed something else,” said George Black, a longtime Magnolia business owner and one of the original steak cook-off and festival committee members. “We cooked hamburgers the year before, but that just wasn’t good enough. We needed a hook — something to make the festival bigger and draw in more people. Buddy [Franks] was really the one who said, ‘let’s try steaks.’ I thought he was crazy — my God was I ever wrong.”
A.O. “Buddy” Franks, now deceased, was a prominent area resident and one a hand-full of well-known steak preppers in the area. His recipes were a bit unconventional from the traditional salt and pepper blend. His unique and large blend of powders, spices, and seasonings that included cooking oil and a paprika-heavy rub always produced a lasting impression on first-time tasters.
He was also no stranger to large-scale cook-offs. He, along with Black, and few others regularly traveled around the state to prepare steaks for groups and social events and had even entered in a few contests themselves. They also had the connections and foresight to not only start the championship steak cook-off, but make it respectable and prestigious from its inception.
With virtually no other comparable sized events to model after, Franks and a small crew of experienced cookers sought out the only other festivals in the region for ideas.
“Buddy and others went to Memphis in May – the big barbecue festival they have at Mud Island — and that’s where they came up with the double-blind judging technique,” said George Wheatley, mayor of Magnolia from 1984 to 1996. “Everyone began throwing ideas around, and soon one conversation led to another and the event came together.”
Franks and Black also scouted Houston’s Livestock Show and Rodeo – one of the oldest and largest festival-like events in the south – that featured its own set of competitive barbecue and cooking contests. They scoped out anything for ideas, or twists on ideas, to incorporate into Magnolia’s Blossom Festival.
“The judges were the key,” said Black. “We did not want local judges and we really didn’t want a Magnolia team to win the first one so it wouldn’t give off the impression that the fix was in. We wanted it to be as classy and respectable as possible.”
The first steak cook-off prize was around $500. Cash prizes were also awarded down to the fifth- or sixth-place finishers to entice more contestants to cook the following year. After all, the more entrants and the more steaks sold, equaled larger cash prizes.
“The money just got bigger and bigger,” said Black. “That really got the word out.”
In total, around 20 cooking teams entered in 1990, with most being either local or semi-local groups. Steaks were judged equally on taste, appearance, and texture. The inaugural winner was a cooking team from Dumas sponsored by restauranteur Butch Long.
A cash award for the best steak was not enough though, not for a festival that was set out to be unique. To add to the event’s prestige, a trophy — the Governor’s Cup — was invented and the cooking contest was tagged the World Championship Steak Cook-Off. To add to the luster, the governor of Arkansas himself at the time, Bill Clinton, officially christened the trophy.
With connections from Franks, a group that included Black, McMahon, and other Blossom Fest committee members traveled to the Governor’s Mansion in Little Rock for Clinton’s blessing. The future president was on board all the way.
“Bill Clinton knew Magnolians very well,” Wheatley said. “He saw the uniqueness of [the festival] and had eaten a few steaks in Magnolia over the years on the campaign trail. Many in Magnolia had also been appointed to high-ranking boards and commissions via Clinton. It just seemed like a natural thing for him to do.”
“Everybody was tasked with a duty,” Black added, “and Buddy’s job was to get the governor.”
By getting the then three-term Natural State governor show up not once, but twice to hand out the cup, the competition was legitimized; the cup’s name actually meant something.
To add to the spectacle, a parade of cookers was added to serve as a centerpiece for Saturday morning. From there, it grew and grew, with Royal Oak Charcoal sponsoring and donating hundreds of bags of their product for the Saturday evening steak competition.
The parade even took on a life of its own. What was at first a simple line of grills trekking down Main Street soon morphed into a procession of living cartoons and wax museum characters with a pulse. Costumes were made, floats were adorned with the most outrageous designs possible, all in an effort to impress the town and its judges.
“It was a big deal,” said Black. “It became a show. The first one was plain vanilla, but then we put our thinking caps on and turned the parade into a competition — that was the key. That’s when it really became what it is today and taken to the extreme.”
With the governor in attendance and the prize money growing with the addition of more and more cooking teams — one group coming from as far as Hawaii in the 1990s, according to Wheatley — the media ate the festival up and spread its reputation like an avalanche.
News teams from Little Rock and Shreveport, La., were the first to jump on board in the early days. Later in the 2000s, national cable networks including Food Network and Travel Channel aired multiple specials highlighting the festival and its steak competition.
“KATV from Little Rock spent a couple of days here in the beginning,” said Wheatley. “They carried it live on Saturday. The media coverage just took it to another level.”
The festival’s committee, leaving no rock unturned, even held a Saturday morning steak cooking for media members to, as Black put it: “butter them up.”
“They loved it,” he said. “They got free steaks and we got great coverage.”
The logistical nightmare of the event was handled by the Blossom Festival Committee. At the high point, some 5,000 steaks were served in roughly an hour. Tickets for an Angus ribeye with all the trimmings were around $10.
To make the serving lines go, large established local institutions heeded the call — namely Magnolia’s two major banks in 1990: First National Bank and Farmers Bank & Trust. Everyone agreed that without them the event could have been a disaster.
“If we did not have the banks that first year and all of their volunteers, we would not have made it,” said McMahon. “We just couldn’t have served that many people without them.”
“They were there from the very beginning,” Black added. “Boy did they help us out.”
Local industries Albemarle, Alumax, SMI Steel and others soon jumped on board, and so began an arms race of sorts to produce the biggest, grandest, and shiniest mobile pit-cookers in Magnolia.
When the steak cook-off and festival were over, the work was not. Committee members often worked into the wee Sunday morning hours with the goal of clearing Magnolia’s square overnight.
“When people went to church the next morning, we wanted them to drive through downtown as if a festival never happened,” Wheatley said.
“We were exhausted after that,” Black added. “We would clean until 3 a.m.”
The former mayor also noted how much the festival and cook-off brought the community a sense of pride and encouraged a large annual spring cleanup in the days and weeks leading to the third weekend in May.
“I always said Magnolia never looked better than those days leading up to the festival,” Wheatley said. “I thought it brought the community a tremendous sense of pride.”
When speaking of the early days, Wheatley, Black, and McMahon all without urging credited Franks as one of the most instrumental figures in establishing the almost instantaneous success of the Blossom Festival and its coinciding steak cook-off. But dozens of others in the community also backed, volunteered, promoted, and contributed ideas and hundreds of hours of volunteer labor to bring the event to fruition.
Many of the people involved in the early days are either deceased or relocated, but their contributions are still evident in the foundational principles that the annual May event still uses. Contributors included, but were not limited to: former Columbia County Judge Barney Hugh Reeves, Tommy Weaver, Susan Weaver, Paula Porter, Tommy Foster, the entirety of the Magnolia-Columbia County Chamber of Commerce, James Whitefield, David McWilliams, Phil Lester, Ken Sibley, and many others.
“You could not believe the hours people put in to make those first few festivals happen,” said Black. “I can’t name them all, but there are hundreds of folks that really deserve credit.”