‘He’s a symbol of good’: On Big Tex’s staying power at the State Fair of Texas

A few years after World War II, the small town of Kerens, Texas, wanted to encourage people to shop locally for their holiday gifts. Their solution? A 49-foot-tall Santa Claus.

Almost 80 years later, that figure is far better known by a different name: Big Tex, who made his public debut at the opening of the 1952 State Fair, wearing size 70 boots and a 75-gallon hat.

Rusty Fitzgerald, senior vice president of Midway operations at the fair, joined the Standard to tell us everything we could ever want to know about its tallest and most well-known face.

This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:

Texas Standard: You know, right from the start, when I drove in to the gate early this morning, people were really excited. You can see the smiles on their faces. Let’s talk about Big Tex. What does it take to set Big Tex up so he’s ready for fairgoers?

Rusty Fitzgerald: Well first off he gets a bath. We clean him up.

I didn’t know there’s a bathtub big enough.

We have long johns, and basically the long johns are plastic, like you would wrap a boat in the winter. It keeps the clothes from blowing into the frame.

After that, we make sure he looks good. We actually wash his clothes. We do that on the parking lot, on the tarp, with a hose, a bucket and soap.

And then, when we go to dry, we get big warehouse fans, open up his pants, open up the shirts. Just like giant balloons, you know, going through. They just don’t make a washer big enough to wash Big Tex’s clothes.

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Does he get a new outfit every year, or do you wash the previous year’s?

He gets a new shirt every three years. And maybe the jeans, too. But the jeans seem to hold up. He’ll get a new shirt next year, and we’re going to try to keep the same pair of jeans – they fit really good on him, so we’ll try to keep them.

Yeah, you won’t find those at the Walmart. All right, so October 2012: a blaze seen around the world – Big Tex caught fire. Tell us about your experience that day. That must have been hard.

Well, I got a call right before 10:00 that Big Tex was smoking, and I was kind of clueless at that point because I go, “Big Tex doesn’t smoke,” you know. So I finally caught on … it’s real smoke, you know, and so I ran up there.

It’s probably only the second time in my life that I’ve ran here at the fair. And then, once I got up there, you could see the smoke coming out and the flames starting to go.

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What had happened – what sparked it? Do y’all know?

I think the speaker wires shorted out and caught the speakers on fire. But as soon as I got up there, the police chief was there, one of the assistant chiefs assigned to the fair, and we set up a perimeter in place. Fire department was already on the way.

Of course, when that happened, I’ve already got my crew coming up, the crane company. It was on nationwide, worldwide TV. It went live everywhere because we had a lot of cameras out here.

And we got the crane here. Soon as the fire truck left, we pulled in the crane, and then we got him down. We wrapped him in the tarp that we usually wash the clothes on, because we didn’t want to get parts everywhere, you know, down the road.

But we were open this time. We had this huge crowd. And so we had to get police motorcycles in front of us. And then we had all the support vehicles and Big Tex. And as we’re going down the road, people were crying, they had their hands over their hearts.

Did you did you think that maybe this was the end of Big Tex?

No, we knew right then, we’re going to build another one, you know. But it was at that moment when we’re taking him down and everybody’s crying that it really struck me how important Big Tex was to the people of Texas, and we were going to do our best to build a bigger, better one.

You were telling me earlier that when you were a kid, you’d come out here to the State Fair – so, iconic even then, I mean, to generations. Why do you think Big Tex means so much to so many?

I think it’s just so special. I think he’s a symbol of Texas and, you know, he’s a symbol of good. He comes out here and people come and take pictures of him. And it’s a yearly tradition. You can see people have pictures with them, their kids, and they just get bigger and bigger and bigger. And so it’s a family tradition to come and see Big Tex.

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