A Charred Life 
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Renaissance Man
Thanks to the vision of founder George Coulam, the Texas Renaissance Festival is a huge success at 25. And we’re not pulling your turkey leg.
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King George was born in Salt Lake City, the third of six children in a Mormon family. “I was a bad dog,” he says of his teenage self. “Up through high school I had no direction. I was a sump head who got into a lot of trouble.” He escaped to San Fernando Valley State College, in Southern California, where as a failed English major he found himself taking art and art history classes. He delved deeply into the studio arts—stained glass, woodworking—and eventually earned his undergraduate and master’s degrees in art. The subject of his thesis was nineteenth-century French architect Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, who had a penchant for Gothic design.
At about this time, Coulam began attending the first renaissance festivals in California, working in costume hawking the works of a stained-glass artist with whom he apprenticed. Smitten with the idea of the festival, Coulam moved back to Utah and tried to start one of his own there. But he made the Mormon church authorities “very nervous,” he says, and they eventually hinted that his festival might be better appreciated elsewhere. “At that time, the church liked to know everything that was going on around there, and we were a bunch of people waving swords, quoting Shakespeare, and carrying on,” Coulam says. “They’d never seen anything like it.” In 1969 he moved the operation to Minnesota, where it grew steadily over the next five years, but squabbles with the owners of the land he was leasing and other bureaucratic hassles ultimately led him to sell the festival for $350,000. On a nationwide search for a new location, Coulam happened on the property near Houston, fell in love with it, and the rest is ancient history.
Renaissance festivals are popular tourist attractions—almost every state has one—that support a subculture of people known as “rennies.” Says vendor Royce Kerbow, “Any participant in a renaissance festival who attends in costume on a regular basis could be called a rennie.” Rennies can range from traveling actors or performers who get paid to play the festivals to vendors like Kerbow, who owns a permanent medieval-weapons shop at the festival, to paying visitors who just love to dress up.
Kerbow, who is based in Denver, sells original and reproduction historical weapons. When you meet him at the festival, you’ll also meet Lord Roy-ke Khan of the Crimson Horde of the Peace Loving Peoples of the Mongol Empire, an alter ego Kerbow invented for himself in the mid-seventies. “We put down a revolt by the king of Korea the same year we conquered Hungary and Poland, 1241,” he tells me in his Southern accent. “We burned Baghdad and Hanoi to the ground within a year of each other.”
Beyond all the jolly good fun, the festival is big business. Kerbow, who spends $825 a year to maintain a shop that is open for only fourteen days, has grossed as much as $40,000 in one year selling his swords, daggers, and spears at the festival. “I never have to take a vacation anywhere because I spend half of my life in one century and half in another,” he told me.
Honey and Paul Groos run an elaborate import business whose only showcase is the festival. Every year, the couple spends a month or two in Asia, collecting rare and valuable items from Thailand, Hong Kong, Bali, and China. They show me elegant bone carvings, handmade furniture, and even an intricately carved, thirteen-foot jade boat that will carry a price tag of $23,500. Of course, most of us wouldn’t dream of spending twenty grand at a theme park, but the Grooses have an exclusive clientele for their most unusual items. “For the first weekend, we do a mailout,” Paul Groos says. “Invitation only. We give them two tickets to the festival, and they come here and are served tea as they peruse our inventory.” In a good year, he says, he and his wife gross $500,000 to $600,000.
“All we provide is the place,” says Coulam laconically. “I don’t run anything. All the foods, drinks, rides, games, fortune-tellers, face-painters, artists, craftsmen, jugglers, mimes, and musical groups are independent.” True enough, but they must follow Coulam’s strict aesthetic guidelines, which are laid out in the Participants Handbook. Every vendor is responsible for building his or her own “shoppe,” but its design must be approved by the festival management, which requires variations on the Tudor-era half-timbered style. Costume is a serious matter: “Every participant must have an approved period costume including a hat and appropriate footwear. . . . No watches, sunglasses, radios, telephones, or any other modern conveniences are permitted in view of the customer at any time.” Staff members tell the story of a festival worker who was spied by King George smoking a cigarette behind one of the shops. He did not return to work the next day.
And you won’t hear vendors telling customers “Y’all come back” in a Texas twang. They are required to speak what the handbook calls the King’s English. “Can I help you?” becomes “What be thy pleasure, m’lord?” while “The bathrooms are over there” is translated as “Privies be over yonder.” Forsooth, a slate of useful insults is even provided: “Out of my sight, wretch. Thou dost infect mine eyes.”
Entertainment coordinator Jeffrey Baldwin oversees the more than five hundred actors the festival employs to be part of the scenery, who must attend seven weekends of rehearsal. They range in age from 7 to 72 and include families hired to portray peasants and two actors who play King Henry VIII and his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves. Since the festival’s second year, the daredevils who perform the jousting have been local ranchers; after seeing the lily-livered job done by the Hollywood stuntmen who were initially hired, they went to Coulam and said they could do better. “And they do,” says King George. “Those are some crazy guys. I guarantee every year some bones get broken. And they may have some trouble keeping up the King’s English, but they put on a damn good show.”
Attendance at the festival has boomed since the mid-nineties. While the early part of the decade saw attendance averaging 210,000 for the duration of the event, that figure has skyrocketed to around 290,000 in the past four years. Everyone you talk to attributes this success to George Coulam. “Everything he does centers around the festival,” says Frank Dean, a local businessman who has known Coulam for twenty years. “It’s his life.”
Says Baldwin: “I like to think of him as Willy Wonka from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. He’s given a few of us lucky ones those golden tickets to come here and live.”
Coulam has designed a personal coat of arms that can be found embroidered like a monogram on his shirts and on the satin bedspread he made himself for his queen-size bed. In its four quadrants the coat of arms depicts a tree, representing his interest in horticulture; a paintbrush, for his artistic side; a boat, to show his love of travel; and a phallus, to indicate his sensuality. As King George might put it, what more is there to say?
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