This is Colonel Sanders' crazy real-life story.
Creating the juggernaut that is KFC wasn't the only fascinating thing he
did. Here’s the man behind the 11 herbs and spices and that iconic white suit.
According to a profile in The New Yorker from 1970, Harland Sanders had a hard go of
it from a young age following his birth outside Henryville, Indiana, in 1890. He was raised by
an ultra-religious mother who taught him that alcohol, tobacco, coffee, and playing cards
were all equally poisonous. After his mother got married to a man who wasn't so keen on the idea
of stepchildren, so starting at the age of 12, Sanders had to go make his own way in the world.
He worked on a farm while going to school, and when that got too hard,
he quit school just two weeks into seventh grade. Over the next three decades of his life,
he worked as a streetcar conductor and railroad fireman, studied law by mail, acted as a midwife,
operated a steamboat ferry, and even more – mostly failing at all these things.
In the meantime, Sanders got married at age 18 and had three children. As Sanders'
autobiography recounts, after Sanders got fired from the railroad, his wife left and went to
her parents in Alabama. Sanders planned — and failed — to kidnap his own children, and instead
reluctantly reconciled with his wife. The couple would eventually divorce, nearly 40 years later.
Harland Sanders' life would change at age 40 when he began selling food to travelers from the back
room of the Shell gas station he ran in Corbin, Kentucky. As History points out,
he became a hit with travelers selling his simple country fare of country ham,
okra, biscuits, string beans, and similar items, as an alternative to
the typical diner food found along the highways. Ironically, fried chicken was
not originally on the menu. It took too long to prepare to be able to keep up with demand.
Sanders would advertise the food at his Shell station by painting giant signs on barns in the
area. This clever marketing scheme greatly upset Matt Stewart, the operator of a nearby competing
Standard Oil station. Stewart began painting over Sanders' signs, so Sanders went to pay him a visit
along with two Shell district managers. What they weren't expecting was that Stewart had a gun,
with which he shot and killed one of the managers. Sanders had his own gun and returned fire,
wounding Stewart in the shoulder. Stewart went to prison for murder,
and charges against Sanders were dropped, leaving him the gas station king of Kentucky.
If you know one thing about Colonel Sanders, it's probably that he made chicken. But if
you know a second thing, well, it's that he's a colonel. Heck, you might even think "Colonel"
is his first name. Certainly more people could name "Colonel Sanders" than "Harland Sanders."
But while it's true that Harland Sanders did serve in the Army,
he wasn't that kind of colonel. As History relates, he lied about his
age to join the Army in 1906 at age 15 or 16. He served in Cuba for about six months,
before he was honorably discharged, possibly because his young age was discovered.
Suffice it to say, this was not enough time for him to ascend to the rank of colonel.
So what gives? In fact, Harland Sanders was a Kentucky Colonel,
which is the highest honorary title bestowed by the governor of Kentucky – a distinction
later held by Muhammed Ali and Bob Barker. Sanders was declared a colonel by Governor
Ruby Laffoon in 1935 and then got re-upped in 1949 because his chicken was just that good.
Not one to miss a marketing opportunity, Colonel Sanders made it a whole thing.
“It’s the only way you’re gonna get chicken that’s finger-lickin’ good.”
Fried chicken wasn’t on Colonel Sanders’ early menu, because 30 minutes was too long to wait
for a serving to cook. Then in 1939, Sanders had probably the most important breakthrough
in chicken history. He began frying his chicken in a pressure cooker, which dramatically cut the
cook time while preserving quality. What’s more, by this time Sanders was refining his
famous blend of 11 herbs and spices, and the combination was ready for explosive success.
And just in time, too. In 1935, Sanders' first post-gas station cafe had been named
a must-see destination in Duncan Hines’ travel guide, Adventures in Good Eating. Like Sanders,
it’s interesting to note, Duncan Hines was a real guy, unlike Betty Crocker.
Sanders was now nationally famous and had expanded his back-room-in-a-gas-station
kitchen into a 142-seat restaurant. It seemed like, finally, at age 49,
after a host of weird jobs and shoot-outs, Sanders had found success. As it turns out,
he hadn't seen anything yet. But first he had to deal with some bad news.
In the early 1950s, Colonel Sanders suffered a couple of career setbacks. As explained by The
New Yorker, the highway junction that ran in front of his cafe was moved, and then a new interstate
highway was built that took traffic away from his location entirely. After a decade of success,
it looked like Sanders was done for. In 1956, he auctioned off his business at a huge loss and was
now, at age 65, living entirely on his savings and a Social Security check of $105 a month.
Fortunately, franchising would be his saving grace. According to History, Sanders taught
his chicken-frying methods to friend Pete Harman in Salt Lake City. As it happens, Harman owned
one of the largest restaurants in town, and he started selling Sanders' chicken as his first-ever
franchisee, calling it "Kentucky Fried Chicken" and selling it in the soon-to-be trademark bucket.
Following Harman's success, other businesses wanted to sell Sanders' chicken
and made arrangements to give him 4 cents for every chicken cooked via his process.
Sanders hopped in his 1946 Ford and drove around the country, sleeping in his car with pressure
cookers and a bag of spices, looking far and wide for franchisees and finding them everywhere. By
1963, Sanders had over 600 restaurants in the United States and Canada selling his chicken.
Pete Harman would be an extremely important contributor to Colonel Sanders' increasing
success. According to Smithsonian Magazine, in addition to coming up with the name "Kentucky
Fried Chicken", being Sanders' first franchisee, and selling via bucket,
the phrase "finger-lickin' good" and the idea of standalone KFC restaurants came
courtesy of Harman. Harman alone would own more than 300 KFC franchises in Utah, California,
Nevada, and Washington. But despite being basically the co-founder of the franchise,
it's not his face on the bucket. That's okay, though. The Colonel made him a millionaire.
“Whooooooo-we!”
The Colonel himself became a millionaire in 1964 at age 73, when he sold Kentucky Fried
Chicken to a group of investors for $2 million. The New Yorker says he was reluctant at first,
but the investors persuaded him by saying they would never tamper with his recipe and that he
could stay with the company as an adviser and brand ambassador, the living face of the company.
The new owners felt having a living, authentic company symbol was a great asset.
And they were right. Soon the Colonel was making appearances on The Tonight Show and Merv Griffin,
as well as a seemingly endless number of television commercials and other advertisements,
with KFC spending $24 million on advertising in 1970, compared to half a million in 1964.
A big part of the Colonel's success as an advertising icon was his trademark look.
As History explains, after his second commission as a Kentucky Colonel in 1949,
he decided to really lean into the whole "Southern gentleman" thing. Sanders grew out his facial hair
and started wearing a string tie. At first he wore a black frock coat but soon switched to
his iconic all-white suit after realizing it hid flour stains much better. Additionally,
he started bleaching his mustache and goatee so they'd match his naturally white hair.
As Colonel Sanders biographer Josh Ozersky wrote for Time,
Sanders actually called himself "Colonel" and had others do the same. He wore his
white suit every day and, indeed, it was the only thing he wore in public
for the last 20 years of his life, and not just for advertisements or TV appearances.
He had a light cotton version he wore in summer and a heavy wool version he wore in the winter.
The suit has become so iconic that suits actually owned and worn by the Colonel
can sell at auction for up to $80,000. Furthermore, the suit and facial hair
are enough to make actors as diverse as Darrell Hammond, Norm MacDonald,
Jim Gaffigan, George Hamilton, Rob Riggle, and Billy Zane recognizable as the Colonel.
Colonel Sanders remained the symbol of the company and traveled 200,000 miles a year
making appearances on television and at the company's franchises.
“Colonel Sanders! What are you doing in Chicago?” “Oh, I’m just here for a short while.”
Even so, Sanders came to hate the changes the company made after he was no longer in charge.
The New Yorker reported Sanders dreamed of gravy so good, quote, "it'll make you throw away the
durn chicken and just eat the gravy." However, the gravy made by post-Sanders franchisees was
decidedly not the Colonel's gravy. A company executive was quoted as saying:
"Let's face it, the Colonel's gravy was fantastic, but you had to be a Rhodes Scholar to cook it."
Which was probably code for "too expensive."
The Colonel didn't care for such changes to his recipes and wasn't shy
about letting people know it, despite his job as brand ambassador. He would visit franchises,
and if the gravy wasn't up to his standards, he would throw the food on the floor and call it,
quote, "god-damned slop." Worse, in an interview in The Louisville Courier-Journal, he referred
to the gravy as "pure wallpaper paste" made with tap water, flour, and starch to which they add,
quote, "some sludge". He further said that the then-new crispy recipe was:
"...nothing in the world but a damn fried doughball stuck on some chicken."
His criticism of KFC was so harsh that the company he founded sued him for libel in 1978. The case
was thrown out, but if you think that's the end of the story, don't worry — it happened again.
Suffice it to say that Colonel Sanders was not happy with the changes made to his chicken and
gravy recipes in the name of savings and streamlining for thousands of franchises.
Can you imagine the glorious explosion of rage that would cover this land if
the Colonel were to appear today and see a Go Cup or a Double Down?
In the 1970s, however, when Sanders was now in his 80s, his solution was somewhat different.
He and his once-mistress-now-wife Claudia opened a new competing restaurant that served
food that rose to the Colonel's standards. As reported in People magazine, the restaurant,
known as “Claudia Sanders, The Colonel's Lady Dinner House”,
would sell sit-down-style dinners of ham and lobster in addition to chicken.
Sanders attempted to expand this business into a chain as well, but KFC wasn't thrilled about
that and sued them to the tune of $120 million. According to Uproxx, the suit was settled for $1
million and Sanders sold the restaurant. The Claudia Sanders Dinner House still exists,
though, and you can visit it, right off I-64 east of Louisville. It is the only non-KFC restaurant
that sells a fully authorized version of the original Colonel Sanders fried chicken recipe.
Sanders died in 1980 at age 90 of acute leukemia.
He kept working until a month before his death. Flags were flown at half-staff for his funeral,
which was attended by over 1,000 people. That seems like it should be the end of his story,
outside debates about the propriety of his image being used in continued advertising after his
death, but for some Japanese baseball fans, the Colonel's death was only the beginning.
Here's the short version of the story, as reported by NBC News.
Osaka's baseball team, the Hanshin Tigers, won the national championship in 1985.
Tigers fans often jump in Osaka's Dotonbori River to celebrate wins. After the championship,
some rowdy fans decided that a statue of Colonel Sanders outside a local KFC looked
enough like the Tigers' American first baseman Randy Bass that he should go in the river too.
So ... they threw the statue in the river. Since that time, fans feel the team has been plagued
by "the curse of the Colonel," which is to say, the Tigers have not won another championship.
The statue was recovered from the river in 2009,
but it had deteriorated pretty significantly in 24 years. The Colonel was missing his legs,
hands, and glasses when pulled from the murky waters of the Dotonburi. The legs and right
hand were recovered the next day, but the left hand and glasses are still missing. Tigers fans
assert it is because of these still-missing pieces that the curse is still in place.
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