Colonel Sanders

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Harland David Sanders, known around the world as Colonel Sanders, was buried in Cave Hill Cemetery in Louisville wearing a white suit and a black western string tie. It was the outfit he had worn in public for the last twenty years of his life.

  The man in that grave had been fired from one job after another. He had watched a law career collapse in a courtroom brawl. At 65 he was living on a small Social Security check, an age when most people stop working.

  How does a long run of failures turn into a fast food empire? Why did the man himself come to despise what his own company served? And how did a title handed out by a Kentucky governor become a costume, a brand, and a character played by actors long after his death?

  2730532

• 2. Years of Failure

  ›

  When Sanders's father died in 1895, five-year-old Harland became the family cook. His mother took a job in a tomato cannery, sometimes working away for days, and by age seven he was reportedly handy with bread and vegetables. The children foraged when food ran short.

  In 1903, at age 12, he quit the seventh grade. Years later he said that "algebra's what drove him off." At 13 he was painting horse carriages in Indianapolis, and at 14 he was back on a farm in southern Indiana.

  In October 1906, at age 16, he lied about his date of birth and joined the United States Army. He served as a wagoner in Cuba and earned the Cuban Pacification Medal. By February 1907 he had an honorable discharge and a train ticket to his uncle in Sheffield, Alabama.

  The railroads gave him work for years. He cleaned ash pans for locomotives in Jasper, then became a fireman, shoveling fuel into steam engines, for nearly three years. He joined union affairs and defended a coworker from dismissal. The company eventually fired him for insubordination.

  In Jackson, Tennessee, he studied law at night by correspondence through the La Salle Extension University. Later he practiced in Little Rock for three years, until a courtroom brawl with his own client wrecked his reputation. His biographer John Ed Pearce wrote, "Sanders had encountered repeated failure largely through bullheadedness, a lack of self-control, impatience, and a self-righteous lack of diplomacy."

  The pattern continued. Sanders sold life insurance for Prudential in Jeffersonville and was fired for insubordination again. Then he sold for Mutual Benefit Life of New Jersey. In 1920, at age 30, he started a ferry company on the Ohio River between Jeffersonville and Louisville, and it succeeded at once.

  He sold his ferry shares for $22,000 and put the money into a company making acetylene lamps. That venture died when Delco brought out an electric lamp and sold it on credit. A job as secretary of the Chamber of Commerce in Columbus, Indiana, lasted less than a year. By his own admission he was not good at it.

  Next came a sales post at the Michelin Tire Company in Winchester, Kentucky, which ended in 1924 when Michelin closed its New Jersey plant. That same year he happened to meet the general manager of Standard Oil of Kentucky, who asked him to run a service station in Nicholasville. The Great Depression shut that station in 1930.

  14848587

• 3. The Roadside Table

  ›

  In 1930, the Shell Oil Company offered Sanders a service station in North Corbin, Kentucky, with no rent. He paid the company a percentage of sales instead. Travelers stopping for gas could also get chicken, country ham or steak, served at first in the living quarters next door, before a proper restaurant opened.

  Business rivalry in North Corbin turned deadly. A local competitor named Matt Stewart had painted over a sign that pointed traffic toward Sanders's station. A shootout followed, and Stewart killed a Shell employee who was with Sanders. Stewart was convicted of murder, which removed Sanders's competition.

  Kentucky governor Ruby Laffoon commissioned Sanders a Kentucky Colonel in 1935. His local fame grew. In 1939 the food critic Duncan Hines stopped at his restaurant and listed it in the guide Adventures in Good Eating. The entry for Sanders Court and Café called it a very good place to stop on the way to Cumberland Falls and the Great Smokies. It promised continuous 24-hour service, with sizzling steaks, fried chicken, country ham and hot biscuits. Lunch cost 50 cents to a dollar.

  Misfortune followed praise. In July 1939 Sanders bought a motel in Asheville, North Carolina. That November a fire destroyed his North Corbin restaurant and motel. He rebuilt it as a motel with a 140-seat restaurant.

  In July 1940, at age 50, Sanders settled on his "Secret Recipe" for chicken. It was cooked in a pressure fryer, which finished the bird faster than a frying pan could.

  Then the United States entered World War II in December 1941, and gasoline was rationed. Tourists stopped coming, and he closed the Asheville motel. He worked as a supervisor in Seattle until late 1942 and sold the Asheville business that year. He later ran cafeterias for the government at an ordnance works in Tennessee. Afterward he became assistant cafeteria manager in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, while his North Corbin business stayed open without him.

  858687883

• 4. Franchising the Recipe

  ›

  In 1952, Pete Harman of South Salt Lake, Utah, became the first person to sell Sanders's chicken under the name Kentucky Fried Chicken. Harman ran one of the largest restaurants in the city and wanted a way to stand out from competitors. In Utah, a product from Kentucky suggested Southern hospitality. The sign painter Don Anderson, hired by Harman, came up with the name.

  Harman's gamble paid off quickly. In the first year, restaurant sales more than tripled, and fried chicken accounted for 75 percent of the increase. Other restaurant owners took notice and signed on, paying Sanders four cents for every chicken.

  Sanders had expected his North Corbin restaurant to prosper forever. But the new Interstate 75 pulled customers away, and he sold the place at age 65. He was left with his savings and US$105 a month from Social Security. So he began to franchise in earnest.

  He drove across the country, often sleeping in the back of his car. At each restaurant he offered to cook his chicken for the staff. If they liked it, he negotiated for franchise rights. In 1959, after closing the North Corbin site, he and Claudia opened a new restaurant and company headquarters in Shelbyville.

  Before long the traffic reversed. Potential franchisees began coming to him. Sanders ran the company while Claudia mixed the spices and shipped them out to restaurants.

  Growth reached abroad. KFC was among the first fast food chains to go international, with outlets in Canada and then the UK, Australia, Mexico and Jamaica by the mid-1960s. In 1962 Sanders obtained a patent covering his method of pressure frying chicken. In 1963 he trademarked the phrase "It's Finger Lickin' Good."

  1310162689

• 5. The Colonel Versus the Company

  ›

  In 1964, at age 73, Sanders sold Kentucky Fried Chicken for $2 million. The buyers were a partnership of Kentucky businessmen led by John Y. Brown Jr., a 29-year-old lawyer and future governor of Kentucky, and Jack C. Massey, a venture capitalist. By then the chain had passed 600 locations, and the pace had overwhelmed him.

  The deal left out the Canadian operations, which Sanders kept. It also excluded franchising rights he had already sold in the UK, Florida, Utah and Montana. He stayed on as a salaried brand ambassador.

  In 1965 he moved to Mississauga, Ontario, outside Toronto, to oversee his Canadian franchises. He lived in a bungalow at 1337 Melton Drive until his death in 1980. From there he traveled 200,000 miles a year for the company, filming commercials and making appearances.

  His influence did not fade. Executives and franchisees respected his cooking knowledge and dreaded what The New Yorker called "the force and variety of his swearing" whenever a restaurant strayed from what executives described as "the Colonel's chicken."

  The gravy became the battleground. Sanders had boasted that it was so good "it'll make you throw away the durn chicken and just eat the gravy." The company simplified it to save time and money. As late as 1979 he still dropped in on restaurants without warning. If the food let him down, he called it "God-damned slop" to the franchisee or pushed it onto the floor.

  The quarrel reached the courts. In 1973 Sanders sued Heublein Inc., then the parent company of Kentucky Fried Chicken, over the alleged misuse of his image to promote products he had not helped develop. In 1975 Heublein sued him for libel after he called their gravy "sludge" with a "wallpaper taste." Heublein lost.

  That October he gave the Louisville Courier-Journal reporter Dan Kauffman an even harsher verdict. He said the company bought tap water for 15 to 20 cents a thousand gallons and mixed it with flour and starch to make "pure wallpaper paste." He added, "And I know wallpaper paste, by God, because I've seen my mother make it."

  Sanders and Claudia also reopened their Shelbyville restaurant as "Claudia Sanders, The Colonel's Lady," serving KFC-style chicken as part of a full dinner menu. They talked of making it a chain, and the company sued him. After a settlement with Heublein he sold the restaurant. It still operates as the Claudia Sanders Dinner House and is the only non-KFC restaurant authorized to serve the original recipe.

  2219251214

• 6. Family, Faith and Giving

  ›

  Margaret Ann Sanders, Harland's mother, was a devout Christian and a strict parent. She warned her children about "the evils of alcohol, tobacco, gambling, and whistling on Sundays." The family attended the Advent Christian Church, and Harland had a rough relationship with his stepfather, William Broaddus.

  On the 15th of June 1909, Sanders married Josephine King of Jasper, Alabama. They had three children. Margaret Josephine was born in 1910 and Harland Jr. in 1912. Mildred Marie arrived in 1919. In September 1932, Harland Jr. died of infected tonsils.

  The marriage did not last. Sanders had a mistress, Claudia Ledington-Price, whom he left in charge of the North Corbin restaurant and motel. He and Josephine divorced in 1947. In 1949 he married Claudia, as he had long wanted.

  In September 1970, Sanders and his wife were baptized in the Jordan River. He befriended Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell, and he was also a Freemason.

  His later wealth went partly to charity. Before his death he used his stock holdings to create the Colonel Harland Sanders Charitable Organization, a registered Canadian charity. The women's and children's wing of Mississauga Hospital carries his name as the Colonel Harland Sanders Family Care Centre, in honor of his large donation.

  The foundation has also given generously to children's hospitals in Canada, including McMaster Children's Hospital, IWK Health Centre and Stollery Children's Hospital. According to a tax return filed with the Canada Revenue Agency, the Toronto-based foundation paid out $500,000 to other Canadian charities in 2016.

  679808190

• 7. The Man in White

  ›

  In 1950, Kentucky governor Lawrence Wetherby recommissioned Sanders as a Kentucky Colonel, and Sanders decided to look the part. He grew a goatee, put on a black frock coat and a black ribbon bow tie, and began calling himself "Colonel." His associates played along, in the words of biographer Josh Ozersky, "jokingly at first and then in earnest."

  Later the frock coat gave way to a white suit. For the final 20 years of his life he wore nothing else in public, choosing heavy wool for winter and light cotton for summer. He bleached his mustache and goatee to match his white hair.

  John Y. Brown Jr., the man who bought his company, remembered Sanders as "a brilliant man with a gourmet flair for food, a visionary and a great motivator, with the style of a showman and the discipline of a Vince Lombardi."

  In June 1980, doctors diagnosed Sanders with acute leukemia. He kept appearing in his white suit before crowds until the month before he died. He died of pneumonia at Jewish Hospital in Louisville on the 16th of December 1980, at age 90.

  His body lay in state in the rotunda of the Kentucky State Capitol in Frankfort, after a funeral service at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary Chapel that more than 500 people attended. A memorial service at KFC headquarters in Louisville followed, with an open casket and a crowd of about 1,000 to 1,200.

  Claudia died on the 31st of December 1996, at age 94. By the time of Sanders's death, the company he started had an estimated 6,000 outlets in 48 countries and sales of $2 billion a year.

  3031362734

• 8. The Colonel Lives On

  ›

  In 1985, during a fan celebration in Japan, a statue of Colonel Sanders was thrown into a river and lost. Japanese baseball lore holds that this started the "Curse of the Colonel" on the Hanshin Tigers. The story says the team would never win the Japan Series until the statue was recovered. Hanshin lost in 2003-2005 and 2014, then won in 2023.

  KFC itself kept the Colonel working. An animated Sanders voiced by Randy Quaid appeared in television commercials from 1998 to 2001. In 2015, comedian Darrell Hammond played him, and some commentators found the portrayal disrespectful. Norm Macdonald followed that August, and his first ad called Hammond an impostor. Jim Gaffigan, George Hamilton, Rob Lowe, Reba McEntire, Jason Alexander and Ray Liotta all took turns in the white suit. Lowe said he had met Harland Sanders as a child.

  Wrestling joined in. At the 2016 SummerSlam, an ad showed Dolph Ziggler as the Colonel beating up The Miz in a chicken suit. In 2017, Colonel Sanders became a playable character in WWE 2K18 as part of a product placement deal.

  He turned up in fiction as well. DC Comics ran three promotional issues, including parodies of Flash of Two Worlds and Crisis on Infinite Earths, with the Colonel teaming up with Green Lantern and Flash. Writer Tony Bedard called working on them "an honor, a privilege, and just plain fun."

  Haruki Murakami's 2002 novel Kafka on the Shore has the Colonel appear when an "abstract concept" takes the form of "a famous capitalist icon." A 2018 General Hospital episode showed him using the programming language Malbolge to defuse a bomb. In 2019, KFC released a free dating-sim parody, I Love You, Colonel Sanders!

  Physical traces survive too. In June 2013, Heritage Auctions sold one of his white suits for $21,510. The buyer was Masao "Charlie" Watanabe, president of Kentucky Fried Chicken of Japan, who put the suit on at the auction in Dallas.

  In 2011, KFC found a manuscript in its archives that Sanders apparently wrote in the mid-1960s. The 200-page cooking book mixes recipes with anecdotes and life lessons, and the company said it planned to try some of the recipes and publish the manuscript online.

  6350557675