by Josh Ozersky
Sanders cast around for his next move. The idea of moving to a bigger city seems not to have occurred to him; but by the early ’20s, modernity had come to Indiana in the form of the automobile, and word had gotten around that the Michelin tire company needed a salesman. Like many Americans of his generation, Sanders had come of age with the railroad. It had been his first job, his first liberation, his first means of escape from the grinding, immemorial tedium of subsistence farming. To the end of his life he remained enchanted by the romance of trains, their noise and rhythmic, clacking power. But the railroad era was over, and with the coming of the auto a new sector was opening up—one that a man of spirit could utilize. A natural salesman, Sanders could as easily have sold cars as tires, but tires were what came his way. The job he talked himself into was something of a plum, with a $750 guaranteed salary each month if he met his quota. Given that he had the entire state of Kentucky as his territory and his ever-enlarging acquaintance with various businessmen around the state—to say nothing of his ready line of patter, still Sanders’ greatest asset—he immediately made a success of his new job. There was nothing he would not do in the service of the company, and his first position of living icon was his role as Bibendum, the company mascot made of tires. Sanders would don his Michelin Man suit and go around to fairs and public events boasting of the product’s advantages and putting its local rivals to the test, often in the form of having muscular farm boys inflate the tires to see which popped first. Like everything else in the Colonel’s life until Kentucky Fried Chicken came along, this career followed the usual trajectory: he quickly became the top tire salesman in Kentucky, but then in 1924, for reasons that remain murky, he either left the company or was fired and found himself back at square one.
A horrible auto accident had totaled both cars, in addition to splitting his head open (a wound the resilient Sanders treated by pushing the skin flaps together on his scalp, or so he claimed many years later). But the upshot was that in this new age of motoring he was reduced to hitchhiking. He lucked into a fateful ride with a representative of Standard Oil whom he was able to talk into letting him take over a gas station in Nicholasville. His usual combination of hustle, palaver, and hard work paid off. The station was a success, and Sanders was able to move his family to town. In 1928 he was even able to send his oldest daughter, Margaret, to college. Two years later the station closed but not due to Sanders’ unmellowed temper or the frequent brawls he got into; the Depression was reason enough for the Standard Oil company to close the Nicholasville station. But soon another one became available in Kentucky, and executives at the Shell oil company, having heard of his success in Nicholasville, gave him a marginal station in Corbin, Kentucky, to run rent free. It was thought that if he could make a go of it the place wouldn’t be a total loss, and he could pay the company a penny a gallon extra in lieu of rent. That penny ended up going a long way.
The location was on a busy road, Highway 25, where it faced a larger, more visible station across the road. But the bigger challenge was the area’s rough trade notoriety. A locus of bootlegging, its northern corner was called Hell’s Half-Acre by locals, owing to the infamous frequency of fights and even gun battles there. (During his time in Corbin, Sanders kept a gun under the cash drawer and a shotgun he called his “hawg rifle” next to his bed at home.) The city was a violent one; during the “red summer” of 1919, a decade earlier, the city expelled all its black citizens in what amounted to a race riot and adopted what southern blacks call a “Don’t let the sun go down on you” attitude.12
This was the city where Sanders launched his new career. It took a tough man to set up business in Corbin. There was no local Rotary chapter to join. Nobody cared about the Four Way Test. But Harland Sanders pushed and promoted the store with his usual passion, even in the face of threats by his direct competitor, a man named Matt Stewart, who had opened a Standard Oil station down the road a short time earlier. The two men had strong wills, hot tempers, and itchy fists. It was only a matter of time before the feud came to a head. Sanders painted a big sign on a railroad wall near the highway directing drivers his way. Stewart responded by painting the sign over. Sanders paid a little call on Stewart and offered to “blow [his] goddamn head off.”13 Sanders went ahead and repainted the sign. The response was predictable, but the timing was bad. He was conferring with two Shell officials, district manager Robert Gibson and a supervisor, H. D. Shelburne, when word came that Stewart was painting it over again. The three men, all armed to the teeth, jumped into a car and headed down to the sign. Stewart was on a ladder painting it over and, seeing the men, jumped down and pulled his weapon. Bullets flew, and the Shell manager was killed instantly with three bullets to the heart. Sanders jumped into the breach and under withering fire grabbed his fallen comrade’s gun. He and Shelburne flanked Stewart, who was hidden behind a wall. The future Colonel unloaded with true aim and hurled hot lead into Stewart’s shoulder, even as Shelburne unloaded into the Standard Oil man’s hip.
“Don’t shoot, Sanders!” Stewart cried. “You’ve killed me.” As it happened, he hadn’t.
The police arrested everyone, and the case went to court. It may have been the simple findings, the power of Shell, or the Colonel’s way with words, but when all was said and done, Sanders and Shelburne had their charges dismissed, and Stewart was given eighteen years for murder. Two years later, Stewart was still appealing his conviction when he was shot and killed by a deputy sheriff who, it was rumored, had been paid by the family of the slain Robert Gibson. Pearce mentions the rumor in Sanders’ biography but adds, suggestively, that “the charges were never proved.”14
Having won the right to sell gas in Corbin by feat of arms, Harland Sanders made a great success of his station. His lifelong enterprise, hustle, and gregariousness more or less guaranteed that his gas station would be a success. His was the first station in the area to offer oil checks, free air pumping, and other services still novel in rural Kentucky. The drivers who came through frequently asked Sanders where they could get something to eat. There wasn’t much in the area. Now, Sanders fed his family in the station every day. Sometimes he even invited travelers to come in and join them. So it occurred to him: why not make a little something on the side? There was a small room on the side of the station, so Sanders bought some linoleum on credit for sixteen dollars and moved the family dining room into it. They had food ready at 11 a.m., since easterners were used to eating at noon, and if none of them showed up, the family could eat the midday meal. If somebody did show up, the family would cook more later. Sanders made all his southern favorites, such as ham, biscuits, greens, and, of course, fried chicken, cooked in a big skillet like all good southern cooks. This was the first form ancestor of all modern Kentucky Fried Chicken. Rather than an afterthought to a full tank of gas, the food soon became a major sideline—so much so that the Colonel, never one to miss a chance for promotion, changed the name of his business from Sanders Service Station to Sanders Service Station and Cafe and then, as the food business continued to expand, to Sanders Cafe and Service Station. When a four-room transient shack next door became available, Sanders took it over and made it into a motel-restaurant, Sanders Court and Cafe.
The names changed, but the character of the place did not. It was a gas station with some rooms attached, in a backward corner of a backward state, in the grip of the Depression, and it was a desperate undertaking, like most small businesses were at that place and time. A family with hungry children had to be fed, clothed, and housed from the proceeds of a gas station at a time when gas was a few cents a gallon. Selling food to travelers was just a way to get more people in to buy gas so the family could make a few dollars more than they might have previously. The food wasn’t a major source of profit; the Sanders family had to buy food, and if no travelers came, they would eat it themselves, the way all marginal, isolated restaurant owners do. Such cash as was kept in the register was essentially the family bank, and if anyone needed some they would
take it out and leave a note in its place saying how much they took and when.15 But by 1935 the motel was doing so well that two other motels nearby existed off its spillover business, according to the Colonel’s daughter Margaret.
Nothing represented the communal nature of rural poverty more than fried chicken. Not everybody has hogs and a smokehouse, and it goes without saying that the poorest Kentuckians were not the sort of people who had herds of cattle contentedly grazing on broad, green fields. No, the rural poor, in Kentucky and throughout the South and for that matter the world, were lucky to have a few yardbirds scratching around, eating bugs and dirt, and laying an occasional precious egg. On Sundays and other special occasions, that kind of family might kill a chicken and cut it up so everyone could have a piece. They would fry it up in lard and season it with spices as they had been taught to do by West African slaves who brought the trick with them from their lost homes. Fried chicken wasn’t a snack treat but a staple, and far from a symbol of heaping bounty as it was later to become commercially, it was rather a fall-back, the homiest and humblest of Sunday meals. It was therefore the preeminent food for poor people in the South, and when they served it to strangers they shared a part of their family life. In that much, the marketing message trumpeted by the chain many years later was not entirely without foundation. Fried chicken, to the Colonel’s mind, was not really something that you ate in restaurants. It was a part of home life. Many southerners understood this and continue to understand it in a way the rest of the world does not. Colonel Sanders, though not exactly a southerner himself, was southern enough, and more than southern enough to embody fried chicken.
For one thing, he understood that simply taking chicken parts, dredging them in flour, and dropping them into boiling oil alongside french fries and onion rings wasn’t really fried chicken. Fried chicken is very difficult to make well and impossible in a fry basket; nearly every traditional recipe, going back to the very first published cookbook in America, The Virginia House-Wife’s Cookbook (1824), calls for cooking it in a heavy pan. Heavy pans full of lard or oil are unwieldy and messy and difficult to handle. They also take a long time to cook food. Most of all, they require great skill on the part of the cook, which is one reason making great fried chicken was a special badge of honor among southern matriarchs, white and black.
Without really knowing it, Sanders attempted to mass-produce this venerated dish, essentially the national food of the American South, for the first time. He did it blindly at first, ad hoc, and without any business plan to speak of. Later, he got help from seasoned restaurateurs and bankers and corporate entrepreneurs. But only a figure like Sanders could have bridged the private and public life of fried chicken, just as only he could have projected the image of a white-suited “southern gentleman” with perfect relevance alongside The Mod Squad.
All of this speaks to the cultural capital that Colonel Sanders brought to the business for which he is known today, Kentucky Fried Chicken. It also speaks to the paradox that he embodied. Anyone who knew anything of the South knew that no Kentucky colonel would have cooked the fried chicken in a southern household; the chicken in prosperous southern households, particularly in the Colonel’s era, was inevitably cooked by a black maid or family housekeeper. Colonel Sanders created an alternative reality in which the white planter not only ate the chicken but implicitly made it. Nothing could have been further from the truth.
Likewise, he appeared to customers in mid-century to be an emblem of old-fashioned values, not in the abstracted commercial iconography of Gibson Girls and watch-fobbed men but in a historically appreciable, specific way. Yes, on some level the success of the business was based on a very good type of fried chicken. But that fried chicken was understood, rightly, as an expression of somebody who knew about fried chicken and the southern food culture that alone was capable of producing it at its best. In some indistinct but real way, Colonel Sanders was the personification of his own past—as a transplanted southerner, as a cook, as an old-fashioned, larger-than-life salesman, as the real deal. And part of his power was that people understood him as a man caught between eras. When he produced this most traditional of foods in a conspicuously ultramodern, space-age, high-tech restaurant that looked like nothing else on earth, the paradox was even plainer.
All this remained in the future. In the mid-1930s he was a well-respected motel owner. Ever the booster, he had made himself president of the Kentucky Restaurant Association. Though still uncommissioned, unbearded, and given to wearing only neat working clothes rather than a spotless white suit, he was by both nature and conscious decision the kind of larger-than-life personality that inevitably sticks in the minds of travelers. Also, his mania for cleanliness and good service, absorbed in the sternest of terms at his mother’s knee, was in stark contrast to rural menus and diners of that time. The amenities offered in the rural motel, such as a no-tipping policy, complimentary umbrellas and car tarps during inclement weather, and even free newspapers, absolutely awed visitors. But it was the food that earned Sanders his first fame. It must have been a glorious day indeed when, after all those years of Sanders’ politicking with local Rotarians, Governor Ruby Laffoon appeared in a black limousine with a full police escort to check the place out. Even the travel writer Duncan Hines, not yet elevated to his own cake-baking immortality, included Sanders Cafe in his 1935 Adventures in Good Eating, the nation’s first road-food guide. In reality, the review is hardly a rave. Sanders Cafe, according to Hines, was “a very good place to stop en route to Cumberland Falls and the Great Smokies,” notable for its “sizzling steaks, fried chicken, country ham, [and] hot biscuits.”16 The fried chicken is only mentioned in passing! But the fame of his restaurant had spread beyond Corbin—and even Kentucky—and this, too, was a first for its owner. In early middle age, it appeared that he had found his place in the world at last. But his story had not yet really begun.
2
THE COMING OF THE COLONEL
The suit was originally black. It came with a string tie and was distinctive enough in its way, but something about it lacked oomph, panache. The Colonel, it is reckoned by his contemporaries, began wearing it around 1950, about the time of his second and final commission. The first, given him by Governor Ruby Laffoon, was a ceremonial decree that pleased Sanders briefly but was by no means defining. He even lost the certificate over the years, leading to his being granted a second one in 1949 by Lieutenant Governor Lawrence Weatherby. He grew a moustache and goatee and let the hair on his head grow out. He made a string tie out of grosgrain ribbon and started introducing himself as Colonel Harland Sanders, and his associates went along with it, jokingly at first and then in earnest. “We used to ask him when he was going to change the name of his place to Colonel Sanders Court, sell Colonel Sanders Fried Chicken. Finally, I think everybody sort of accepted it,” a Corbin friend told Sanders’ biographer.1 The rechristened Colonel Sanders even went so far as to have his beard bleached, as he was not yet old enough to have a white beard. He knew, though, that a paternal-looking southern gentleman was expected to have a white beard, and eventually he figured out that he would need a white suit, too. That came later, when Harland Sanders, selling himself as Colonel Sanders and seeking to create a brand on the strength of his Corbin restaurant, had begun his Sisyphean labors of driving around the country trying to make it happen. He was sixty-five years old. He should have been enjoying his retirement. But it hadn’t worked out that way.
The Corbin restaurant had been an unqualified success. On the strength of the Sanders Cafe’s reputation—which now, thanks to Duncan Hines, extended from coast to coast—Sanders by 1945 had what seemed like the success of which he had always dreamed. He was making money hand over fist from the cafe, which had by 1937 expanded to 142 seats from its original 6—so much so that he had opened another motel in Richmond, Kentucky, and even one in Asheville, North Carolina, the home of the Biltmore mansion. Contemporaries suggest that its far distance from Josephine may have been one reason
for such a sequel; there certainly wasn’t much else to recommend it, and it soon closed. He opened a furniture store; he added rooms to the motel. He bought a plumbing supply store. He drove around in his white Cadillac and checked out a lot of restaurants, learning more about how the business was working, both regionally and nationally. When the cafe burned down in 1939, he is said to have received the news calmly and rebuilt it despite having had only $5,000 of fire insurance coverage. The new place did even better than the old one. He was, in short, a success. But there was a terrible shadow to his prosperity.
Harland Sanders had no son to pass on his business to; his son, Harland Jr., died at age twenty in 1932 of blood poisoning from a streptococcus germ picked up in the hospital, in one of those random tragedies so common in the years before the advent of antibiotics. Years later, when ruing his decision to sell Kentucky Fried Chicken, the senior Sanders would point to the absence of a male heir as one of the main reasons for that choice.2 In reality, of course, the Colonel could no more have run Kentucky Fried Chicken than he could have piloted the space shuttle; even when there were only a handful of restaurants paying him a franchise fee for the use of his recipe and seasonings, the enterprise was already getting beyond what he could reasonably handle.
He had enough money to live comfortably and to provide for his family; he was well liked and respected in his community and even had something in the way of fame to show for his half-century of struggle. Things went along like that for a good long time and might easily have gone on that way until he died at the age of ninety. Had he been an ordinary restaurant owner, that would have been the story of Harland Sanders. His obituary in the local paper would have remembered him as a pillar of the community, a beloved family man, and a colorful character. It should have ended, “He is survived by his wife, Josephine, and his daughters Margaret and Mildred.” But that is not what happened. Just when he was beginning to reap the rewards of a grueling life, disaster struck yet again, landing him penniless and jobless at the age of sixty-five. The state had been talking about linking U.S. 25, the road on which Sanders Cafe was positioned, with a new interstate mandated by the National Highway Act. Sanders thought the new traffic would put him over the top at last, pumping rich arterial blood into his business and poising him for long-awaited expansion. Then the news came down: U.S. 25 would be linked to the interstate, all right, but only after it was rerouted—away from Sanders Cafe. The business that he had built through unrelenting labor over twenty years became a dead issue more or less overnight. Sanders had lobbied ceaselessly to get the interchange put in place; but someone else lobbied more ceaselessly, or in any case more effectively, to get U.S. 25 moved elsewhere. Now Sanders’ business was off the main road, a Bates Motel, and that was the end of the story. No amount of umbrella service or country ham could make a difference; larger forces were at play, and not even all of Sanders’ legendary energy could sway them the tiniest bit. In this way, small-business owners are so very vulnerable; all it takes is one disgruntled customer, one bad review, one fire, and all can be lost.