Colonel Sanders Born: KFC's Future Founder Arrives

Harland "Colonel" Sanders franchised his secret recipe of eleven herbs and spices at age sixty-two, transforming a Kentucky roadside diner into a global fast-food empire. Born in Henryville, Indiana, in 1890, he dropped out of school in sixth grade and cycled through jobs as a farmhand, streetcar conductor, railroad fireman, insurance salesman, and tire salesman before opening a gas station in Corbin, Kentucky, during the Depression. He served fried chicken to travelers from a table in the station's back room, and word spread. When a new interstate bypassed his restaurant in 1956, the sixty-six-year-old Sanders took his recipe on the road, traveling from restaurant to restaurant in his car, cooking batches for owners and offering franchise agreements to anyone who would pay him a nickel per chicken sold. His insistence on consistent quality through pressure-frying at precise temperatures and times standardized what a franchise could promise customers: the same meal in Louisville, Los Angeles, or London. By 1964, when he sold the company to a group of investors for two million dollars, Kentucky Fried Chicken had over six hundred locations. He stayed on as the brand's public face, wearing the white suit and string tie that made him one of the most recognizable figures in American advertising. He remained intensely critical of the company's quality standards after the sale, publicly complaining that the gravy tasted like wallpaper paste. He died on December 16, 1980, at ninety. KFC now operates over 27,000 restaurants in more than 145 countries.