Colonel Sanders: The Road That Made Him, and the Road That Ended It

Harland Sanders was sixty-five years old, living on Social Security, and driving around Kentucky in a car packed with a pressure cooker and a bag of spices when he started building the franchise that made him famous.

The cooking had come first. In nineteen thirty, Sanders took over a Shell filling station in North Corbin, Kentucky, on United States Route Twenty-Five, the main road between Louisville and the mountains of Appalachia. Travelers stopped for fuel and he started feeding them. He converted a storeroom into a dining area using his own table, and within a few years the dining room had expanded to seat more than a hundred people. He developed his method of pressure-frying chicken, which was faster and more consistent than pan-frying, and he worked on the seasoning until he settled on a combination he called his original recipe.

In nineteen thirty-five, Kentucky Governor Ruby Laffoon commissioned Sanders as a Kentucky Colonel, an honorary title. In nineteen thirty-nine, food critic Duncan Hines, who was then producing a respected national restaurant guidebook, ate at the Corbin cafe and recommended it. Business grew.

Then Interstate Seventy-Five bypassed North Corbin in the mid-nineteen fifties. The traffic stopped coming. Sanders sold the cafe and started over, driving from restaurant to restaurant, cooking chicken for owners and asking them to pay him a nickel per piece sold under a franchise agreement. The first franchisee was Pete Harman in South Salt Lake, Utah, in nineteen fifty-two. Don Anderson, a sign painter Harman hired, coined the name Kentucky Fried Chicken.

By the time Sanders sold the brand in nineteen sixty-four for two million dollars, there were more than six hundred franchises. He was seventy-three years old. He kept the white suit and the title. He kept appearing in advertisements until his death in nineteen eighty.