“Damn! There ain’t a decent place around here to eat!” The complaint reached Harland Sanders in North Corbin, Kentucky, in the early 1930s, when he was running a filling station on U.S. Highway 25 and giving travelers tire checks, windshield cleanings, and not much else.[2]
Colonel Sanders sold Kentucky Fried Chicken in 1964 for $2 million, about $17 million today, but stayed on as KFC’s white-suited public face. The deal aged strangely as the chain grew, especially after Sanders complained that the company no longer made the chicken the way he had.
Sanders answered the hungry traveler by turning a storage room into a dining room. He covered the floor with linoleum bought on credit, moved in the family dining table from the living quarters behind the station, arranged six chairs, and began serving country ham, mashed potatoes, biscuits, and fried chicken.[2]
The roadside meal became a business because the road was full of people who needed one. Truck drivers, tourists, and traveling salesmen passed through southeastern Kentucky, and Sanders later remembered the thought that stuck after the complaint: “One thing I always could do was cook.”[2] From that small room, he built Sanders Court & Cafe, developed his “secret recipe,” and used a pressure fryer method to cook fried chicken faster than traditional pan frying allowed.[1]
The “Colonel” in Colonel Sanders did not come from a military command. Sanders had served briefly in the United States Army as a private, but his famous title was the honorary Kentucky Colonel designation.[1] Paired with the white double-breasted suit, goatee, black string tie, and cane, it helped turn a real restaurateur into a symbol customers could recognize from the highway.[2]
The Sale That Followed 600 Franchises
In 1952, the first Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise opened in South Salt Lake, Utah.[1] Sanders had found a way to send more than chicken across the country. The recipe, the pressure-frying method, and the image of the courtly old Colonel could travel from restaurant to restaurant without him standing at every stove.
By 1964, more than 600 franchises were selling fried chicken made from the Colonel’s blend of “eleven herbs and spices.”[2] That year, when Sanders was 75, he sold the company for $2 million.[2] He did not disappear from the business. He remained a brand ambassador, and his name and image continued to serve as KFC’s public face long after he no longer controlled the company.[1]
The price looked smaller once the chain kept expanding. Later reporting noted that the investors who bought KFC sold it to Heublein Inc. in 1971 for $285 million.[3] In a WFAA interview that year, Sanders reflected on the much larger sale and said he felt “left out.”[3]
His irritation was not just a matter of missed money. Sanders was still attached to the food as something made, tasted, and judged. After the sale, he complained that the company had cut costs and made an inferior product compared with the chicken of the early days. For a man whose fortune began with six chairs beside a filling station, the brand had become enormous, but the meal itself had slipped partly out of his hands.
The Colonel Above The Roofline
The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History holds a mid-20th-century Kentucky Fried Chicken weathervane bearing Sanders’s image, with the Colonel holding a gold-handled cane.[2] Similar weathervanes once sat atop the cupolas of stand-alone KFC restaurants, a folk-style ornament over a fast-food chain spreading in many directions.[2]
That weathervane leaves Sanders in a fitting pose. The man who began by feeding travelers at his own table ended up above the roofline, cane lifted, white suit fixed in place, pointing customers toward chicken he no longer owned and, at times, no longer approved of.
![When Colonel Harland Sanders, by that time estranged from KFC, visited a Manhattan KFC in 1976, he described the food as 'the worst fried chicken [he'd] ever tasted' and compared the gravy to 'wallpaper paste'](/cdn-cgi/image/width=258,format=webp,quality=80/https://fantasticfacts.net/media/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/5a083acf3306b5f4481cf33e0d2a1c21.jpg)
