The friendly face on the red and white bucket was a real man, but the truth about Harland Sanders is far stranger and darker than the cheerful logo suggests. He was never a soldier, never earned the title Colonel through military service, and the grandfatherly image he projected for decades was a carefully constructed costume. Behind the white suit and gentle smile was a hard, restless man with a violent temper, a profane tongue, and a history of failures that stretched across forty years. Sanders was born on an Indiana farm and was just five years old when his father died.
His mother worked in a cannery, leaving him to care for his younger siblings, which forced him to learn to cook at an early age. By the seventh grade, he had left school for good. Over the following decades, he drifted through a remarkable string of jobs, working as a streetcar conductor, a railroad fireman, and even a lawyer for about three years after studying law by correspondence. That legal career ended when he brawled with his own client in open court.
He sold insurance until he was fired, started a ferry that actually turned a profit, then lost the money on an acetylene lamp company that was destroyed by the spread of electric light. In 1930, at age 40, he was running a small filling station in Corbin, Kentucky, on a rough stretch of road locals called Hell’s Half Acre. It was there that he began serving fried chicken to travelers at his own kitchen table. In 1931, a roadside feud over painted advertising signs turned deadly.
A rival operator named Matt Stewart had repeatedly painted over Sanders’ signs, and on May 7, Sanders confronted him along with two men from Shell Oil. Shots were exchanged, and Robert Gibson, one of the Shell men, was killed on the spot. Sanders pulled the pistol from the dead man’s hand and fired back, wounding Stewart. Stewart was convicted of murder, while charges against Sanders were dropped.
The following year, in 1932, Sanders’ 20-year-old son, Harland David Jr. , died from complications of an infected tonsils. The loss broke something in him, and his marriage to his first wife, Josephine, which had been failing for years, finally ended in divorce in 1947. He married Claudia, a younger woman who had worked at his restaurant, in 1949.
By then, his Sanders Cafe had grown into a successful operation with a motel. He perfected a method of frying chicken in a pressure cooker, which cut cooking time dramatically, and guarded his blend of 11 herbs and spices as a closely held secret. The cafe earned a recommendation in Duncan Hines’ influential guidebook, and travelers began going out of their way to eat there. But in the mid-1950s, the new Interstate system routed traffic away from Corbin.
Business collapsed. In 1956, at age 65, Sanders sold the restaurant at auction for about $75,000, far less than its value, and was nearly broke, relying on a social security check of roughly $100 a month. Instead of retiring, he hit the road, cooking samples of his chicken in restaurant kitchens across the country. For every chicken a restaurant sold, he received five cents.
He faced rejection many times, traveling on a shoestring and sometimes sleeping in his car. The gamble paid off. By the early 1960s, there were roughly 600 Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets across the United States and Canada, and the company was one of the largest fast-food operations in the country. In 1964, Sanders sold the business to two investors, John Y.
Brown Jr. and Jack Massey, for $2 million in cash. He famously appeared on Johnny Carson’s show with the money in a clear plastic cage. Believing the company would be worthless without him, he turned down company stock.
Within seven years, the new owners sold the business for around $285 million, and Sanders received almost none of that fortune. Just as significant, he had signed away the rights to his own likeness. The white suit, string tie, and goatee now belonged to the corporation. He spent his later years publicly criticizing the company’s food, calling the gravy “wallpaper paste” in newspaper interviews, and making surprise visits to restaurants to complain about quality.
He sued the company over the misuse of his image, seeking around $122 million, but settled for about $1 million. A restaurant he opened with Claudia had to be renamed without the Colonel title because he no longer owned the rights to it. Sanders gave away a great deal of his money, tithing to his church and funding children’s hospitals and college scholarships. He died on December 16, 1980, at age 90, after battling acute leukemia.
His body lay in state in the rotunda of the Kentucky state capital. More than a thousand mourners attended his funeral in Louisville. He was buried in his white suit at Cave Hill Cemetery, where his grave became the cemetery’s most visited site, marked by a bronze bust sculpted by his daughter. The man who spent forty years failing at nearly everything, survived a roadside gunfight, buried his only son, went broke at retirement age, and then clawed his way to a fortune, was buried.
But the mask he created outlived him. The cartoon Colonel still sells chicken in countries he never visited, an ageless, smiling figure fully detached from the complicated, restless human being who invented him.