History of The Nerd Part I #15: Nerd Food: KFC

In America today the rising obesity problem in our nation is clogging the arteries of our online dating services. That hot photo of Cutegirl_500 on okcupid.com is really ten years old and twenty thousand pieces of fried chicken ago. I do not have a problem with this really. There are a lot of guys out there that will stick their penises into just about anything that moves and, lets face it, the heftys are willing to “give it up” thereby saving our colleges from another sexually frustrated school shooting. Today I stand up and salute one of the architects of our nation’s low self esteem, and creator of some of everyone’s favorite Nerd-Food, Colonel Harland Sanders and the invention of the 11 herbs and spices.  

Sanders was the son of a coal miner, born on September 9, 1890. Thankfully for him, and for the sake of the future, his father died at the age of six forcing him to learn to cook for the family since his mother took to the work force. When Harland was 12 his mother remarried. Harland’s step father disliked all the children, so his mother sent them all away. I guess she thought that she could always make more. Trying to shake off the emotional scarring of his childhood he took on a number of odd jobs. He was a steamboat driver, an insurance salesman, railroad firefighter, and farmer. Harland joined the Army to try to get some kind of direction in his life. He served as a private in 1907 in cuba, most likely drinking the night away and dancing with Desi Arnaz. I know that Desi wasn’t born till 1917, but it’s a nice mental image I’d like to keep.

At the ripe age of 40, Sanders owned a gas station in Corbin, Kentucky. He must have thought to himself that if this doesn’t work out then he could at least use the gas to take himself, his family, and a third of Kentucky out in a literal blaze of glory. The Sanders family lived at the station in living quarters in the back and the greasy cook would serve the famous chicken for his family. The smell of the finger licking good food would waft out to the customers. It didn’t take long for some rude asshole to inappropriately sick his head in and ask for some food. This would be the start of a sensation. They renamed the gas station the “Sanders Court and Café”. Soon the chicken outsold the gas and the Sanders family had to move to bigger digs. They expanded the gas station into a motel and restaurant right along the highway. It seated 142 people and Harland was, of course, the head chef. Harland hit a peak of glory that he hungered for all his life. Kentucky Governor Rudy Laffoon made Sanders an honorary Kentucky Colonel in recognition of his contributions to the state’s rising number of heart attacks. This was an award that was given to pretty much everyone. Dave Thomas founder of “Wendy’s” is also a Kentucky Colonel and you don’t see him rubbing it in anyone’s face.

In the shining year of 1939 the “Sanders Court and Café” was listed in Duncan Hines’ “Adventures in Good Eating.” Okay, let’s have a little sidebar on “Adventures in Good Eating.” Back during the horrible and unimaginable times before cable television, families would be so bored that they would a have to do something before cabin fever set in and dad chased you around with an axe and murderous rage. To remedy this natural tendency to kill one’s own family, people of the time would pack into their cars and hit the road to see some of the more crappy parts of the country. This was apparently fun. The guidebook for millions was the Duncan Hines’ “Adventures in Good Eating”. People planned their vacations around this thing. Getting or not getting into the book could mean the difference between owning a successful shit hole or a just plain ol’ shit hole. Now back to the story.

Sanders was riding high and the Kentucky Colonel thing went straight to his head and made him a little crazy. He started dressing like a slave owning plantation master. God took note of this and decided to knock him down a peg. In 1939 fire struck the “Sanders Court and Café” which burned down to ashes. The restaurant was soon rebuilt and opened again but God would have the final say much, much later.

The Colonel first made his chicken by pan-frying; this was a long process that took up to a half an hour. This was much too long for customers who were now addicted to it like heroin. Harland thought this over and came up with a solution. Apparently not learning from the fire incident he decided to cook the chicken in pressure cookers. This did give the customers fresh chicken much faster but would cause World War II style carnage if the things ever blew. Colonel Sanders was not only a great cook, but also he was an old man with a death wish and a taste for blood.

Harland was an obsessive man who spent more time cooking than servicing his wife with the kind of deep dicking that’s required to keep a successful marriage working. By 1948 they were divorced. The Chicken Pimp, as some would call him, got over it pretty quick. A year later he married Claudia Price and would once again be neglecting someone he pretended to love. Claudia met Sanders while working at his first restaurant as a waitress, setting the precedent for old crusty restaurant owners to bone their young teen waitress.

The battle between God and the Colonel continued on in the early 1950’s with the building of an interstate bypass that completely bypassed and “flipped the bird” to Corbin, Kentucky entirely. Without the highway drivers Sanders knew that God had won and his culinary empire was doomed. He auctioned off all of his operations to pay off all his debts and lived off the $105 dollars he got from social security. This was needless to say pretty upsetting to the Colonel, but he was a person with more than enough moxie to try something new.

In 1951 at the National Restaurant Association convention in Chicago, the Colonel would have a chance meeting with a man who would change everything. The convention was thick with the noise and smoke of drunken conventioneers. These fat cats who got rich screwing over their illegal employees were finally together for some down time and they planned to party like it was 1999. This was appalling to Harland and Claudia. Harland had a salty tongue, but drinking, smoking, and molesting booth bimbos was behavior that he personally hated. It’s polite to pay when some molesting is done.  Naturally, he was drawn to a young quiet couple, Pete Harman and his wife Arline. They were from Utah. Yes, they were Mormon. No, they were not polygamist. Yes, they did enjoy board games and Jell-O deserts… I’m going to move on now. Harland and Harman instantly struck up an enduring and alliterative friendship. On the way to a trip to Australia, the Colonel stopped by Salt Lake City to visit his new Mormon friends. Pete Harman took Sanders on a tour of city that day taking in the beautiful sites of the Temple Square, the Bingham Copper Mines and the large statue of Joseph Smith that had a placard quote that said “I only did it for the poontang.” (You might have guessed that I made that last part up.)

Pete mentioned that he was looking for a dish to be featured at his restaurant, the Do Drop Inn. One could image the old hawk raising his eyebrows when he heard this. Sanders offered to cook Pete dinner that night. Harland cooked like a fiendish madman, obsessive in perfection because “the crackle’ns had to be just right for the gravy”. It took him all night and dinner was served at 10pm. Pete and Arline took one bite and were hooked. Pete convinced Harland to cash in his social security checks and start franchising out his chicken to restaurant around the country. Pete himself was the first to put up a sign on his restaurant that said “Kentucky Fried Chicken” the very next day after their fateful meal. This would be the model on which Sanders would sell his chicken. He and his wife would ride around talking restaurant owners into letting him cook dinner for them. He would take until the coming of the “End Times” to do it, until they were nice and starved out so that anything would taste good. The restaurants would feature his chicken and they give Harland five cents for every piece of chicken they sold. I’m sure he swung around demanding his cut or smack them bitches around, like the pimp he was.

Colonel Sanders’ temper was known far and wide. He was perfectionist, which is a nice way of saying that he was an asshole. Most people that call themselves perfectionists usually are. The Colonel was known to bust into a restaurant and yell at some poor underpaid cook for not making the gravy right and on more than one occasion caused tears, lots and lots of tears. If a restaurant really was a mess he’d grab his bag of seasonings and his special pressure cookers, and backed over them in the parking lot. This was prison mentality; beat somebody up and make him your bitch. You just didn’t fuck with the Colonel.

That first year Sanders only sold four franchises. But in just four years, by 1960, more that 200 restaurants in the United States and Canada were offering sweet southern fried fry-ieness and soon Sanders had to stop traveling to focus on managing his growing business. His old friend Pete created the marketing strategy of his enterprise and also created the famous KFC bucket. Pete Harman recalled years later that they filled the bucket with chicken and lifted it up and it didn’t quite feel like you had your four dollars and seventy-five cents worth. They put in a pint of mashed potatoes and gravy and that felt more like you got your money’s worth. This was a charming sentiment, but let’s face it, not the best model for a business, “this weighs about $4.75, here you lift it…” But who am I to judge? By 1964, the franchise had grown to over 600 franchised outlets in the United States and Canada. This level of popularity was soon killing the 75-year-old chicken slinger. He remarked in News Week article, “[it] was beginning to run right over me and mash me flat.” If you were to read between the lines, it would have said something like, “I feel like someone took the largest drum stick in the batch and began vigorously ramming my brown zone.” He would soon know the meaning of true anal rape when he sold his business later that year.

Sanders sold Kentucky Fried Chicken to Jack Massey and his partner John Y. Brown, Jr. Jack Massey was a Nashville millionaire and John Y. Brown, Jr., was a young would-be entrepreneur who wanted to apply modern sales and management strategies to Kentucky Fried Chicken, i.e. he wanted to fuck the shit out of everything the Colonel and Pete created. The Colonel received $2 million in addition to a lifetime annual salary of $40,000 for publicity and advisory work. (This amount was later increased to $75,000.) Sanders was also guaranteed a spot on the Kentucky Fried Chicken board of directors until 1970. Harland eventually found out that this was a deal with the devil and no amount of fiddle playing would get his ass out of this one. Kentucky Fried Chicken was changed from a sit down restaurant to a take out restaurant and the worst example of heresy to the colonel was the changes to his recipes. Foods that were once hand made were being prepared in minutes by untrained cooks. The mashed potatoes and gravy were replaced with instant products that no one in their right mind really enjoyed.

In 1971, the Colonel sued Heublein Inc., the company that then owned Kentucky Fried Chicken, over alleged misuse of his image in promoting products he had not helped develop. Heublein Inc. settled out of court for over a million dollars. This was most likely shut up money but the craggy old chicken stewart just couldn’t stop running his mouth. He was sued by Heublein Inc. for libel because the Colonel stated publicly that their gravy was “sludge” with a “wallpaper taste” and that what they were serving was “crap”. Apparently thems be fight’n words to say that their food tasted like shit but Heublein lost that fight. R.J. Reynolds then acquired the company and then sold it to the Pepsi Cola Co. in 1986 for a cool $840 million dollars of which the colonel never saw a dime. 

Colonel Harland Sanders battled leukemia for seven months and died in Shelbyville, Kentucky on December 16, 1980. Over 1,000 people attended his funeral and he was buried with his classic white suit and black tie in Cavehill Cemetary in Louisville, Kentucky. The secret of the 11 herbs and spices is still publicly unknown and is locked away in a vault at corporate headquarters.