![]() “American Enterprise,” a new permanent exhibition at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., features some 600 artifacts, arrayed to tell the story of American business and innovation from the mid-1700s to the present. In 1964, when the 75-year-old Sanders sold his company for $2 million dollars, more than 600 franchises were distributing his fried chicken-made from the Colonel’s secret blend of “eleven herbs and spices." Now a subsidiary of Yum! Brands, KFC boasts almost 20,000 outlets worldwide, 5,000 of them in China. Slogans like “North America’s hospitality dish” and "We fix Sunday dinner seven nights a week" beckoned customers to eat in or carry out. Harland Sanders became “Colonel Sanders,” and his Southern gentleman guise, replete with goatee, black string tie and white double-breasted suit, solidified into an iconic brand. He did better than “worse”-far, far better: In time, and with some dramatic ups and downs, that one-room café expanded into a multi-million-dollar fried-chicken empire, Kentucky Fried Chicken, known today as KFC. “I figured I couldn’t do worse than these people running these places around town,” said Sanders, as recounted in John Ed Pearce’s 1982 biography, The Colonel.Ĭolonel Harland Sanders (1890-1980), the founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken, celebrates his 88th birthday on September 1, 1978 And he had begun serving family-style meals: country ham, mashed potatoes, biscuits and fried chicken. He had arranged six chairs around the single table. He had rolled in the dining room table from the living quarters he and his family occupied behind the station. “One thing I always could do was cook.”īefore long, he had covered the floor of his station’s small storage room with linoleum, purchased on credit. “I got to thinking,” Sanders later recalled. “I’m afraid you’re right,” Sanders replied.īut the complaint took hold. The man had a point: It was the early 1930s, and truck drivers, tourists and traveling salesman whose paths through southeastern Kentucky delivered them to North Corbin found little more in the way of welcome than the tire checks and windshield cleanings Harland Sanders offered at his filling station on U.S. “Damn! There ain’t a decent place around here to eat!”
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