Sixty-Five and Starting Over

In 1956, a new highway opened in Kentucky. It was fast and wide, and it carried travellers smoothly from north to south.

It also passed several miles away from the little town of Corbin, where a white-haired man ran a busy restaurant beside the old road. Almost overnight, the cars stopped coming.

Harland Sanders was sixty-five years old. The business he had built over a quarter of a century was suddenly worth very little.

A boy who cooked

Harland Sanders was born on 9 September 1890 near Henryville, Indiana. When he was five, his father died.

His mother had to go out to work, sometimes for days at a time, peeling tomatoes at a cannery and sewing for other families. Harland, the eldest child, looked after his younger brother and sister. He learned to cook for them, and by the time he was seven, he later said, he could make a good loaf of bread.

He left school early. After that came a long string of jobs, one after another. He worked as a farmhand and a streetcar conductor. He joined the army for a short time. He worked on the railways as a fireman, feeding coal into steam engines. He studied law by correspondence and practised for a while in Arkansas, until he got into a fight with his own client in a courtroom. He sold insurance, ran a ferry boat, and sold tyres.

He was hard-working, but he had a quick temper, and he was fired from more than one job. By the time he was forty, he had very little to show for all that effort.

The service station

Around 1930, during the Great Depression, Sanders took over a roadside service station in Corbin, Kentucky. Travellers stopped there for fuel, and many of them were hungry.

So he began cooking for them. At first he served meals at his own family dining table, in the living quarters at the back of the station. People came for the fuel and stayed for the food. In time he opened a proper restaurant across the road, and then a motel.

His fried chicken became famous along the highway. He was a perfectionist, and he spent years trying to cook it faster without losing its flavour. Frying chicken in a pan took a long time. He found that a new kitchen invention, the pressure cooker, could be adapted to fry it much more quickly, and he worked out a blend of herbs and spices that he kept secret.

In 1935, the governor of Kentucky gave him the honorary title of Kentucky Colonel, a title the state gives to people it wishes to honour. He liked it so much that he used it for the rest of his life.

Fire, and the highway

His years in Corbin were not easy. In 1939 a fire destroyed his motel and restaurant. He rebuilt. During the Second World War, petrol was rationed, travel fell away, and business dropped sharply.

Then came the new highway. In 1956 Sanders sold his restaurant at auction. After paying his debts, he had almost nothing left. He was living on his first government pension cheque, a little over one hundred dollars.

The road again

A few years earlier, he had made an agreement with a restaurant owner in Utah, Pete Harman, who began selling the Colonel's chicken and paid Sanders a few cents for every chicken sold. It had worked well.

Now Sanders decided this would be his new life. He loaded a pressure cooker and his blend of spices into his car and set off across the country with his wife, Claudia. He would walk into a restaurant and offer to cook his chicken for the owner and staff. If they liked it, he offered them a deal.

Many said no. The story is often told that he was turned down hundreds of times, though no one knows the exact number. Sometimes he slept in the back of his car to save money. Claudia mixed and packed the spices at home and sent them to restaurants that signed up.

Slowly, the number of restaurants grew. By the early 1960s, there were hundreds of them across North America.

The white suit

In 1964, at seventy-three, Sanders sold the company to a group of businessmen, while staying on as its public face. In his famous white suit and black string tie, he travelled the world visiting restaurants. He could be a fierce critic when the food was not cooked the way he liked.

He gave much of his money to churches, hospitals and children's charities. He kept working almost until the end. Harland Sanders died on 16 December 1980, at the age of ninety.

Want to read more?

Harland Sanders told his own story in his autobiography, Life As I Have Known It Has Been Finger Lickin' Good. Josh Ozersky's Colonel Sanders and the American Dream is a short, thoughtful biography.