okay, so here’s the true life story of colonel sanders & KFC. buckle up lol. https://twitter.com/theerkj/status/1340726223815716864

Harlan Sanders was born in 1890 to an super religious mom who told him everything was bad (tobacco, alcohol, playing cards, coffee etc). She would later marry a man that wasn’t excited to have step children so he literally left home at 12 to go work on a farm.

Just two weeks into the 7th grade he realized he could no longer finish school & work on the farm (he said algebra was hard) so he dropped out. 6 years later, he got married at 18 & had 3 children with his future wife of 40 years...

But not before he planned & failed to kidnap his own children after he lost his job with the railroad (he got in a brawl with a colleague) & his wife left him to visit her mom in Alabama. For the next 30 years, he was a streetcar & steamboat operator, fireman and even a midwife.

Harlan’s luck would change at the tender age of 40 when he started selling country ham, okra, biscuits, string beans out the back of a gas station in Corbin, Ky. The one thing he didn’t serve ironically was fried chicken because it took too long to cook for travelers.

Because filling stations were a dime a dozen in the area, Sanders’ was famous for painting signs on barns nearby to signal people where to stop for his shell station. Well that got the attention of a rival station owner who then went around painting over the colonel’s signs...

So Harlan did what any white male business owner in the jim crow south with a potential hater—he got 2 regional managers together & they went to “pay him a visit”. But what the trio didn’t expect, was that the rival Stewart was about that life and shot one of the managers.

But what Stewart didn’t know was that Harlan became a lawyer by mail, lied about his age to serve 6 months in the military at 15, lost his kids and his wife already and was known for "the force and variety of his swearing” so naturally he had a gun and shot him back.

Although the intent was to “kill the competition” Stewart would go to prison for murder, and charges against Sanders were dropped, leaving him the gas station king of Kentucky. Becoming the new gas station king opened him up to be now adorned the Colonel of Chicken.

A real, honorary title bestowed by the Governor btw. fellow Kentucky Colonels include Muhammad Ali & Bob Barker for whatever reason...

So back to the chicken right? Pan frying chicken was just taking too long, Harlan thought the chicken was too dry and unevenly cooked. But it was so popular customers would wait up to 30 minutes for the chicken, until he had a breakthrough in 1939...

He found that deep frying in a pressure cooker, which gave him the right balance of time and tender quality. Add that he was finalizing his famous “11 herbs & spices” and he was about to blow and Duncan Hines (yes the cake box) was the one who put him on the map.

Duncan Hines was a popular food critic who published “Adventures in Good Eating” which was just a road guide to good food. Finally at 49, Sanders turned his gas station chicken into a 142 seat restaurant right across the street. But shit happens right...

The first Kentucky Fried Chicken happened to be in Utah because a new highway junction basically rerouted all his customers away from his original location and in 1956 he auctioned off the business at a loss & lived off a $105 social security check. but lucky for him...

He actually began the process of franchising four years prior to Pete Harman in Utah. Pete owned one of the largest in Salt Lake City and as a student of Harlan’s new chicken methods he started selling Sanders' chicken as his first-ever franchisee of the “Kentucky Fried Chicken”.

Now there’s a lot of speculation that has been slightly debunked about the recipe, it’s origins and how a black woman may have created it but I find this passage from his 2003 biography to sum it up perfectly:

As Black history has been routinely removed from origin stories & history for hundreds of years (See: Uncle Nearest/Jack Daniels paradox) we may never know the “truth” but that wouldn’t matter because by 1963 he’d patented his pressure cooking method & had over 600 restaurants.

Now if we remember, Pete Harman has coined the phrase “Kentucky Fried Chicken” and “finger-lickin good”, owned half of all the the US/CA locations and came up with the bucket itself...but it’s the colonel’s face on everything so ultimately that made him a millionaire at 73.

The colonel being the newly rich man in his seemingly twilight years reluctantly sold KFC to a group of investors for $2 mill if they promised to never tamper with the recipe & he’d stay on as an adviser and brand ambassador.

KFC now bumps it’s marketing budget from $500k to $24m in just 6 years. The colonel’s signature look actually came from him wanting to appear as a southern gentleman and the all white “hid flour stains”. He bleached his mustache & beard to match his hair.

The look became so iconic & synonymous that he began to call himself the colonel wore that suit the next 20 years of his life. But oh boy, was that’s spicy 20. Sanders would go on to hate KFC (just like y’all) even after traveling all around the country for appearances etc...

The changes the company made would go on to frustrate the shit out of Harlan & he would talk shit about everybody. He reportedly wanted a gravy so good “it'll make you throw away the durn chicken and just eat the gravy." But post-Sanders franchisees saw it as too expensive.

So the gravy you know, isn’t the Colonel’s vision & he let everybody know. He would visit franchises & would throw the food on the floor and call it "god-damned slop." He even called it “pure wallpaper paste" made with tap water, flour, and starch to which they add "some sludge".

He would go on to even criticize the company’s “new crispy recipe” calling it “nothing in the world but a damn fried doughball stuck on some chicken." The block was so hot between the Colonel that in 1978 KFC sued him for libel (the case ended up being thrown out)

The tension between The Colonel and KFC may or may not have opened up an archive on him with the FBI but definitely not an investigation but a request for a signed picture (lol)

Disgruntled and over saturated in his 80s, his now wife Claudia decided to open ‘Claudia Sanders, The Colonel's Lady Dinner House’, as a sit-down styled restaurant (think The Colonnade or Mary Mac’s Atlanta) and of course KFC said absolutely not & sued for $120 million.

They would settle the case to the tune of $1 million if Sanders sold the restaurant. The restaurant, now Claudia Sanders Dinner House, is the only KFC-licensed chicken recipe location outside of the franchise itself.

In 1980, Sanders died at 90 to acute leukemia...but it doesn’t end there, for whatever reason. In Japan, Osaka’s baseball team the Hanshin Tigers won the championship in 1985. To celebrate, they would jump into the Dotonburi River but some fans took it a little further.

They thought a statue outside of a local KFC looked like Tigers' American first baseman Randy Bass so into the river it went too. Since then, the Tigers would never win another championship & call it the “Curse of the Colonel”. The statue was retrieved in 2009 but missing pieces.

Even though The Colonel got out the gas station chicken game before the 60s, Shell Gas Stations (and a myriad of other brands) still sell (delicious) pressure cooked fried chicken less than 100 feet away from the pump til this day