Colonel Sanders - Career

Career

In 1930 Sanders opened a service station in Corbin, Kentucky where he cooked chicken dishes and other meals such as country ham and steaks for customers. Since he did not have a restaurant, he served customers in his adjacent living quarters. His local popularity grew, and Sanders moved to a motel and 142 seat restaurant, later Harland Sanders Café and Museum. Over the next nine years he developed his "secret recipe" for frying chicken in a pressure fryer that cooked the chicken much faster than pan frying. In 1939 food critic Duncan Hines visited Sanders’s restaurant incognito and was so impressed he listed the place in “Adventures in Good Eating,” his famous guide to restaurants throughout the US. As his success grew, Sanders played a more active role in civic life, joining the Rotary Club, the chamber of commerce, and the Freemasons. In 1947 he and Josephine divorced, and in 1949 he married his secretary Claudia, as he had long desired. He was "re-commissioned" as a Kentucky colonel in 1949 by his friend, Governor Lawrence Wetherby.

Around 1950, Sanders began developing his distinctive appearance, growing his trademark mustache and goatee and donning a white suit and string tie. He never wore anything else in public during the last 20 years of his life, using a heavy wool suit in the winter and a light cotton suit in the summer. He bleached his moustache and goatee to match his white hair.

At age 65, Sanders' store having failed due to the new Interstate 75 reducing his restaurant's customer traffic, he took $105 from his first Social Security check and began visiting potential franchisees.

The franchise approach was successful, and less than ten years later (in 1964) Sanders sold the Kentucky Fried Chicken corporation for $2 million to a partnership of Kentucky businessmen headed by John Y. Brown, Jr. The deal did not include the Canadian operations. In 1965 Sanders moved to Mississauga, Ontario to oversee his Canadian franchises and continued to collect franchise and appearance fees there and appearance fees in the U.S. (He was locally active. For example, his 80th birthday was held at the Inn on the Park in North York, Ontario, hosted by Jerry Lewis as a Canadian Muscular Dystrophy Association fundraiser.) In September 1970 he and his wife were baptized in the Jordan River. He befriended Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell.

In 1973, he sued Heublein Inc. — then parent company of Kentucky Fried Chicken — over alleged misuse of his image in promoting products he had not helped develop. In 1975, Heublein Inc. unsuccessfully sued Sanders for libel after he publicly described their gravy as "wallpaper paste" to which "sludge" was added.