Colonel Sanders and the American Dream

by Josh Ozersky

  The pressure cooker, then a space-age novelty still on the cutting edge of gastronomy, was, in more ways than can be calculated, the perfect instrument and symbol of everything the Colonel was trying to do. For one thing, although it is sometimes associated in the minds of baby-boom historians with the 1950s culture of domesticity and plenty (the happy wife imagined in her kitchen filled with useless gadgets), in reality, like the Colonel himself, the appliance was a product of scarcity. Although the technology had been around in one form or another since the seventeenth century, pressure cooking never really hit it big in the United States until the Depression and then the war effort made home canning an economic necessity. There, in the stark and shabby kitchens of a million working-class homes, the machine was put to use making apple preserves or softening lentils. Like fried chicken, it was primarily a home technology as well. Fried chicken was the specialty of matriarchs wielding heavy pans who assembled their clans weekly for ceremonial banquets. Unlike hamburgers or hot dogs, public snack foods that only enter the home by way of the backyard, chicken was something you raised, killed, plucked, and ate when needed—a ready staple alongside the canned preserves that frequently accompanied it.

  Even so, modern pressure cookers were high-tech. No one was going to start a fast-food empire using cast-iron skillets, even if those were the best way to cook chicken. (And they are. Calvin Trillin has memorably written, with complete justice, that “a fried chicken cook with a deep fryer is a sculptor working with mittens.”)7 It takes too long to make chicken in a pan, and even the most colossal version hammered out by a southern smithy can only hold thirty pieces at a time at most. On the other hand, it’s not as if the pressure cooker was the obvious option. A fast-food restaurant can make as much fried chicken as it wants in minimal time by the expedient of just throwing the chicken into a deep fryer, a giant tank of boiling oil that stays at constant temperature. In fact, that’s what nearly every fast-food operation uses, and even Kentucky Fried Chicken, over the Colonel’s most strident objections, used the technology to create Extra Crispy chicken—which, to his bafflement and dismay, soon sold nearly as well as Original Recipe. It seems not to have occurred to the Colonel to use a french-fry machine for his chicken. No doubt the excellence of the final product had a lot to do with it; pressure-cooker chicken is succulent and moist in a way that no open fryer’s chicken can be, no matter how ingenious or assiduous the pretreatment.

  The real significance of the pressure cooker, though, is how completely and utterly mechanical a way of cooking it is. The Colonel was, by all accounts, a wonderful cook, but he was a country cook, accustomed to doing everything by feel and intuition. When you make fried chicken, you put some shortening in the pan, or maybe some lard, or maybe both, or not, and you get it hot. You don’t know how hot because there’s no thermometer nearby, and you can’t say how high a flame because chances are you are using a wood or coal stove. (The fire you get depends on how much you use and how clogged the flues are and how much fuel is left in the pile.) You put a little of this and a little of that in the breading—usually whatever you have in the kitchen—and make it cling with an “egg warsh.” The fat is ready when it sizzles when the chicken goes in. You wait long enough for it to brown. How long is that? Who knows? It takes as long as it takes, and you know how long that is because you’ve done it a thousand times and watched your mother do it a thousand times before that. You flip it when it’s brown, and you move the dark pieces in around the hot parts of the pan and the white pieces around the colder parts so they all come out just right together. That’s how you made fried chicken in Kentucky in 1900, when Harland Sanders started doing it, and how you do it today, at home in the South.

  The pressure cooker is another story. It’s a closed, windowless prison, a black box, an isolation chamber. You can’t see the chicken as it cooks in there, can’t smell it, can barely hear it. There’s a little jiggly thing that alerts you that the pressure is on, but you don’t know how much pressure the chicken is getting. And since it’s cooking in an unnatural way, both steaming and frying at the same time, there’s no way to tell what the hell’s going on with it based on your actual experience as a southern home cook. In truth, everything about southern fried chicken is absent from and alien to Kentucky Fried Chicken except for the fact that it’s not trying to be southern, which, paradoxically, makes it real. The Colonel would not have served chicken he thought he couldn’t be proud of; and if it was a little softer than the pan-fried variety, that was OK. Southern cooks are not too particular about these details; they tend not to get hung up on genre and definition. As long as it was great, the Colonel was happy. But the fact remains that pressure-cooker chicken is a modern, mechanical, commercial technology, and the Colonel’s chicken was designed from the ground up as modern, mechanical, commercial technology. Everything about it was modern except the Colonel himself. That has been the genius of Kentucky Fried Chicken then and now. In the early going, the pressure cooker was as much of the pitch as the proprietary seasoned flour or the Colonel’s image itself.

  The instrument played a memorable role in the very first moment of franchising. When Sanders was still in business in Corbin, before any hint of highway rerouting had appeared in the air, he determined, for some reason nobody has been able to reconstruct, to go to Australia to cure himself of cursing. A group of Kentucky clergyman booked the flight, and so the Colonel thought he might as well go along.

  A year earlier, he had attended the National Restaurant Association’s annual convention in Chicago and met a nice couple named Pete and Arline Harman. They were from Utah and teetotalers, like the Colonel, which put them in select company at a convention of restaurant operators in 1950. The three ate several dinners together and talked about food and cooking, and the encounters ended with a friendly invitation to stop by if he was ever in Salt Lake City. The chances of Harland Sanders finding himself there were remote, but he was exactly the kind of person who would look them up. When the flight to Australia had a long layover in Salt Lake City, the Colonel called up Harman and asked to see him. Kentucky Fried Chicken was about to be conceived, though neither man knew it at the time.

  Pete Harman remembers the Colonel’s original pitch. When Harman mentioned that he needed a new product, the Colonel, who had just started to think about the possibility of sending his fried chicken out on the hedges and the highways, took notice. (Five years later the chicken would be his salvation; in 1950, it was still a sideline.) Like almost everyone, Harman, the owner of a successful restaurant in Salt Lake City, immediately liked the Colonel and got a kick out of his salty, avuncular ways. But going into business with him was another story. When the Colonel arrived he announced that he wanted to show Harman something.

  “Pete, instead of you taking me up the canyon for dinner, I want to cook for you,” the Colonel told him.

  He needed spices, he needed a pressure cooker, he needed chicken, and he needed a stove to cook on. They found spices and four whole chickens at Jake’s grocery store. A pressure cooker was tracked down at [an employee’s] home, and she was invited to come try the new kind of chicken with them at about 5:30 that evening. The Colonel was a whirlwind in the kitchen, but inadequate burners on the stove slowed him down. It took forever to boost the oil to the necessary 400 degrees. As time ticked away and stomachs growled, the chicken finally was ready and put in a hot cabinet for holding until dinner. . . . Finally, at 10:00 pm, the Colonel announced that dinner was ready and set out the food for his dubious hosts. “It looks like greasy restaurant chicken,” Arline whispered to Pete while the Colonel fussed some more in the kitchen.8

  Everything turned around after everyone tasted the chicken and, of course, the Colonel’s famous gravy, combined with the old man’s sales pitch, perfected after decades and decades of practice. The trip to Australia, while pleasant enough, had no effect whatsoever on the Colonel’s “cussing.”

  Harman is the unheralded hero of the Kentucky Fried Chicken story, the company
’s virtual cofounder. A quiet and unassuming man, more than anyone else he was the architect of Kentucky Fried Chicken Inc. Harman was the one who thought of the name Kentucky Fried Chicken.9 He conceived of Kentucky Fried Chicken as a stand-alone restaurant. He invented the bucket, which, after the Colonel himself, was the chain’s most recognizable symbol. (What other food, from what other chain, comes in a bucket?) He created the slogan “finger-lickin’ good,” which was likewise synonymous with the brand for most of its history. He remained a top figure in the hierarchy of the company through all its corporate owners. He was the first franchisee and the man who, it was felt by many, knew the Colonel best professionally. He is not known to the public because nobody cares who thought of the bucket, just as nobody cares who invented the idea of making Kentucky Fried Chicken primarily a take-out restaurant—an innovation that had as much to do with the chain’s success as anything else in the mobile, motorized 1960s. (For the record, it was the Colonel’s daughter Margaret.) Harland Sanders thought to reinvent himself as “the Colonel” and convinced a guy he had met once to use his fried chicken recipe at his diner. For that he deserves his immortality. But it would be a mistake to consider Sanders the sole author of Kentucky Fried Chicken or to credit him with having found solutions for the enterprise’s innumerable practical challenges. Although given to fits of frustration with the food he tasted at far-flung restaurants, he did not have it in him to oversee the chain’s operations himself. Though he would periodically vent—sometimes even to the press—the truth is that he liked to show up in his white suit, talk about “his” chicken, and leave. Everyone was happy with the arrangement, especially the Colonel. Pete Harman was actually charged with making it all work.

  One of the biggest challenges Harman faced was figuring out a way to use pressure cookers to produce chicken at one volume. Even a single-burner pot, such as the Colonel drove around with in his backseat, was trouble. But how to run the dozens it would take to do the chicken on a large scale? Because that was what Harman had in mind from the beginning. The chicken wasn’t to be a single item buried in a menu; it was to be the star of his restaurant, illustrated with a large roadside image of the Colonel. But this infernal machine was as precarious, volatile, and unpredictable as the Colonel’s temper—another thing that made it an ideal symbol of the enterprise in the early days. For all their usefulness, the pressure cookers of the 1930s and ’40s were, like so much else from that era, thrown together by any number of now-defunct factories, many only slightly more efficient than Oskar Schindler’s. They tended to blow up, often sending deadly shrapnel in every direction, and in some cases, shooting their contents at murderous velocity as well. The Colonel’s practice of putting hot oil and chicken into them gave many a diner owner pause, and if the magnificent bird that came out was well worth the risk (and the nickel), they often remembered the pressure cooker to the end of their days. “You danged old fool,” one told him, “you’re only supposed to cook green beans and the like in a pressure cooker. That thing’s going to blow you from here to Kingdom Come some day.”10 On at least one occasion, the Colonel managed to set himself on fire.11 The pressure cooker took some raw physical courage, too—another quality that separates Harland Sanders from the other businessmen who founded restaurant empires in America. (Did Ray Kroc ever stitch his own scalp after a car accident? Did Glen “Taco” Bell ever trade gunshots in Hell’s Half-Acre?)

  Harman didn’t take much convincing after he tasted the Colonel’s chicken recipe. He acted quickly and decisively. First, having decided to make Kentucky Fried Chicken the centerpiece of his restaurant, Harman’s Cafe, he put an enormous sign with the words “Colonel Sanders’ Kentucky Fried Chicken,” written with the now-ubiquitous lettering, in the window. Harman then bought all the unused radio time available on the local station for a bargain-basement five hundred dollars. “If there was anything that got Kentucky Fried Chicken off the ground,” he later remembered, “it was gambling on radio’s unsold time. We had to change equipment practically every day for two weeks just to cook enough chicken to satisfy demand.”12

  The restaurant, already a success, became a profit machine, and subsequent restaurants followed. At each one Harman pushed Kentucky Fried Chicken harder. By the time the third restaurant opened up, an oversize image of the Colonel, white suit and all, was featured on the sign. Harman was a natural at the business. He saw that take-out was going to become more important in an increasingly motorized, mobile, suburban postwar society, so to-go meals, designed from the ground up, became a key part of the operations. (Though not the main focus; that was to come later.) The bucket was an effort to sell big orders to whole families and quickly became the sole focus of Harman’s take-out business. He saw that television was becoming a dominant medium and committed to TV, even arranging to have a local station broadcast live from one of the newly opened restaurants. In one of the most conservative parts of the country, he came up with a profit-sharing plan for his employees when such an arrangement was unprecedented. He was also one of the first major restaurant operators to aggressively hire women as managers.

  But Harman’s most lasting insight was in seeing, as the McDonald brothers did at about the same time in California, that the sit-down restaurant was a waste of time and effort, not to mention money. Why go to all the trouble of having waitresses and dishwashers and porters and busboys and salads and hamburgers and all the rest of it when all anyone wanted was chicken and that to take out? Harman, like the McDonalds, had come up out of small diners and restaurants and assumed that more was better, that the personal touch counted, that people wanted to eat a meal together. Not so! All they wanted was a bucket of very good, highly seasoned, crusty but tender fried chicken in a bucket and to be on their way. This insight would eventually lead another Sanders protégé, Dave Thomas, to invent the drive-in window, but that was still years in the future.

  In the late 1950s, after Sanders Court and Cafe finally gave up the ghost and freed the Colonel to put all his thunderous energies into spreading his chicken gospel, the business started to pick up. All those little restaurants—a diner here, a roadhouse there—selling his chicken and honoring their end of a handshake deal began to pay off. There were hundreds of them, and more every day, as prospective franchisees would take a pilgrimage to Shelbyville, where the Sanders family now lived in a big white house. There the Colonel would talk up a storm, put them up for the night, and then make an immense southern breakfast of country ham, red-eye gravy, biscuits, scrambled eggs, bacon, grits, various pastries, and the strong black coffee served in the South. The franchisees, however, didn’t join Team Sanders because of his ham and gravy, legendary though that was. They joined because they could make money with Kentucky Fried Chicken. And as Kentucky Fried Chicken became a more streamlined corporate business in the years to come, with a massive advertising budget and a famous name, those profits got bigger still.

  The experience of Earl and Winnifried Smalley was a typical one. In 1969 the New York Times ran a profile of the couple. In the years when the Colonel was still recruiting franchisees, they would have been ideal targets. Incredibly hardworking, both had been brought up on farms, like the Colonel. They slaved away at a tiny mom-and-pop restaurant in Warsaw, Indiana, that barely supported them. Earl worked sixty-five hours a week, getting up before dark to clean and prep the place; Winnifried worked forty-five hours and raised their children. From 1957 to 1963 the place grossed $45,000 to $55,000 a year; after expenses, the two made about $3,000 a year—between the two of them. A year or so later (the piece doesn’t specify), Earl was introduced to the Colonel. By this time it was no easy feat to get a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise, which was recognized as a gold mine. But the Smalleys were given the chance, and they sold the luncheonette for a piddling $800, less than the equipment was worth. “At least I made something,” Earl told the newspaper. “There have been three guys in there since and they all went broke.” They borrowed $20,000 to buy the franchise and within ten months had p
aid it off. The first year they earned $30,000, literally ten times what they made previously.

  Multiply the story of the Smalleys by ten thousand and you begin to get the picture of what Kentucky Fried Chicken meant to its partners. The image everyone has of a fast-food “empire” is that of a vast and homogeneous pattern of clones filling up a map like cancer cells and erasing all tradition at the behest of self-interested corporate forces. This isn’t entirely inaccurate, and there’s no question that any number of small, rural institutions, very much in the vein of Sanders Cafe, have now been replaced by Kentucky Fried Chicken franchises. On the other hand, there is something so wrong, so un-American about the working poverty of people like the Smalleys. How could someone work that hard in a business so necessary, so woven into the daily life of their town, and not have anything to show for it? These weren’t factory workers or migrant field hands or sweatshop drudges; these were property owners who had clawed their way to middle age and still could barely make enough to live on. All they wanted was a chance. It wasn’t the Warsaw Chamber of Commerce that gave it to them or the Rotarians or the Great Society; it was the Colonel.

  Moreover, as would become increasingly clear in the years ahead, it was the franchisees for whom he had the most sympathy. They were the ones sweating in the kitchens, striving away, while in Louisville a group of high-handed businessmen reaped the profits, just as they were reaping the profits from his life’s work. (Of course, when he ventured into a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise that served “his” food in less than satisfactory form—which was pretty much all of them—he would berate them mercilessly.) The franchisees had an ongoing relationship with the corporation, which began as warm and personal, became merely cooperative later, and by the 1980s would become deeply adversarial. The company gave with one hand and took with the other. On one side, Kentucky Fried Chicken gave them their fortunes and their livelihoods, not to mention the secret central substance, the Colonel’s unique seasoned flour—the chain’s sole claim of distinction in a murderously crowded field. Then, too, the corporation matched their advertising and marketing contributions so both were partners in promoting the brand. Meanwhile, the company got a lot from the franchisees, too. They were its lifeblood. All of the company’s revenues came from them, and they weren’t employees. They were partners who needed to be treated politically rather than ordered around. The only remedy against their disobedience was to threaten removal of their franchise, which would just result in losing all the money they brought in. Eventually the company would own thousands of stores itself, but in the beginning, every Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant was private property. The owner could lock the door and tell the CEO to go to hell at any time, and this did happen from time to time. At the same time, the company retained operating control, which was something a business rarely gets to keep when running on outside capital. It took money from the franchisees, but they didn’t have to give back a single bit of stock or the power it represented.