Colonel Sanders (Founder of KFC)

About

Colonel Harland David Sanders was an American businessman and restaurateur who founded the Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) restaurant chain.Colonel Harland David Sanders was an American businessman and restaurateur who founded the Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) restaurant chain.

Life

Sanders was born on September 9, 1890 in a thin-walled, four room shack on a country road 3 miles (4.8 km) east of Henryville, Indiana. He was the oldest of three children born to Wilbur David and Margaret Ann Sanders.His father was a mild and affectionate man who tried to make a living as a farmer, but fell and broke his back and a leg and had to give up his profession.He worked as a butcher in Henryville for the next two years. One summer afternoon in 1895, he came home with a fever and died later that day. Sanders' mother obtained work in a tomato-canning factory; the young Harland was required to cook for his family.

Sanders dropped out of school when he was 12. When his mother remarried in 1902, his stepfather beat him. Therefore, with his mother's approval, he left home to live with his uncle in Albany, Indiana.

What's interesting?

• Sanders falsified his date of birth and enlisted in the United States Army at the age of fifteen, completing his service commitment as a mule handler in Cuba.
•  He was honorably discharged after four months and made his way to Sheffield, Alabama where an uncle lived. His brother Clarence had also moved there, in order to avoid his stepfather.
• During his early years, Sanders held many jobs, including being a steamboat pilot, insurance salesman, railroad fireman, and farmer.
• Sanders married Josephine King in 1908 and started a family, but after his boss fired him for insubordination while he was on a trip, Josephine stopped writing him letters. He then learned that Josephine had left him, given away all their furniture and household goods, and taken the children back to her parents’ home. Josephine’s brother wrote Sanders a letter saying, "She had no business marrying a no-good fellow like you who can’t hold a job." He had a son, Harland, Jr., who died at an early age, and two daughters, Margaret Sanders and Mildred Sanders Ruggles.
• 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 with a 142 seat restaurant, later designated the 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.