Description
From Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben to the Jolly Green Giant and Ronald McDonald, corporate icons sell billions of dollars’ worth of products. But only one of them used to be ever a real person—Colonel Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken/KFC. From a 1930s roadside café in Corbin, Kentucky, Harland Sanders launched a fried chicken business that now circles the globe, serving “finger lickin’ good” chicken to more than twelve million people each day. But to get there, he had to surrender regulate of his company and even his own image, becoming a mere symbol to people today who don’t know that Colonel Sanders used to be a very real human being. This book tells his story—the story of a dirt-poor striver with unlimited ambition who personified the American Dream.
Acclaimed cultural historian Josh Ozersky defines the American Dream as having the ability to transcend your roots and create yourself as you see fit. Harland Sanders did exactly that. Forced at age ten to go to work to help toughen his widowed mother and sisters, he failed at job after job until he went into business for himself as a gas station/café/motel owner and in any case achieved a comfortable, middle-class life. But then the interstate bypassed his business and, at sixty-five, Sanders went broke again. Packing his car with a pressure cooker and his secret blend of eleven herbs and spices, he began peddling the recipe for “Colonel Sanders’ Kentucky Fried Chicken” to small-town diners in exchange for a nickel for every chicken they sold. Ozersky traces the upward thrust of Kentucky Fried Chicken from this unlikely beginning, telling the dramatic story of Sanders’ self-transformation into “The Colonel,” his truculent relationship with KFC management as their ceaselessly-disregarded goodwill ambassador, and his equally turbulent afterlife as the world’s most recognizable commercial icon.