KFC

The gravy was wrong. Colonel Harland Sanders knew it in his mouth the way a pianist knows a missed note in the dark — not through analysis but through decades of bodily knowledge, the accumulated memory of a hundred thousand batches cooked in pressure cookers across two dozen states, the exact ratio of drippings to flour to time that separated the sublime from the merely competent. He broke a biscuit in half, poured some gravy over it from his guest's bowl at the Colonel Sanders Kentucky Inn in Shelbyville, Kentucky, took two thoughtful bites, then pushed it away. "Ain't fit for my dogs," he said.

By then — the late 1960s — the company that bore his name, his face, his white suit, and his secret recipe of eleven herbs and spices was selling more than $500 million worth of fried chicken annually through some 2,700 outlets worldwide, more prepared food in dollar volume than any company on Earth. It had minted more than 125 millionaires among its stockholders, franchisees, and employees. Twenty-one people who reported to work each morning at KFC headquarters in Louisville were millionaires or multimillionaires. The stock had returned 700x for early investors. And the founder — the actual human being whose artistry had made all of this possible — was sitting in his own restaurant, sampling his own gravy, and finding it unfit for canine consumption.

This is the central tension that runs through every era of Kentucky Fried Chicken, from a gas station back room in Corbin to 30,000 restaurants in 150 countries under the umbrella of Yum! Brands: the war between the artist's obsession with the perfect product and the franchise operator's obsession with replicable profit. Every great franchise system must solve this problem. KFC didn't solve it so much as embody the contradiction — building one of the most successful food businesses in history on top of a recipe so finicky that, as one executive admitted, "you had to be a Rhodes Scholar to cook it."

Harland David Sanders was born September 9, 1890, on a farm three miles from Henryville, Indiana — a world so far removed from the contemporary franchise economy that the distance cannot be measured in years alone. When he was six, his father died. His mother went to work sewing for families and peeling tomatoes at a canning factory. Little Harland was left in charge of his younger sister and brother. He learned to cook the way some children learn to survive: out of necessity, with stakes attached. By seven, he was excelling in bread and vegetables and, as he later recalled, "coming along nicely in meat."

The defining intellectual moment of his childhood — perhaps the one that determined everything that followed — came in a schoolhouse near Greenwood, Indiana, when algebra was introduced to his arithmetic class. "The only thing I got out of it was that x equalled the unknown quantity," he said decades later. "And I thought, Oh, Lord, if we got to wrestle with this, I'll just leave — I don't care about the unknown quantity. So my school days ended right there." He was in the seventh grade. He was twelve years old when his mother's remarriage to a man unenthusiastic about stepchildren drove him from home entirely.

What followed was a quarter-century of American picaresque that reads less like a business biography and more like a Cormac McCarthy character study of a man who could not sit still. Between the ages of fifteen and forty, Sanders worked as a streetcar conductor in New Albany, Indiana; served in the Army in Cuba; got married and had three children (the marriage would last thirty-nine years before ending in divorce); shoveled coal as a railroad fireman across Alabama, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Virginia; studied law by correspondence and practiced in justice-of-the-peace courts in Little Rock; sold insurance in Kentucky and Indiana; operated a steamboat ferry on the Ohio River; served as secretary of the Columbus, Indiana, Chamber of Commerce; manufactured acetylene lighting systems; sold tires; and ran service stations in Nicholasville and Corbin, Kentucky, where he created a mild sensation by brushing customers' cars with a whisk broom.

For more on Sanders' improbable journey, Josh Ozersky's Colonel Sanders and the American Dream offers a sharp cultural analysis, while John Ed Pearce's The Colonel provides the definitive biographical account.

None of these ventures made him rich. All of them made him something arguably more valuable: a man who understood the American road — its rhythms, its hungers, its democracy of appetite — from the inside.

The chicken started almost as an afterthought. At his Corbin, Kentucky, service station in the early 1930s, Sanders cooked for his family in a back room and began selling meals to interstate travelers "crazed with hunger after the greasy-spoon diet of the open road." Pan-fried chicken, country ham, string beans, okra, hot biscuits. Word spread. Grateful travelers carried news to other states. By the late 1930s, Duncan Hines listed the Sanders place in Adventures in Good Eating — the Michelin Guide of the American highway.

But Sanders had a problem that every restaurant operator will recognize: the tyranny of cooking time versus demand variability. Pan-frying chicken took thirty minutes. Cook after an order was placed and the customer waited; cook a batch in advance and you threw away unsold product at closing. French-frying — immersing chicken in deep fat — cut the time in half but produced meat that was, in Sanders' unsparing assessment, dry, crusty, and unevenly done.

Then, in 1939, Sanders made what one food historian called "a historic breakthrough." He hit on the idea of frying chicken under pressure using a newfangled utensil called a pressure cooker. The concept was simple. The execution was not. He experimented obsessively until he found the precise balance of pressure, cooking time, meat size, fat type, and fat filtration. Pressure frying sealed in the chicken's natural juices, preserved its moisture, and produced a soft finish — neither greasy nor crusty — in only eight or nine minutes. A 70% reduction in cooking time with superior quality.

This was the core innovation, and everything that followed — the franchise empire, the billion-dollar brand, the global expansion — rested on the marriage of that technique with the secret blend of eleven herbs and spices Sanders had been refining since the 1930s. The chicken was the product. The pressure-frying process was the technology platform. Together they constituted a system that, unlike most restaurant cooking, could theoretically be standardized and replicated — though the Colonel would spend the rest of his life arguing that "theoretically" and "actually" were different things, and that the gap between them was filled with God-damned incompetence.

Sanders' restaurant in Corbin prospered through the 1940s. He expanded it to seat 142 customers. He thought he was set for life. He was wrong in the way that small-business owners along the American highway system were wrong throughout the 1950s — wrong because the federal government was about to rearrange the topology of American commerce.

First, a highway junction in front of his restaurant was moved to another site, slashing traffic. Then came the announcement that a new interstate highway would bypass his location entirely. The Colonel was sixty-four years old. His restaurant was doomed. In 1956, he auctioned it off at what he described as a considerable loss.

He was now living on savings, what he had salvaged from the sale, and a Social Security check of $105 a month. Most men in this position would have retired. Sanders had a different idea — one born from an experiment he'd conducted four years earlier, almost as a favor.

In 1952, he had taught his chicken-frying process to Pete Harman, a friend in Salt Lake City, and let Harman begin serving the chicken in his restaurant. Harman's business increased substantially. News of Harman's success spread. By 1956, six or eight restaurant owners had made informal franchise arrangements with the Colonel, paying him four cents for every chicken they cooked with his process.

So at sixty-six — an age when his contemporaries were collecting pensions and watching television — Colonel Harland Sanders put a couple of pressure cookers and a bag of seasoning into his car and hit the road.

The franchising method Sanders devised was a masterclass in what contemporary operators would call "product-led sales," though there was nothing contemporary about it. He would drive to a likely-looking restaurant, walk in, and beg the owner to let him cook some chicken for the employees after the lunch rush or after closing time. If the staff liked the chicken, he'd offer to stay for a couple of days and cook for paying customers. A favorable public reaction would lead to franchise negotiations.

It was, by any modern standard, absurdly inefficient. To offset travel expenses, Sanders cadged free meals from friends in the business wherever he could and often slept in the back seat of his car. He longed to sign a prestige franchisee — the owner of a big restaurant, someone prominent in the National Restaurant Association — but during the early days, these men were uninterested.

But Sanders was not desperate enough to sacrifice standards for growth. He inspected prospective franchisees with the same ruthlessness he applied to gravy. "My wife and I went way over in Illinois once," he recalled. "It was fifteen hundred miles, round trip. We got in there just after dark, and as soon as I looked at the daggone place I was afraid the trip was for nothing. I got out of the car and went around to see what the back end looked like. They had a glass door in the kitchen and I could see in, and I knew immediately I didn't want to put the chicken in there. So I went back to the car and we come on home. The owner don't know yet today that I ever did see that joint."

Within a couple of years, inquiries were coming to him. By 1960, there were approximately 200 outlets in the United States and half a dozen in Canada. The Colonel's profit before taxes was $100,000 a year. His wife, Claudia, handled the mixing, packing, and shipping of the spices and herbs from their home in Shelbyville, Kentucky. The recipe itself was never given to franchisees — then or now — to prevent it from falling into competitors' hands.

By late 1963, the Colonel had more than 600 franchised outlets — well ahead of Chicken Delight, Chicken in the Rough, and every other fried-chicken operation in America. His annual pre-tax profit was running around $300,000. He had seventeen employees. He had put up an office building behind his house. And he was beginning to feel that the company was getting out of hand.

The right buyer arrived in the form of John Y. Brown, Jr. — a twenty-nine-year-old Kentucky lawyer whose biographical compression could serve as a case study in American velocity. Son of a prominent attorney and the grandson of a tenant farmer, Brown had been earning $700 a month selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door at sixteen. As a University of Kentucky freshman, he made $500 his first weekend selling Encyclopædia Britannica. By the time he graduated from law school, he was a district sales manager for Britannica, supervising thirty men and earning $25,000 a year, while also competing on the golf and swimming teams. He turned down a $75,000 sales job to practice law with his father.

Brown and Sanders met in June 1963, when the Colonel asked Brown to work as his attorney. Brown declined, but over polite conversation was astonished to learn the scale of Sanders' operation. "When I heard that, I imagined that he had salesmen everywhere," Brown recalled. "I said, 'Well, Colonel, how many salesmen do you have out in the field?' And he said, 'Oh, we don't solicit — we don't believe in solicitation.' I was flabbergasted. It was a one-man operation. The Colonel was the whole show."

Brown's sales instinct activated instantly. He secured financial backing from Jack Massey, a Nashville millionaire, and by October 1963 the two men were making their pitch. Sanders answered without hesitation that a sale was out of the question. He made mildly disparaging remarks about city slickers. Brown and Massey argued that if Sanders died before selling, much of his estate would go to taxes. They offered $2 million, stock in the proposed new company, and a continuing relationship — the Colonel as the company's adviser and living image. They promised quality control as their byword. They swore no one would tamper with the recipe.

Could a father sell his child? The Colonel meditated. Brown wooed. They crisscrossed the country counseling with daughters, grandchildren, nephews, preachers, bankers, accountants, franchisees — everyone close to the Colonel or affected by the sale. On January 6, 1964, the Colonel signed. He took $2 million (with a $500,000 down payment on March 6), a lifetime salary of $40,000 a year (later raised to $75,000), and — in a decision that would haunt financial observers for decades — turned down ten thousand shares of KFC stock. Had he taken them, they would have eventually been worth an additional $7 million or more.

The Colonel retained Canada. The new company got the rest of the world minus England, Florida, Utah, and Montana, which had already been disposed of. Brown and Massey now owned one of the most valuable brands in American food — bought from a seventy-four-year-old man who had built it entirely alone, from the back seat of his car, starting at an age when most people stop.

John Y. Brown was a salesman, and he understood instinctively what the Colonel — the artist, the perfectionist, the man who could detect substandard gravy at twenty paces — either could not or would not see: that KFC's value lay not in any single restaurant but in the system's scalability. Within months of the acquisition, Brown made four decisions that transformed a loose collection of franchise relationships into one of the most formidable food-distribution machines of the twentieth century.

First, he promoted the Colonel. Sanders had grown the mustache, goatee, and adopted the all-white outfit years earlier, making himself a minor celebrity. But he had never fully exploited the promotional possibility that Brown immediately grasped: the possession of a brand symbol who was both authentic and alive. Unlike Betty Crocker, Colonel Morton, or Aunt Jemima — fictional constructs designed by marketing departments — Colonel Sanders was a real human being who could appear on television, shake hands, sample gravy, and deliver withering quotes in a Kentucky drawl. Brown hired a PR firm in New York, and the Colonel soon appeared on the Tonight Show, The Merv Griffin Show, and more than thirty network programs, where he more than held his own with show-business professionals. He traveled 200,000 miles a year, taping all KFC television commercials, appearing in parades and festivals, and playing small roles in several movies. Outside New York, he became, by the late 1960s, "probably as well known as any man in the country."

Second, Brown unified advertising. In the year before the sale, KFC had spent perhaps half a million dollars on marketing. By 1970, the company and its franchisees together spent more than $24 million on advertising — a 48x increase in six years. This was the capital required to build a national brand in the television era.

Third, Brown renegotiated franchise economics. Under the Colonel's regime, franchisees paid a flat fee per chicken (raised from four to five cents before the sale). Brown replaced this with a percentage of franchisee sales — a move that protected the company against inflation, gave it a cut on accessory items like salads and beans, and, most critically, aligned the parent company's incentives with system-wide revenue growth rather than unit counts.

Fourth — and most consequentially — Brown halted the franchising of sit-down restaurants and insisted that all new outlets be freestanding take-home units with standardized appearance and menus. The take-home concept had originated with Sanders and his daughter Margaret Adams, who ran the Florida franchise, as early as 1959. But most outlets under the Colonel's regime had been restaurants where KFC was one item on a broader menu, and the few take-home units were storefronts. Brown saw what the Colonel, for all his culinary genius, had missed about the changing topology of American consumption: a growing number of housewives wanted to eat dinner at home without cooking it themselves. The freestanding take-home unit — visible from the road, standardized in layout, dedicated exclusively to the KFC menu — was the delivery mechanism for that desire. In 1957, Sanders and Pete Harman had invented the KFC Chicken Bucket — 15 pieces of chicken, a pint of gravy, and biscuits, marketed as a way for housewives to "escape the kitchen" and still serve a great dinner by merely adding a salad and a vegetable. The bucket was the product. The freestanding unit was the distribution system. Together they constituted what we would now call a platform.

The results, in the years after Brown's four interventions, were staggering. KFC outlets multiplied from roughly 600 to more than 2,700 — a five-to-one lead over the nearest chicken competitor. Outlet sales surged from $35 million annually to $600 million. Company profits after taxes leaped from about $200,000 to approximately $12 million. A $5,000 investment made in 1964 was worth $3.5 million by 1970. The company made millionaires of more than 125 people. Pete Harman, the first franchisee, had KFC stock worth over $15 million and operated 100 outlets in Utah and northern California generating $25 million in annual sales. Mrs. Maurine McGuire, the corporate secretary, was worth more than $3 million. Mrs. Marge Allard, the credit manager, about $1 million. Brown himself drew a $100,000 salary, had a few million in the bank, and held KFC stock reportedly worth $50 million. He was thirty-six years old.

What made KFC unusual — and what distinguishes truly great franchise systems from merely large ones — was the uniformity of success at the individual outlet level. "There are companies that have good units and bad units," said Don Greer, a KFC vice president and former franchisee. "K.F.C. has only good units. I know for a fact — without any doubt — that if I opened a store in a good location in, say, Cleveland, and ran it the way the company teaches you to, I would make money on it. Not just money — a lot of money. There simply isn't any question."

The typical KFC outlet had an annual gross of $240,000 and a net of $45,000 to $50,000 — a net margin of roughly 19-21%, extraordinary for food service. Some units grossed more (a Brooklyn outlet was expected to hit $1 million annually). Company officials claimed there had never been a failure among the 2,700 outlets. Occasional mediocre showings were always attributed to management, not to the chicken, and the remedy was simple: revoke the franchise and find a worthier operator.

Scores of competitors appeared — Minnie Pearl Fried Chicken, Maryland Fried Chicken, Daniel Boone Fried Chicken — but Brown spoke of them in the past tense. "They were too late," was all he would say. He was encouraged by the story of one competitor that, entertaining its franchisees at a national convention, served a meal catered by the local Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet. "This is what's killing us," an executive of that company reportedly told his people. "Now, what are we going to do about it?"

Behind the financial performance lay an operational obsession that bordered on religious practice. KFC's quality control apparatus was — and this is not an exaggeration — the spiritual descendant of the Colonel's personal kitchen inspections, formalized into an institutional system that combined indoctrination, surveillance, and the industrial standardization of cooking science.

It began at KFC University in Louisville — a standard KFC outlet equipped with a classroom, where enrollment for each five-day term was limited to ten students. Day one: a pep talk and an inspirational film, Portrait of a Legend, about the life of Colonel Sanders. The refrain — "How did he do it? Can you believe it?" — was designed to make franchisees feel they were joining something larger than a chicken business. Days two through five: rigorous crash courses in chicken-frying, equipment care, basic accounting, employer-employee relations, advertising, and — the foundational science of the entire operation, richer in nuance than any outsider would suspect — shortening.

The KFC obsession with shortening deserves its own paragraph. How it could best be filtered, how long it could be used, what heat did to it, when its free fatty acid content signaled degradation — these were not trivial concerns. Engineering Bulletin No. 116, issued December 1, 1967, revealed "Procedures and New Techniques to Provide Tender Loving Care to Shortening and Obtain a Quality Product." Art Pelster, the director of engineering — an electrical engineer recruited from the aircraft industry — was studying the effects of free iron and free copper in shortening, water, breading, and batter with the help of research departments at Kraftco, Hunt-Wesson, and Durkee's. The flour preferred by KFC — "the most uniform in history," according to Pelster — was made only from wheat grown in certain "soft-wheat" regions of Illinois and Texas.

After graduation, the surveillance began. Every KFC outlet was visited at least once every three months — at irregular intervals, so the visit was always a surprise — by a company field representative who checked everything from lobby tidiness to chicken taste. Twenty field representatives rotated through the system continuously. They filed written reports with the home office. Their biggest headache: misguided experimentation.

The quality control system was, in essence, a mechanism for imposing the Colonel's artistic standards on thousands of independent operators who lacked his taste, his experience, and his volatile temperament — while simultaneously preventing those operators from exercising the creativity that might improve their version but would destroy the brand's consistency. This is the franchise paradox: you need operators entrepreneurial enough to run a profitable business but disciplined enough to never, ever deviate from the system.

KFC's international expansion began in earnest in the late 1960s, and the early returns suggested that the Colonel's chicken could leap geographical, linguistic, and culinary barriers with an ease that surprised even the company's most optimistic executives. By 1970, there were 79 foreign outlets across Mexico, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Jamaica, the Bahamas, Australia, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, Japan, and Thailand. The company projected at least 260 additional foreign outlets within two years, with expansion planned into Bermuda, Aruba, Curaçao, Panama, Venezuela, Austria, Belgium, Italy, France, Sweden, Lebanon, and Switzerland.

The most consequential international story, however, would unfold not in the 1970s but beginning in the late 1980s: China. KFC opened its first Chinese restaurant in Beijing's Tiananmen Square in 1987 — a geopolitical and commercial bet that would eventually make China the brand's single most important market. By the time Yum! Brands spun off its China operations as Yum China Holdings in 2016, KFC China had evolved into something the Colonel would scarcely have recognized: a locally adapted menu featuring rice congee, egg tarts, and Peking duck-flavored wraps alongside Original Recipe chicken. The strategy was radical in the context of American fast-food franchising — most chains replicate their domestic menu with minor modifications. KFC China rethought the model from the ground up, adapting not just the food but the store format, the supply chain, and the dining experience to Chinese consumer preferences. Yum China's CEO was reportedly known to sit for hours watching customers eat, looking for behavioral cues that could inform new menu items.

In Japan, KFC became entangled with an entirely different cultural phenomenon. A 1970s marketing campaign promoting Kentucky Fried Chicken as a Christmas dinner — "Kurisumasu ni wa Kentakkii!" (Kentucky for Christmas!) — became so embedded in Japanese culture that, decades later, Japanese families still queue outside KFC outlets on Christmas Eve to collect pre-ordered holiday chicken buckets. The campaign's architect understood something about cultural imprinting that transcends marketing theory: a brand that attaches itself to a ritual owns a slot in the consumer's calendar that no competitor can dislodge.

In Vietnam, the picture was more complex. By March 2024, KFC was pushing toward its goal of 100 new restaurants by 2025, competing against Lotteria (which held approximately 9% market share to KFC's 8.5% as of 2020) and Jollibee in a fragmented market where street food — cheaper, perceived as healthier, rooted in local flavor — remained the default for most consumers. International fast-food chains collectively held about 43.7% of the food service market, but individual brands held relatively small shares. KFC had established itself as the second-largest fast-food group by adapting its menu with local flavors, enhancing the customer experience, and building a digital presence — but victory was anything but assured.

If the Colonel's story is one of artistic obsession and stubborn self-reliance, the corporate story of KFC after 1964 is one of serial ownership — a company passed from hand to hand like a valuable but temperamental inheritance, each steward extracting value while layering on new management philosophy, new debt, and new strategic ambition.

Each transition tells its own story. The Heublein acquisition in 1971 — for roughly $285 million, a staggering markup from the $2 million paid seven years earlier — represented the triumph of Brown and Massey's bet. But it also inaugurated KFC's longest and most troubled period of absentee corporate ownership. Heublein was a liquor company; R.J. Reynolds was a tobacco conglomerate. Neither knew anything about fried chicken. PepsiCo, which acquired KFC in 1986 as part of a restaurant portfolio alongside Pizza Hut and Taco Bell, at least understood consumer brands — but the combination of a beverage giant's corporate bureaucracy with the operational demands of 10,000-plus franchise restaurants created friction. When PepsiCo spun off the restaurant division in 1997 as Tricon Global Restaurants (later Yum! Brands), it was an acknowledgment that the beverage business and the restaurant business required fundamentally different management rhythms.

Through it all, the Colonel's face remained on the bucket. The secret recipe — still mixed in two separate halves by two separate suppliers, neither of which knows the complete formula — remained locked in a vault. The brand endured what any other fast-food brand would have endured under the same circumstances: periods of neglect, periods of reinvigoration, menu bloat, menu simplification, competitive assaults from Chick-fil-A and Popeyes, and the secular American trend toward healthier eating that made "fried chicken" a harder sell with each passing decade.

By 2015, KFC in the United States was in trouble. Same-store sales were declining. The brand felt dusty, nostalgic in the wrong way — associated with a previous generation's eating habits rather than with anything a twenty-five-year-old would choose. The Colonel was dead, and his image had calcified into wallpaper.

Then Wieden+Kennedy — the Portland agency that had built Nike's brand mythology — took the account and did something audacious: they brought the Colonel back, not as a static logo but as a character, played by a rotating cast of celebrities. Darrell Hammond, Jim Gaffigan, George Hamilton (as "Extra Crispy Colonel"), Rob Lowe, Billy Zane, Reba McEntire — each iteration was deliberately ridiculous, deliberately unpredictable, and deliberately designed to generate the kind of cultural conversation that a legacy fast-food brand cannot buy with media spend alone.

The strategy worked. Awareness surged. Sales recovered. But the deeper lesson was structural: KFC's greatest marketing asset was not a tagline or a media buy but the Colonel himself — a character so distinctive, so loaded with backstory and visual identity, that he could be reinterpreted endlessly without losing recognizability. The white suit, the string tie, the goatee — these constituted a brand asset of extraordinary durability, one that Brown had identified back in 1964 and that Wieden+Kennedy proved could still generate returns a half-century later.

In France, where KFC had been growing steadily for three decades and operated more than 300 locations serving over 200,000 daily customers, a different approach won Kantar's Most Effective TV Campaign for 2022: a spot called "KFC Origins" that depicted a KFC worker and the Colonel collaborating to create a crispy chicken sandwich. Seventy years into the brand's existence, the Colonel remained the creative engine.

After six years, the Wieden+Kennedy era ended — the agency dropped out of a crowded pitch for the account in 2021. But the creative playbook it established — the Colonel as a living, evolving, occasionally absurd character rather than a frozen corporate icon — had demonstrated something fundamental about brand longevity in the attention economy.

Harland Sanders died of pneumonia at the Jewish Hospital in Louisville on December 16, 1980. He was ninety years old. His leukemia had been diagnosed earlier that year, and he had been hospitalized since November 7 for kidney and bladder disorders. At the time of his death, there were approximately 6,000 Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets in 48 countries.

The Colonel had spent the last sixteen years of his life as the company's most valuable asset and its most relentless critic — touring the world, taping commercials, posing with housewives ("Umm, that gal's let herself go," he muttered during photo sessions), and conducting surprise kitchen inspections that left franchisees wincing years later. He never stopped banging his cane about the gravy. He never stopped swearing — despite asking the Lord for help at a church service — and he never stopped believing that the right way to run a chicken business was to start with the quality of the food and let the profits follow, not the other way around.

"If you were a franchisee turning out perfect gravy but making very little money for the company," a KFC executive observed, "and I was a franchisee making lots of money for the company but serving gravy that was merely excellent, the Colonel would think that you were great and I was a bum. With the Colonel, it isn't money that counts, it's artistic talent."

He died having given away much of his wealth to churches, schools, hospitals, and relatives. His remaining shares in the Canadian operation were held in trust, to be divided between American and Canadian charitable foundations. The man who had been driven from home at twelve, who had worked as a farmhand, streetcar conductor, soldier, railroad fireman, correspondence-school lawyer, insurance salesman, steamboat ferry operator, chamber of commerce secretary, acetylene lamp manufacturer, tire salesman, and gas station attendant before discovering, at forty, that the one thing he could do better than anyone alive was fry chicken — that man died comfortable, famous, and fundamentally dissatisfied with the gravy.

The two-million-dollar check he had cashed in 1964 was the transaction price. But the real valuation was the one the market rendered: KFC's system sales would eventually surpass $30 billion annually. The Colonel had sold the Mona Lisa for the cost of the canvas.

At the Colonel Sanders Kentucky Inn in Shelbyville, on one of his last visits to the kitchen, he had stopped before a young employee he didn't recognize and stared him hard in the eye. "Son, are you any 'count?" he asked. The young man answered, "Yes, sir!" The Colonel looked at him doubtfully. "Well," he said, "I sure hope so."