Colonel Sanders late 1970s

Although Colonel Sanders has sadly passed away in 1980, he remains as a pop culture icon for his restaurants and his legacy is strongly carried on. Many people know and recognize Colonel Sanders as the face and founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken, but they have no idea about the story behind it nor the state of his life prior to founding KFC.

Harland David Sanders was born on September 9, 1890 near Henryville, Indiana. His father passed away when Sanders was 5 years old and his mother then had to take up a job at a cannery to provide for the family. This left young Sanders to feed and take care of his two younger siblings. The young kids often had to forage for food during their mother’s multi day work shifts and learn to survive on their own. By the age of 7, Sanders was reportedly excelling at cooking for his siblings. He had become very skilled cooking with bread and vegetables, and he was quickly learning with meat (haha funny sentence lol). 

By the age of 10, Sanders had gotten himself a job as a farmhand to support his family, and when his mother remarried two years later, Sanders had developed a tumultuous relationship with his stepfather and promptly dropped out of 7th grade the next year to live and work on a nearby farm. At age 13, he left home for Indianapolis to work painting horse carriages, and then at 14 he went to work on a farm in south Indiana. In the first few years of his life, Sanders had worked many different labor intensive jobs and would further continue this sporadic and diverse career.

For the next 25 odd years of his life, Harland Sanders would jump from job to job and venture to venture in hopes of only having a stable job to pay the bills. He would be fired for insubordination multiple times and ended more than one gig (including his law career) through beating the living crap out of people he did not agree with. To be fair he also left many jobs on his own volition in order to seek better opportunities. Finally in 1920, Sanders had established a ferry boat company that became an instant success. A few years later, he decided to cashout his shares in the company to fund a venture manufacturing acetylene or carbide lamps that was promptly dismantled after Delco introduced the electric lamp. Sanders then went on to find yet another job that would let him go when they closed their doors. 

Colonel Sanders’ North Corbin Restaurant

Then what happened next was probably the most important thing ever to happen to Sanders, in 1924, he would be very lucky to randomly meet the general manager of the Standard Oil company of Kentucky. This man gave Sanders the opportunity to manage a service station (a gas station and restaurant combo) in Nicholasville, Kentucky. Unfortunately this only lasted for 6 years as the service station went under as a result of the Great Depression. Sanders was then approached by the Shell Oil Company to run one of their service stations in Corbin, Kentucky, where he would be involved in a shootout, commissioned as a Kentucky colonel (and recommissioned in 1950) because the Governor loved his fried chicken (how he became Colonel Sanders), and continually tried to perfect his fried chicken recipe all while gaining local popularity at an unnatural rate. Sanders moved on to acquire a motel as well and, as fate would have it, both the motel and his restaurant were destroyed in a November 1939 fire. 

Sanders rebuilt the motel with a 140 seated restaurant add-on, and during this time he would finally perfect his secret fried chicken recipe. Unfortunately World War 2 had started and as gas was rationed and the tourism industry dried up forcing Sanders to close his motel in 1941. For the next 12 years, Sanders worked managing cafeterias for the government, and it was only until 1952 that any mention of a fried chicken franchise escaped Sanders’ lips. This was the founding of the first KFC in South Salt Lake, Utah. Within the first year, the restaurant reported more than triple its average annual sales and it was clear that this was the result of Sanders’ chicken. Soon after, many other restaurants heard about the success and decided to join the franchise. By 1964, 12 years later, KFC had expanded to more than 600 locations and became one of the first fast food chains to expand internationally as well, with stores in Canada, Mexico, UK, and Jamaica. At the age of 73, Colonel Sanders was finally successful and accomplished, and he sold the KFC Corporation for around $2 million (~$16.5 million today) and kept the Canadian KFC Operation for himself.

Sander’s life was full of bumps, bruises, and hardships. He had spent the first sixty years of his life hopping from one thing to the next as he was met with seemingly every failure and economic mishap possible. Yet by chance, Sander’s golden goose finally fell into his lap and he proceeded to become successful in the one thing he had been proficient at as a kid: making food. This should serve as a lesson to not let your age define your success. Just because you spent the first 30 years of your life accomplishing nothing does not mean it too late to start or that the next 30 years will be just more of the same. You are never too old for success as long as you persevere.