Drive-Thru Dreams - Adam Chandler Page 0,22

classic Sanders side hustle. He would get a few pennies of passive income for every chicken cooked using his patented method. Untethered from his old base of operations, Sanders—white-haired and two-thirds of a century old—would now (literally) suit up and set out in earnest with a white Cadillac full of pressure cookers, loads of spices, and coolers of chicken, a broken hero on a last-chance poultry drive.

The Colonel steered thousands of miles with his achy hands, dropping in unannounced on places he thought to be worthy of him and his chicken. He would charm his way in and whip up meals for the staff and ownership during dead hours, and if he sensed that a deal was close, he’d often hang around an extra day, sleeping in the back of his car to save money and shaving in public bathrooms and gas stations before plying customers with charm and chicken.

Through this back-roads offensive, Sanders assembled a chicken empire piecemeal, banking on himself and the honor of a disjointed guild of tiny operators across Appalachia, a mix of old friends and associates as well as total strangers. The road made for grueling work, but his proposition was straightforward. Unlike Ray Kroc’s rigid, soup-to-nuggets operational regimen, Sanders was simply selling a recipe and the creative repurposing of a Depression-era kitchen gadget. The rest was up to the franchisees. To the Colonel, only the food required martial discipline. And he did not abide defection. One of Sanders’s first employees was a sixteen-year-old Kentuckian named Bill Samuels, Jr., who was Sanders’s driver and gofer the summer Bill got his license.* Samuels rode around with Sanders, whom he’d later refer to as “the greatest salesman who ever lived,” watching him make handshake deals out of the passenger side of the car. After the agreements were made, the two would later double back to make sure proprietors were cooking the chicken properly. It was then that Samuels saw the Colonel’s supernatural wrath unleashed upon those who deviated from his standards.

Duly scared straight, Sanders’s partners generally fell in line, and most everyone on the program made out well. With logistical support from his second wife, Claudia, who had worked as a waitress at the Sanders Café and who occasionally appeared alongside him in antebellum dress at restaurant openings and who painstakingly mixed and mailed bagged blends of proprietary herbs and spices to remote cookhouses across the Midwest and Appalachia, Sanders cultivated a roster of loyal franchisees that would number into the hundreds. Soon enough, he quit the road. Restaurant operators now sought him out, and the Colonel’s chicken, well, continued to spread its wings.

Kentucky Fried Chicken rose to become, for a time, the largest fast-food operation in the world. By the early 1960s, Sanders had amassed over six hundred franchisees in the United States and Canada, while White Castle remained small and privately held with a few hundred locations, and McDonald’s only breached the triple-digit mark in 1959. This feat was achieved not just from Sanders’s masochistic exploits on the road or the small-scale word about his famous chicken or his legendary coloneling. No, for once his timing had been just right; Sanders’s product and relentless virtuosity as a pitchman made for a perfect combination in the so-called golden ages of both television and advertising. In this effort, Sanders found aid from a few forward-thinking lieutenant colonels.

The first KFC franchisee was a café operator named Pete Harman, a Utahn and fellow teetotaler that Sanders had befriended amid a confederation of drunks at a restaurant convention in Chicago. In 1952, Sanders had paid Harman a visit in Salt Lake City while on the way to attend a conference in Australia where Sanders hoped to be cured of his cursing habit. The conference failed to make a lasting impression, but the fried-chicken dinner Sanders prepared for Harman certainly did. Harman rearranged his entire business around Sanders’s exotic fare, which he debuted under the name KENTUCKY FRIED CHICKEN painted on a huge roadside sign.*

Seeing the changing character of the American family dinner and the increasingly mobile and suburban nature of life in the 1950s, Harman conceived the brand’s iconic chicken bucket to bolster his take-out business and to slyly market his expanding businesses. Harman also spread the gospel across local airwaves, shrewdly purchasing a bulk set of unused ad time for cheap. “If there was anything that got Kentucky Fried Chicken off the ground, it was gambling on radio’s unsold time,” Harman later told Robert Darden in Secret Recipe. “We