had to change equipment practically every day for two weeks just to cook enough chicken to satisfy demand.”
Of course, television would soon conquer the media frontier, beaming alongside the cars and suburbs and heady militarism as hallmarks of the postwar decades. Like roadsters before them, televisions began as luxury items for the wealthy; in 1949, only 2 percent of the country owned a set. By 1962, 90 percent of American households had one. Ahead of his election in 1952, Dwight Eisenhower took acting lessons, and savvy politicians were wise to speak in segment-friendly sound bites. Television created a gold rush in advertising billings ($5.7 billion in 1950 to $12 billion in 1960), and TV commercials supplanted radio spots as the leading advertising medium in the United States by 1954. By the end of the 1950s, TV Guide reigned as one of the bestselling periodicals of the entire decade.* Pete Harman capitalized on the medium by inviting local news broadcasts to air stories about his store openings in Utah. With some goading, the Colonel, too, would edge into the shot.
In his improbable seventh act, the Colonel also met a fellow fast-food traveler whose early life rivaled Sanders’s in its cinematic deprivation. Abandoned after birth by his unwed mother, Dave Thomas lost his adoptive mother when he was five, leaving him and his adoptive father on the go, looking for work, living in trailers and squalid rooming houses. He lied about his age to get a job as a soda jerk at a Walgreens, only to be fired when he was discovered to be twelve instead of sixteen. Thomas ended up in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where he held odd jobs, dropped out of high school to work in restaurants, and stayed behind to live alone in a YMCA at fifteen after his father remarried and moved away. During a stint in the army, Thomas attended Cook and Baker’s School and cheffed for a few years in Germany during the Korean War.
Following the Korean War, Dave Thomas returned to his job at the Hobby House restaurant in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where he moved up to head cook. Thomas had married a waitress there and started a family and was struggling to make ends meet. In 1955, he encountered Sanders at the restaurant during one of his famous drop-ins. Thomas tried his best to play it cool. “He introduced himself and asked if I knew him,” Thomas later wrote. “I pretended I didn’t even though I knew all about him. We sat down over a cup of coffee, and he talked to me like an old friend. I’ve never met a better salesman. When he left, I had a sense this man was going to change my life.”
The two built a relationship and Thomas would later be enlisted by him to turn around four poorly performing Kentucky Fried Chicken stores in Columbus, Ohio, in exchange for a large ownership stake. In a few short years, Thomas pared down the menus, installed an enormous rotating chicken bucket outside the stores, and even started donning the white planter’s suit and string tie that had become the Colonel’s trademark. In the ultimate pay for play, Thomas exchanged fried chicken for publicity from local radio stations. Whenever possible, Thomas also pushed Sanders to appear more on radio and television and cash in on the novel mystique of Kentucky Fried Chicken in markets beyond the Midwest.
The Colonel was old and prone to fits and couldn’t be reasoned with, but he imparted to Thomas the knack of salesmanship and operations and the business of franchising. With his stores flourishing, Thomas eventually sold back his stake to the company, making him a millionaire at thirty-five. Not long after, Thomas opened Wendy’s Old Fashioned Hamburgers in Columbus, Ohio, using the nickname and befreckled image of his redheaded, eight-year-old daughter, Melinda Lou, as inspiration. Wendy’s restaurants were styled to look like the parlor of a sweet but lonely uncle—bentwood chairs, tabletops covered with old newspaper ads, wood-paneled walls, and Tiffany lamps hanging overhead, and Thomas played the part of that sweet but lonely uncle in a red tie and short-sleeved dress shirt. Over the decades, he appeared in roughly eight hundred television spots (a record for a company founder) in a folksy and almost-introverted demeanor with his old-shoe delivery and big glasses, which were square like his hamburgers because his adoptive grandmother had taught him to “never cut corners.” “Popeye wasn’t my hero,” Thomas once said, “Wimpy was, because he loved hamburgers.”
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