Drive-Thru Dreams - Adam Chandler Page 0,7
trajectory toward “fullest stature” and worldwide fame started at that humble service station in southeastern Kentucky, far from the whirring velocities of the car and hamburger assembly lines.
What’s most affecting about the story of Harland Sanders, later known by much of the world as the Colonel, is how unlikely it all was. How Sanders would come to embody the troublesome and elusive concept of the American Dream involves decades of endless scrapping, bad breaks, grueling work, and self-promotion. Because Sanders’s story is so mythical and his image so corporatized, it’s easy to forget he was even a real person. But not only does his biography trace America’s adolescence and fulfill the most classic interpretation of the American Dream, it’s also a useful prism through which the history of fast food can be understood.
The four-room shack where Sanders spent his early years sat off a country road three miles east of nowhere Indiana that, in 1890, could have passed for 1790 frontier wilderness. One day when Sanders was still very young, his father, Wilbert, a twenty-nine-year-old butcher with a broken back, came home from work sick with a fever and died hours later. Harland’s mother struggled to find work and eventually took a job peeling tomatoes at a canning factory in town, leaving five-year-old Harland to look after his two younger siblings and do the family cooking for days at a time. Little did he know, these privation-born domestic chores would set the path to his becoming the Colonel. Later, in interviews and television ads, Sanders would hark back to the pride he felt in baking a loaf of bread as a seven-year-old child in his kitchen. “So I set my yeast, made the sponge, made the dough, baked off the bread. When I was done I had the prettiest loaf of light bread you ever saw.”
From there, the Sanders myth goes—preteen dropout, hired out at ten for farm labor by his mother, stepson to a hostile stepfather, and thirteen-year-old runaway. When Sanders was about sixteen and working as a streetcar conductor in New Albany, Indiana, he lied about his age to join the army ahead of America’s second occupation of Cuba. Soon, he was jammed on a ship of mules, retching his meals overboard into the Atlantic. “Being that close to that many mules was bad enough,” he later wrote in his 1974 autobiography, “but I had never been near no water bigger than the old swimming hole.”
Once Sanders got to Cuba, his commanding officer apparently figured out that Sanders was way too young and sent him back stateside. Sanders returned by way of New Orleans, where his dizzying American odyssey resumed. He took a boat up the Mississippi and rode the rails around the South. Still in his teens, he became a railroader in the golden age of the industry, just before World War I and ahead of the rise of automobiles and airplanes, when railroad engineers were the heroes of the era. Back then, trains accounted for 98 percent of intercity travel in the United States and more than 75 percent of its freight traffic. Working the trains would also account for a 50 percent increase in the vocabulary of young, intemperate Sanders, whose coworkers taught him to cuss with the heat and steam-laced ferocity of the Cannonball Express.
In addition to this newfound eloquence, Sanders displayed flashes of what would make him a great showman in his later years. He was a deft public speaker, exceedingly self-assured, and when he wasn’t in a trademark swearing fury, Sanders proved to be charismatic and proficient in the dark art of schmoozing. He successfully argued to save the job of one of his fellow railroad workers, and following his dismissal from the Illinois Central Railroad—apparently, for getting in a fistfight with an engineer—Sanders decided to study law by correspondence. He took on cases with his trademark force of will and fancied himself the second coming of Clarence Darrow. “He was particularly proud of the time he was able to negotiate better settlements for the mostly black victims of a train wreck, and of his efforts to stop courts from pressuring defendants into settlements,” the writer Alan Bellows noted of Sanders’s lawyering years. Sanders seemed poised to do well with a career in law; that is, until he got into a courtroom fistfight with a client over unpaid fees. From there, he went on to build and sell a successful ferryboat operation, went belly-up in a failed lighting-systems venture, and sold insurance,