Drive-Thru Dreams - Adam Chandler Page 0,8
at which he triumphed until fired, as he often was, for his stubbornness, fondness for fisticuffs, or insubordination.
He next served as a secretary for a local Chamber of Commerce before becoming a tire salesman for Michelin just as the Model T made cars fashionable. To help nail his quota, Sanders would make a promotional, sales-generating spectacle of himself, walking around county fairs in Michelin’s famous puffy “bib” suits. To demonstrate the brand’s superior strength, Sanders would deputize local boys to pump tires alongside competing brands until the latter ones exploded, to the delight of the gathered crowds. By one account, Sanders lost his Michelin job after a bridge collapsed while he was using his Packard to tow the family Model T across it, leaving him badly bloodied and without the transportation that the job required. But by the following week, he had stitched his own scalp back on and hitched a fortuitous ride with an oil executive. Sanders talked his host into letting him manage a gas station and did well by it until a drought and then the Great Depression forced it to close. By then, his reputation as a salesman had gotten around. Soon enough, Sanders got another chance, at that fabled station in Corbin, Kentucky, where he would slowly carve out the makings of a hospitality empire.
Like traffic circles and the rules of soccer, the governing dynamics of the American Dream have always been vague, frustrating, and subjective. By the terms set by James Truslow Adams, Sanders had already achieved the dream simply by the dint of his ambition and his legendary dissatisfaction with the status quo. In The Epic of America Adams holds up Kentucky-born Abraham Lincoln as a virtuous exemplar of American success, but not for grandiose achievements like the Emancipation Proclamation or losing his Senate election to Stephen Douglas despite winning the popular vote. “Lincoln was not great because he was born in a log cabin,” Adams wrote, “but because he got out of it—that is, because he rose above poverty, ignorance, lack of ambition, shiftlessness of character, contentment with mean things and low aims which kept so many thousands in the huts where they were born.”
Since the dawn of the republic, a person’s ability to make it in America has often been depicted in the most cold-blooded terms, where success is a simple matter of character and drive rather than luck or fate or inborn social advantage. Adams’s assessment isn’t so different from a sentiment later expressed in Hillbilly Elegy, the influential 2016 memoir by J. D. Vance, about escaping Appalachian poverty. In it, Vance writes, “What separates the successful from the unsuccessful are the expectations that they had for their own lives.” In spite of Harland Sanders’s expectations for himself (and the many advantages he held by default), he had no wealth and little stability to show for the first forty grueling years of his life. Like Lincoln, Sanders had escaped the humble shack where he had been born only to end up just over a hundred miles east of Lincoln’s log cabin, at the helm of a failing gas station in a troubled corner of Appalachia.
Two of the more spectacular nicknames for Sanders’s section of Corbin, Kentucky, were Hell’s Half-Acre and the Asshole of Creation. Both names were owed to the ambient poverty as well as its setting near a key intersection between two highways, a corridor where booze runners flaunted Prohibition and deadly violence happened daily. “Bootleggin’s, fights, and shootin’s was as regular as a rooster’s crowing in the mornin’,” Sanders once remarked about his surroundings. According to his biographer John Ed Pearce, Sanders kept a pistol under the cash register for safety and a shotgun in the bedroom, which he used to ward off men from killing each other outside his station. To advertise his business, Sanders shrewdly sought out the sides of barns because, he said, “good old boys riding around like to shoot up signboards, but they thought if there might be a cow or mule on the other side of the sign, they wouldn’t blast away like they liked to.”*
These complications notwithstanding, Sanders’s service station flourished as travel by car surged in popularity in the 1930s. His business became a well-regarded and convenient pit stop for motorists exploring their way down the fledging Dixie Highway, which connected the Midwest to Florida. They would gas up, and Sanders would make a grand production of wiping their windshields and offering free air to build a loyal clientele. Ever