Drive-Thru Dreams - Adam Chandler Page 0,9
the angler, Sanders realized he could further outgun his rivals if he started offering food to this emerging breed of road dogs. “I got to thinking,” he later recounted. “One thing I could always do was cook.” And so, Sanders started to whip up the staples of his larder on his old Vulcan range—steak, okra, biscuits, chess pie, and Kentucky mock oysters. Often, he would prepare meals for his family, and they would only gather at the table to dine after hungry travelers hadn’t appeared to eat dinner first. Increasingly, travelers would linger to grab a bite of country ham or even the homemade fried chicken that their opportunistic host had begun offering.
More and more, these hungry travelers appeared as they drove in on newly built roads, spent nights in newly built motels, and experienced the country in unprecedented ways. In her book Dixie Highway, Tammy Ingram outlines how, despite an endless jam of contentious and competing social and political forces, America’s first “fully-fledged interstate highway system” helped to efface regional isolation in the United States. Much in the way that technologies such as radio and the rise of the hamburger had nationalized the cultural gaze, the Dixie Highway physically served disparate groups of “tourists, businessmen, farmers, and everyday travelers alike.” On the Dixie route through Corbin, Sanders nourished unlikely gatherings of strangers with his vernacular cuisine on a daily basis.
Sanders parlayed his successful reputation as a cook and turned one spare table in a gas station storeroom into an entire café in 1937. But the food at the Sanders Café wasn’t the only draw. In his book Open Road, Phil Patton details how Sanders, true to form, emphasized the benefit of offering both dinner and a show:
He told stories about the local moonshiners and tall tales of his days working on the railroad and getting in fights with his bosses.
When the audience was deemed appropriate, he poured over these stories, like gravy over his ham or chicken, a profanity whose color and inventiveness was remembered years later by his listeners. “He had a heart as big as a barrel,” said a man who knew him then, “but, Lord, he would cuss a blue streak.”
Alas, Sanders’s luck didn’t quite stick. The café burned down to the ground in 1939, and once again he was forced to start from scratch. But Sanders, who had become a prosperous, self-made man despite the Great Depression, had gotten a taste of the dream.
* * *
In 1940, Sanders rebuilt his café, this time with an adjacent seventeen-room motel. The Sanders Court and Café opened on the Fourth of July with red-checked gingham napkins and a country ham breakfast served with biscuits, red-eye gravy, fresh grits, and eggs.* The kitchen had white walls, ceilings, and floors to project cleanliness and was open so customers could peer in and see how well maintained it all was. Sanders even installed a model motel room beside the women’s bathroom of the café so that the “lady of the house” could check out how homey the facilities were and perhaps be persuaded to allow her family to stay the night. To signal how modern it was, Sanders had equipped the room with a pay phone.
Around the same time that Harland Sanders’s rededicated roadside business flourished, the influential Austrian-American economist Joseph Schumpeter popularized “creative destruction,” a theory that he copped in part from Karl Marx. Creative destruction describes the chaos that ensues when a new industry built on a new technology emerges and leaves networks of outdated industries in its wake. Creative destruction is why many people feel a twinge of sadness when looking over their dusty DVD libraries and wistfully chuckle at the sight of fax machines and newspaper classified ads.
To this point, Harland Sanders’s life had been wholly shaped by creative destruction. In his younger years, he had worked the railroads, which had replaced horses and canals. In one of Sanders’s early business schemes, he created a company that sold acetylene lighting to farmers, but the rapid and widespread adoption of the light bulb and electricity had completely wrecked his investment. Sanders had settled in Corbin, a town developed by the grimy grace of coal and railroads. The primacy of the railway travel would be overtaken by cars, creating a need for tires (which Sanders sold) as well as roadside food, gas, and lodging (which is how Sanders had made a name for himself in southeastern Kentucky).
Had Harland Sanders had the temperament to remain a lawyer or an insurance