April 18, 2012
Colonel Curmudgeon and KFC’s Mascot Problem
Colonel Sanders was a real guy, an unemployed one who was forced out of his highway-side restaurant at the age of 65. He started selling the rights to make his pressure-cooker fried chicken, with a secret blend of 11 herbs and spices, from the back seat of a white Oldsmobile. He originally wore a black suit rather than a white one, and his pressure cooker was as much a part of the pitch as his proprietary spice blend.
By 1975, Sanders had sold the franchise, Kentucky Fried Chicken, to a liquor and food conglomerate. He stayed on as a goodwill brand ambassador, raking in an annual salary of $70,000 a year. He put on a white linen suit every morning and rode around in a company-chauffeured Cadillac, visiting the company’s white-columned headquarters. But the colonel was bitter: The quality of his chicken had “slipped mightily” and the whole culture of fast food appeared to disgust him.
“Drive out of any town now and everyone is selling his piece of chicken or hamburger up and down the highway,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “You can’t get a decent meal anymore.”
So the Colonel did what he did best: He started a new restaurant and called it the Colonel’s Lady Dinner House. It had fewer frills and was intended to resemble the average dinner table. Then Sanders launched a vocal campaign against the new owners of Kentucky Fried Chicken. As the Los Angeles Times wrote:
He said he has been disappointed and that the conglomerate has treated him like “the saloon bums they’re used to dealing with rather than a sophisticated Southern businessman.”
In the past, he has insulted KFC’s gravy, called the men he first sold out to in 1964 “the biggest bunch of sharpies you ever saw” and labeled Heblein executive a “bunch of booze hounds.”
Company executives have long ignored such comments. Realizing that the colonel is one the nation’s best known trade names, they’ve handled him with kid gloves.
“He has been doing this forever,” said John Cox, the firm’s vice president for franchising and public affairs. “It comes and goes. The colonel is just a very independent minded individual.”
But there is a more serious issue involved in the current dispute: who controls the use of Sander’s familiar face and Southern gentlemen image.
Sanders is anxious to settle the case. “I only want to find how much of my body and soul they own.”
Once the colonel and the company settled, for a reported $1 million, Sanders promised not to attack the company. “He started to do so practically before the ink was dry on the agreement,” Josh Ozersky writes in the new book Colonel Sanders and the American Dream. Unlike the malleable Betty Crocker, Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben and Ronald McDonald—advertising characters concocted in corporate boardrooms—Kentucky Fried Chicken had a real live spokesman, who stood his ground as a corporation reduced his recipes to poor imitations of their former selves.
Ozersky believes the company’s closely guarded “Original Recipe” was probably not the one invented by Sanders. Take this quote he unearths from 1970: A company executive says, “Let’s face it the Colonel’s gravy was fantastic but you had to be a Rhodes Scholar to cook it.” The superhuman grandiosity that gave birth to the colonel’s image, meant to conjure up the magnolia-scented myth of the Deep South, proved to be a double bind. As Ozersky writes, “Oh to have a nice fictional mascot instead!”
Book cover design by Derek George/Colonel Sanders and the American Dream/Courtesy of University of Texas Press.
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Kentucky is not “Deep South.”
This is true. Just a bit south of the Mason-Dixon line, which runs along the northern border of Kentucky.
Wish I knew the original recipe!
Lorem, did you ever live in Kentucky? I lived in KY for a year. It was a deep south as one could get without actually being on the map. Racism abounded, ignorance was prevalent. The distinction between rich white and poor white was blatant. It was a horrible albeit educational year.
I grew up in Ky and if the president can identify with the particular race that he pleases, Ky can call itself southern! There was a atar for Ky on the Confederate flag. Most native born Kentuckians do consider themself southern.
People certainly show their own narrowmindedness when they say the South is racist, ignorant, and socially stratified. I don’t know any geographical area that’s superior to another. Not all Southerners are the stereotypical morons the media has portrayed us to be. Are you casting stones, perhaps? From the true Deep South, where good manners are still appeciated…
Good chicken is what you make at home, even good places over cook it so it is dry as a bone. Soak it in buttermilk bread it in flour and fry it. Yum.
I’m born and raised in KY and think your protrayal of the commonwealth is wrong. Your criticisms can be found any any town if that’s what you’re looking for. I doubt one year in the commonwealth makes you an expert. Ky is neither deep south in geography nor attitude. Sounds like you were the one with the racism and ignorance problem. Glad you left though with your attitude.
My comments were directed at Judy Friend living her life as part of the Truman Show.
It’s interesting how an article on Col. Sanders vs. the Corp. that runs KFC, has turned into a ‘discussion’ on racism in KY and whether or not it is truly southern! I met the real Colonel was as a child; he seemed like a nice man. As to the other areas of interest, Kentucky, although a relatively small State, has a very diverse geography: Everything from bayous in the west to mountains in the East, and of course the beautiful bluegrass region in between. The people that live here are as diverse as the geology. Without a doubt, there is poverty, ignorance, and bigotry. But there is also a rich culture, with philharmonics, arts, music, dance and universities. I was born and raised in Lexington, moved away for years, and now am back – and I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else.
The article is not about Kentucky; it is about the Colonel and the KFC corporate owners. What I find troubling is the local KFC fast food outlets in the Columbus, Ohio area are staffed with people who do not seem to care much about doing their jobs. In some places, none of them speak English. They don’t even understand what customers want. The food is often good but it’s not worth the trouble.
The Sanders Cafe in Corbin is a pretty interesting place off I-75. Though the food is generally run-of-the-mill KFC, the museum is interesting.
In the Nova Scotian Hotel in Halifax, Canada, as a boy I rode once in an elevator with Colonel Harland Sanders; he was there for a food-service convention and I was attending a wedding reception. At the time, we were both about the same height, and that day we were both wearing white suits—his had no grease spots, and he left no fingerprint on the “up” button.
@Kathy (#2) – The Mason Dixon Line has two parts – the border between Pennsylvania and Maryland, and the border between Maryland and Delaware. It doesn’t touch Kentucky. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mason%E2%80%93Dixon_Line