2. Eat some fried chicken in honor of Colonel Sanders.

In 1924 Sanders moved to Jessamine County because he thought that Camp Nelson was “the most beautiful place I’d ever seen.” He bought a house against a hill where Hickman Creek joined the Kentucky River. The only way to reach the house was on a swinging bridge.

 

He found a job managing a Standard Oil gas station in Nicholasville. Unfortunately, the townspeople were angry because the popular previous manager had gotten fired by corporate. They immediately began boycotting the station. The first day Sanders ran the station, he sold only three and a half gallons of gas with a profit margin of just two cents a gallon.

 

Sanders won them over. When a car rolled in to the station, he would grab a water can and head for the radiator. After filling the radiator, he dipped his hand in the water, flipped some on the windshield, and wiped it. “Notice your right back tire is a little low,” he’d say. “If you’ll pull over to the hose, I’ll be glad to fill that tire up for you.” After checking the rest of the tires, he’d ask, “Anything else I can do for you?” “Why, yes, I want some gas,” they’d say.

 

News of Sanders’s exceptional service got around. Within a month, he was doing $12,000 of business. That was three times as much as anyone had ever made at the station. “It proved one thing to me,” Sanders would say. “Hard work works.”

 

That’s one story, the story Sanders himself told in a corporate memoir. Locals tell a different—or at least an additional—story: that the Colonel made his money bootlegging during Prohibition. Some also say that he was a womanizer. One time, it’s said, a woman’s husband was chasing the Colonel down the street. The future chicken magnate ducked into Betts Funeral Home to hide, jumped into an empty coffin, and closed the lid.

 

Sanders was hit hard by the Great Crash of 1929 and had to start selling off his equipment to pay the rent. So he quit his job in Nicholasville and moved away. Either that, or as a local woman says, “I heard he was taken to the county line at Camp Nelson and told to never come back.”

 

At any rate, Sanders moved to Corbin, Kentucky, and started a new service station. He also began selling his homemade chicken to truck drivers for a bit of extra cash. But it’s said that he had already developed his famous recipe in Jessamine County, “selling chicken up and down U.S. 27 for years.” The owner of the Windmill Restaurant claimed that she fired Sanders as her chef for experimenting too much with chicken recipes. One local still has a recipe book from the 1920s that has Mrs. Sanders’s biscuit recipe in it.

 

Soon Col. Sanders opened more chicken restaurants. He began using a pressure fryer that cooked the chicken faster (in just a few minutes!) than pan frying. It also retained more of the moisture. Sanders exulted in his refinement of the old-fashioned cuisine. “If you give good fried chicken with mashed potatoes, chicken cracklin’ gravy, and hot biscuits and vegetables, you’re giving the best the American table can offer.”

 

Sanders sold Kentucky Fried Chicken in 1964 for $2 million. He occasionally made surprise visits to franchises. If the chicken disappointed him, he would call it “God-damned slop” and throw it to the floor. In 1973, KFC’s owner sued him for libel after he publicly called their gravy "sludge" with a "wall-paper taste.”

 

The Colonel died from leukemia in 1980 at the age of 90. His body lay in state in the rotunda of the Kentucky State Capitol in Frankfort. At the time of Sanders’ death, there were about 6,000 KFC outlets in 48 countries. Now it’s the world’s second largest restaurant chain after McDonald’s and boasts over 30,000 outlets in 145 countries.

 

The Standard Oil gas station in Nicholasville became a Philips Bus station, a cab station, a liquor store, and a pizza carryout restaurant.