Post #4142729

I love this story. I never knew about the original Colonel Sanders. It would be so funny to be eating at Kentucky Fried Chicken, with his picture on the sign, and then see him walk in and angrily complain about the food! He started his chain in the late 1930s. Making Southern fried chicken in a cast-iron skillet could take half an hour, so he developed a special quick recipe using a pressure cooker. In 1956, a new interstate rerouted customers away from his restaurant. He and his wife packed a pressure cooker, a cooler of raw chicken and his special spice mix into their Oldsmobile and took off. A few years later he had 600 franchises and a well-developed persona. In 1964, a wealthy Nashville investor and a young lawyer persuaded him to sell them his company and his likeness for $2 million. They soon resold it for over a hundred times that. He remained with the company to promote the brand. He took the job seriously, making hundreds of appearances and autographing buckets of chicken. "But as the company grew and changed his recipes, he became increasingly outraged. He sometimes walked into franchises, berated the manager and threw out food he thought was subpar. “That extra-crispy recipe is nothing in the world but a damn fried dough ball stuck on a chicken,” he told the Louisville Courier-Journal in a 1976 interview, in which he also likened the gravy to wallpaper paste. A local franchisee group sued him, claiming that he had defamed the brand and damaged sales. A court ruled that his comments were protected speech." From here: https://archive.is/564B8