DID YOU KNOW?
Now, his restaurant menu was built around chicken fried the way his mother had taught him as a boy in Indiana. Served with hot biscuits and honey, the chicken sold well, despite this motto on the bottom of the menu: “Not worth it, but mighty good.”
Anyway, he was named a Kentucky Colonel in 1936. Sanders proceeded to get more mileage from that honorary title than anyone in history. Soon, he began playing the role of the goateed, mustachioed Kentucky Colonel—a role that later became one of the most recognizable trademarks in the world.
In 1948, after divorcing his first wife, Sanders married Claudia Price, also a divorcee. She had gone to work for him in 1930 as a waitress and later helped him run various business ventures in North
Carolina and Florida. She played a significant role in helping Sanders franchise his chicken. By 1955, Sanders’ business was doing so well that he turned down an offer of $164,000 for it.
opened a service station in Nicholasville. He did so well that in 1929, a major oil company built him a new station on U.S. 25 near Corbin. Ever the salesman, Sanders advertised “Free Air” for tires. That helped him make enough money to open a small restaurant and later a motel.
A year later, however, Sanders could hardly give his business away. The announcement that a new interstate highway, I-75, would be built seven miles away brought devastating consequences. For merchants along U.S. 25, the new road meant doom. Once completed, U.S. 25 would become a ghost highway.
Within a year of the announcement, Sanders’ business declined so drastically that his complex was sold at public auction for far less than the $164,000 offer he had once refused.
Now, that is when he and Mrs. Sanders hit the road to sell the Colonel and his fried-chicken recipe. As Sanders once explained to reporter Irene Reid of The Courier-Journal, they used an “act” to promote franchises:
“When I would get a franchise in a restaurant, they did not have carry-out places in those days; I would dress up in my Colonel suit and fry the chicken. And Claudia, she would dress up in this antebellum dress. She would serve as