Every person watching this video has at least driven passed a Kentucky Fried Chicken, if not been lured inside by the scent of its trademark 11 herbs and spices and the inviting face of its founder and mascot, Colonel Sanders. But did you know that Colonel Sanders not only existed, but that his life story was a carnival ride of odd jobs, gunfights, and cantankerous southern living far removed from his kindly image as the face of KFC? Today, on Weird History Food we are going to talk about the crazy true story of Colonel Sanders. [MUSIC PLAYING] But before we get started, be sure to subscribe to the Weird History Food channel, and let us know in the comments below what other fast food founders you would like to hear about. OK, grab an eight piece original, and let's bite into some greasy chicken history. [MUSIC PLAYING] Colonel Sanders is known the world over as the smiling genial avatar of fried chicken. In his 1974 autobiography Finger Licking Good, he wrote, they think I look so much like Santa Claus in Shelbyville, Kentucky, where my home is, that I put on a red suit and give out buckets of fried chicken at Christmas. But despite his friendly, folksy image, he was an elderly Southern man who lived through the Great Depression, standing in sharp contrast to his obsessive cleanliness, a personality quirk that led to his trademark white suit-- You likely wouldn't wear a white suit in a busy kitchen. We never worry about that in the Kentucky Fried Chicken kitchen. Keeping everything clean and neat is part of our recipe for real goodness. Sanders wove a tapestry of dirty words nearly every time he opened his mouth. He once remarked, I used to cuss the prettiest you ever heard. Explaining that, it's hard for me not to call a no good, lazy, incompetent, dishonest SOB by anything else but his rightful name-- tasty And honest. Sanders also did not bother to clean up the force and variety of his swearing in mixed company. I did my cussing before women or anybody else, he once said. But somehow nobody ever took any offense. Sanders came by his rough edges honestly. Despite his incredible success and enduring status as a pop culture icon, Sanders didn't start turning a humble gas station cafe into a global fast food franchise until he was in his 60s, which is when most people retire, ironically, to spend the rest of their days eating KFC in front of the television. His early life was a struggle. Sanders was born in 1890. His father died when he was six, which left him responsible for taking care of his younger brother and sister. He joined the workforce early to support his family working as a railroad fireman, a streetcar conductor, a farmer, and an insurance salesman. Pretty much all the jobs you would expect a man who looks like Colonel Sanders to have with the notable exception of folksy humorist or Mark Twain cosplayer. He also had to cook for his family at a young age where he would experiment with different recipes, because he was a kid in the single digits and didn't know what the hell he was doing. He was married to his childhood girlfriend, Josephine, by the age of 18. That might seem a little young to you now, but Sanders had already been taking care of a family and a household for more than a decade at that point. He'd essentially been an adult since he was six, so he probably assumed he was ready for the big leap. Within a year, Josephine gave birth to the couple's first daughter. Despite his grandfatherly image of the proprietor of a family friendly chicken empire, Sanders had a not so good habit of beating the feathers out of people. As a young man, he loved to fight, and his quarrelsome nature got him fired from several jobs. He lost his railroad firefighting job after getting into a fracas with an engineer beneath a water tower. Another time he was dismissed at a justice of the peace court after attempting to beat his own client with a chair. And reportedly, Sanders once punched a man in a barber's chair so hard that the shaving lather flew right off the man's face. Josephine, understandably, grew annoyed with Sanders' chronic inability to hold a job longer than it took to smack someone in the head, so she left him and went to her parents' house taking their daughter with her. Sanders was a colorful Southern [BLEEP] kicker used to getting his own way, so he wasn't about to take that lying down. He deep fried a plan to kidnap his own daughter away from his estranged wife, although the exact details of the incident are a bit sketchy. In his autobiography, Sanders mentioned he was planning to kidnap multiple children despite the fact that the couple only had one child at the time. Was he confused about how many kids were available to kidnap or was he remembering a different kidnapping? How many kidnappings did you plan, Colonel Sanders? Luckily, Sanders' criminal plots weren't as meticulous as his business acumen. His entire kidnapping plan was to lurk in the bushes outside of Josephine's parents' house and wait for his daughter to come within snatching distance, and sop them up like a biscuit does gravy. It's unclear whether his aging knees started aching from hiding in the bushes or if he just got sick of waiting, but he eventually gave up his plan and simply walked inside the house, first to talk to Josephine's father, and then to Josephine herself. The couple eventually reconciled and brought the family back together. [MUSIC PLAYING] After losing more jobs than a party planner, Colonel Sanders finally settled down as the owner and manager of a gas station in Kentucky in 1930 when he was 40 years old. He couldn't know it at the time, but this was the first step towards what would become a wildly successful career and officially the longest single job he would ever hold. In order to satisfy hungry gas station customers, Sanders began serving meals of chicken and other delicious meats. When the chicken became a hit, he added a full cafe to the station and hired a woman named Claudia Price to run it. Claudia just so happened to also be the Colonel's mistress, a fact he made no attempt to hide from his wife Josephine, who finally divorced him and left him for good in 1947. Apparently, there is a limit to how many fistfights, affairs, and attempted kidnappings a person is willing to tolerate. After splitting from his first wife, Sanders married Price in 1949 and stayed with her until his death. Sanders' pit stop was located on a particularly rough stretch of the Dixie Highway in Corbin, Kentucky, called hell's half acre. This being the deep South during Prohibition, it was a place where booze and shotguns lived. Come to think of it, booze and guns have pretty much always been kindred spirits. In the Colonel's own words, bootleggings, fights, and shootings was as regular as a rooster's crowing in the morning. Crime and violence were commonplace, but fuel was always in demand, and Sanders' motor stop was well positioned to earn him a comfortable living. Also he was not exactly a stranger to thuggery. Sanders once got into a shootout with a rival gas station owner named Matt Stewart. The conflict began when Stewart started painting over Sanders' highway signs. And if there is one thing you absolutely do not do, it is to [BLEEP] with the Colonel's money. With some executives from Shell Oil in tow, Sanders went to confront Stewart. The confrontation quickly became a gunfight. One of the Shell executives was killed, but Sanders wounded Stewart badly enough that the man gave up and was arrested for murder. While the incident was tragic and probably not the way Sanders had intended things to go down, taking Stewart out of the picture gave him a monopoly on gasoline sales in the area. On another occasion, Sanders was awakened early in the morning by the sound of gunfire outside his business. Two rival bootleggers were engaged in a shootout entirely too close to the Colonel's gas station. Clad in nothing but his underwear and clutching his own standard issue Kentucky scattergun, he kicked open his door and shouted, line up both of you sons of bitches, and throw down your guns. We don't know if Sanders forgot to put his clothes on, but doing that in your skivvies, that's a power move anybody will respect. The two men complied, and a still pantless Sanders help the Sheriff escort them to jail. Even after finally settling into his role as a gas station manager, Sanders still filled his off hours with odd jobs and volunteer work. Either he was captured by the wanderlust spirit or he was trying to make sure his biographers had as much material as possible, and we appreciate that, Colonel. One of his many side hustles was volunteering as the local midwife in Corbin, Kentucky. He traveled across the county delivering babies like an armed stork, ultimately helping to bring eight new lives into the world. It was this work, along with his famous fried chicken, that earned him the title of Kentucky Colonel, the highest civilian honor the state can bestow. The honor was given to him by Kentucky governor, Ruby Laffoon, who sounds like a character in a Kentucky Fried Chicken universe or KFCU if we're being Marvel about it. [MUSIC PLAYING] Sanders made it his personal mission to be one of the most eclectic and unique figures in modern American history. It's like he was collecting future bar trivia questions about himself. He managed to be tangentially involved in the most significant research project ever conducted. Fuel rationing during World War II forced Sanders to pick up a few more side gigs, which he was already more than accustomed to doing. One of those supplemental jobs involved him serving as the assistant manager of a few cafeterias located within a research facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where materials were being developed for Project Manhattan. Yeah, Colonel Sanders finger licking fingerprints on the project that created nuclear weapons. The research site where he managed a few eateries was tasked with producing uranium-235, a vital component in Little Boy, the bomb that was ultimately dropped on the city of Hiroshima in the first atomic attack in history. Bit of a dubious distinction, but even doomsday architects have to eat. [MUSIC PLAYING] Colonel Sanders, did your chicken make you a wealthy man? Yeah, I started franchising when I was 66 years old. Now, that's an advantage again. Don't quit because you're 65, because you can do something quite worthwhile after that. The popular version of the story of the founding of Kentucky Fried Chicken involves Colonel Sanders contemplating suicide after retiring at 65 and instead deciding to take a chance on building a fast food empire. And although that charming tale of a senior citizen weighing the pros and cons of offing himself is the story KFC itself likes to promote, it's probably a myth. There's no evidence Sanders ever considered ending his own life or that he ever really retired. The man collected jobs like signatures for a student council election. He didn't even quit after becoming a millionaire. More on that in a bit. However, the true story of KFC's founding is just as interesting. Sanders did not stop working when he hit his 60s, but he was forced to change careers yet again after the construction of the Interstate Highway System effectively killed business at his rural highway gas station. Between the loss of his primary source of income and the meager sum of his social security checks, the Colonel was strapped for cash. Sanders reached out to Pete Harman, a restaurateur he'd once met at a convention, and pitched him a restaurant franchise based on Sanders' personal fried chicken recipe that had proven so popular at his cafe. To sell Harman on the idea, he took his potential investor with him to the grocery store to buy ingredients and then fried up some chicken with 11 herbs and spices right in Harman's kitchen. The meal was evidently enough to convince Harman, who briefly tried to convince Sanders to sell him the recipe before finally agreeing to franchise the first Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in Salt Lake City in 1952. Surprisingly, Sanders had nothing to do with the name. Kentucky Fried Chicken was reportedly coined by a painter named Don Anderson whom Harman had hired to paint a sign for the restaurant. Solid pick, Don. With Pete Harman already on the hook, Sanders began to travel around the country looking for more franchisees. He loaded his car full of chicken, flour, pressure cookers, oil, and 11 different herbs and spices, offering to cook batches of chicken in exchange for a nickel for each order sold. He slept on the road to save money and time, and we get the feeling that Sanders was a guy who was comfortable sleeping in his car. Sanders more or less stayed on the road for the next 12 years building his empire by recruiting more and more franchisees. By 1964, KFC had over 600 franchises across the country. That same year, he sold his interest in KFC to some investors for $2 million when he was 73. According to Sanders, the amount was paid in cash in three glass covered carts totaling the $2 million. They had 31 FBI and Treasury Department guards watching over that pile. Even though he no longer had any ownership stake in the business, Sanders continued to make public appearances acting as the face and mascot of KFC, visiting KFC restaurants around the world as a spokesman. When KFC was acquired by Heublein Inc in 1971, the fast food chain had over 3,500 franchises and company owned locations across the globe. Kentucky [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] Heublein paid $285 million for the empire Sanders built. I see in the paper yesterday, the same company that I sold for 2 million sold for 240 million yesterday? Do you feel you got left out? Oh, I'm left out. That's right. I don't want nobody to write me for any money, because I didn't get any of that. [MUSIC PLAYING] Sanders began to sour on KFC after the Heublein acquisition, and he engaged the company in several legal disputes. He tried to sue them for misusing his image. Heublein countersued for libel, but both cases ultimately fizzled. Sanders also attempted to open a brand new fried chicken franchise using his image, which he technically no longer owned as far as the food service industry was concerned, but he eventually backed down, my guess after he realized he couldn't beat Heublein executives into a gunfight. But that didn't stop him from publicly denouncing KFC. He complained that the changes the company had made to his gravy recipe reduced it to a [BLEEP] damn slop. Sanders was witnessed walking into a KFC franchise as late as 1979, a year before his death, to throw food on the ground and berate the manager for what he perceived to be subpar quality. Maybe not surprising for a guy who plotted to abduct his own child? Colonel Sanders died on December 16, 1980, in Louisville, Kentucky at the age of 90. He saw the end of the 19th century as the dirt poor son of a single mother working to support his siblings, and nearly saw the end of the 20th century as a millionaire restaurateur and one of the most famous faces on the planet. Not a bad run, Colonel. Meanwhile, Heublein was acquired by RJ Reynolds Industries, now RJR Nabisco, in 1982. Four years later, PepsiCo bought KFC from RJR Nabisco in 1986 for a whopping $840 million. That is a lot of chicken and even more bolo ties. So what do you think about the real life Colonel Sanders? Let us know in the comments below, and while you're at it, check out some of these other videos from our Weird Food History. [MUSIC PLAYING]