Colonels Of Truth

March 21, 2016 4:46 PM

This encounter might have been as commonplace as any other gunfight around Hell’s Half-Acre were it not for the identity of the driver. The “Sanders” who put two bullets in Matt Stewart was none other than Harland Sanders, the man who would go on to become the world-famous Colonel Sanders.
posted by Confess, Fletch (29 comments total)

Sanders and his criminal associates.
posted by thelonius at 5:00 PM on March 21, 2016 [16 favorites]

Feel the Harl
posted by blueberry at 5:07 PM on March 21, 2016 [3 favorites]

Sounds to me that Colonel Sanders, was not, in fact...

chicken
posted by effugas at 5:08 PM on March 21, 2016 [4 favorites]

That was trigger finger good.
posted by clavdivs at 5:19 PM on March 21, 2016 [6 favorites]

This should have a KFC tag. Because for a while, it was just KFC.
posted by asperity at 5:36 PM on March 21, 2016

Here's his house in Mississauga, Ontario from '65 until his death. I understand he still spent the winters down south - like a lot of Canadian retirees.
posted by bonobothegreat at 5:40 PM on March 21, 2016

Wait...KFC is...Canadian?
posted by rhizome at 5:45 PM on March 21, 2016 [1 favorite]

"like a wizard casting a poultry hex"

Funniest line in a funny article.
posted by Mr. Yuck at 6:28 PM on March 21, 2016 [2 favorites]

I quite liked the line immediately after that, though it's funny in a somewhat different way:

The eggs sailed, egg-like, across the expanse between them.
posted by clockzero at 6:33 PM on March 21, 2016 [7 favorites]

That picture with the crow on his shoulder with the penny in its beak is some straight up Stephen King Dark Tower shit.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:10 PM on March 21, 2016 [5 favorites]

That line's a Lyttle Lytton contender.
posted by delfin at 7:11 PM on March 21, 2016

The "...with Alice Cooper for some reason" photo caption was a nice touch.

Also, although I rarely think "this should be a movie," this should be a movie. Barring that, there's a novel in here somewhere.
posted by thomas j wise at 7:27 PM on March 21, 2016 [2 favorites]

In 1935 or 1936, in recognition of Sanders’ midwifery work, food donations, and his regular shuttling of townsfolk to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, Kentucky governor Ruby Laffoon commissioned Harland Sanders as a “Kentucky Colonel,” the highest title of honor bestowed by the Commonwealth of Kentucky.

Two-fisted, gun-toting, foul-mouthed... midwife, AA-sponsor and one-man foodbank in Hell's Half Acre. Good goddamn if he didn't earn that Colonel's commission. He followed that up by putting his new career as a restaurateur on hold during The War to help keep the nuclear scientists in Oak Ridge properly fed. Then he went on to mentor Dave Thomas. Wow, this is kind of awesome...
posted by Slap*Happy at 7:59 PM on March 21, 2016 [17 favorites]

Wow. Just wow, dude.
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:49 PM on March 21, 2016

"By July 1940, Sanders had developed a system to fry chicken to golden brown in about eight minutes"..
OBSESSION!
posted by bird internet at 9:04 PM on March 21, 2016

This was a damn good episode of damn interesting. The way he got ripped off in the end was sad, though
posted by double block and bleed at 9:28 PM on March 21, 2016

They should have made Forrest Gump about Colonel Sanders, I don't even know exactly what that means but it seems right
posted by clockzero at 9:30 PM on March 21, 2016 [4 favorites]

I have it on the authority of someone in a position to know that the Colonel, Dave Thomas, and Bob Evans would go on road trips (this must have been in the 70s), driving around to local diners and family restaurants to see what food people were making, and if something they really liked made its way onto a menu at one of their restaurants later on, so much the better. Apparently one of these trips somehow ended up in New Orleans, leading to my acquaintance getting a midnight phone call from Dave begging for someone, anyone to come get him off this damn riverboat with the Colonel.
posted by Copronymus at 9:58 PM on March 21, 2016 [9 favorites]

I met him the year before he died. I was maybe nineteen, working a tourist trap summer job. He was traveling with a big family group, but a little too frail to take the tour. So I ended up talking to him and one of his daughters for about half an hour. He seemed a very nice guy, genuinely interested in what a young man thought about things, and rather bemused at his fame.
posted by philip-random at 10:59 PM on March 21, 2016 [7 favorites]

My favourite pun might be "the seasoned veteran".
posted by terretu at 3:40 AM on March 22, 2016

Quite the life that man had.

First time I was in London I stumbled across a KFC and decided to eat there as I had not set foot in one before (Norway has no franchises of KFC at all, actually), but the experience was rather underwhelming. And the line in the article about the modern seasoning being mostly salt, pepper, sugar and MSG rings true. Maybe I should stick to home cooking, as there are apparently several people online who have dedicated a lot of time and energy in recreating the original recipe.
posted by Harald74 at 4:26 AM on March 22, 2016

While in Mississauga, Colonel Sanders endowed a family care centre.
posted by tallmiddleagedgeek at 6:10 AM on March 22, 2016 [1 favorite]

Asperity: The snopes link is from The Repository Of Lost Legends. Click on the additional information link on the bottom. (Hint: Kentucky Fried Chicken didn't change their name, even for just a while.)
posted by bayreader at 8:05 AM on March 22, 2016 [1 favorite]

Bayreader: I remember when it was announced that they were changing their name to KFC, all over the news of the day. The Snopes page may be deliberately false, but I think that's saying the reasoning given on the page, the story about the copyrighting of the name, is what's wrong, and the "downplay fried" story is what's correct.

When you go to their webpage, they refer to themselves as KFC Corporation.

Ah, here's an article from 1991 discussing the change.
posted by Four Ds at 8:48 AM on March 22, 2016 [1 favorite]

Thinking about it, just modifying a pressure cooker to experiment with cooking oil at high temperature and extreme pressure takes crazy balls.
posted by bonobothegreat at 10:10 AM on March 22, 2016 [1 favorite]

Kanadian Fried Chicken?

This was a thing: Scott's Chicken Villa.

See also:

A Finger Lickin’ Good Mississauga Colonel

Some of those Scott's Chicken Villa locations are still around..

My parents rarely bought KFC, so when they did it was a big deal. True story: I recall they once said "The colonel's coming to cook tonight." I was just at the right age where it seemed like it was plausible, and was sad when my dad came home with only the chicken and no Harlan Sanders in tow.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 12:39 PM on March 22, 2016 [1 favorite]

Wait, they only named one neighborhood in Kentucky “the asshole of creation?”
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 1:58 PM on March 22, 2016

Someone call Norm Macdolnald!
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 1:59 PM on March 22, 2016

Am I the only one that is now thinking the Colonel would have made a great character on Justified?
posted by Ber at 2:18 PM on March 22, 2016 [2 favorites]