Kentucky: Sam visits the original KFC

(...continued from previous blog)

Exit 205 was accessorized by several sun-faded billboards pointing to Corbin, Kentucky... 2.5 miles, past American Greeting Card Road, right at the light, over a creek dammed up by two garbage-bloated shopping carts, past a tanning salon in a trailer, a home with 2 billy goats grazing in the yard, a dingy scuttle of warehouses each with a litter of 18-wheelers chomping at its doors, and then......................

Words escape me.

I gained 10 pounds on the spot.

Danny’s cholesterol soared.

Sam broke out in zits.

The fresh Kentucky air transformed into a greasy-moist haze, as if tens of thousands of buckets of fried chicken had been opened on that very spot, which, in point of fact, they had, since the 1920s. We swallowed the air in startled gulps. For this was the very spot where Col. Harland Sanders had raised the chief tenant of all Southern cuisine—If it’s worth eating, it’s worth frying—to the level of global franchise. Today KFC enjoys a cushy corner office in the globby global conglomerate Yum! Brands, Inc. For example, if you would like to visit KFC club in Taiwan, simply click here: http://www.kfcclub.com.tw/ .

Perhaps the most compelling aspect of the Col.’s story is that at the age of 66, the state’s new superhighway bypassed the town of Corbin. Up till then, Sanders had enjoyed a prime spot on the main north-south road. So the Col., by now silver haired and billy goateed, took to the road with his secret 11-spice recipe. He made deals where he would get a nickel for every piece of chicken sold and so it came to pass that the first official Kentucky Fried Chicken opened in Salt Lake City in 1952. He sold the franchise in 1964 for $2 million. So I just thought you would be heartened to know that unless you are 66, and even if you are, you can launch new ventures. If a Kentuckian could do that much damage with poultry, imagine your potential.