Today I learned that Colonel Sanders of delicious crispy chicken fame was not a military colonel but a Kentucky Colonel
Though way back in the day Kentucky Colonels did have some manner of involvement in military, it basically just became like Kentucky knighthood where the only qualifications are “Kentucky thinks you’re cool”. Kentucky Colonels do not need to be from Kentucky. They don’t need to have lived in Kentucky. They don’t even need to have lived in America.
Other Kentucky Colonels include Muhammad Ali, Winston Churchill, Hunter S. Thompson, and Jeff Foxworthy, which is a failed Bill & Ted script just waiting to happen.
Anyways, Colonel Sanders had a goddamn wild life. Here’s some choice moments from his wiki page and and some other places:
-Faked his birthday to join the army when he was 16 and was honourably discharged a year later
-Worked on trains until he became a lawyer. Stopped being a lawyer after getting into a fistfight with his own client in the courtroom.
-Got a job selling life insurance and got fired for insubordination. After selling more life insurance for a different company, decided to start a ferry company.
-While acting as a minority shareholder and secretary for the ferry company, he became secretary of commerce in the state of Indiana. He quit a few months later because he “wasn’t very good at it”
-Sold his shares in the ferry company to start a company that produced acetylene lamps, which failed due to a competitors cooler electric lamps. Got a job selling tires, and then got laid off when the plant closed. Got a job running a service station, then got laid off when the station closed, because the Great Depression happened.
-Got a job at a different gas station owned by Shell and began selling chicken (!). Became the uncontested king of local chicken after his competitor showed up, tried to shoot him, shot a Shell official instead, and got convicted of murder.
-After his wife took their kids and left him to move back in with her parents, Sanders hid in the forest outside their house planning to kidnap the kids when they came outside. Got bored of waiting for them so he just strolled over to the house and talked it out with his wife and in-laws.
-KFC happened, being a colonel happened, he sold it but continued to be the company’s public image. Proceeded to randomly show up at various KFC franchises and insult them if they made it poorly. Continued to insult KFC’s parent company Heublin forever, including saying their food was gross and suing them for misusing his image. They tried to sue him for libel and were unsuccessful.
-He literally wore nothing but that white suit for the last 20 years of his life and also bleached his facial hair
-“According to a Thought Catalog synopsis of [his autobiography], Colonel Sanders was a servant of God, with a nasty mouth and a willingness to pummel a man with a chair”
-He has a publicly viewable file with the FBI that includes a paragraph that begins with “Colonel Harland D. Sanders has not been the subject of an FBI investigation” immediately followed by a paragraph of redacted text
I’m supposed to be up at 6am tomorrow but here I am reading about the chicken man. I don’t even know if I CAN sleep now
and here was me thinking the weirdest thing connected to colonel sanders was kafka on the shore