The Real Colonel Sanders Was A Relentless, Amazing Maniac

His father died when he was young, and Sanders wound up having to do all of the cooking for his large family at seven years old. At that age, I couldn't open a Go-Gurt without scissors. He was forced to improvise with what he had. It was kind of like Chopped, only instead of being handed a basket where the "curveball" is goat cheese, he had to make a meal for ten out of cow dick, a nickel, and sadness.

At the ripe age of 13, Sanders moved out to go work on a farm. He bailed out of school in the seventh grade, saying "algebra's what drove me off." Thus began one of the most utterly ridiculous journeys to success in history.

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Somewhere around the train toilet incident, he met and married his wife, with whom he had two daughters and a son. Oh, and he was also studying law via a correspondence class, because of course he was. He practiced law (the barrier for entry was much lower then) in Little Rock, Arkansas for a few years ...

And then lost that job because he got into a fistfight with a client while in court.

I can find no additional context for that story. All we know is that he was arrested and forbidden from practicing law. Or as Sanders says in his autobiography, "I decided I didn't want to be a lawyer anymore." He immediately went back to work for the railroad, cleaning toilets. He was pushing 30 at this point.

Over the next several years, he did everything from selling life insurance to delivering babies as a midwife (a ... midhusband?) to operating ferry boats. None of this stuck -- he was fired at least one more time for fighting on the job. And as if things couldn't get worse, it was around this time that his only son died from infected tonsils. We like to say that we can never catch a break when we end up in boarding group B on a Southwest flight, but Harland David Sanders was the true embodiment of this phrase.

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See, success never really enjoyed Sanders' company for long. After finding out that another local business owner was painting over his signs to direct traffic away from his joint, Sanders decided to take matters into his own hands. After threatening to shoot the man if he ever caught him doing it again, Sanders in fact caught him doing it again.

The guy decided to just started shooting first, killing one of Sanders' fellow workers at the Shell station. Sanders then grabbed the dead man's fucking gun and shot back, wounding the sign-painting guy. The cops arrested everyone involved, but Sanders got off, since he kind of acted in self-defense. And like that, Sanders' main competition was out of his way.

Over the next few years, Harland would sling his gas station chicken pretty damn successfully, having developed a method of frying in a pressure cooker that would just shoot grease right into the meat. He was perfectly situated off of a main highway that saw an abundance of traffic. He would also be bestowed with Kentucky's highest civilian honor by two separate governors: the title of colonel. Sanders' life is less of a straight line and more like someone pulling crazy redneck scenarios out of a hat.

Then, at age 66, he lost everything.

Though Sanders found himself without a job once more, he did possess one thing that he didn't have in his previous undefined years: A passion for putting bread on dead chickens and throwing them into wildly hot grease. Sanders took his famous recipe on the road, and began offering it to restaurants with a licensing deal whereby they'd give him a cut of every bird sold. He packed up his bags of spices and pressure cookers and drove around, living off of Social Security checks and sleeping in his car.

So imagine for a moment you're walking into a restaurant and you pass by a rumpled 68-year-old man changing his pants in the back of a sedan, his passenger seat full of greasy pressure cookers. Would you guess this guy was about to launch a multi-billion-dollar international business? Because he sure as fuck was.

By the mid-1960s (when he was in his 70s), Sanders had franchised hundreds of restaurants with his chicken recipe. He turned himself into the logo, never leaving the house without that white suit and black tie. The man understood personal branding as well as any of today's finest Instagram influencers. And then he lived happily ever af-

Ah shit, wait. This is America, after all, and when there's someone with actual talent and drive succeeding, the parasites without those qualities will always swoop in. A couple of young Kentucky millionaires descended upon the Colonel with hopes of convincing him to sell.

Sanders didn't want to sell. Even at his age, he wanted to stay at the controls, afraid they would change the recipe or otherwise tarnish his legacy as the greatest shootout-winnin', soot-faced, chicken-breadin', courtroom-brawlin' colonel in the fine state of Kentucky. Eventually, however, he gave in. He settled on a few million and a pretty modest yearly salary after that. And he instantly regretted it.

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If nothing else, you have to wonder how many people exactly like him never got that chance.

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