KFC's Colonel Sanders
When I read last week
that a majority of Americans ages 18 to 25
didn't know who Colonel Sanders was,
I was shocked.
According to USA Today,
61% of respondents didn't know
who the guy with the beard in the KFC logo was.
For anyone who grew up in America
in the second half of the 20th century,
the Colonel was a true icon.
You didn't need to be able to read to know who he was;
you didn't even need to watch TV.
Anyone who drove a mile in any direction
would see his beaming, grandfatherly visage and white suit
and know that Kentucky Fried Chicken could be found there.
Maybe not everybody knew that he was the chain's founder
or remembered his TV commercials from the '60s and '70s,
when he talked about
how each piece was dipped in an "egg warsh" before frying.
But, at least, they knew he was real.
Half of the young adults in the survey,
which was ordered up by the chain,
assumed that he was the creation of KFC,
rather than the other way around.
In fact, the Colonel wasn't just a fast-food baron
who represented his company on TV.
Sanders was the living embodiment
of what his food supposedly stood for.
His white suit wasn't the invention of a marketing committee;
he wore it every day and was never seen in public
for the last 20 years of his life in anything else.
He was a failure who got fired from a dozen jobs
before starting his restaurant,
and then failed at that when he went out of business
and found himself broke at the age of 65.
He drove around in a Cadillac with his face painted on the side
before anybody knew who he was,
pleading with the owners of run-down diners
to use his recipe and give him a nickel commission
on each chicken.
He slept in the back of the car and made handshake deals.
He was a lawyer who once assaulted his own client in court.
He was indeed a Kentucky Colonel,
an honorary title given to him by not one but two governors.