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Born on September 9, 1890 on a small farm just outside of Henryville, Indiana, Harland Sanders was only six years old when his father (a butcher) died, forcing his mother (a homemaker) to seek work to support the family, leaving Harland to take care of his two younger siblings and much of the family's cooking. He held his first job at age 10 helping out at a nearby farm, and dropped out of school in seventh grade to work full time to help support the family. He was 12 when his mother remarried, and he left home at age 13 over conflicts with his new stepfather.

He enlisted in the U.S. Army as a private stationed in Cuba at the age of 16 (he lied about his age when enlisting). After completing military service, he married Josephine Kling in 1908 and had three children in their 39 years of marriage. Though Harland held a wide variety of jobs, his skill as a cook remained. In the midst of the Depression in 1930 (age 40), while working as a gas station operator in Corbin, Kentucky, he opened his first restaurant in a small front room of his living quarters (using the family's dining table and six chairs) and was both chief cook and cashier. He named the dining area "Sanders Court & Cafe" and sold complete meals to busy, time-strapped families who stopped in for gas - his slogan was "Sunday Dinner, Seven Days a Week."

Young Sanders It was during the 1930s that Harland developed his world-famous "Secret Recipe" for chicken. "In those days, I hand-mixed the spices like mixing cement on a specially cleaned concrete floor on my back porch in Corbin," the Colonel recalled years later. "I used a scoop to make a tunnel in the flour and then carefully mixed in the herbs and spices." Over the next decade, he worked to perfect his secret recipe.

When he first started cooking for folks in the 1930s, Harland used the normal pan-frying method for cooking his chicken. However, he felt that waiting 30 minutes or more for their food was not conducive to fast customer service for the average person. He experimented with the "Southern" method of frying in deep fat, which was quicker but the taste wasn't the same. Then sometime in the late 1930s, he purchased a newly-invented pressure fryer, which, after making a few adjustments and a lot of experimenting, he came out with the best chicken he'd ever tasted, and what we've come to know as Kentucky Fried Chicken was born. Today, there are several different kinds of cookers used to make Original Recipe Chicken, but every one of them fries under pressure, the principle established by Harland.

In 1936, Kentucky Governor Ruby Laffoon made Harland Sanders a member of the Honorable Order of Kentucky Colonels in recognition of his contribution to the state's cuisine. He was re-commissioned in 1949 by Governor Lawrence Wetherby. Although he had been a Kentucky Colonel for nearly two decades, it wasn't until after 1950 he began to look the part, growing his trademark mustache and goatee and donning his white suit and black string tie.

Picnic As more people started coming to his Corbin restaurant strictly for the food, in 1937 he purchased the roadside motel and restaurant across the street from the gas station, which expanded the restaurant's capacity to 142 seats. Disaster struck in 1939 when fire destroyed the cafe, but Colonel Sanders quickly rebuilt and reopened for business.

Colonel Sanders and Josephine divorced in 1947. He later (Nov. 18, 1948) married his long-time employee, Claudia Ledington Price. Shortly afterward, Colonel Sanders and Claudia began actively franchising his chicken business by traveling by car (accompanied many times by Claudia) going from town to town cooking batches of chicken for restaurant owners and employees. His first success came when in 1952 the first Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise was awarded to Pete Harman of Salt Lake City on a handshake agreement stipulating a payment of a nickel to Colonel Sanders for each chicken sold.

For years, Colonel Sanders simply carried his secret recipe in his head and the spice mixture in his car. Today, the recipe is locked away in a safe in Louisville, Kentucky - only a handful of people know the multi-million dollar recipe and each is obligated to strict confidentiality by contract! One company blends a formulation that represents part of the recipe while another spice company blends the remainder. He later wrote, "It gobbles the mind just to think of all the procedures and precautions the company takes to protect my recipe, especially when I think how Claudia and I used to operate. She was my packing girl, my warehouse supervisor, my delivery person - you name it. Our garage was the warehouse . . . . After I hit the road selling franchises for my chicken, that left Claudia behind to fill the orders for the seasoned flour mix. She'd fill the day's orders in little paper sacks with cellophane linings and package them for shipment. Then she had to put them on a midnight train."

The value of his restaurant in Corbin was $165,000 in 1953, but fell dramatically when plans for a new highway took shape and bypassed Corbin. He auctioned off the property in 1956 (age 66) to pay his mounting debts. He and Claudia were almost broke living only on his monthly social security check of $105. He decided to go on the road to sell his Secret Recipe to restaurants. By 1960, his hard work paid off with 190 Kentucky Fried Chicken franchises and 400 franchise units in the U.S. and Canada. By 1963, he made $300,000 a year in profits before taxes.

KFC Bucket In 1964 (age 74), with over 600 franchised outlets, Colonel Sanders sold his interest in the company for $2 million (plus a lifetime salary of $40,000, later increased to $75,000) to a U.S. group of investors, but the deal did not include the Canadian operations. Colonel Sanders moved to Ontario with Claudia and continued to collect franchise fees and remained a public spokesman for the company, collecting fees for his visits to franchises. Heublein Inc. acquired the company in 1971 and three years later, Colonel Sanders sued the company because he did not like changes they had made to the product; the suit was settled out of court for over $1 million. R.J. Reynolds Industries, Inc. (now RJR Nabisco, Inc.) acquired the company in 1982 for $840 million, In 1986, Nabisco sold KFC to PepsiCo, who in 1991 changed the name from Kentucky Fried Chicken to KFC apparently in an effort to disassociate itself from the term "fried." PepsiCo created Tricon Global Restaurants, Inc. in 1997 (PepsiCo's quick service restaurants KFC, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut). In 2002, Tricon changed its corporate name to YUM! Brands,Inc., which today is the world's largest restaurant company in terms of system restaurants. Every day, more than 12 million customers are served at KFC restaurants in 109 countries and territories around the world. KFC operates more than 5,200 restaurants in the United States and more than 15,000 units around the world. More than a billion of the Colonel's "finger lickin' good" chicken dinners are served annually worldwide.

Colonel Sanders and Claudia lived in Shelbyville, Kentucky when in June of 1980 was diagnosed with acute leukemia and died of pneumonia on December 16, 1980 at the age of 90. He was buried in his characteristic white suit and black string tie at Cave Hill Cemetery in Louisville, Kentucky. Until his death, the Colonel traveled 250,000 miles a year visiting KFC restaurants around the world. Claudia Sanders died on Jan. 1, 1997 at the age of 94 and she now rests beside her husband.