Sanders, Harland

When Harland was six years old, his father died. To make ends meet, his mother worked in a tomato-canning plant, leaving the boy to fend for his siblings. Every night Harland cooked and fed them—nurturing, legend has it, his talent as a truly good cook. “The one thing I always could do was cook,” he would say years later. The rest of Sanders’s early life was spent doing a variety of jobs: farmhand, streetcar conductor, private in the military in Cuba, railroad fireman. Always he dreamed of making it big. He settled with his wife in Kentucky, seizing on business opportunities as a lawyer, an insurance salesman, and a ferry operator, alternating between going up in the world and slipping down. By 1930 Sanders was operating a service station on Highway 25 in Corbin, Kentucky. Noting the lack of anywhere decent to eat, he started cooking traditional Southern fare—including fried chicken—for passersby out of a small room in his filling station. Despite the Depression, the Sanders Café did well, even attracting the praise of Duncan Hines in Adventures in Good Eating (1939), a book designed to inform Americans where they could eat well on the road.