One-Man Brand

Harland Sanders was stuck. He was the proprietor of Sanders Café and Court, a successful roadside operation on Route 25 in Corbin, Kentucky, that included a restaurant, service station, and motel. The Sanders Café had become profitable thanks to hungry travelers pulling off the busy road, drawn by accolades from two Kentucky governors and a popular travel guide writer who raved about a fried chicken recipe Sanders had spent 15 years perfecting. He was making a little money on a franchise deal with a Salt Lake City restaurateur involving his chicken recipe. His tiny empire had survived a bloody gunfight with a rival gas seller, a catastrophic fire, and four lean years of wartime gas rationing.

But in 1955, just as Sanders was celebrating a quarter-century of hard work and material reward, the state had rerouted Route 25, crushing his cash flow. In 1956 the U.S. Congress passed the Interstate Highway Act, intended to stitch the nation together with limited access roadways. One of those was going to run past Corbin, but not in a way that would do Harland Sanders, 66, any good. He sold his business at a loss. His monthly income shrank to a $105 Social Security check and a pittance from his lone franchisee in Utah.

Deciding the path to recovery lay in franchising, he and wife Claudia hit the road. By 1965, Sanders was a millionaire with a stake in hundreds of restaurants. He had elevated fried chicken from a low-budget utility meal into a nationally beloved cuisine and was the figurehead for one of the country’s biggest restaurant chains. In a century crammed with corporate icons, from Mickey Mouse to Uncle Ben to the Jolly Green Giant to the genial Quaker on the oatmeal canister, Harland Sanders stood out as an actual human being turned corporate standard bearer. Even when designs reduced his presence to a few strokes of black and white, even after his death, he was and is the face of KFC.

in a shack in Henryville, Indiana—a place that at the end of the 19th century “might as well have been the eighteenth,” a biographer wrote. His father died