So I tend to find a lot of "gems" during the course of my job at the public library, many of which I've noted here before. But nothing piques my interest so much as a mysterious, out-of-print book concerning controversial hometown spectres--especially those who have achieved ubiquitous, world-wide iconography. I'm talking, of course, about "Colonel" Harland Sanders and his lost autobiography: Life As I Have Known it Has Been Finger Lickin' Good. Score! I was even more excited about it than I was that time I found a copy of Dave's Way lying around. You see, early American entrepreneurial ventures--along with their accompanying origin stories, secret histories & hidden meanings--are a regular pop culture Da Vinci Code that I find absorbingly interesting. In the realm of iconic fast food empires I think we can all agree that the Colonel is an Illuminati. A really folksy, maddeningly rambly, poorly edited Illuminati (seriously, it's like he got absolute, unmonitored editorial carte blanche on this thing--the Citizen Kane of shitty, tell-all memoirs).
Anyway, this one is truly remarkable in that I hadn't heard about it, which seems really surprising. I mean, I went out of my way once to visit the Colonel's grave (not very far out of my way, but still). It was published in 1974 by Creation House in Carol Stream, Illinois. I was pretty excited to dig into this lost treasure, but wow, it is proving a real challenge. This, for instance, is the first paragraph:
"Dadgummit! Ever since I was seventy-four and got paid two million dollars for my fried-chicken franchising business--that I started when I was sixty-five and was thinking about settling down with my social security check--folks has been hounding me to write my life story."
You find yourself saying the words in your head in a Yosemite Sam voice, punctuated by pistol fire sound effects and an occasional "YEE-HAW!" interjected. He goes on to brag about being on talk shows, in parades & on set for his tv commercials (a regular hillbilly jet-setter), & then he bitches about how hard it is to write things (I strongly suspect that this is what Going Rogue must be like...). That's pretty much the entire first chapter, if you can hack it that far. But as far as I can tell, he isn't giving up any real information concerning the underbelly of the chicken biz: the secret of the "famous recipe" is still well-kept (it is common knowledge here in Louisville--home of KFC HQ--that the original, hand-written recipe of the notorious 11 herbs & spices is kept hermetically sealed in a high-security vault, the only existing hard copy. Access to the vault is restricted to a select group of upper-level Freemasons, each of which has memorized a specific part of the recipe. Before their deaths, each selects a successor to pass on their part of the secret to, thus preserving the recipe and its perfect, unbroken line of hush-hushy-ness). So of course, the intrigue does not abate.
One other point of interest: look how serious everybody is in the cover photo! What must the Colonel be reading to that (surprisingly diverse) group of children? Those kids are downright gloomy--like the cruel chicken man just informed them that the world is really a cold, unfeeling meat grinder of cutthroat business deals, complicated franchising logistics & extra-crispy backstabbery. Santa Claus cannot possibly exist in such a morally ambiguous place, children--the Colonel is here to tell you that.
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