The National :: Colonel Sanders and the American Dream

Colonel Sanders and the American Dream

by Josh Ozersky

Buy It Now

Colonel Sanders: the American Dream inside a bucket of fried chicken
Steve Donoghue

Josh Ozersky, in his earnest Colonel Sanders and the American Dream, stresses at the outset his alarm over the fact that a growing number of Americans don't realise that unlike Uncle Ben - in fact unlike any other such marketing creation - Colonel Sanders was a real person, not a corporate creation. And not only a real person, an exemplar: "More than almost anyone in the hagiographic literature of American business, he truly lived the American Dream."

Ozersky's book is part of the University of Texas Press's Discovering America series, which operates on the premise that much of US history still remains to be written and sets out to tell the peculiar and perhaps illustrative side stories that get lost in the drama of wars and westward expansion. But since the food company that Colonel Sanders founded, Kentucky Fried Chicken - KFC - has a worldwide reach (more than 15,000 outlets in more than 100 countries), it's incumbent on Ozersky to do a little clarifying about that central conceit of his book - just what is the American Dream?

 He rejects the simple definition: "Often it is used to describe hard work leading to fortune, but there is nothing especially American about that; that is the Protestant work ethic wrapped in a flag," he writes. Instead, he digs deeper: "The phrase 'American Dream' was coined specifically to describe a state of egalitarian opportunity, a novus orbis where a man might transcend his roots and create himself as he saw fit." Our author's main contention in this energetic little book is that people shouldn't forget that Harlan Sanders was a real person, because forgetting that fact would drastically lessen the heroism of the man's personal journey from obscure beginnings to global figure.

Read more at publishersweekly.com »

Austin American Statesman :: Colonel Sanders and the American Dream

Colonel Sanders and the American Dream
By Josh Ozersky
Buy it Now

Colonel Sanders and the American Dream
by Josh Ozersky

According to Josh Ozersky, youth of today have no clue that the figure on the bucket of chicken was an actual person, not just a fictitious character like Betty Crocker or the Jolly Green Giant. But, as old-timers over 40 remember, the guy with the white goatee and string tie was Harlan Sanders – developer of "original recipe" Kentucky Fried Chicken, founder of the chain, and a real colonel (an honorific bestowed by the governor).

Sanders grew up in rural poverty, leaving school at 10 for farmwork to help his widowed mother. But thanks to relentless drive and talent for salesmanship, he pulled himself into the middle class. By 1925, he was running a gas station in Corbin, Ky., and selling hot lunches. This morphed into a prosperous cafe/motel, his food and service developed a national reputation, and he assumed the persona of the patrician, white-suited colonel. When Sanders was 65, the highway was rerouted and his business collapsed overnight. But he started over, taking his persona, his pressure cooker, and his secret recipe on the road, selling franchises across the country.

The book is primarily concerned with developments after Sanders sold Kentucky Fried Chicken at age 75 to a food conglomerate. He was kept on as goodwill ambassador, the literal face of the company. But it was a bitter and negatively vocal old age; as a powerless adjunct of his former creation, he watched the company expand exponentially as the food quality diminished. Ozersky waxes eloquent on the fraught and difficult relationship between the living mascot and the corporation who owned him. Not a pretty picture of the American Dream.

read more at statesman.com »

LA Review of Books :: Killer on the Road

Killer on the Road

by Ginger Strand

Buy It Now

Jeremy Lybarger on Killer on the Road 
Lost Highway Revisited

IN AUGUST OF 2008, POLICE in Lubbock, Texas, were notified of a woman's body found in a desolate oilfield near Interstate 27. She had been bludgeoned and was partially submerged in mud. Recent rainstorms had all but obliterated potential forensic evidence. Fingerprints identified her as a twenty-nine year old local woman with a history of prostitution and drug abuse. Her last known address was a rundown motel, the Sunset, in northwest Lubbock. Investigators had no witnesses and few leads. The woman apparently died as she had lived: unnoticed.

She wasn't the only one. For more than a decade, Lubbock — a midsized, industrial city best known as the birthplace of Buddy Holly — has been a clearinghouse for unsolved murders. At least five of the victims were prostitutes, women who tricked the corridor of truck stops along I-27 and route 82. Their bodies — strangled, stabbed, or beaten — were dumped in vacant lots and on backroads. Although the methodology varied case by case, reports of a serial killer roving the Texas plains seized local headlines. Area highways took on the dark radiance of a killing floor.

In 2009, the FBI released statistics claiming nearly five hundred bodies have been dumped along America's highways over the last thirty years. The dead seem to have come from nowhere, five hundred cold cases, the aftermath of some colossal killing machine still at large. It's the history and ubiquity of this machine that Ginger Strand confronts in her new book, Killer on the Road: Violence and the American Interstate. No other feature of our national landscape has the same lonely menace, the same panoramic yet stifling dread, of an empty highway. I experienced this for myself while driving from New York City to San Francisco last spring. Following I-80 through the Alleghenies and into West Virginia, the road was business as usual: Best Westerns and Super 8s, Walmarts and Home Depots, the fluorescent shoal of drive-thru food. Things changed after I-40 in Knoxville. The suburban sprawl thinned; hotels and restaurants dwindled. By Texas's panhandle, the whole vibe had gone ominous. The highway was windblown and barren. Towns appeared and vanished like aneurysms. Little handmade crucifixes, memorials, clustered in the ditch, while overhead billboards shrilled prophecies of abortion, meth, and Armageddon. In New Mexico, burned-out houses crumbled in the desert. One was littered inside with gay pornography and mass market paperbacks, a gutted computer, dozens of desiccated condoms. The refrigerator held a single box of baking soda. Strand describes highways as "analogs of cultural psychosis," and anyone who's pulled into a rest stop after dark knows what she means. There's something about encountering your fellow road dogs that inspires both suspicion and edgy goodwill. As early as the 50s, the FBI distributed a series of PSAs urging motorists to avoid picking up hitchhikers. "Is he a happy vacationer or an escaping criminal — a pleasant companion or a sex maniac — a friendly traveler or a vicious murderer?" the ads asked, and the questions were clearly unrhetorical. No matter that such scare tactics were meant to deter student activists from attending civil rights demonstrations, a new catechism reverberated through the cultural imagination: Highways are dangerous places.

Read the full review at lareviewofbooks.org »

Wall Street Journal :: Colonel Sanders and the American Dream

The American Way of Eating
Harlan Sanders and Clarence Birdseye, just like today's locavores, saw a meal as a way to improve people's lives
By Henry Allen

Colonel Sanders and the American Dream

by Josh Ozersky

Buy It Now

 Fine, fast and frozen: three food groups that changed America after World War II.

Let's take them in order, by contemplating the revolutionaries chronicled in three biographies:

First, there is Craig Claiborne, the New York Times columnist who taught us how to know good from bad veal fricandeau and how to bedizen our kitchens with copper pots from France. Second, Colonel Harlan Sanders, a founding father of fast food—his was Kentucky Fried Chicken and he sold it by the bucket.

Third, Clarence Birdseye, the frozen-food man who believed in a future built by industry, an inventor who gave us seafood far from the sea and fruits and vegetables far out of season. Birdseye and Sanders aimed at the masses. Claiborne, however, addressed the emerging classes known variously as creative, culture-bearing and knowledge, along with the rich, who could afford to eat Henri Soulé's food at Claiborne's beloved Pavillon in Manhattan before it closed.

During a life chronicled by Thomas McNamee in an insouciant biography called "The Man Who Changed the Way We Eat," Claiborne joined with heros of the table such as M.F.K. Fisher, James Beard, Julia Child and Alice Waters to create a new kind of gourmet or gourmand—what we now call the foodie.

There had once been gourmet splendor in hotels and railroad dining cars for the rich in America, but it faded with the Depression and the decline of railroad travel. After the war, new suburban lifestyles and the end of servants for all but the rich brought us instant everything—bricks of Birds Eye frozen spinach to be heated and served and Betty Crocker cake mixes.

Diners looking for the Big Meal went to prime-rib or lobster joints with little waterfalls out back, and the popover was the pinnacle of pastry. Ultimate praise was "you can't eat it all," as diners patted their stomachs and shuffled out to Buick station wagons monogrammed with yachting flags. They had never heard of heirloom tomatoes or extra-virgin olive oil. They cooked from Peg Bracken's "I Hate to Cook Book" in linoleum kitchens. They drank milk with dinner.

Read the full article at wsj.com »

New York Post :: Colonel Sanders and the American Dream

Colonel Sanders and the American Dream
By Josh Ozersky
Buy it Now

Cluck off!
KFC’s ‘Colonel’ was hardly a genteel man in a white suit
By LARRY GETLEN

Colonel Sanders and the American Dream
by Josh Ozersky
University of Texas Press

Around 1930, Harland Sanders ran a Shell gas station in a rough section of Corbin, Ky. The station prospered despite the rough locale — he kept a gun under his cash register for protection — and intense competition from a man named Matt Stewart, who ran a Standard Oil station down the road.
The men’s mutual animosity grew as Stewart painted over one of Sanders’ signs, and Sanders responded by threatening to “blow [Stewart’s] goddamn head off.”
Sanders repainted his sign but got word that Stewart was painting over it again just as he was meeting in his office with two Shell supervisors. The three men — all armed — raced to the scene, and Stewart drew his weapon and fired.

One of the Shell managers was killed instantly and Sanders “jumped into the breach and under withering fire grabbed his fallen comrade’s gun . . . [and] the future Colonel unloaded with true aim and hurled hot lead into Stewart’s shoulder.”

Read more at nypost.com »

New York Times :: Colonel Sanders and the American Dream

Colonel Sanders and the American Dream

By Josh Ozersky
Buy It Now

Unlike Aunt Jemima or Uncle Ben, Colonel Sanders was a real person, although never a real colonel. It was some honorary title bestowed on notable Kentuckians by the governor. Yet Sanders introduced himself to his associates by it. It’s one of many entertaining affectations — including bleaching his beard — that Josh Ozersky uncovers in “Colonel Sanders and the American Dream” (University of Texas Press, $20).

Read the full article at nytimes.com »