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16 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 7.15 the bit JUST SAYIN' A Colonel of Truth Goofng on the Colonel to sell more chicken. By Jack Welch Illustration by Carrie Neumayer s a rockabilly-crazy preteen growing up in Wisconsin, I managed to get two emerging national icons — Col. Harland Sanders, who frst franchised his fried-chicken recipe in 1952 and whose face had appeared in Life magazine, and Col. Tom Parker, Elvis Presley's imperious manager — mixed up. Both were referred to simply as "the Colonel," with a capital C. I pictured Elvis being led around by a kindly little goateed man with white hair, a black string tie and a white suit. When radio DJs talked about "the Colonel's" dictatorial manners, I couldn't quite believe it. I bring this up because of a new KFC ad campaign, to go along with a new interactive website (colonelsanders.com), that turns Sanders into a caricatured laughingstock, infuriating former Gov. John Y. Brown Jr., who bought Kentucky Fried Chicken from Sanders in 1964 and defends the late Colonel as an astute businessman and forceful personality. Indeed, it's pretty tragi-ironic that KFC's founding father — who was kept on salary by Brown to be the successful face of the company before subsequent corporate owners removed his trustworthy image from their advertising — would be brought back to sell the product as a corn-pone goofball, even though we all know that in today's ad world goofness is the ticket to riches. brazeiros.com As a kid, I was dead wrong about the Colonel's genteel kindliness. The truth is, he was salty, witty and hardly docile. And he was candid. When Brown's fnancial partner, Jack C. Massey, decided to relocate the company's headquarters from Kentucky to Nashville, Tennessee, Sanders — KFC's moral compass — remarked, "This ain't no goddam Tennessee Fried Chicken, no matter what some slick, silk-suited son-of-a-bitch says." The new KFC website does the most diminishment damage, depicting a stage with six different cartoon images of the Colonel at various stages of his life (the last being a bust on a pedestal for his death in 1980). The 28-year-old Sanders holds an extended chicken leg as a pointer and confesses to not hooking onto meaningful work for decades, "giving me loads of time to fail at a plethora of other careers." At one point, talking about his short Army stint in Cuba, he inanely explains that he "spent most of my time fghting seasickness and shoveling mule poop. Remember, washing your hands is important, friends." Then he snickers with an aggravating little cough-laugh that has nothing to do with the real Colonel. I guess because Sanders and his wife Claudia are long deceased, corporate types at KFC think they're not hurting anything by turning him into some kind of sideshow clown, but I'm with John Y. You don't insult the guy who set up your livelihood.