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soldiers' skills to suitable duties, Shelton scored so highly that, rather than join up with the Army's 104th Infantry Division, he was sent to Princeton University, where, he says, "the Army told me I was going to be an engineer!" When he arrived by train in Princeton, N.J., there on the platform was the town's most celebrated citizen, Al- bert Einstein. "He wasn't waiting for us," Shelton quips, "but he was a sight to see." Following his discharge in 1945, Shel- ton earned a master's in engineering at West Virginia University and was hired by GE in 1948. When the huge company consolidated its major-appliances manu- facturing operations in Louisville in the early 1950s, Shelton and his new bride bought a small house and 40 acres of land off Chenoweth Run Road, and he began research and development work for GE's automatic washing machine division at Appliance Park. Years later, when Shelton and his broth- er got the itch to strike out on their own, the initial plan to leave GE centered on the creation of a zero-radius-turn lawnmower, designs he penned and refined by rising at 4 a.m. nearly every day for two years. "Oh, there were days when I didn't want to do that," he recalls, "but I'd tell myself, 'Shel- ton, you did this yesterday and it all went well. So just get your ass out of bed and get to work.'" When he and his brother started EPS, their focus was to build the mower. But they were so quickly over- whelmed with other paid work, the mower never materialized. When one of their customers, a filter- ing-equipment manufacturer named Carl Mies, asked Shelton to help him with an idea for a pressure fryer for cooking chicken, Shelton toured a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise to witness what was then a perilous and inexact preparation process: Chicken was fried in 400-degree shorten- ing under pressure in stove-top covered pots, then rushed across the kitchen and poured onto a screened basin that caught the food and let the molten shortening slip through. Cooks were burned regularly and the pressure cookers occasionally explod- ed. "I watched that madness and thought, 'Tat's an engineer's dream, man!'" Shel- ton recalls with a laugh. "Tere were so many problems to solve, and that was just the low-hanging fruit." Shelton designed Mies' fryer for him, then expanded on the idea and created a stationary, self-filtering fryer that would use precision time and temperature con- trols to produce Kentucky Fried Chicken to Colonel Harland Sanders' legendarily Celebrate Kentucky's year! Frankfort Avenue photo by Angela Shoemaker www.louisville.com www.quillscoffee.com 7.12 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE [35] 220th Downtown photo by Bill Luster Then e-mail it to zach@louisville.com. All submissions will appear on our Pinterest site (pinterest.com/louisvillecom) and the best ones will be run on Louisville.com. At 2:20 p.m. on 7/20, snap a candid photo of anything happening in Kentucky. Seriously, anything.