| For younger Americans, it may come as a surprise to learn that Colonel Sanders—the smiling, grandfatherly face of Kentucky Fried Chicken—was a real person. Unlike Betty Crocker, the K.F.C. figurehead wasn’t a corporate creation, and his title, in contrast to that of Cap’n Crunch, wasn’t conceived by a marketing department (although it wasn’t conferred by the military, either). When The New Yorker profiled the Colonel, in 1970, the man born Harland Sanders in rural Indiana was nearing eighty, and his fried-chicken empire was finally about to reach New York City. William Whitworth, a longtime New Yorker editor and writer who died last week, was clearly excited about the chicken, and impressed by its inventor. It’s easy to see why. In a piece full of odd, funny details—K.F.C. published a company magazine called Bucket—Whitworth recounts the unexpectedly Cinderella-like story of Sanders, who left home at age twelve and quit school in seventh grade, following the death of his father and his mother’s marriage to a man who didn’t want stepchildren. Despite his lack of formal education, Sanders eventually devised a revolutionary new frying technique, an innovation “regarded in chicken circles as a historic breakthrough.” But that was only after decades of working jobs that ranged from tire salesman to steamboat conductor, and after formulating a secret chicken recipe whose ingredients were so critical to the company’s success that the combination wasn’t shared even with franchisees. (Whitworth reveals how many herbs and spices it contained.) After a disastrous setback at an age when many people are retiring, Sanders became a millionaire and a celebrity in his seventies—even as his friends grumbled that some executives got richer than he did. The Colonel stayed focussed on food, a topic that generated its own frustrations. While K.F.C. labored obsessively to insure that Sanders’s chicken remained consistent across thousands of locations, it took a looser approach to side dishes. “The Colonel is vexed almost beyond endurance,” Whitworth reported, “by the subject of gravy.” | 
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