The summer months are usually slow when it comes to big-ticket auctions. Not so for Menish Group, the auction platform and real estate business based in Louisville, Kentucky, which this week is holding what will surely go down as the sale of the century: the personal archive and property of Colonel Sanders, founder of KFC and the closest figure the fast-food community has to a god.
Among the lots on offer are the Colonel’s famous bow tie (and his suspenders), a personalised copy of the New Testament, a bronze bust of him crafted by his daughter Margaret, an early plastic prototype of the famous KFC bucket from the 1950s or ’60s, and even some of the original pressure cookers the Colonel used to perfect his recipe in the early days of the KFC empire. Two properties are also up for sale: Blackwood Hall, the 19th-century mansion in Shelbyville, Kentucky, in which the Colonel resided with his wife Claudia for 25 years, and the Claudia Sanders Dinner House, a still-going restaurant next door that Sanders founded in 1968, four years after he sold Kentucky Fried Chicken for $2 million. (Despite describing KFC’s food as ‘wallpaper paste’ in the years after he sold up, he remained the brand ambassador and face of the company.)
Perhaps the most valuable lot on offer here, however, is an unassuming one: the Colonel’s notebook from 1964, which on one page lists 11 herbs and spices – presumably the herbs and spices that KFC has always used to season its chicken. The recipe is so secret that the original copy, written up in 1940, is reportedly locked in a safe encased in two feet of concrete, monitored round the clock by both CCTV and motion-detection surveillance. The photographer who has shot the auction lots has even been banned from taking pictures of said page of the notebook, according to Jonathan Klunk, who is organising the sale. Rakewell would give a lot to be in the room when the auctioneer bangs the gavel – presumably a chicken drumstick in this case – on that hoard of secrets.
This all sounds rather serious, but KFC has a funny side too. In 2017 the official KFC Twitter account unfollowed everyone and then refollowed exactly 11 people: six men named Herb, four of the Spice Girls (Posh was left out, who knows why) and the deodorant brand Old Spice. The eagle-eyed Twitter user who first noticed that this adds up to 11 herbs and spices was the next day sent in the post what looks like an AI-generated oil painting of himself being given a piggyback by the Colonel in some kind of mountain landscape.
And that’s not even the first – or surely the last – time that Colonel Sanders has been immortalised in paint. In one of the weirder discoveries your correspondent has made in recent months, it turns out that Mike Myers (yes, the Austin Powers and Shrek actor) gave an interview in 2014 in which he revealed that one of his hobbies was painting portraits of Colonel Sanders in various poses and guises. ‘He has his own unique silhouette – you can draw him in three lines,’ he told GQ. ‘On the day that Lucian Freud died, I painted my version of a Freud with the Colonel, naked, holding a palette, painting himself. Then I did the Colonel with the Pearl Earring. Then I did the Colonel Lisa. You know, which is the Mona Lisa with the Colonel […] it’s just for funsies.’ It’s not clear what has happened to these paintings, but if Myers didn’t name the series Gravy, Baby, he missed a trick.
