I hate when Google shoots my arguments out of the water.
So they were using his image by 1963 but I t must not have been widespread enough for most people to recognize him.
In addition to the big red bucket sign, all the stores had a big portrait(s) of him on the walls. This too goes back as far as I can remember, but I don’t know how far back that is.
My earliest specific recollections about KFC go back to 1969, but I’m sure I was eating KFC since sometime before that.
Same here. We were eating chicken out of the bucket on a ski boat waiting for fireworks on Lake Havasu a few weeks after the first moon landing. I knew who Col. Sanders was but I couldn’t tell you what he looked like at the time.
Agreed. I can definitely remember frequenting Kentucky Fried Chicken in 1967 (San Diego). I’m fairly sure I was aware of it well before then.
Dang I’ll bet there aren’t too many of those left.
(love old - and way too quickly disappearing - kitschy signs)
Totally unrelated to OP but will mention vicarious claim-to-fame anyway of a friend of a friend recounting 70’s mall appearance, with the Man, Himself, sitting alone at a table eating cole slaw with dribbles and drabs of the stuff hanging from his mouth - an image that said extended friend was stuck with, all this time.
I’d say mid-60s was when I was aware of Colonel Sanders, mainly because I was a wee lad and thought his string tie was his actual body.
Sanders was infamous for going around after he sold the company and complaining how the new owners had ruined the food.
As for people not knowing him, it might be because KFC was a much smaller and more regional chain in those days. It had about 600 outlets as opposed to 4000 today. It certainly featured Sanders in its ads: here’s a page with multiple ads from the 1950s showing Sanders’ face.
What’s My Line was shot in NYC by CBS in Studio 52. I don’t remember one in upstate New York as a kid, and it may be that it just hadn’t reached New York City by 1963. Very few fast food franchises put stores there until much later.
Trivia extra: CBS Studio 52 was located at 254 W. 54th St. That’s why a later more famous nightclub was called Studio 54.
No one knows what Roy Croc looked like.
Ray Kroc, however…
https://www.biography.com/.image/t_share/MTgwMzY3NTg3NTM0NzEwNjM2/gettyimages-82600289.jpg
Try loving this one!
Warning! Profoundly offensive by modern sensibilities!
https://images-cdn.auctionmobility.com/is3/auctionmobility-static/IS2U-1-1Z1E6/1-4FND7/164A_1.JPG
Omg, that is hilarious! I’ll never be able to see that any other way now!
Why would you even post that? Let alone in a thread about KFC?
Cause the guy loves old kitchy stuff? At least I followed the double-click rule, and included a warning.
It’s possible that the nature of the panelists made them less aware of the Colonel:
- Arlene Francis and her husband, Martin Gabel, were both Broadway actors; Francis was also a radio and TV show host
- Dorothy Kilgallen was a columnist for the New York Evening Journal
- Bennet Cerf was a publisher and writer
They were all New Yorkers, and likely at least somewhat upscale in their social circles and tastes. Especially if KFC didn’t have many (if any) outlets in NYC back then, the four of them might simply have not really known much about the chain, or the founder.
I also wonder to what extent KFC was doing network television advertising at that time. The oldest ads for them that I can find with a cursory search on YouTube go back to around 1967, though that is undoubtedly not definitive.
Definitely hadn’t reached NYCity by 1963. Here’s a 1970 article from the New Yorker saying:
New York City, where the K.F.C. franchising effort has just begun.
And I don’t remember one in upstate New York in the 1960’s, either (that is, there may have been some, but not anywhere I usually went to; certainly not by 1963. For fried chicken we went to Nor-Ann’s.) I don’t think I ever heard of KFC until, maybe, the 70’s.
This is interesting:
By 1956, Sanders had six or eight franchisees, including Dave Thomas, who eventually founded the Wendy’s restaurant chain.[1][24] Thomas developed the rotating red bucket sign, was an early advocate of the take-out concept that Harman had pioneered, and introduced a bookkeeping form that Sanders rolled out across the entire KFC chain
That’s what I was thinking. Those people were not the target audience for this restaurant chain.
It’s more than that. They had probably never even seen a franchise or an ad for one. Nothing about KFC had appeared in New York at the time. The simplest explanation for why they didn’t recognize him is that they never had an opportunity to see a store, or look at a bucket, or have an ad run in one of their newspapers.
If you asked a New Yorker today what an In-and-Out Burger symbol looked like, they probably would have no idea for the same reason: they’d never seen one, even if they’d heard references to the chain.
What is the In-N-Out Burger symbol? The first thing I think of is the two crossed palm trees.
ETA: Pic:
KFC wasn’t sold only at KFC joints. When I was a kid in northern Virginia, you could get KFC at Topps Drive In.