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Business Wars

KFC vs Chick-fil-A | Fast Fists and Failure | 2

Business Wars

Wondery

History, Business, David Brown, Management

4.613.2K Ratings

🗓️ 29 March 2021

⏱️ 23 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

It’s the 1900’s and a young Harland Sanders learns how to cook out of sheer necessity when his widowed mother leaves him at home to care for his younger brother and sister. Crushing poverty prompts his mother to loan him out as a field hand when he’s just twelve, and from then on he’s on his own. He labors as a farmworker, a blacksmith’s helper, and a railroad fire stoker. Eventually Sanders bamboozles his way into a career as a correspondence course lawyer, only to lose his practice due to his fiery temper and tendency towards violence. 

Meanwhile, as the nation sinks into a depression, poverty leaves scars and forges ambition in eight-year-old Truett Cathy. He learns to cook in the family’s boarding-house in Atlanta, and contributes desperately needed cash with a thriving coca-cola stand and newspaper delivery route. As his family’s finances worsen, they end up in the city’s first housing project, and Truett’s father teaches his son hard lessons at the end of a razor strap.

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Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Hey, Prime members, you can listen to Business Wars Add Free on Amazon Music. Download the app today.

0:14.0

A note to listeners. This episode contains adult content and language.

0:18.0

It's summer 1897, outside Henryville, Indiana, a small town 100 miles south of Indianapolis.

0:30.0

Seven-year-old Harlan Sanders carefully reaches into the hot oven. For the towel in each grubby hand, he takes out the first loaf of bread he's ever baked all by himself.

0:40.0

He's barefoot and bare-chested with a bushy head of red hair. He lets the bread cool for a while, just like his mother does, and then cuts off slices to give to his younger sister and brother.

0:53.0

Harlan takes care of his siblings every day while his mother works at a canning factory. His father died two years ago.

1:01.0

Three-year-old Catherine gobbles the bread down.

1:03.0

Harlan, this is so good. Let's show mama.

1:08.0

Harlan packs up the rest of the bread and grabs his five-year-old brother's hand. Together they half-lead, half-carry their sister the three dusty miles to the factory.

1:17.0

The children enter the factory, thrumming with the sounds of milling machines and conveyor belts. The women on the canning line spot the three children first. A young woman with a red bandana over her hair recognizes the tired, sweaty kids.

1:33.0

Why, your Margaret Sanders little ones. My goodness! What are you doing all the way over here?

1:41.0

Harlan unwraps his bread from the towel and displays it to the admiring women. I baked it all by myself. We came to show mama.

1:50.0

Now that looks damn right professional. Can't we try some? Girls, shall we do a little taste test?

1:57.0

The women nod and smile and Harlan hands out pieces of his loaf. They hug and kiss and muss his hair. Harlan squirms and their arms. He's not used to this much affection.

2:07.0

The last woman pops the hunk of bread in her mouth and points to the far end of the factory where Harlan's mother is peeling tomatoes.

2:15.0

Your mama's over there. She'll be so proud of you.

2:20.0

Harlan trots across the factory floor, holding the remains of the loaf above his head like a trophy.

2:26.0

Look mama, I just made this bread just like you taught me.

2:28.0

His mother glances up from the tomato she's peeling. She can lose her job if the foreman spots her kids here. She shakes her head angrily at her son.

2:38.0

Harlan, be quiet. What are you doing here? And look at your filthy feet. I told you to take care of your brother and sister. Not drag them all over creation. Now go home before I get fired.

2:51.0

The joy drains from Harlan's face. The rare times he's gone to school he wasn't any good at it. The only thing he has an act for are cooking and baking.

3:02.0

But not even that seems to please his mother. He turns around and trudges home with his siblings, his stomach and knots, waves of anger and shame wash over him.

...

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