Walking on Holy Ground: Colonel Sanders’ Kentucky Fried Chicken Cafe & Museum, Corbin, KY

While in Kentucky, make certain you visit the National Corvette Museum, in Bowling Green.

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Journeys

In Kentucky, Fried Chicken History

By WILLIAM GRIMES

Published: August 24, 2012

WHEN making his rounds as a traveling salesman for a Chicago printing company, Duncan Hines would occasionally pull off the Dixie Highway in Corbin, Ky., and eat at Sanders Cafe. In the 1939 edition of “Adventures in Good Eating,” his pioneering restaurant guide, he recommended the cafe and its adjoining motor court as “very good place to stop en route to Cumberland Falls and the Great Smokies,” highlighting its “sizzling steaks, fried chicken, country ham, hot biscuits.”

The Sanders Cafe and Museum in Corbin, KY / Jonathan Palmer for The New York Times

The cafe is still there, only now it incorporates a museum and holds down a spot on the National Register of Historic Places, for one huge, unignorable reason. The owner, chef and resident genius of the place was none other than Colonel Harland Sanders, who, on this hallowed ground, cooked the first batch of Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Cumberland Falls does not work the magic it once did, and Corbin itself is not high on anyone’s list of tourist destinations. But the Colonel Harland Sanders Cafe and Museum is a modest must. In addition to capturing a pivotal moment in the mass-marketing of American vernacular food, it evokes a dreamlike time, before the arrival of the Interstate System and its proliferation of fast-food restaurants and chain hotels, when traveling the American highway was a thrilling, high-risk proposition, with marvelous discoveries and ghastly disappointments waiting at every turn.

In its present form, the Sanders Cafe and Museum was born in 1990, the 100th anniversary of Colonel Sanders’s birth. JRN, a Tennessee-based company that operates nearly 200 KFC franchises in the Southeast, was about to open a modern KFC restaurant next to the old cafe. To mark the great birthday, it put out a call for artifacts and memorabilia that would allow it to celebrate the Colonel, his cafe and his fried chicken.

All sorts of stuff

KFC & Coke with the New York Yankees! Honestly?

In an earlier entry, I had opined about why someone might want to work for Huntsville Hospital. As I had also noted, a related search term that led to this blog – “Why do you want to work at Huntsville Hospital” – was my source of inspiration for that particular entry.

In this entry, what I would like to do is to further define some standards and terms used to describe honesty, and then ask some critical questions about behavior those terms may describe.

Doubtless, there are numerous terms that can be used to describe one’s particular ability to tell truth. Among them are honesty, veracity, forthrightness (I really like that one), candor, accuracy, fidelity, constancy, certainty, factual, actuality, original, reality, verity, veracity, indisputable, uprightness, candid, and more.

And yet, for all the words that we use to describe truth, the question often remains whether we are truthful when we are not always forthcoming with ALL information.

For example, is it absolutely necessary to give every minute detail of every event in order to be truthful?

To answer that question, let’s consider the question “Which Major League Baseball team has won the most World Series?”

Perhaps the most straightforward answer would be