Colonel Sanders’ white hair, weird-looking goatee, and dapper suit have been a fast-food staple for decades, but there’s much more to Harland David Sanders’ story than meets the eye.

During his lifetime, the man behind the poultry opened up a competing fried-chicken restaurant because he despised what Kentucky Fried had become.

https://twitter.com/UPROXX/status/636596724761559040

KFC eventually changed the recipes for both its fried chicken and gravy, because the Colonel’s original recipe was allegedly too complicated to be carried out uniformly through the company’s 5,000 plus restaurants.

Legend has it that Sanders became so infuriated with the poor quality of his chicken that he would throw fits inside of the KFC locations he visited across the country. He once told a reporter “[this is] the worst fried chicken I’ve ever seen” while visiting a KFC in Greenwich Village.

According to Uproxx,

“Sanders was so angry about it that he announced plans to open a new, competing restaurant, named after his mistress-turned-wife: ‘Claudia Sanders, The Colonel’s Lady.’ KFC sued him for $120 million (the lawsuit was eventually settled for $1 million and Sanders sold the restaurant off, though it still exists in Shelbyville, Kentucky, under the name Claudia Sanders Dinner House ).”

https://twitter.com/toddwhaines/status/636590643872051201

In Colonel Sanders and the American Dream. Josh Ozersky writes, “[The Colonel] had to give up control of his company and even his own image, becoming a mere symbol to people today who don’t know that Colonel Sanders was a very real human being.”