"Colonel's landmark KFC is mashed." That is the headline in the Deseret News story about Harmon's original Kentucky Fried Chicken in Salt Lake City. The story behind this store is one of the great stories in America's vast entrepreneurial lore. You can get a pretty full version of the story here, including pictures of Harmon, Sanders, and the original Harmon's Cafe in its heyday. (For this story, along with others in franchising history, see John Love's excellent history of McDonalds: Behind the Arches.) If you have time only for the abridged version, here it is:

A year after meeting the Harmans, the Colonel traveled to a religious conference in Australia. He had a short stop in Utah, so he looked them up. "I took him to Hotel Utah's Roof Garden for lunch, and through the Salt Lake Temple grounds and the Bingham Copper Mine," Harman recalled during an interview with the Deseret News. "On the way out there, we mentioned we needed some kind of a specialty item for the restaurant."

Harman planned to take his guest out to dinner, but Sanders insisted on cooking it. It took a while to borrow the pressure cooker, find four chickens and heat the oil to the necessary 400 degrees. "We ended up having dinner at 10, and my wife had been sitting out there since 5 o'clock," said Harman.

He watched when [Harmon's wife] Arline picked up a drumstick and took a taste of it. "She never said anything, but she got the darndest gleam in her eye, and I knew it was good," Harman said. "It was so much better than any chicken we'd ever had."

With a handshake agreement, the couple agreed use Sanders' recipe on their menu and pay him a nickel for each chicken they sold.

Harman wanted to advertise the chicken on the cafe's 10-foot-high windows, but he wasn't sure what to call it. He conferred with his sign painter, Don Anderson, who agreed that Utah Fried Chicken didn't sound right. "Kentucky" had an image of Southern hospitality and good food.

My wife is from Salt Lake City, and it took me a long time to understand why they referred to the KFCs as "Harmon's." Now you know, too.

Thanks to Juan Carlos Lozano for the pointer.

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