KFC Lincoln, Nebraska 1967

Kentucky Fried Chicken, September 16th, 2018

The Drudge Report today has an article about how a KFC customer in Melbourne, Australia found a raw chicken heart in his red and white striped box of KFC fried chicken with mashed potatoes, biscuits, and cole slaw.

I was not surprised.

Back in January of 1967 in Lincoln, Nebraska, my good friend Patrick worked at the Kentucky Fried Chicken store on South 48th Street.

On this particular Sunday in January, a very bleak and cold Midwestern day, the store was mobbed by the usual black Baptist crowd coming home from Church who wanted their fried chicken.

The lobby was jammed with people. The kitchen was “in the weeds” as we say in the catering/restaurant business as the staff could not keep up with the orders.

The teen-age girls in their red and white striped “candy stripper” outfits kept coming back to the kitchen and giving Patrick and the guys a hard time about how slow they were in getting the orders out.

These white cooks were 15 years old and didn’t give a shit about this. Patrick and crew were very hot because all of the pressure cookers were on full blast. The chicken is not fried. It is covered in the secret recipe and put into pressure cookers.

First off Patrick and the crew took off all of their clothes and just wore their aprons and shoes. This shocked the candy strippers and kept them out of the kitchen.

The crew’s next decision was just to “flash fry” the frozen chicken in the pressure cookers just for long enough so that the meat was crispy on the outside.
Soon enough the orders were going out quickly and the pressure relented somewhat.

Patrick made the mistake of taking out the trash at this critical time. It was 13F and he was only wearing his apron and shoes so of course his fellow cooks locked him out of the kitchen.

Patrick had to walk around the store and into and through the lobby to return to the kitchen. The comments from the black Baptists in the lobby on this situation were very humorous.

Slowly the crowd of customers dissipated and things calmed down. The store manager as usual was across the street at the bowling alley drinking.

But then a Baptist in his suit and tie came back to the KFC bearing his box of fried chicken.

“This chicken is raw!” He exclaimed. “There is frost on the bone!”

The manager found out about all of this and Patrick and crew were fired, but they were always rehired.

This wasn’t the first or last time that Patrick and the cooking crew rebelled at the KFC on South 48th Street.

Thanks to Patrick for being my friend and for the story.

Tim McGraw