The Frozen Cook at Kentucky Fried Chicken, September 14th, 2023

The Frozen Cook at Kentucky Fried Chicken, Sept. 14th, 2023

It was a cold Sunday in January of 1969. My friend Patrick was almost 17 years old and working at the Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant on S. 48th Street in Lincoln, Nebraska.

The temperature was 10F (-23C) with plenty of snow and ice in the parking lots and on the streets. Patrick and his crew were cooking up a storm in the back room of KFC as they put frozen chicken into the dozen or so pressure cookers. It was Sunday so the usual after church crowd of Black Baptists were in the lobby dressed in their Sunday best. They all wanted the Colonel’s fried chicken for Sunday dinner.

The candy strippers (the teenage girls wearing the red and white striped uniforms of the store) were busy taking orders, cash, and handing out bags of fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, biscuits, and coleslaw.

The kitchen was getting hot from all the pressure cookers working at maximum temperature. It was 100F in their for the cooks.

Patrick decided that the cooks (all teenaged boys) should take off all their clothes and just wear shoes and a folded apron around the waist to protect their dicks and balls from the hot grease. They also kept on their red and white paper cook’s hats.

One of the candy strippers came back into the kitchen to ask about some orders and screamed when she saw all the semi-naked boys with their butts showing. Some were hairy.

She ran back into the front lobby and told the other girls to avoid the kitchen.

It was Patrick’s turn to take out the trash from the kitchen to the dumpster. It was very cold outside but only a short 15 yards to the dumpster.

As Patrick opened the dumpster lid to throw in the trash bags, he heard the bolt on the back door to the kitchen slide shut.

“Damn them!” Patrick said to himself.

He went back as quickly as he could to the door and pounded on it.

“Let me in! It’s freezing out here!”

Nothing but laughter from the cooks behind the door.

“I’ll throw your dicks and balls into the pots if you don’t let me in!”

“Be careful you don’t freeze your own dick and balls off!” A voice shouted from behind the kitchen door.

“Damn!” Patrick said to himself again. He was starting to turn blue and the sweat in his curly Afro was turning to ice.

He decided that he’d have to go back into the store through the lobby.

Patrick made his way through the slippery parking lot cursing with every sliding step on the ice and snow. As he opened the door, he saw the jammed-in crowd of Black Baptists.

“Oh, shit!” He said to himself.

As Patrick tried to quickly make his way through the crowd to the front counter, he was brushing up against the coats and dresses of the parishioners.

A large middle-aged black woman noticed Patrick’s white butt going by.

“Gladys, will you look at that boy’s skinny cracker ass!”

“I swear, Henrietta, I ain’t seen nothin’ that white.”

“Looks like two loaves of Wonder Bread with legs.”

As Patrick finally reaches the counter a black man ordering his food sees Patrick’s naked ass and that he’s only wearing shoes and a waist apron.

“What kind of an establishment is this that has their cooks running around half-naked cooking our fried chicken! People, we are leaving this disgusting store. There must be pubic hairs in all the food.”

Turns out the black man at the counter was the pastor of the Baptist Church. All of the customers leave except for a couple who still have paid for orders of fried chicken coming to them.

The candy stripper at the counter calls the store manager on the phone. As usual, he is across the street drinking at the bar in the Parkway Lanes bowling alley.

“What!” The manager shrieks into the phone at the bar. “I’ll be right over!”

The manager drives to the store and fires Patrick on the spot.

A few days later Patrick gets his job back as no one else in town wants it. This was the second time Patrick had been fired.

He would be fired again in the Mangy Dog story but I’ll relate that at a later date.

TJM