Colonel Paula Stone Williams
I was watching the television show Godless with a friend. In the second episode a character is introduced as a colonel and the de facto mayor of the town says, “Colonel of what?” I turned to my friend and said, “I’m a colonel.” She laughed. I said, “Seriously, I am a colonel. I am an official Kentucky Colonel, you know, like Colonel Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken fame. I also met Colonel Sanders once. I wrote about it in my first book.”
When you’ve been alive a certain number of years you have a lot of stories to tell. Some escape being retold, something for which your children are grateful. I’ve not talked about my life as a Kentucky Colonel in a very long time
I’ve always loved fried chicken. My grandmother’s chicken was the best, my mother’s a close second, followed by Aunt Ruth and Aunt Lela. Way, way, way down the line was the chicken from Colonel Sanders.
We went to a restaurant after church almost every Sunday when I was growing up in Akron, Ohio. One Sunday a brand new sit-down restaurant had opened in a shopping center in Fairlawn. There were tables and waiters and whatnot. As we sat eating chicken, a white Cadillac pulled up and Colonel Sanders stepped out and came into the restaurant. He went from table to table asking people how they liked the chicken. He asked my mother and she lied and said, “It’s delicious.” I knew it was a lie because I knew it was not delicious. It was just okay. In fact, in my book of stories, Laughter, Tears, and In-Between – Soulful Stories for the Journey, I titled that particular story, “Just Okay Chicken.”
We didn’t know anything about Colonel Sanders at the time, other than that his picture was on the sign in front of the restaurant. We didn’t know he was from Indiana, not Kentucky, that he had a history of numerous business failures before hitting it big with KFC. We didn’t know he was made a Kentucky Colonel in the year more colonels were named than any other in history. We just knew he got out of a white Cadillac and wore a white suit with a black western bow tie. He didn’t speak to me, nor I to him, children being expected to be silent and all.
As for my own declaration as an Honorable Kentucky Colonel, it happened sometime around the early to mid-90s. I had a friend who was the Assistant Secretary of State of Kentucky and he nominated me. The official declaration arrived shortly thereafter, signed by the governor and the secretary of state. I have it in a box somewhere in the basement. It’d be kinda fun to get it out and put it on the wall in my office. You know, as a conversation starter.
“Just Okay Chicken” was a lot of reader’s favorite story in my first book. I have a few copies of the book left. I’m saving them for my granddaughters. You can find the book on Amazon. I know because I just looked it up. Since it was published 23 years ago it’s out of print, but you can buy a used copy for eight bucks if you find yourself oddly driven to read 48 short stories from my previous life.
Do I eat Kentucky Fried Chicken anymore? Nope. I’d prefer my arteries not stand on end, hardened like Kentucky limestone. Occasionally I do dream about my grandmother’s fried chicken. She’d pick out a chicken from the pen by the barn; my grandfather would cut its head off on a tree stump and the chicken would take off running around the yard, headless. I remember one chicken that went clear around the side of the house, across the driveway, and into Grandma’s garden before she finally gave up the ghost. My brother always hid when the chicken’s heads were cut off. I watched with delight, much as I enjoyed the poems of Edgar Allen Poe later in my childhood. I guess there was a sadistic streak that has since gone underground.
Grandma never let me watch the de-feathering and whatnot. I didn’t see the chicken again until it was frying up in a larded pan. If allowed, I ate four pieces, a leg, both wings, and a thigh. Come to think of it, when I was around she probably had to fry more than one chicken. The chicken dinner would be followed by blackberry cobbler or maybe a butterscotch pie. Grandma Stone seemed to believe her calling was to satisfy the gustatory cravings of a four-year-old.
Later in life I read that Colonel Sanders was really into astrology. The sale of the company to John Y. Brown, who later became the governor of Kentucky, was helped along by Brown’s knowledge of Colonel Sander’s fixation with the stars, his offer being made when the stars were aligned just so. That was clever.
When introduced to speak at religious gatherings, I’m usually referred to as Reverend Doctor Paula Stone Williams. I never request that introduction, but it comes with the territory. What if I asked to be introduced as Reverend Doctor Colonel Paula Stone Williams? Too ostentatious? Yeah, there’d probably be somebody in the back who would say, “Colonel of what?”
And so it goes.
