Walking and talking the Sanders Life

Jun. 29—CORBIN — Colonel Johnny Miller hasn't always lived and breathed the Sanders spirit for KFC but his journey in life led him to the unexpected career path in 2009 out of desperation and by accident.

Formerly in the United States Air Force, Miller served his country watching radar in the 1960s. He attended college while he was off duty while in the Air Force and studied Psychology. When he was discharged he started taking night classes.

Halfway through his junior year he worked at Kentucky Fried Chicken as a cook and actually got to meet the real Harland Sanders.

"I remember I was back there cooking and hearing them saying, 'The colonel is here, the colonel is here.' They were flipping out," Miller recalled. "A big white Cadillac pulled up. He got out his golden spoon and checked the gravy, flour and then a chicken thigh. If it passed those three things, nothing else mattered. I enjoyed meeting him in 1979."

Those were the three sticklers and not the last time Miller would have a KFC Sanders moment.

Miller finished college and had a dream of understanding the criminal mind. This led him to work at the Department of Corrections at the prison half counseling and also as an officer.

Having been saved by that point, Miller struggled with some of the things he had to investigate and ultimately walked away from that entire career to maintain his Christian experience.

Years went by and Miller found himself working all over the states in the propane industry.

"I was the real life Hank Hill," Miller said. "I loved it and retired from it after 33 years, I was a professional gas passer as those in the industry like to say."

Exposure to the radiation in the Air Force during the Cold War caused him some serious medical conditions that came unexpectedly later on.

"They called us 'scope dopes.' My CB handle was the South Florida Scope Dope," Miller said. You know what happens when you put a chicken leg in a microwave? it cooks it and here we are every 60 seconds and we are sitting under that beam in the late '60s getting cooked."

Miller's medical condition worsened and he was forced to retire from the propane job he loved after he had a near-death moment when the radiation caused major issues in his prostate. This led Miller to a stand-still, confusing moment in his life.

In the interim, he'd become involved in a religious cult. Though he got out after 20 years, he ended up losing his wife due to it and becoming "pretty depressed."

Miller wrote a book about the experience called The Followed.

It was at a KFC in the Yuma, Arizona, foothills as a jobless, depressed man enjoying his fried chicken and debating what he was going to do with his life that he began receiving comments on his uncanny similarities with Col. Sanders from the Canadian tourists.

The tourists asked for his autograph. Miller had met Sanders and worked for KFC before but had no idea what his signature looked like.

"He shoved the napkin towards me and low and behold I look at the wall next to me and I'm sitting right next to his signature. I said, 'I can do that.' I signed that, didn't think anything of it and went back to my lunch," Miller recalled.

Two weeks later, it happened again.

"This time I said, 'What just happened here?' A light bulb went off in my head. I finished my meal; I got up, walked into the men's room at the KFC and stood in the mirror. I had a goatee, did the whole profile thing and said, 'I think I can make this work.'"

Out of desperation, Miller decided to give it a go — jumping all in.

"It was 2009 and I started studying Colonel Sanders on the internet and where I could find a suit," Miller said of Sanders' signature white attire. "I found a Vietnamese tailor in New York and ordered it. I had some money laid back and went all in."

He adorned himself with his tailored suit, bleached hair, Colonel Sanders glasses, a cane and French cuff shirts and links.

"I even researched the organizations he was part of and got some lapel pens on ebay like Sanders and got the voice down pat," Miller said.

When he was finally ready, he walked back in the same KFC he always did but this time walked, talked and breathed like Sanders did the day he met him in the seventies. He was not going to break character no matter what.

He didn't know what to expect. He knew all of them in the KFC as a regular of theirs but that day, he was Sanders.

He ordered his food just like Sanders would have.

The staff at the KFC in Arizona was amazed, dropping all they were doing to grab the manager on duty — whom Miller knew quite well.

Out of all his research he didn't come across one important detail.

The manager said something that totally blew him out of the water even after all his research.

"Colonel, Colonel, why didn't Louisville call and tell us you were coming?" she said.

Miller knew the manager had been working for KFC for years and knew the Colonel was dead.

Still not breaking character, Miller told the manager he always dropped in unexpected and ended up with a free meal that he couldn't eat due to tourists "coming after me like flies," Miller recalled. "Selfies, autographs and I can't even eat my free meal."

Miller was loving feeling accomplished when a man plopped hurriedly next to him and asked the same thing the manager did earlier that day.

"Colonel, why didn't Louisville tell us you were coming," the strange man said.

Miller finally broke character and asked who the man was. He turned out to be the owner of seven KFCs and wondered if Miller was doing a marketing campaign for the home office.

When Miller confessed that he didn't work for KFC and shared his story, the franchise owner told him that he should.

"I was finally working for KFC, yet again," Miller recounted.

A few months later a Phoenix newspaper was covering the Yuma fair that Sanders was working at marketing for the local KFC. The journalist snapped a photo of Miller and took it back to his editor. The Phoenix newspaper hunted him down through the Yuma Sun newspaper, leading to the next chapter of his Sanders career.

"I found an agent on the internet from Vegas. She saw my photo and took me on immediately," Miller said.

The agent hired a professional photographer and the Yuma paper ran the story with the professional photos.

"As Paul Harvey would say, the rest of the story of how I got discovered...," Miller said, pointing to a corner of a newspaper. "It says AP. It got picked up by the Associated Press, which means that article ran in every major newspaper on the planet that was willing to run it."

Rick Maynard, head of public relations for KFC, saw the article in Louisville. He gave Miller two first-class airline tickets to Louisville and told him they were going to have a talk.

Miller went to the Louisville headquarters as the KFC Sanders riding in a limo and was offered a job marketing on behalf of the beloved restaurant chain.

"That was 13 years ago and I have been busy ever since," Miller said in his home in Corbin. "I have been all around the world, I have done nine TV commercials and been to every continent except South America and Antartica, and I love it."

To learn more on where the Sanders journey has taken Miller check out the next part to this series in an upcoming edition of The Times-Tribune.