Col. Sanders' secret manuscript found

Yes, Colonel Sanders, who died 31 years ago at age 90.

On yellowed pages hidden for decades, the white-jacketed man with a special fried chicken recipe and a vision that helped create the modern fast-food industry reveals he saw a future in another lucrative market -- celebrity food books.

The recent discovery of an unpublished manuscript written by the founder of KFC shows that while Sanders was helping build Kentucky Fried Chicken into a global brand, he was recording his life and love of food -- and recipes -- for the world.

No, not that recipe.

Sanders' secret mix of 11 herbs and spices remains locked inside the company's vault.

But the manuscript from the mid-1960s, found recently by an employee rummaging through KFC's archives, again shows that the man who started the world's most popular chicken chain from a Social Security check and his secret recipe was a man before his time.

"This is a new kind of book," Sanders wrote in the first chapter of an approximately 200-page, typewritten manuscript that KFC plans to offer up on the Internet. "There's never been another written like it as far as I know.

"It's the story of a man's life and the story of the food he's cooked and eaten, running right along with it."

-- AP