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The 10 coolest things that sold at the Colonel Sanders auction

From a planner that sparked a KFC lawsuit to a clip-on bow tie on the world's most famous logo, ten items from the Colonel Sanders auction

Credit: The Menish Group

10 cool things that sold at the Colonel Sanders auction

A Kentucky dinner house sat quietly for decades holding onto a dead man’s bow tie, his cash register and a notebook nobody outside one family had opened. On Tuesday night, the collection finally broke apart in public. Bidders from around the world logged on and packed a Shelbyville, Kentucky, showroom to compete for objects that once belonged to Harland Sanders, the man behind the white suit, the black glasses and the goatee that made Kentucky Fried Chicken a household name decades before anyone called it KFC.

Most estate sales scatter a public figure’s belongings among strangers within a year or two of death. Sanders died in 1980, and his personal effects stayed inside a single trusted circle for 46 years afterward. Tommy and Cherry Settle bought Sanders’ former home and restaurant directly from him and his wife, Claudia, in 1974, and the couple’s family kept his keepsakes intact instead of selling them off piecemeal. This unbroken chain of ownership gave Tuesday night’s sale a rare quality auction houses can’t manufacture: nothing here passed through a dealer, a collector, or an estate liquidator first. Every lot traces straight back to the man who slept in the house and worked the dinner house floor, and that direct lineage explains why bidders logged on from continents away to compete for objects most people would otherwise never see outside a museum case.

The Menish Group ran the sale, combining online bidding with a live event at the Claudia Sanders Dinner House in Shelbyville, drawing bidders from well beyond Kentucky. The Associated Press reported the results directly from the auction floor, where auctioneer Bill Menish and eXp Realty agent Jonathan Klunk handled the live sale. At the same time, sealed bids for the underlying real estate closed separately later the same week. The 10 lots below cover the personal items and documents that changed hands, along with the property that once anchored Sanders’ entire operation.

1. Sanders’ 1964 planner hides an unlabeled spice list

Credit: The Menish Group

A pocket-sized executive planner from 1964 sold for $30,000, the top price of the entire memorabilia auction. Sanders used the notebook for ordinary business scheduling. Still, its final pages carry something else: a handwritten list of 11 herbs and spices, along with the quantities needed to combine them, written in his own hand, with no label explaining what the mixture was.

KFC Corp. took that ambiguity seriously enough to sue. In the early 2000s, company lawyers went to court to keep the planner’s contents sealed, worried the list might expose the fried chicken chain’s guarded 11-spice blend to public view. The case collapsed once KFC’s own team examined the notebook directly. The proportions didn’t align with the company’s proprietary recipe, and staff concluded that Sanders had jotted down instructions for a stuffing mix instead.

Menish called the planner “a keepsake” during the bidding and, at one point, grew animated enough to knock over a camera recording the event. The reaction fits the object. Sanders wrote the entry decades before anyone thought to protect it, in a private notebook meant only for himself, and the mystery survived a corporate lawsuit intact.

Whoever bought the planner now owns a genuine unsolved puzzle from American food history, a rare case where a lawsuit generated more questions than it answered and the answer still isn’t public. The Menish Group listed the planner alongside dozens of other personal effects. Still, bidders singled it out from the opening minutes of the sale, driving the price well above that of every other item on the floor. Its final sale figure alone signals how much weight collectors still place on Sanders’ most guarded professional secret, decades after his death and years after the lawsuit that tried to settle the question once and for all. Nothing in the surviving paperwork explains why Sanders chose that particular notebook for such a sensitive entry. That gap keeps the object interesting long after the lawsuit itself faded from headlines.

2. Sanders’ bow tie reveals a wardrobe secret

Credit: The Menish Group

One of Sanders’ signature black bow ties sold early in the auction for $8,000. It’s the same style depicted on the KFC logo itself, the small black accent beneath his chin in a portrait recognized on nearly every continent. Bidders competing for it weren’t buying a costume piece. They were buying the literal object visible in a brand mark seen by billions of people.

Auctioneer Jonathan Klunk let slip a detail that surprised even longtime fans watching the sale: Sanders wore clip-ons. The tied version most people picture never touched his collar. A man whose entire persona ran on careful visual control chose the version that snapped into place in seconds instead of the one that required practiced fingers each morning.

This choice fits a bigger pattern Menish described during the sale. Sanders adopted his full look, the white suit, the goatee, the glasses and the tie, only after he began actively building Kentucky Fried Chicken into a national brand. None of it came from personal habit. He built the colonel the way a company builds a mascot, piece by piece, with intention behind every element.

The bow tie sold as a costume accessory once worn by a chicken salesman. It changed hands as a fragment of one of the most recognized commercial images in the country’s history. Auction organizers noted worldwide interest in the sale precisely because of items like this one, since a single accessory tied so closely to a globally recognized logo carries value far beyond its material cost. Bidders competing online from outside the United States pushed the price up throughout the evening, confirming that Sanders’ image still resonates internationally, not only among American diners who grew up eating at his restaurants.........

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