It could have been Indiana Fried Chicken.

If not for a few twists of fate, it could have been Indiana Fried Chicken. That's the idea one gets from reading The Colonel's Secret: Eleven Herbs and a Spicy Daughter, a new tell-all book from Margaret Sanders, daughter of KFC founder Harland Sanders.

Many Hoosiers may be aware that when

Times were tough in the tiny southern Indiana town of Henryville after 5-year-old Harland Sanders' father died. When he was 12 his cash-strapped mother agreed, out of financial desperation, to marry a Greenwood produce farmer and move the family to suburban Indianapolis. Young Harland quarreled and fought frequently with his new stepdad, and within a year Harland's mother shipped him back to Clark County to maintain the peace. He worked as a farmhand, then a New Albany streetcar conductor, and after a brief underage stint in the Army he got married and spent a short time moving his young family to Alabama, then Tennessee, then Arkansas, and finally back to Indiana.

Sanders landed a job selling Prudential insurance in Jeffersonville and became quite a cog in the local business community. He started what became a successful ferry company operating between Jeffersonville and Louisville before taking a job as secretary of the Columbus Chamber of Commerce. In that post, he met an inventor who discovered how to operate natural-gas lamps on a gas derived from carbide, and with visions of carbide lamps lighting farms across rural America, Sanders bought the patent rights and launched a Columbus manufacturing company. Unfortunately for Sanders but lucky for chicken lovers, the rural-electrification program made his company's product obsolete, torpedoed the firm and sent Sanders packing to Kentucky as a tire salesman, then a gas-station manager, then a restaurant owner. The rest is history.

Sanders' Indiana connections don't stop there, however. On New Year's Day in 1962, Sanders visited a franchisee in Fort Wayne and noticed a particularly conscientious employee, a 29-year-old who had traveled from city to city with his own family and had worked in restaurants since he was 12. "That young man is going to amount to something someday," Col. Sanders predicted.

Indeed, that Fort Wayne resident did. Though he later traded in fried chicken for burgers, he followed in Sanders' footsteps to become one of the restaurant business' most recognizable faces: Wendy's founder Dave Thomas.