'This is Your Life' gala honors Harman's 50th

Nation's Restaurant News, Sept 16, 1991 by Alan Liddle

|This is Your Life' gala honors Harman's 50th

SAN FRANCISCO -- Leon W. "Pete" and Arline Harman, "The First Couple of Fast Food," recently marked their 50th anniversary in the restaurant industry by taking a walk down memory lane with hundreds of friends and employee-partners.

The Harmans, then of Salt Lake City, were Colonel Harlan Sanders' first franchisees in 1952, and Pete Harman was instrumental in creating the operating systems that got the white-haired entrepreneur's fledgling Kentucky Fried Chicken chain through its earliest years. Today they oversee Harman Management Corp. of Los Altos, Calif., the world's largest privately held KFC franchisee, with more than 246 restaurants in four Western states.

To celebrate the couple's 50 years in foodservice, Harman Management threw a gala black-tie affair at the Grand Hyatt hotel in San Francisco. Attending the event were 260 of the Harmans' friends, owner-managers and "Founders," or managers who have been with the company for more than 28 years.

While Sanders proved to be an important part of the Harmans' foodservice destiny, they were established restaurateurs of 10 years by the time the good Colonel came to call. Much of the fun at the gala celebration centered around props and skits dealing with the Harmans' first restaurant, the Do Drop Inn.

In one skit, executive vice chairman Jackie Trujillo and retired staffer Miriam Holmes, both of whom were hired as carhops by the Harmans in 1952, donned uniforms from yesteryear to relive what it might have been like if Trujillo had served the bosses on her first day.

According to Harman Management's Marjorie Harter, the crowd got a good chuckle when Trujillo dropped the tray of food on Pete Harman's lap. Holmes, after watching the disaster, concluded in a tongue-in-cheek manner that the car hop in training "obviously didn't have a future with Harman's," she said.

Hartter said the evening ended with the presentation of gifts to the Harmans, including a crystal obelisk with the Do Drop Inn etched on it and their own Do Drop Inn carhop hats. She said a note from Ronald and Nancy Reagan was among the congratulatory letters included in a scrapbook given to the couple.

Though the Harmans developed a bit of a Midas touch later, their early years were typical of those encountered by other young business owners.

The two met and married while Pete was working at Foster's Lunch, a cafeteria in San Francisco. In 1941 they moved to Salt Lake City, where they purchased a "curb-service" restaurant with 16 inside seats for $700, which they borrowed from his brother.

On opening day, a match salesman asked the young owners what name they wanted printed on the matchbooks. Harman remembered, "We thought about it for a while but didn't come up with anything, so finally he says, |Well, the Do Drop Inn is always good.'"

In 1951, with strong encouragement from a banker who was about to lend them money to expand the restaurant, the couple renamed the business Harman's.

Besides being recognized as KFC and fast-food industry pioneers, the Harmans are known far and wide for their unique employee-incentive program.

Harman Management shows its appreciation for its employees by sponsoring week-long meetings in resort areas for key performers and by letting employees buy an interest in the company's restaurants.

Many people attribute the incentive program and the Harmans' generosity to charitable causes to Pete Harman's childhood experiences. An orphan, he was raised with 13 other youngsters by an aunt in Salt Lake City before he struck out on his own to San Francisco at age 17.

Pete Harman is credited with developing three of KFC's earliest signatures: the take-out bucket, the term "Kentucky Fried Chicken" and the slogan, "It's finger lickin' good!" But the way he tells it, he merely recognized the good ideas of others in two out of three of those cases.

Harman first bundled 14 pieces of chicken, five rolls and a pint of gravy in a bucket to offer families "a complete meal" for $3.50 in 1957. He said he took the project as a favor to Colonel Sanders, who had called on behalf of a franchisee wondering what to do with 500 buckets he bought off a traveling salesman.

"It was right after Labor Day [and slow] and a good time to advertise, so we put them [buckets] on the menu," Harman recalled. He said that to ensure that the word got out about the new product, "We bought 125 six-sheet signs . . . all the available radio time we could get."

Bucket sales "took off," Harman said, and they made it possible to open free-standing KFC restaurants "by giving you the volume that justified a manager and the overhead."

Up until that time, he said, "The Colonel's chicken was sold with other foods in existing restaurants, usually coffee shops that had signs out front that said, |Featuring Col. Sanders.'" His company's development of the first free-standing KFC takeout unit in 1959 or 1960 "really helped the Colonel sell franchises," Harman explained.

Harman credits a sign painter with coming up with one of two phrases now synonymous with the late Sanders. He said he hired the painter to decorate the front window of Harman's to let the public know chicken was being added to the menu.