He’d developed a 14- to 15-minute cooking process, and since chickens were fried to order, everyone expected to wait. Once a new shack was up and running Pierce was hands-off, and many franchises began deviating from the standards he’d set. On the wall of every shack hung a framed photograph of His Majesty, smiling benignly, his chin supported by a hand bearing a gold pinkie ring, the wrist wrapped in a diamond-studded Bulova. He also designed the chain’s distinctive faux-redbrick walls and white painted archways. He was close to his 60s before he ever got a credit card.”Įarly on people began calling Pierce the Fried Chicken King, so he designed the logo of the hatchet-wielding sovereign, who later on became a chef. “Whenever he would go to pick up money at the stores he would put it in chicken bags–just like he was walking out with chicken. “At one time he had an apartment in the Shoreland Hotel, and there was a cedar closet where he kept all his money,” says J.R. Pierce did well, but he didn’t trust banks. But afterward “they just went back to being cousins and working.” “My dad actually knocked two of his teeth out,” he says. Pierce, who now handles training and development for the chain, remembers his father once caught his cousin “bootlegging”–buying chickens from a different supplier and not reporting the sales. 18.Īnd most knew not to try to get anything over on him. The UnGala is back! Clic k here for the ticket link for this year's celebration at Epiphany Center for the Arts on Oct. “He had a one-on-one relationship with everybody, and everybody respected him.” “He would call you and tell you to come in and bring his money,” she says. His daughter Kristen, now CEO of Harold’s Chicken Shack Inc., says he kept his accounts in his head and knew exactly who owed what when. He put $50 in their registers, told them to get their chickens from Rosen, and expected them to pay him a 42-cent royalty per bird. The next few stores were trademark agreements with family and friends. 36 is supposed to open in Wicker Park later this month. Pierce, who grew up in Midway, Alabama, never dreamed the joint would spawn an empire that reached as far as Atlanta, much less the north side–No. That was the original Harold’s Chicken Shack. Gene Rosen, who owned a poultry shop down the street, offered him a few birds to fry up for the guys, and they liked the results so much that Pierce opened a take-out joint at 47th and Greenwood, with Rosen supplying the chickens. He and his wife, Hilda, ran a restaurant on 39th called the H & H, and they specialized in chicken feet with dumplings, a recipe he thought could be adapted for fried chicken. And many of them offer their own interpretations of the way Harold Pierce, the Fried Chicken King who died nearly two decades ago, meant his birds to be prepared.īack in 1950, five years before Ray Kroc opened his first McDonald’s and two years before the Colonel began franchising his secret recipe, Pierce was sitting in the barbershop at 69th and South Park with some buddies, playing checkers and talking chicken. Harold’s Chicken Shack, the ubiquitous south-side and south-suburban fast-food chain identified by a maniacal monarch chasing a chicken with a hatchet, is a confederacy of individual outlets.
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