She met KFC’s Colonel and owned many stores
Jessie Bullock shook hands with the Colonel in 1957 and, with that, became an owner of a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise.
“We first brought the large hamburger to Little Rock, with the HiBoy hamburger,” says Bullock, 91. “Then we were in Memphis one weekend and we saw all of these crowds, a block long, trying to get into a Kentucky Fried Chicken Store. We decided we would call the Colonel.”
She means Colonel Harland Sanders, of course.
“We wanted to see about getting Kentucky Fried Chicken in our store,” she says.
The Colonel went with her then-husband, John Bullock, to pick up two pressure cooker pots from a drugstore that had been selling his chicken recipe, and he gave them to John.
“He came to our house several times. We would take him to the races, and it was like being with a celebrity, because that’s what he was, you know?”
— Jessie Bullock on Colonel Sanders
“And with a handshake — no contract or anything, just a handshake and our word — we owned a franchise of Kentucky Fried Chicken,” she says.
The Bullocks owned two Hi-Boys by then, one on Markham Street, across from the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, and one on 12th Street.
The Colonel visited them often, Bullock says, after the 12th Street location became a supplier.
“He came to our house several times. We would take him to the races, and it was like being with a celebrity, because that’s what he was, you know?” she says. “He was very personable and very outspoken.”
She and the Colonel had farming backgrounds in common.
Bullock was born in Plum Bayou, a little community near England.
“I was a country girl,” she says. Her father was foreman of a plantation in that area, and Bullock and her sister and three brothers helped pick and chop cotton there during the summers.
“When I think back, I think I had the best life, because we worked in the summertime but we had fun things, too — going to the lake, going swimming, riding horses,” she says.
She went to Capital City Business College in Little Rock for two years before she married John Bullock. John, who died in 2015, joined the Air Force and was stationed in Texas, first at San Antonio and then Wichita Falls before finishing up in Fort Worth.
“Airmen don’t make much money,” she says. “When we got to Wichita Falls, they told me, ‘You’ll never get a job here.’ But the first interview I had, I got a job. I can remember running down the hill and telling my husband.”
While in Wichita Falls, they ate at a place that served up fourth-of-a-pound hamburgers and decided when they could, they would start their own store.
“Neither of us knew anything about the food business,” she says. “I think we had $500 to our name and we put that money into buying a grill.”
They bought an ice cream machine on credit and she and her sister ran the store while her husband worked for the railroad.
“We chopped onions up the day before and let them sit in the refrigerator, and we put chopped onions or whatever anybody wanted on their burgers,” she says.
Meat was delivered fresh each day by a friend who owned a meat company.
“Our hamburgers were really good,” she says. “I never get a hamburger today that tastes as good as ours did. I don’t know if it was the grill we had or what.”
When the Razorbacks played at nearby War Memorial Stadium, Bullock made money on parking in the Hi-Boy lot on Markham. Adding Kentucky Fried Chicken was initially not quite as lucrative as that.
“We practically had to give it away,” she says. “I mean, we literally would go outside with chicken and ask people to try it. I guess they just weren’t used to getting a chicken dinner.”
It caught on, of course.
“I had all the confidence in the world that it would work. There was a time that we had lines blocks long of people waiting to get it, too,” she says. “We worked really hard. We would work 12 or 13 hours a day, and it was seven days a week. Those were hard years.”
Bullock has five children, 11 grandchildren and 18 great-grandchildren.
“I am surrounded by family,” says Bullock, who has enjoyed traveling, internationally and across the United States, including regular trips to Destin, Fla., with friends to play tennis when she was younger.
Even during the years when she worked long hours, she made sure her family was nourished.
“We would bring home chicken or hamburgers a lot, but I fixed just regular meals for my family,” she says. “We always had breakfast together, and dinner.”
She cannot remember if she cooked for the Colonel when he came to their home.
“I think I would have been very embarrassed to cook for him,” she says.
Bullock, who lives in Bryant, still likes to eat at KFC on occasion.
“I like the mashed potatoes and gravy and the coleslaw, and I like their biscuits,” she says.
The Bullocks had KFC stores in Little Rock, Crossett and Springhill, La.
“We sold 11 stores in 1975 and we sold the last two in 2015,” she says. “Our HiBoy store was really successful. But KFC was very good to us.”