John Y. Brown Jr. Helped Col. Sanders Make KFC a Giant

While studying law at the University of Kentucky in the late 1950s,

John Y. Brown Jr.

sold encyclopedias door to door and sometimes earned $500 in a weekend. It was the best training he ever had, he said later.

As chief executive and part owner of Kentucky Fried Chicken in the 1960s, Mr. Brown continued to dazzle with his salesmanship as the chain grew from a small operation into an international franchising giant. In 1979, he sold himself to Kentucky voters as a successful candidate for governor whose campaign was launched shortly after he married a TV sportscaster and former Miss America,

Phyllis George,

and just two months before the primary election. As governor, he promoted Kentucky as a paradise for business.

An advertising campaign he launched described Kentucky as “the state that’s run like a business.” Mr. Brown told The Wall Street Journal: “We’re cutting waste just like entrepreneurs. It’s even easier than running Kentucky Fried because you aren’t competing every day.”

Mr. Brown died Nov. 21 at a hospital in Lexington, Ky. He was 88 and had been under treatment for Covid-19.

After a brilliant start to his career, Mr. Brown endured many setbacks. Three marriages ended in divorce. None of the other restaurant chains he helped launch had anything resembling the success of KFC, now owned by

Yum Brands Inc.

“You just can’t beat KFC,” Mr. Brown told the Lexington Herald-Leader in 1999. “The KFC recipe is just addictive.”

Still, his guide was

Norman Vincent Peale,

the apostle of positive thinking, who presided over the wedding when Mr. Brown married Ms. George in 1979.

“I’ll try anything,” Mr. Brown told Sunshine magazine. “I’m not afraid of failure.”

John Young Brown Jr. was born Dec. 28, 1933, and grew up in Lexington, Ky. His father, the son of a tenant farmer, was a lawyer specializing in criminal law who served in the Kentucky legislature and one term in the U.S. House of Representatives.

The younger Mr. Brown had his first success as a door-to-door salesman. In selling encyclopedias, he strove to meet moms rather than dads at the front door. He asked whether they had an educational system for their children. If they admitted to lacking such a system, he had the perfect opening to propose a set of encyclopedias.

“I really don’t know how I ever passed the bar [exam],” he told Nation’s Restaurant News much later, “because all I did in law school was play poker and sell encyclopedias.” After completing his law degree in 1960, he joined his father in a law practice.

One early client was

Harland Sanders,

the founder of KFC, who wanted tax advice. Col. Sanders had a recipe and a chicken-cooking technique but hadn’t developed a systematic expansion strategy. He sometimes slept in his car while on the road selling his ideas to restaurant owners. Mr. Brown had no restaurant experience but saw the potential for expanding and franchising more aggressively.

With partners, he agreed in 1964 to buy KFC for $2 million. The company went public two years later. While the number of KFC restaurants soared, efforts to diversify into roast beef and fish-and-chip outlets fizzled. When Wall Street analysts visited, Mr. Brown told the Journal, “I always made sure they saw our computer room. It made us look well organized, even though I guess we weren’t.”

After hitting a peak in 1969, KFC stock began to fall steeply. In 1971, Mr. Brown sold the company to Heublein Inc. and stepped down as chief executive.

He had been worn down by professionals recruited to bolster the original small management team. “You never saw a more negative bunch,” Mr. Brown said. “Those guys came in with textbooks under their arms telling us all the things we weren’t supposed to be doing. If I’d have listened to them in the first place, we’d never have started Kentucky Fried Chicken. It got to be no fun, so I got out.”

The sale of his stake in KFC enriched Mr. Brown and left him searching for an encore. He mixed with the jet set in Florida and briefly had ownership stakes in several professional basketball teams, including the Boston Celtics, where he clashed with the general manager,

Red Auerbach.

Mr. Brown later said his biggest mistake ever was selling his stake in the Celtics in 1979 shortly before the arrival of

Larry Bird.

After divorcing his first wife, he sought an introduction to Ms. George, the TV star and former beauty queen. “I didn’t know her from a load of coal,” he said later. “But I thought, ‘What the heck. I’ll take a shot.’”

Andy Williams

sang “Just the Way You Are” at their wedding in the Marble Collegiate Church in New York, where guests included

Walter Cronkite,

Tom Brokaw,

Eunice Kennedy Shriver

and

Ed McMahon,

the Louisville Courier-Journal reported.

In his perpetual search for excitement, gambling was a favorite pastime. His large withdrawals from a Florida bank caught the attention of banking regulators in the early 1980s. Mr. Brown told the New York Times he needed the cash to cover “one real bad night” of gambling in Las Vegas. “I worked hard for my money,” he said. “I made it legally, and I paid taxes on it. If I want to take it out of a bank in wheelbarrows, that’s my business.”

Partly because of his down-home charm and uptown fundraising abilities, he had been seen as a potential Democratic candidate for president, but his political career faded. In 1987, seeking another term as governor of Kentucky, he lost in the primary.

Mr. Brown’s survivors include five children and 12 grandchildren. Positive thinking never failed him. Days before his death, while on a ventilator in a hospital, he scrawled a message on a white board for his family: “I’ve never been so happy.”

Write to James R. Hagerty at bob.hagerty@wsj.com