OCEAN RIDGE — John Joseph Wurster died knowing the Colonel’s secret recipe.
“He knew it, he really did,” said Wurster’s widow, Josephine, the granddaughter of Kentucky Fried Chicken icon and founder Harland Sanders.
“I don’t know it, but he did mix the spices for my grandfather.”
But while Mr. Wurster claimed that well-protected company secret, it was his work ethic, sense of humor, kindness and love for family that is being recounted now.
Mr. Wurster died June 12 of a heart attack. He was 75.
“He was a gentle giant,” said Mr. Wurster’s daughter, Cynthia, of Wellington. “Everybody was afraid of my dad because he was tall and had a deep voice. He was quiet. He was an observer. And he worked very, very hard.”
Josephine Wurster says she met a young John Wurster back in 1954, as she and a girlfriend walked down Louisville’s Bluegrass Avenue, bundled up against the cold. Mr. Wurster and some buddies drove by in a Model-T, she said, and offered them a ride.
That summer, she went to visit her mother in Salt Lake City and her new boyfriend wrote her every day.
“I still have all those letters in my cedar chest,” she said.
The couple were married a year later, in August 1955.
It was also around this time that Mrs. Wurster’s grandfather was starting his fried-chicken business. John and Josephine Wurster moved to Florida in 1959 and helped the family establish new KFC restaurants around the state.
A pilot who had earned his wings through the Civil Air Patrol when he was just 17, Mr. Wurster would fly himself around Florida, making deals and setting up restaurants, his wife said.
He’d also mix the spices.
The couple had been married 55 years, and had lived in the same house in Ocean Ridge for 32 years, she said.
In addition to business and family, John Wurster loved boating, said his wife.
“He was a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful man,” she said. “He was not only loved, he was respected as a wonderful human being.”
Besides his daughter, Cynthia, Mr. Wurster is survived by three other children: John Joseph Wurster, Jr., of Palm Springs, Calif.; Harland James Wurster, of Palm Beach Gardens; and Christopher Francis Wurster, of Boynton Beach. He is also survived by four grandchildren.
Services were held June 25 and family members ask that any memorials be sent to Hospice of Palm Beach County or St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.
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