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. 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.
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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. 36 is supposed to open in Wicker Park later this month. The next few stores were trademark agreements with family and friends. 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.
And most knew not to try to get anything over on him. His son J.R. 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. “My dad actually knocked two of his teeth out,” he says. But afterward “they just went back to being cousins and working.”
Harold Pierce died of prostate cancer in March 1988, when he was 71. By then, says J.R., there were around 30 or 40 shacks in Chicago. Harold’s second wife, Willa, took over the business and expanded it out of the city. When she died three years ago Kristen and J.R. kept it growing. Today the siblings rule the kingdom from a small office suite in Hazel Crest. A giant gilt-framed photograph of their father hangs over a leather sofa in the waiting room.
Harold never cared about that kind of consistency. He just wanted his money. “He never was one to just run around,” says J.R. “Basically everybody ran their stores, and they just paid him the royalties. He never expected it to get where it got. He just cruised. He’d just have fun.”
