LOUISVILLE — Margaret Sanders, the eldest daughter of Kentucky Fried Chicken founder Colonel Harland Sanders, died of congestive heart failure. She was 91.

        Ms. Sanders, who referred to herself as the “spicy daughter” in a book she wrote, corresponded with Albert Einstein about his theory of relativity and searched for the lost continent of Atlantis.

        She sold cars in Florida. She worked as a Kentucky Fried Chicken waitress in Salt Lake City. She ran a body-relaxation treatment business in Lexington. She worked in a gun plant and acted in Louisville. She helped start an eye bank in New York City, said her daughter, Josephine Wurster of Ocean Ridge, Fla.

        “She was always picking up and moving away.... She wasn't happy being in one place,” Ms. Wurster said.

        Ms. Sanders sculpted many famous people. Her sculpture of her father overlooks his grave in Lou isville's Cave Hill Cemetery.

        “It was a God-given talent. She never had any lessons,” her daughter said.

        But it was her book that drew international attention. In the book, The Colonel's Secret, published in 1996, Ms. Sanders brought out family skeletons. It included some disclosure of the colonel's sex life and the fact that he had had “a mistress.”

        Tabloid newspapers as far away as England called Kentucky about the book, subtitled: “Eleven Herbs and a Spicy Daughter.”

        Ms. Sanders once wrote to Einstein, telling him about her theory of relativity and what she thought about his. He wrote back, her daughter said. “Mother had one of these far-out minds that understood that stuff.”

        Ms. Sanders also had a “big interest” in the lost continent of Atlantis and flew to Bimini in search of it.

        She worked at her father's restaurant in Corbin for a time. “Grandpa told her to get her damned hands out of the clay and get into the kitchen,” Ms. Wurster said.

        Ms. Sanders, who later was the Kentucky Fried Chicken franchiser for Florida, took credit for the concept of take-out fried chicken. “Mom hated to cook. That's why she started the take-out concept,” her daughter said.

        As for the Colonel's secret recipe: “She did not know that. She never knew it,” Ms. Wurster said.

        “Her story is that he wrote it up above a door frame in the restaurant in Corbin. He said, "If anything happens, here's the recipe.'” But the recipe was painted over before she ever learned it or wrote it down, Ms. Wurster said.

        In addition to her daughter, Ms. Sanders is survived by two sons, Harland Adams of Merritt Island, Fla., and Trigg Adams of Coconut Grove, Fla.; a sister, Mildred Ruggles of Lexington; nine grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.

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