Howard Johnson's

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~ the goodbye ~

Howard Deering Johnson borrowed two thousand dollars in 1925 and took over a drugstore in Wollaston, a corner of Quincy, Massachusetts. The soda fountain outsold everything else in the shop, so he worked on the ice cream instead of the pharmacy, doubling the butterfat against what anyone else was selling. His own explanation of the famous number was that he thought he had every flavor in the world, and twenty-eight became the trademark. The first actual restaurant opened in Quincy in June 1929, which was poor timing.

The crash left him with a good format and no capital, and his answer to that is the part with real historical weight. In 1935 he persuaded an acquaintance to open a second Howard Johnson's in Orleans, Massachusetts, under his name and his standards but with someone else's money. It is counted among the first franchise agreements in the country. The visual kit came together in the same decade: the orange roof with the cupola and weathervane, and the Simple Simon and the Pieman sign drawn by John Alcott.

Then the highways arrived and Johnson understood them faster than anyone in the business. The Pennsylvania Turnpike opened in 1940 and he bid for and won the exclusive right to feed everyone who pulled off it, and he kept winning the same deal on the toll roads that followed. For twenty-five years Howard Johnson's was frequently the only food available on a limited-access highway in the eastern United States. By 1975 the chain was over a thousand restaurants with more than five hundred motor lodges behind them, and the oil embargo of 1973 had already started taking away the driving that all of it stood on.

~ the chronicle ~

~ twenty-eight flavors ~

The ice cream was the product that built the company and the fried clam strip is the one it pushed into the American diet, taken up through an exclusive arrangement with a Massachusetts clam house and sold at every orange roof in the country. Both were the same trick: take a regional New England item and standardize it hard, then put it where a family driving to Florida will find it at seven in the evening. It worked until standardization stopped being the interesting promise on a highway exit and speed became the interesting promise instead.

~ the sign that outlived the food ~

Imperial Group PLC of Britain bought the company in 1979 for more than 630 million dollars, taking on 1,040 restaurants and 520 motor lodges, and made very little of it. Marriott bought the whole thing in 1985 and then took it apart: the company-owned restaurants stayed while the motor lodge business and the trademark went to Prime Motor Inns. A great many orange roofs were converted into Bob's Big Boy or knocked down. After that the restaurant count only ever went one direction. The Bangor, Maine location closed on 6 September 2016. The last one, in Lake George, New York, stopped serving in 2022, and even that date is soft, since en.wikipedia puts the closure in March while the national coverage ran in early June.

The motels are what survived, and they survived because Marriott cut them loose from the kitchens in 1985. Prime Motor Inns became Howard Johnson International in 1990, which went to Cendant, which became Wyndham, which has run the brand since 2006 across roughly three hundred hotels worldwide. You can still book a Howard Johnson tonight. There has been nowhere to eat in one since 2022.

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