News that New England’s last Howard Johnson’s
The restaurant chain was left behind by McDonald’s and others long ago, but there was a time when Howard Johnson’s sat atop the food chain. The company peaked in the 1970s, with around 1,000 restaurants. Among them was the Howard Johnson’s in White River Junction. It survived into the 1990s at its site across from the VA on Route 5. (Nationally, the Howard Johnson’s motels motor on, but with different corporate owners.)
The Highwayhost website, which recounts HoJo’s history, says the White River Junction Howard Johnson’s opened in the 1940s, with a “modern motor lodge” and restaurant replacing it in 1968. In 1961, a Life Magazine article on media-averse author J.D. Salinger of Cornish said he sometimes took his family there for Sunday dinner. An online critic called the food “passable but not memorable.”
But Howard Johnson’s did make memories. When a postcard image of the local restaurant was posted last year on a Facebook page devoted to the Hartford of the past, local people offered their recollections: “My first real job” … “Many a lost night partying in the lounge” . . . “My last meal before I jumped on the bus for basic training.” One fondly recalled a combo of fish and chips and strawberry daiquiris. Another said it was a good place to bring the kids as they worked on table manners. Would the passing of a contemporary fast-food place evoke such recollections?
Howard Johnson’s company history dates to 1925, when Howard Deering Johnson bought a small pharmacy in Quincy, Mass. Soda fountain sales were brisk, so he developed his own ice cream recipe and new flavors — the company once boasted of having 28, a total considered remarkable. By the late 1920s, the first Howard Johnson’s restaurant opened. One source credited the national chain with popularizing clam strips, the merits of which remain up for debate.
Cultural observers link Howard Johnson’s success to the emergence of America’s car culture, which blossomed as cars and roads improved. It was a pioneer in branding — the attention-grabbing orange roofs put aesthetics in the service of marketing. The company was among the first to recognize that Americans seek something familiar, even in places where they are strangers.
In Bangor, waitress Kathe Jewett told the Associated Press that Howard Johnson’s was the only place she had ever worked. “It’s bittersweet, but it’s nothing to be sad about,” she said about the closing. “I’ve been here for 50 years, and it’s time.”
There may be nothing like standing on your feet for half a century in the service industry to make you unsentimental about the end of things.