Howard Johnson's 🍦 From a Quincy Soda Fountain to the Host of the Highways

If you grew up riding in the back seat on a long highway trip, you probably remember the orange roof. It meant fried clams, a cold glass of something, and a cone from a freezer case with more flavors than you could ever get through in one summer. 🧡

Howard Johnson's was once the biggest restaurant chain in America, and it all started with one man, one borrowed-money corner store and one very rich scoop of ice cream. Here is the whole story, from a cigar shop in debt to a stock listed on the New York Stock Exchange, and the certificates that company left behind.

🍦 Who Was Howard Johnson?

Howard Deering Johnson was born in Boston on February 2, 1897. He finished only elementary school and went to work in his father's cigar business.

He served in France with the American Expeditionary Force during World War I. When his father died, Howard inherited the cigar business along with its debts. He ran it until 1924, when he liquidated it, and still could not clear a debt of about $10,000.

So in 1925 he went looking for a way to pay it off. He took over a little store in the Wollaston neighborhood of Quincy, Massachusetts, just south of Boston. It sold candy, newspapers and patent medicines, and it had a soda fountain. That soda fountain soon became the busiest part of the store.

🍨 What Made Howard Johnson's Ice Cream So Famous?

Butterfat, and plenty of it. Howard bought an ice cream recipe from a pushcart vendor for $300, and the formula he settled on roughly doubled the butterfat of the ordinary stuff and used only natural flavorings. He started out cranking it by hand in his basement.

A 1940 Fortune article put his butterfat at 18 to 19 percent, when most states only required 10. People could taste the difference. He opened his first summer stand on the beach in 1926, sold $60,000 worth of cones from a beachfront stand in a single summer, and by 1928 was grossing about $240,000 a year from ice cream sold at the store and on the nearby beaches.

Then came the number that followed him for the rest of his life. He worked his way up to 28 flavors, and he said himself that "28" became his trademark. 🍒 The list reprinted most often includes the everyday ones, Vanilla, Chocolate and Strawberry, alongside flavors you hardly see anymore: Burgundy Cherry, Frozen Pudding, Lemon Stick, Macaroon, Peppermint Stick and Fruit Salad.

Even after he retired, he kept dropping in on his restaurants unannounced in a black Cadillac with the license plate HJ-28, his initials and his flavors. He ate at least one ice cream cone every day and kept ten flavors in the freezers at his Manhattan penthouse and his home in Milton.

The 28 flavors were famous enough that Mel Brooks made a joke of them. In Blazing Saddles (1974), John Hillerman plays a Howard Johnson who runs an ice cream parlor in the 1874 town of Rock Ridge. His sign offers exactly one flavor.

🎭 How Did a Banned Play Help Launch the First Restaurant?

In June 1929, Howard opened his first real sit-down restaurant in Quincy, paid for with a loan from the Granite Trust Bank. The menu was New England through and through: fried clams, broiled swordfish, chicken pot pie, homemade baked beans and brown bread, frankfurters grilled in butter, and of course the ice cream.

Then Boston did him a favor. That same year Mayor Malcolm Nichols banned Eugene O'Neill's play Strange Interlude, and the Theatre Guild simply moved the production out of the city's reach, to the Wollaston Theatre in Quincy, near the new restaurant. The play ran about five hours with a dinner break, and Bostonians who came out to see it needed somewhere to eat. The crowds that came out from Boston to see it brought a stream of new customers to Howard Johnson's restaurant down the street.

🤝 Was Howard Johnson's the First Restaurant Franchise?

It is credited as one of the very first. In 1935, Howard wanted a restaurant in Orleans, out on Cape Cod, and did not have the money to build it himself. So he teamed up with a local businessman, Reginald Sprague, who opened it under the Howard Johnson's name.

The deal is what made it modern. Sprague paid a fee to use the name, the food, the supplies and the logo, and Johnson kept the standards. That arrangement is widely called the first modern restaurant franchise.

It caught on fast. There were 41 Howard Johnson's restaurants by 1936, and by 1939 there were 107 of them running along the East Coast all the way down to Florida, bringing in $10.5 million a year.

🧡 Why the Orange Roof, and Who Are Simple Simon and the Pieman?

Johnson wanted his restaurants to be spotted from far down the road, so he gave them orange roofs, cupolas and weather vanes. A traveler could pick one out from a long way off, which is exactly the point.

The logo came from an old nursery rhyme. "Simple Simon met a pieman, going to the fair," and in the 1930s the artist John Alcott turned that scene into the Howard Johnson's sign: the Pieman with his tray, Simple Simon and a little dog. Charles Pizzano later sculpted the fiberglass versions that stood out front.

The aqua that went with the orange was the work of the decorator Sister Parish, who did a restaurant in Somerville, New Jersey, in that color in the 1930s. When the motor lodges came along in the 1950s, a new character joined Simple Simon: the Lamplighter, reaching up to his street lamp. The lodge offices wore an aqua cupola with a Simple Simon and Lamplighter weather vane on top. All of it added up to the nickname the chain wore proudly, the "Host of the Highways." 🛣️

🚗 How Did Howard Johnson's Survive World War II?

Barely. When America entered the war there were about 200 Howard Johnson's restaurants. Then came gasoline rationing, and with nobody driving for pleasure, the roadside business dried up. By the summer of 1944 only 12 were still open.

Howard kept the company alive by feeding people who were still working. Some locations were turned into jam factories, and others ran cafeterias for war-plant workers and fed Army recruits from the company's commissary kitchens.

He had also made one very smart deal just before the war. In 1940 Howard Johnson's won the contract for the restaurants on the brand-new Pennsylvania Turnpike, 24 of them, with a monopoly on that road until 1979. Ironically, the Turnpike would not allow the orange roof there, because it wanted Colonial-style buildings of local stone. The Ohio, New Jersey and Connecticut turnpikes followed.

🏨 When Did the Motor Lodges Begin?

After the war, America got back in the car, and Howard Johnson's went right along with it. Construction started on 200 new restaurants across the Southeast and Midwest in 1947. By 1954 there were 400 restaurants in 32 states, and the company had popularized Soffron Brothers' fried clam strips.

That same year, 1954, the first Howard Johnson's motor lodge opened in Savannah, Georgia, designed by the architects Rufus Nims and Karl Koch. Now a family could eat dinner and sleep in the same orange-roofed stop. There were 88 lodges by 1961 and 130 by 1964, each with a restaurant on the site or right next door.

👨‍🍳 Did Famous French Chefs Really Cook for Howard Johnson's?

They did, and it is one of my favorite parts of this story. Howard Johnson was a regular customer at Le Pavillon in New York, then one of the finest French restaurants in the country. He hired away two of its cooks, Pierre Franey and a young Jacques Pépin.

Pépin has said he went to Howard Johnson's in the spring of 1960, after turning down an offer to cook at the White House for the Kennedys. He and Franey spent years in the commissary developing recipes that could be prepared in quantity, frozen and shipped out to the restaurants so that the food tasted the same wherever you stopped.

Pépin went on to become one of the best-known chefs on American television, and he has credited that training at Howard Johnson's for much of what he did afterward. When the flagship Times Square Howard Johnson's closed in 2005, he wrote a farewell for The New York Times titled "Howard Johnson's, Adieu."

✊ What Happened at the Howard Johnson's Near Dover?

Not every chapter is a happy one, and this one belongs in the story too. In 1957 a Howard Johnson's near Dover, Delaware, refused to serve Komla Agbeli Gbedemah, the finance minister of the newly independent Ghana, because he was Black.

Gbedemah had only recently hosted Vice President Richard Nixon in Ghana, and he said plainly that if the Vice President could eat in his house, he could not understand being turned away from a roadside restaurant in America. The story drew attention around the world, President Eisenhower publicly apologized, and the chain's executives told the Dover owner that segregation was not welcome at Howard Johnson's.

Segregated franchises remained a target of the civil rights movement. CORE and Floyd McKissick led protests at a Howard Johnson's in Durham, North Carolina, with mass arrests in May 1963. In December 1962 the company issued a statement opposing segregation in its restaurants, and it took the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to finally settle it.

📈 When Did Howard Johnson's Go Public?

In 1959 the founder handed the presidency to his son, Howard Brennan "Bud" Johnson, who was just 26. Two years later, in 1961, the Howard Johnson Company was incorporated in Maryland and went public, with its stock listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

The numbers at the time were enormous. There were 605 restaurants, 265 run by the company and 340 by licensees, plus 10 Red Coach Grills and 88 motor lodges in 33 states and the Bahamas. Seventeen manufacturing and processing plants in 11 states kept them all supplied. Sales had climbed from $31.8 million in 1951 to $95 million in 1960, and sales and per-share earnings rose every year from 1959 to 1966.

The elder Johnson stayed on as chairman and treasurer until 1964. Between 1961 and 1967, the founder, his son and his daughter sold nearly two million shares of the stock.

📜 What Does a Howard Johnson Company Stock Certificate Look Like?

This is where the story lands on paper. Howard Johnson Company stock certificates were engraved by the Security-Columbian Banknote Company, formed in 1957 when Security Banknote and Columbian Banknote merged, using the same intaglio printing banknote firms used to stop counterfeiters.

The certificates carry the company's own sign right in the vignette. A robed classical woman sits in the center, and on either side of her are white silhouettes of the Pieman with Simple Simon and his dog, and the Lamplighter at his street lamp. The printed seal reads HOWARD JOHNSON COMPANY, MARYLAND, 1961, the year of the incorporation and the public offering, and each certificate is transferable in Boston, Massachusetts, or New York, New York, a nod to the company's New England roots and its Wall Street listing.

🔶 The orange-bordered Howard Johnson Company 100-share certificate is the classic one, with "100 SHARES" in both upper corners and Bud Johnson's printed signature as President. Certificates of this design were issued from the late 1960s into the 1970s, so each one carries its own date, number and owner.

🔷 The blue-bordered Howard Johnson Company certificate is the odd-lot form, marked "LESS THAN 100 SHARES" in the corners, for holdings smaller than a round lot. This blue design carries Bud's printed signature as President and his father's as Treasurer, father and son on one sheet. Both measure about 12 by 8 inches and frame up beautifully.

Every one of these was issued during the company's public years, between the 1961 offering and the 1979 sale. Nobody will ever issue another Howard Johnson Company share, and once the ones on the market are framed and hung, they will be very difficult to come by.

🌅 What Happened to Howard Johnson's?

At its peak in 1975, Howard Johnson's had more than 1,000 restaurants and over 500 motor lodges in 42 states and Canada. But a highway business lives and dies by the highway. The 1973 oil embargo hit travel hard, rising fuel prices kept people off the road, and more and more travelers were flying instead of driving.

Howard Deering Johnson died on June 20, 1972, at 75. In September 1979 the company accepted an offer from Britain's Imperial Group of $28 a share, about $630 million, for 1,040 restaurants and 520 motor lodges. Bud left the company in 1981.

From there it was taken apart piece by piece. Imperial sold the company to Marriott in 1985 for $314 million, and Marriott kept the company restaurants, turning most of them into Big Boys and other brands, while the lodges and the franchise system went to Prime Motor Inns. The hotel name passed through several owners and has belonged to Wyndham since 2006, which still runs Howard Johnson hotels today.

The restaurants slowly disappeared. The one in Bangor, Maine, the last running continuously from the original chain, closed in 2016. The very last Howard Johnson's restaurant, in Lake George, New York, closed for good in 2022.

🧡 A Share of the Orange Roof

It is a lot of history for one company: a soda fountain in Wollaston, a banned play in Quincy, a handshake deal on Cape Cod, the turnpikes, the lodges, two great French chefs and a seat on the Big Board. The restaurants are gone now, but the paper is still here.

If you or someone in your family still talks about those orange roofs, a Howard Johnson Company stock certificate is a real piece of the company that built them. 🍦