Vintage Howard Johnson Company Stock Certificate 1960s 🧡 100 Shares Roadside Americana

Who Were the Pieman and Simple Simon on a Howard Johnson's Certificate? 🧡 A Vintage 1960s-1970s Howard Johnson Company 100-Share Stock Certificate, Orange Border

Size: 12" x 8"

Do you remember spotting that orange roof from the back seat? This is a share of the company behind it: a real, issued HOWARD JOHNSON COMPANY common stock certificate, INCORPORATED UNDER THE LAWS OF THE STATE OF MARYLAND, with 100 SHARES in both upper corner panels and an orange border on cream, engraved by the SECURITY-COLUMBIAN BANKNOTE COMPANY. The orange seal reads HOWARD JOHNSON COMPANY MARYLAND 1961, it's transferable in Boston or New York, and the printed signatures are Howard B. Johnson, President, and John H. Wyllie, Treasurer. Each one was filled in, signed and cancelled, with the assignment form on the back.

Like everything I keep, these live in the dark at under 40% relative humidity and a steady 72°F, climate controlled, so any age one shows, it had before it came to me.

🥧 The Pieman, Simple Simon and the Lamplighter

Up top a robed classical woman with a laurel crown holds out a leafy sprig - the old allegory American security engravers put on everything from railroad bonds to bank stock. Look at who's sitting with her, though. The little white silhouette on her left is the Pieman with his tray of pies, Simple Simon and a dog: the nursery-rhyme pair John Alcott drew for Howard Johnson's in the 1930s, the same figures that hung on the sign out front of every restaurant. The one on her right is a lamplighter raising his lantern to a street lamp while a child watches, the Lamplighter the company brought in during the 1950s to advertise its motor lodges. It's a company putting its two businesses, the restaurants and the motels, right on its own stock.

📅 1960s-1970s

The 1961 on the seal is the year Howard Johnson Company incorporated in Maryland and went public. Sheets of this orange 100-share design turn up dated from the late 1960s into the 1970s, and the company stayed public until 1979. The one you get will carry its own date, number, owner and stamps, and may look a little different from the one in my pictures.

🍦 The orange roof

Howard Deering Johnson bought a little drugstore in Wollaston, part of Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1925 on borrowed money - it sold candy, newspapers and patent medicines, and the soda fountain was the busiest corner of the place. He doubled the butterfat in his ice cream and built up to twenty-eight flavors, the number the company would brag about for the rest of its life. His first restaurant opened in Quincy in 1929. The Orleans franchise of 1935 made Howard Johnson's one of the first modern restaurant franchises, and by the end of 1939 there were 107 Howard Johnson's up and down the eastern seaboard. After the war the orange roofs rode the turnpikes and the new interstates, famous for fried clams and that long freezer case of ice cream, and through the 1960s and '70s it was the biggest restaurant chain in the United States. People called it the "Host of the Highways."

When the company went public in 1961 it had 605 restaurants - 265 run by the company and 340 by licensees - and 88 motor lodges, and the founder's son, Howard B. Johnson - Bud, whose signature is on this sheet - had been running it since his father handed it over in 1959, when Bud was 26. That same year the company hired two young French chefs, Pierre Franey and Jacques Pépin, to work out recipes at its Brockton, Massachusetts commissary that could be frozen and trucked to every restaurant, so dinner tasted the same on Cape Cod as it did in Florida. By 1975 the chain had more than a thousand restaurants and over five hundred motor lodges, in 42 states and Canada - its peak.

Local legend among road-trip nostalgists and former patrons holds that no drive up the East Coast in the 1960s or 70s felt complete without at least one stop for fried clams and a mountain of ice cream under that roof, and old-timers who grew up on those trips still talk about the striped uniforms and the smell of the soda fountain the moment you walked in.

🏦 The banks that handled them

On this design the registrar is Manufacturers Hanover Trust Company of New York and the transfer agent is The Chase Manhattan Bank, and those two names tell their own Wall Street story. Manufacturers Hanover was born in 1961 from Manufacturers Trust and the Hanover Bank, merged into Chemical Bank in 1991; Chemical merged with Chase Manhattan in 1996 and took the Chase name; and that Chase joined J.P. Morgan & Co. in 2000 to make JPMorgan Chase. Plenty of shares in those years sat in "street name," held by a brokerage firm for its customers, which is why so many surviving certificates name a Wall Street house rather than a person. That's half the fun of scripophily, collecting old stock and bond paper: nobody meant for any of it to survive. It was made to be traded, cancelled and thrown out once a company changed hands.

🧡 When the roofs came down

In September 1979 Howard Johnson Company accepted the British Imperial Group's offer of $28 a share, about $630 million, and the public company - and its stock certificates - came to an end. In the mid-1980s Marriott bought the company from Imperial, kept the company-run restaurants and sold off the motor lodges and franchise system, and from there the chain passed through one owner after another while the orange roofs thinned out exit by exit. The very last Howard Johnson's restaurant, in Lake George, New York, closed in 2022 after about seventy years, and the building was sold about a year later to become a sushi and hibachi buffet.

🧡 About these

They're 12 by 8 inches, engraved on heavy paper. Frame one for a kitchen or a diner booth at home, a road-trip room, or anybody who still dreams about those clam strips. The supply is finite - Howard Johnson Company has been gone since 1979, nobody's issuing its stock again, and once these last ones are framed, they'll be very difficult to acquire.