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

Chasing the Orange Roof Down the Turnpike 🧡 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. Up top a robed classical woman sits between two little white silhouettes - the Pieman and Simple Simon from the old Howard Johnson's sign. 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.

📅 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. I have a stack of them, so 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, doubled the butterfat in his ice cream, and had twenty-eight flavors by 1928. The Orleans franchise of 1935 made Howard Johnson's one of the first modern restaurant franchises, and the orange roofs spread up and down the highways. When the company went public in 1961 it had 605 restaurants and 88 motor lodges, and the founder's son, Howard B. Johnson - Bud, whose signature is on this sheet - was running it. 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

The banks countersigning these changed over the years - some sheets in my stack name Manufacturers Hanover Trust and The Chase Manhattan Bank, another Boston's Old Colony Trust Company - and they 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.

🧡 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. The chain passed through one owner after another, the orange roofs thinned out, and the very last Howard Johnson's restaurant, in Lake George, New York, closed in 2022.

🧡 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.