The
last Howard Johnson’s in America
closed this June, in Lake George, up in the Adirondacks. There was one in Lake
Placid, too, but it went under in 2015. The following year the second-to-last, in Bangor, Maine,
turned out the lights. Once upon a time,
they were a fixture across the U.S.
and Canada, familiar
roadside stops – there was one in Times Square
- now as forgotten as the passenger pigeon.
They
started out in Quincy, Mass., a drugstore with a soda fountain, and
Howard – there was in fact a Howard –
came up with a better ice cream recipe, higher butterfat, and made a
killing. The first restaurant
followed. He franchised a second down in
Orleans, on Cape Cod,
and popularized the fried clam “strip” (the foot, minus the belly) which became
industry standard.
He
weathered the stock market crash in 1929, but WWII rationing nearly put him out
of business. He saved himself with War
Department contracts to serve food in Army commissaries. Then he went after state turnpikes, which had
tolls, limited access, and service plazas.
He locked up Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Jersey, and Connecticut. It was the first major nationwide chain.
Me,
what I remember, is driving up to Maine in the summer, and back in the 1950’s,
before the turnpike to Augusta, you took Route 1, along the coast. Somewhere along the way – I’m guessing a
little way north of Portsmouth, NH, or Portland
- my dad would pull into the HoJo’s. I
was crazy for the hot dogs, because they nicked them with a knife, so they
swelled and popped open on the grill, and they buttered the outside of the
rolls, and toasted them on the
grill. It came in a paper sleeve, and
you could dress it up in yellow mustard and dill relish, and not have the whole
slippery thing slide into your lap. And of
course we got ice cream sodas.
An
interesting thing happened, though, in the 1950’s, Brown v. Board of Education.
Howard Johnson’s, and Woolworth’s, both had a lot of outlets in the
American South. Woolworth lunch counters
in the South were segregated; they wouldn’t serve black patrons. Same with Howard Johnson’s. The fact that these were franchise
operations, not corporate, made no nevermind.
There was economic leverage applied.
I used to go to the Woolworth’s in Harvard Square. They sold everything from notions to tropical
fish you took home in plastic bag, but now, I wasn’t supposed to go the lunch
counter. A boycott had been organized,
in sympathy with the sit-ins to integrate Southern lunch counters. Then a Howard Johnson’s in Delaware made the
national news when they refused service to a visiting diplomat from Ghana, and there
was more than enough embarrassment to go around, the Eisenhower administration
trying to build bridges to the Third World as a counterweight to Soviet
influence, and Jim Crow making them out to be hypocrites.
It’s a
little strange, and not a little scary, that we can connect that ten-year-old
kid with his hot dog and an ice cream soda to a larger and more ambiguous
circumstance, the Cold War and the nuclear threat, the struggle for personal
respect and ordinary decency, and the realization that political change is both
local and glacial, but that experience was in fact one of my earliest
encounters with the wider world – an understanding that the boundaries I took to
be solid as stone, family, neighborhood, tribe, were as brittle as glass, and
afforded no protection. The world could
break in. There were more than
twenty-eight flavors. The story we
believed was a comforting construct, a fiction we’d chosen, just one among many.
I
don’t know that it made me apprehensive, so much. More of an insight, that this was the world
grown-ups inhabited, all day and every day.
It was a small glimpse of wisdom.
But still,
admittedly, a lot to read into a hot dog.
