Howard Johnson's

Howard Johnson's is a chain of restaurants and hotels (now separate companies) which was founded in 1925 by Howard Deering Johnson when he borrowed $2,000 to buy a small corner drugstore in Wollaston, Massachusetts. It sold candy, newspapers and patent medicine.

Icon of popular culture

Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Howard Johnson's was an icon of popular culture. The orange-roofed buildings were as identifiable as McDonald's arches today, the slogan "28 flavors" as familiar as Baskin-Robbins's 31.

Related Topics:
McDonald's - Baskin-Robbins

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Howard Johnson's typified both the best and the worst features of the national, uniform, standardized chain restaurant. A family on a trip looking for a place to eat in an unfamiliar area could always find a Howard Johnson's, it would always be acceptable, and if you happened to like fried clam strips you could be sure they would have them; but it represented boring uniformity as much as dependable familiarity.

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Howard Johnson's lived up to its (then) slogan, "Host of the Highways." In fact, its domination of turnpike locations and service plazas was so complete that people began to think of it as a place where they ate while on road trips because they had to, not a place that they went to at home because they wanted to. The nickname "HoJo," eventually officially adopted by the company, was as disparaging as it was affectionate.

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The use of the Howard Johnson's name in the 1974 satirical western movie Blazing Saddles indicates the pervasiveness of the restaurant chain at the time. The movie, set in 1874 in the fictional city of "Rock Ridge", features a bogus "original" Howard Johnson's Restaurant, which offers "1 Flavor", presumably vanilla to match the color and attitude of the citizenry. Reference is made to "the orange roof on Howard Johnson's outhouse", and the joke is furthered as every citizen in town is surnamed "Johnson".

Related Topics:
1974 - Blazing Saddles

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