The "Does Anyone Remember When Howard Johnson's Was A Popular Lancaster Restaurant ? Story

It was an ordinary day.  Scouring a few of my favorite websites when I came across a story that was posted on "The Lancastrian" which is a site devoted to those that like to read and post stories devoted to the town of Lancaster, Pennsylvania.  One of my favorite writers who posts quite often on the site is John Earl Hambright.  He recently posted a story he had written titled "Does Anyone Remember When Howard Johnson's Was A Popular Lancaster Restaurant?  I enjoyed his story so much that I asked him for permission to post it on my blog for you to read.  I have included his entire story for you to read.  I'm sure you will enjoy it just as I did.  Please read on.....

It opened in 1940, only five years after the chain began. But already Howard Johnson was – as their signs long boasted – sweeping the nation.

By legend clam shack owner Howard Johnson owed his success to one of America’s foremost playwrights. Eugene O’Neill’s experimental drama STRANGE INTERLUDE previewed in the seaside city of Quincy, Massachusetts, south of Boston. O’Neill’s play ran so long the producers cut the play in two and staged the first half in the afternoon and the second in the evening.

During the dinner hour intermission playgoers streamed out of the Quincy theater and across the street to young Howard Johnson’s humble eatery which featured, in addition to fried clams, a remarkable line of ice creams.

O’Neill’s drama might have been a lengthy trial with an indecisive verdict but there was no argument about Howard Johnson’s fried clams, hot dogs and ice cream. Word-of-mouth quickly made them a must-try for folks from throughout New England.

In 1935 Mr. Johnson opened a second restaurant on Cape Cod and a second American Revolution broke out. In just four years his chain had expanded to well over a hundred Howard Johnson’s located in every New England state but Vermont as well as seven other states.

Overnight the popular chain transformed dining-out in the USA. With their bright orange roofs and beacon-light cupolas instantly recognizable along the most-traveled stretches of the country’s busiest highways – including our own – Howard Johnson’s offered an unvarying menu of familiar fare – the same formula that would one day build McDonald’s and dozens of other roadside fast-food empires.

Howard Johnson would never have called his fare fast-food, but – in addition to his store’s signature Mt Vernon look – he pioneered another trade secret copied by all his successors. The basics are prepared in central kitchens and shipped out to store destinations – always in unmarked trucks. You don’t want the public to think their happy meals are cooked in any place but right where they’re dining.

Lancaster’s Howard Johnson (see photo below) on the Lincoln Highway East was owned by a franchisee named Lattomus. As car ownership quickly took off after World War Two, the Route 30 E. location drew increasing crowds of Lancastrians who cheerfully lined up for the chain’s popular fried clam strips, hot dogs in square-cut buns, brown bread and Boston baked beans.

More challenging for ice-cream loving Lancastrians was the chain’s celebrated line of 28 flavors.

Did any of you ever try all 28?

I’m betting more than one of you did – at least as long as they lasted. Did they survive the restaurant's name change to Dutch Grill?

In my experience, the peak for Lancaster’s Howard Johnson’s restaurant came on a night in April 1957 after I’d made the Pennsylvania finals in a schoolboy speech contest. Even though I had come in only second, The Lancaster Toastmasters Club invited me to recite my piece at their monthly meeting in the handsomely appointed banquet room; and the group’s president – my McCaskey band-mate Phil Gabriel’s Dad – gifted me with a ticket to accompany French-horn playing Phil to an upcoming concert at the high school by Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops.

That’s my last memory of the Howard Johnson restaurant on Route 30 East. Soon after apparently, it got swept up in the rising tide of cuteness and kitch engulfing so many fertile Lancaster County acres and emerged as "The Dutch." Gone were the clams -- and the 28 flavors of ice cream.

As for Howard Johnson -- after phenomenal success with stand-alone restaurants in the 1940s and 1950s – the company made the fateful decision to follow Holiday Inns into the booming motel business.

Lancaster’s franchise unveiled its makeover plans in 1963 and by 1966 a Howard Johnson’s Motor Inn was up and running in the heart of Tourist Alley East -- only to falter and fade nationally when the 1970s gas crisis put the pinch on car travel.

Remember a contest in the Jimmy Carter years to re-name the brand? HO-JO’s, they tried with only middling success.

But who were the Mad Men who thought up THE GROUND ROUND?

I mean, where’s the ice cream in that?

PHOTO: Orange roof gone and so is the sign promising 28 flavors now sweeping the nation, but the cupola still shouts HO-JO, to the Bel-Airs and Fairlanes at the end of the '50s. Happy days.

Hope you enjoyed John's story as much as I did.  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.