Many a blogger (for example) is lamenting the closure of the last Howard Johnson's restaurant. There are still motels that bear the once-ubiquitous name of Mr. Johnson but no more eateries. To some, it feels like it will feel for a kid of today to hear that the last Burger King has shuttered some day in the future. The food was not good but it was there…and you can probably recall some happy memory that took place at one.
Howard Johnsons' used to be everywhere…except near where I grew up. I don't recall one within twenty-five miles when I was a kid but when we made vacation car trips — up to Monterey or down to San Diego — we passed a bunch of them. I don't recall we ever stopped. I do recall that some of their advertising promised "28 flavors of ice cream," to which I sniffed, "Big deal. Baskin-Robbins has 31." (And being a kid who didn't like trying new foods, I don't think I tried more than about six.)
But I was aware that people loved Howard Johnson's. And (again) being the kind of kid who didn't like trying new foods, I could understand why: Dependability. If you went to one, you knew what you were going to get.
So there was the conundrum that doomed Howard Johnson's. You went to one because it was familiar. But if the one near you closed, a Howard Johnson's was no longer familiar…so you didn't go to one when you were traveling. And with less travelers going to them, that caused more and more of them to close…so they were no longer familiar to the non-travelers who went to them and that caused those non-travelers, when they became travelers to not go to them and…
You figure out what I just wrote. I sure can't.
The only one I ever went to was out in Thousand Oaks near where Jack Kirby lived in the early seventies. When my friend Steve Sherman and I worked for him, usually on the weekends, we usually wound up going out to dinner with the Kirby family and those dinners were often at the Howard Johnson's. I had the same thing every time: A hot turkey sandwich and a dish of orange sherbet with a cookie stuck in it.
And the dinner I most remember there — the only one I remember there of all the times we went — was one in which Jack sat quietly while the rest of us talked. Jack, though seated at the table throughout, was somewhere else entirely. DC Comics had asked him to come up with a new comic in the weird/monster vein and as the rest of us talked, Jack just sat there and created in his head. When our meals arrived and we stopped talking, Jack started.
He told us the idea for the new comic he'd just created. It was called The Demon and he'd worked out everything about it — who The Demon was, who the other characters were, how they interacted, a couple of plots for stories, etc. — before the server arrived with our entrees. He'd even figured out what everyone looked like and was eager to get back to the drawing board and putting those ideas on paper. I ate my sherbet and the cookie stuck into it in a hurry.
That's my only Howard Johnson's story but it's a good one. I hope the rumors about the Applebee's chain closing down aren't true, not because I especially like eating at them but because I don't have a story about anything interesting that happened while I was at one.