The Rise and Fall of a Casual Dining Empire in Mitchell Sammarco’s A History of Howard Johnson’s
By Ian MacAllen on Monday, September 16th, 2024 at 2:07 pm
Few restaurant chains are memorable enough to have their legacy outlast their operations. Howard Johnson’s is the rare exception, in part because their unique buildings remained identifiable icons long after a location closed. Anthony Mitchell Sammarco looks into this rich history in A History of Howard Johnson’s: How a Massachusetts Soda Fountain Became an American Icon.
Sammarco’s book is more than a decade old, but recently popped up as a sale item and I grabbed a copy. A historian based in the Boston area, Sammarco has written dozens of hyper local history volumes, and he’s a prolific researcher.
The story of the Howard Johnson’s restaurant chain wasn’t quite complete when the book first published. There were at the time a handful of locations that remained in operation. Since then, those final restaurants have closed, with the last one shutting down in 2022. The brand IP, and the hotel chain that was spun off in the 1980s, is now owned by Wyndham Hotels and Resorts. There are still two hundred or so hotels with the branding around the world.
Howard Johnson’s became a fast casual restaurant decades before concepts like Applebee’s and Olive Garden grew into mainstays of American culture. It offered family dining, and might even be considered to have invented the concept when other restaurants were far more formal. The restaurant chain, and eventually hotel chain, also benefited from and capitalized on the rise of automobile culture. In many ways, the chain helped make the lifestyle possible, by providing food and services to customers along the growing interstate system. None of those innovations though would ultimately save the chain.
Sammarco’s book opens with the summary: “Howard Johnson created an oranged-roofed empire of ice cream stands and restaurants, that following World War II, stretched from Maine to Florida and from the East Coast to the West Coast.” He then offers up a profile of founder Howard Deering Johnson, and the origins of the first location in Wollaston, a neighborhood in Quincy, Massachusetts, a Boston suburb. The introduction also lays out an overview of the chain, from the first franchise location that opened in Orleans on Cape Cod, to the final two in Lake Placid, New York and Bangor, Maine, (both closed since publication).
The book is clearly detail-focused and rooted in research, but the narrative suffers from a structure that is disconnected and repetitive. Chapter one begins with Johnson’s biography, and while this goes into more details than the introduction, we offered some repetitive facts. The details are richer and more thoroughly explored, but so much of this is laid out in the introduction, it feels like a bit too much. And that’s the problem throughout much of the book. Material is repeated over and over again, as though we hadn’t just read the previous chapter.
The book often reads like the chapters were written in isolation without regard to what came before or after. I understand the problem and it’s a challenge as a writer to provide the right context without presenting repetitive information. The balance here is off with far too much background duplicated. Many of the chapters probably could stand on their own, and maybe that’s by design with the hope of having them published elsewhere individually, but it slows down the narrative. Or more to the point, each chapter is treated as its own narrative, and there is no cohesive central storyline.
The story of Howard Johnson’s has a natural story arc, from its founding, to the peak, and eventually demise. It even has an organic comeback story built into it, since during World War II the chain contracted dramatically and eventually grew back to a 1,000-strong chain.
Unfortunately, much of the drama is missing from this tale. There’s no central plot holding these chapters together, even in the early chapters that move through time chronologically.
But then as the book progresses, the primary narrative structure collapses. Chapter 8, for instance, is given over entirely to the personal biographies of select employees. A better editor would have insisted on integrating these stories into the main narrative body. They stand out, sort of a jarring interjection in the history of the chain. But had these biographies integrated when each employee participated in the various components of the chain, their personalities would have contributed to the overall story and made it come alive in a way that is simply missing.
The same is true of the chapter on the Red Coach Grill and the Ground Round, two restaurant brands created as spinoffs from Howard Johnsons. This chapter felt tacked on at the end and not part of the broader story of how casual sit down restaurants became America’s favorite way of eating. These chains should be part of the broader Howard Johnson story, but there is little hypothesis on why this wasn’t a successful strategy, no commentary providing an explanation. The narrative is focused on facts rather than the causations.
There are great tidbits contained in the book though. For instance, the explanation of the origin of the tendersweet clams on the chain’s menu – strips cut from the large digging muscle of Atlantic surf clams and the backstory of how that came about. And of course there’s a discussion of the famous 28-flavors of ice cream at the chain, all while noting that vanilla remained the most popular.
There’s a whole lot of information contained in the book, and feels thoroughly researched and annotated. But the facts themselves are not enough to create a story, especially when so many of those facts are arranged independently of each other. The thorough and well-researched book may appeal to other historians and superfans of the HoJo chain, but A History of Howard Johnson’s: How a Massachusetts Soda Fountain Became an American Icon is far from a page-turner and casual history buffs may find it overburdened by repetitive facts rather than an enjoyable afternoon read.
