Once upon a time, those orange roofs were everywhere
Anastasia E. Lennon| Patriot Ledger Staff
In the early '60s, fourth grader Patricia Hurley was excited about having her birthday party at her family's new home in Quincy. But, on the day of her party, her mother decided to cancel it because her little brother was still recovering from double pneumonia.
Instead, she ended up going to Howard Johnson's on the Southeast Expressway with her dad, her other brother, and a few friends for a mini-party that she's never forgotten.
"I vividly recall what I had for dessert, and it was this piece of warm chocolate pound cake, drizzled with chocolate syrup with vanilla ice cream and whipped cream. I savored every bite, and to me it was heaven," she said.
Hurley, now 66, lives in Westerly, Rhode Island, and that birthday party at Howard Johnson's is still one of her happiest memories.
For more than 90 years, the iconic orange-thatched roof of a Howard Johnson's restaurant was part of the landscape near and far. The last restaurant closed in Bangor, Maine, in 2016, but the happy memories of creamy ice cream, first dates, birthday parties, summer jobs and fried clam strips still endure.
The popular restaurant chain started in 1925 when Howard D. Johnson, in debt because of his father's business, opened a newspaper and ice cream shop on Beale Street in Quincy. Within a few years, there were at least a dozen Howard Johnson's ice cream stands in Massachusetts, said Alexandra Elliott, curator at the Quincy Historical Society.
Howard Johnson's soon became known for its 28 flavors of thick ice cream that had double the butterfat of most competitors' products.
"During the post-war boom, Johnson began expanding rapidly, so by the company's peak in the 1960s, there would have been dozens of restaurants on the South Shore alone," Elliott said. "The highways were his niche, and so he chose his locations to take advantage of Cape traffic."
At its height, the Quincy-based chain had nearly 1,000 locations throughout the United States. In 1953, the business opened its first motor lodge, in Savannah, Georgia, and in 1971, it crossed the northern border and opened a restaurant and motor lodge in Toronto.
Chris Spencer, of North Quincy, said Howard Johnson's is the reason he's alive. His mother, a bookkeeper, met his father, a manager, when she visited his location. Spencer said his father wrote love notes to her on the back of paper place mats.
Growing up, Spencer visited nearly every Howard Johnson's restaurant in New England with his dad, who had a "side gig" as a security shopper. In 1974, when Spencer was a teenager, he got a summer job at the Howard Johnson's factory in Wollaston.
The factory pumped out meals, confections and candy for Howard Johnson's restaurants throughout the United States. Working in the cooler, Spencer packaged food headed to restaurants in Baltimore, Dallas and Buffalo. Sometimes, he stole a few treats before sealing the boxes.
"A few boxes going to Dallas were short a few candy bars," he said, laughing. He got even more chocolate thanks to the shenanigans of co-workers.
"Hershey used to send these huge pallets of giant chocolate bars, 50 to 60 pounds, but the forklift drivers would always bump into them to break corners of the chocolate bars off," he said.
Spencer said he'd always grab a couple of those chunks off the ground too.
"I loved that job. I used to love watching them make the saltwater taffy and seeing the thin mints go down the chute to the first floor," he said.
A few years after Spencer's stint in the factory, Howard Johnson's started to decline. A New York Times reporter wrote that sales in the spring of 1979 had been as soft as a cone of ice cream in August.
The proliferation of other fast-food restaurants and changes in American tastes contributed to the beginning of the end for the chain, and by the 1980s, the company had been sold twice.
The Wollaston factory closed in 1989 and sat empty for many years before a four-alarm fire severely damaged it in 1996. Today, the renovated building is part of Eastern Nazarene College's campus.
All these years later, the nostalgia is strong, as memorabilia listed on eBay illustrates. It varies from a motel room key from Illinois for $13 to an unopened, Howard Johnson's-branded sugar packet for $8 to a new, re-created neon Simple Simon and the Pieman sign for $8,500.
Even though he worked at Howard Johnson's for only a few months of his 64-year life, Spencer has his own collection of memorabilia. Hanging in his Marina Bay condo are the original mirrors from the Brighton location he worked at one summer. He asked to take them home when he saw his manager was going to throw them out. On them are painted all the ice cream flavors.
In his kitchen are customized stools made to resemble the old counter chairs and, more recently, he spent more than $2,500 on two original weather vanes.
The orange roofs to which those vanes were attached are gone, but all the memories formed under them are still alive.
Material from The Patriot Ledger archives was used in this report.
HoJo's highlights
•Howard D. Johnson was 28 years old when he took over his father's shop in Wollaston.
•French fashion house Christian Dior designed the waitress uniforms in the 1960s.
•By the 1960s, Howard Johnson's was the biggest restaurant chain in the world, with hundreds of locations across the continental United States.
•During the civil rights era, demonstrators protested outside South Shore locations demanding an end to segregation at Howard Johnson's restaurants in the South.
•In 1979, the franchise was sold to a British group, Imperial Group Ltd., for $630 million.
•The last Howard Johnson's restaurant standing was in Bangor, Maine. It closed in 2016.
(Sources: Quincy Historical Society, Patriot Ledger archives)
