Reflections on 28 Flavors

By Otto Friedrich

It is strange how often business enterprises that seem a basic part of American life just fade away, and how soon one forgets that they were ever there. Yes, like Packards and Studebakers (or convertibles with rumble seats). Or getting one's daughter shoes at Best's, until she grew old enough for cashmeres from Peck & Peck . . . Or trying to recall the Burma-Shave signs that used to enliven those long trips before most people ever took airplanes. TO STEAL/ A KISS/ HE HAD THE KNACK/ BUT LACKED THE CHEEK/ TO GET ONE BACK/ BURMA-SHAVE.

Imagine, if you can, living someday in an America where nobody under the age of 40 can remember names like Pepsi-Cola or Ford or Howard Johnson's. Impossible! So on a drive from New York City to Washington not long ago, it seemed the most natural thing in the world to stop for lunch at the next Howard Johnson's. A hot dog and some French fries and a dish of maple-walnut ice cream. That was what one had been doing on the superhighway to Washington ever since it was built back at the dawn of the Republic. But when that familiar orange roof loomed up out of the rain near Wilmington, Del., it turned out that the orange roof covered only a Howard Johnson motor lodge and the adjoining restaurant called itself Bob's Big Boy. It would be uncharitable to criticize a Big Boy restaurant for not being a Howard Johnson's, but when one has been looking forward to a Howard Johnson's hot dog and a dish of Howard Johnson's maple walnut, anything that Big Boy has to offer is, well, not the same. And if one inquires politely how far down the superhighway one must go to find the next Howard Johnson's restaurant, the polite answer is that there aren't any there anymore.

And so another piece of one's childhood is consigned to oblivion. The reason those hot dogs linger so deliciously in the memory is not the hot dogs themselves, actually, but the toasted buns they came in, and the yellow pseudobuttery glop that reduced the toasted buns to toasted mush, and the elongated white cardboard containers that held the toasted mush so that one could make a game of trying to gnaw on the hot-dog mush without getting one's hands and face entirely covered with the dripping glop -- a game that, to one's parents' despair, one invariably lost.

But that was just an appetizer to the prospect of a Howard Johnson's ice- cream cone containing one of the famous 28 flavors. Chocolate or coffee (or maple walnut) might be good enough for parents, but if one was an inquisitive and competitive boy with a mania for collecting things, the obvious challenge was to eat all 28 flavors. This was not so easy as it might seem, for not all Howard Johnson's restaurants carried all 28 flavors. Nor was it as pleasant as it might seem either, for there were flavors like ginger that had very little reason to exist except to be one of the magical 28. But there were always the marvelous cones, for Howard Johnson's cones were just about the only ones that stayed crisp and tasty no matter how long one spent lapping the ice cream down into the bottom, trying to make it last longer than anyone else's cone. Mon Dieu, tell Marcel Proust that madeleines are not made anymore.

But is it really possible that Howard Johnson's simply disappeared, and without anyone saying farewell? No, the reality is more interesting. From the day in 1928 when Howard D. Johnson opened his first roadside stand, in Wollaston, Mass., to sell hot dogs and a rich chocolate ice cream of his own formulation (16% butterfat), the next half-century was largely a story of growth and profit. But that success inevitably brought increased competition from all kinds of newcomers, like McDonald's, and the gas shortages of the 1970s hurt all roadside businesses considerably. There were also some who claimed that baby-boom customers preferred zippy novelties like, say, tacoburgers. So when Howard B. Johnson, son of the founder, got an offer in 1979 from a British conglomerate named Imperial Group Ltd., he was happy to sell an empire that included 1,040 restaurants (about a quarter of them , locally franchised,) plus 520 motor lodges for a tidy $630 million. But the deal did not bring lasting happiness to the Britons, and in 1985 they sold Howard Johnson's to the Marriott Corp. Marriott, which owns Bob's Big Boys, kept only about 400-odd company-owned Howard Johnson's restaurants, which magically began turning into Bob's Big Boy restaurants, and sold off the bulk of the empire to Prime Motor Inns Inc.

Marriott has little interest in Howard Johnson's traditions. It prefers its own traditions, as exemplified by the name of co-founder Alice Marriott. Last June it began giving Bob's Big Boys in San Diego the new name of Allie's. "The intention, long term," says a company spokesman, "is to convert all Bob's Big Boys and Howard Johnson's to Allie's." While this was going on, however, some of the old-timers who had obtained their Howard Johnson's franchises from old Howard Johnson himself were fretting about being sold from conglomerate to conglomerate. So they hired onetime Attorney General Griffin Bell to lead them into battle.

This never came to court but came instead to an agreement in which Marriott and Prime each put up $500,000 to enable as many as 90 old-timers to incorporate in 1986 as Franchise Associates, Inc. A year later, 54 of the licensees actually bought stock in the new company. FAI now includes 137 individually owned Howard Johnson's restaurants in 26 states, a far cry from the 1,040 of yesteryear, but still . . . And although they don't all have all 28 flavors of Howard Johnson's ice cream, an FAI spokesman admits, they all have at least 18. Which indicates that if we can't preserve all the riches of the past in this forgetful and conglomerate age, we can, with a certain determination and a certain effort, preserve at least some of them. Burma- Shave.