TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/050189/05018900.017

Text File | 1990-09-18 | 5.9 KB | 103 lines

ESSAY, Page 82

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.