The last HoJo’s
I’ve been in the “music game” for 57 years, ever since my mom bought me my first bass guitar outfit when I was 16. As a musician playing six nights a week for many years, I logged hundreds of thousands of miles in VW Beetles, minivans, panel trucks, box trucks and even hearses.
Gigs in the sixties and seventies routinely ran from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. After loading out, we were back on the road around 3 a.m. We were hungry, but we avoided truck stops because we were – as the Five Man Electrical Band stated in their song, “Signs” – “long-haired freaky people.” Luckily, we were often on the Ohio or Pennsylvania turnpikes, and Howard Johnson’s had the restaurant franchise for service plazas. HoJo’s was freaky friendly: never were we abused verbally or refused service. So it was with a mixture of sadness and nostalgia that I read on Wednesday that the last HoJo’s has closed.
The restaurant, located in Lake George, N.Y., was the last remnant of a chain that at its peak in 1975 operated more than 1,000 restaurants and some 500 motor lodges in 42 states and Canada. Howard Johnson began the business in 1925 with a small pharmacy in Quincy, Mass. When the store’s soda fountain proved to be its most popular attraction, Johnson decided to make more flavors of ice cream, eventually arriving at the “28 Flavors” that – along with an orange roof – became one of the chain’s trademarks. Johnson rode out the Great Depression and in 1935 convinced a friend to open a second restaurant as a franchise, one of the first such efforts in America. The restaurants and motor lodges thrived until the late seventies, when competition from fast-food chains and economic conditions started to take a toll. By 2005, there were just eight HoJo’s left.
I honestly can’t recall the last time I ate at a HoJo’s. But I remember that in 1972, at 3 a.m. on the Ohio Turnpike on the way back from a gig, nothing hit the spot quite like a HoJo’s hot roast beef sandwich and mashed potatoes or a steak-and-eggs breakfast – medium rare, over easy, please. Were I to eat one of those roast beef concoctions at 3 a.m. today, I doubt I’d see the dawn.
My favorite memory of HoJo’s is sitting at the counter on the way back from Cleveland with my drummer buddy, Dave. A public relations graduate, Dave had the gift of gab and oozed charm. Few women could resist him. Except for one particular waitress at this particular HoJo’s.
Wherever we stopped to eat, Dave made it his crusade to talk the waitress into making a grilled peanut butter sandwich for him. Apparently there was some unwritten caveat against this sandwich because the peanut butter would ooze out onto the grill surface, and Dave took it as a personal challenge to have one made for him. Dave almost succeeded a few times, but never came close at this HoJo’s. Every night, the same waitress eyed him up and down, smirked and flat out refused to make the sandwich. Maybe Dave’s holey jeans, shoulder-length hair and red bandana headband offended her. Maybe it was just a game to see who could outlast the other. Dave never conceded defeat.
Could be Dave’s tastes have changed over 50 years, but I’m betting that if he had known about the Lake George HoJo’s closing its doors, he would have been the last customer at the counter, trying one final time to coax a grilled peanut butter sandwich out of a recalcitrant waitress.
And I like to think that, this time, she would have agreed.