HoJo and Me

"Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers."

- Aldous Huxley

Lately I've found a Facebook page for those who fondly remember Howard Johnson's.

Or, I guess it found me. I must've "liked" a photo on one of the nostalgia pages, some image of a menu or a motor lodge somewhere I remembered from long ago.

It was part of our identity as a family you know, moving constantly from one town to another as Dad worked his way up the corporate ladder. We'd be driving along the interstate or along some highway soon to be supplanted by the interstate, and at the top of the offramp or at the stoplight there we'd see the familiar orange roof and pale blue steeple.

This one happened to be back home in Panama City, out on the west end of Highway 98 near the port. It was still there when I came to interview for a clerkship in 1995, and I splurged to spend a night under familiar sheets, surrounded by familiar smells, with the bay right outside my window.

Of course, that was the motor lodge. Dad was a restaurant guy.

Yep, that's more like it.

They occupied two completely different career tracks within the company, and although he had plenty of friends on the other side I was never aware of any corporate cross-pollination with the hoteliers.

As I've mentioned before, Dad was hired during what he called the "Eisenhower Recession", having been laid off from the steel mill, as a management trainee. For a kid from Yalobusha County, Mississippi with a high school diploma, that meant starting at the dish rack running the Hobart. By the time he was in his 30s, he ran the largest division of what was then the largest restaurant chain in the United States. Quite a story.

And we were very much a Howard Johnson's family. I reckon it was a lot like being in the military--we moved so much we never really got to know our neighbors, and at Thanksgiving and Christmas our house would be filled with cigarette smoke and this island of misfit toys all associated with the company. As with restaurant folks forever, the assembly included gays and lesbians, bad alcoholics, at least one cross-dresser (or so it was rumored, as if I knew what that meant at 7 or 8), mostly funny and smart and outgoing because that sort of goes with the job.

I haven't thought of it until recently, but we were really proud to be associated with HoJo, this company that had brought so much success to our incredibly ambitious father and prosperity to our household. I also happened to love the food---I think by the time I was twelve I'd eaten more fried clams than most people would eat in two lifetimes--I couldn't get enough of them, even though I occasionally broke habit and feasted on their massive hamburger called the Big Jumbo, and at birthdays would bury myself to the elbows in one of their sundaes served in a heavy stemmed bowl the size of a human skull.

All that gone now, killed by a combination of the shift to fast food and drive thru windows and the venture capitalists who bought the company, gutted it, and fired all the executives, including poor Dad. He recovered (what else can one do?), helped grow Sbarro's Pizza during its explosive expansion in the late 80s and early 90s, but always was most proud of his time as Mr. Johnson's prodigy, the guy who could look at traffic count off of some exit on the Indian Nations Turnpike, run the numbers in his head, and rattle off gross sales and what the company should pay for the long-term lease on the dirt where a year or so later another orange roof would appear. Sometimes he took us to the stores before they opened and let us help unpack--I remember spending one Sunday afternoon doing that in Cartersville, Georgia when I was about ten.

There I am digressing again. It was such an important part of our identity as a family. And for all of Dad's tragic shortcomings, I remember being so proud of him even as I came to realize his ambitions and mine were radically different, and we never could quite understand each other. Isn't that always the way?

Feeling the urge to call my sister today, the only one alive who remembers those days when we Dickeys from nowhere were HoJo nomads.

On to work.