A History of Howard Johnson's

How a Massachusetts Soda Fountain Became an American Icon

Anthony Mitchell Sammarco

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781614239161
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Wirtschaftsgeschichte

The iconic restaurant chain that defined Americana by introducing twenty-eight flavors of ice cream, "tendersweet" clam strips, grilled "frankforts, " and more. Popularly known as the "Father of the Franchise Industry, " Howard Johnson delivered good food and fair prices—a winning combination that brought appreciative customers back for more. The attractive white Colonial Revival restaurants, with eye-catching porcelain tile roofs, illuminated cupolas, and sea blue shutters, were described in Reader's Digest in 1949 as the epitome of "eating places that look like New England town meeting houses dressed up for Sunday." Learn how Johnson created an orange-roofed empire of ice cream stands and restaurants that stretched from Maine to Florida... then all the way across the country.

CHAPTER 1

The Johnson Family

In the early days, the company was a lovely place to work because it was a small outfit with closeness between the people. Everyone worked together.

—Jack Hipson

Howard Deering Johnson, the son of John Hayes Johnson and Olive Belle Wright Johnson, was born on February 2, 1897, in Dorchester, Massachusetts. The Johnson family lived at 4 Franklin Street in Port Norfolk, a neighborhood today referred to as Neponset. In 1899, the family moved to Quincy, Massachusetts, and lived at 309 Belmont Street in Wollaston (it has been listed as both 34 and 241 Belmont Street, but the house was renumbered when the street was extended toward Squantum Street). His father, John H. Johnson, was a cigar manufacturer for many years, first doing business under his own name and conducting a retail store at 69 High Street and, later, at 15 Court Square in Boston, in addition to manufacturing cigars. He was referred to as a “shrewd business trader.” He later served as the treasurer and general manager of the United Retailers Company, a cigar manufactory on Summer Street in downtown Boston.

It was said that the “senior Johnson believed in facing facts squarely with courage and conviction and reared his son…under rigid disciplinary methods. As a result Mr. Johnson’s strong determination and phenomenal memory were products of early training and discipline and were to prove invaluable in the years to come.” The Johnson family, like most aspiring middle-class families moving at the turn of the twentieth century to Quincy, set down roots in the community, and they joined the Wollaston Unitarian Church, a shingle-style church designed by noted Dorchester architect Edwin J. Lewis Jr. and built in 1888 at 155 Beale Street in Wollaston. In 1960, the congregation merged with the First Parish Church in Quincy, and the church was sold to St. Catherine’s Greek Orthodox Church. John H. Johnson also became a member of the Neighborhood Club, the Granite City Club, the Quincy lodge of Elks and the Community Club in Quincy.

Howard Johnson and his sisters attended the Wollaston Grammar School, then a small wood-frame stick-style school that was located on Beale Street between Prospect and Winthrop Avenues, but he left school in the eighth grade to begin working with his father. According to an article in Pageant, “When he was 12 years old he went to work in a Boston drugstore. For $5 a week he washed windows, scrubbed the floor and sold cigars. At 16 he became a salesman for his father, a cigar wholesaler.” The grit and determination manifested by the young Howard Johnson toward work was obvious when his father imported a large order of cigars from the American West Indies Trading Company in Puerto Rico on a prepaid basis to receive a steep discount. However, they arrived damaged and could not be sold or returned, as the company had subsequently folded. According to an article in the Saturday Evening Post:

When Howard was only three months away from grade-school graduation, a financial storm gathered over the Johnson family. A big shipment of Puerto Rican cigars turned out to be not only substandard but infested with worms. Johnson senior, having signed a sight draft for the shipment, had no legal recourse against the supplier. Hearing the news, Howard announced that he was quitting school and going to work in his father’s store. The elder Johnson roared disapproval, but Howard stood his ground and won a compromise. If he got his diploma he could work in the store that summer, and if, in the fall, he still didn’t want to continue his schooling, he could stay on. September came, Howard hadn’t budged, and his father grudgingly kept his part of the bargain.

Without Howard Johnson’s determination to leave school, in opposition to the wishes of his parents, the family would have been in a precarious position, and he and his father doubled their efforts to try and recoup their losses.

With the advent of war in Europe in 1914, the aggression of Germany provoked strong opposition from Allied countries; they thought that the war would be over in a matter of weeks, but it extended so much that thousands were killed in the trenches, and the lives of civilians were imperiled as well. On April 6, 1917, following the sinking of seven United States merchant ships by German submarines, President Woodrow Wilson called for war on Germany, which was formally declared by the United States Congress.

Like most of the young men of his generation, Howard Johnson entered World War I, serving in France in the American Expeditionary Force, known as the Twenty-sixth Infantry Division, before returning after the armistice to rejoin his father. This division was formed on July 18, 1917, and activated a month later at Camp Edwards, Massachusetts, consisting of units from the New England area. General Clarence Ransom Edwards, the division’s commander, chose the nickname of the “Yankee Division” to highlight the division’s two brigades comprising national guard units from the six states of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire.

Sent to Europe during World War I as part of the American Expeditionary Force, the division saw extensive combat in France. During World War I, it was said that “the division spent 210 days in combat, and suffered 1,587 killed in action and 12,077 wounded in action.” The division returned to the United States and was demobilized on May 3, 1919, at Camp Devens in Ayer, Massachusetts. Following World War I, Route 128, which is a major highway that encircles the city of Boston, was called the “Yankee Division Highway” in honor of the Twenty-sixth Infantry Division and its heroism during the war. Upon his return, Howard Johnson resumed his job working with his father, with “a determination to place a cigar in every male mouth in New England.”

In 1919, John Hayes Johnson began to market the “Yankee Division Brand” cigar that was named for the division in which his son had served in World War I. Volume 28, issue 12 of the National Association of Retail Druggists noted that “John H. Johnson, a former president of the T.M.A. of the Massachusetts Pharmacists Association has placed on the market a new cigar which is becoming popular.” Father and son continued to sell cigars, during a new age when cigarettes were becoming more prevalent in society, to an aging male customer base. One thing Howard credited his father for was his mnemonic skill, which is a memory system developed by the ancient Greek scholars and orators to help remember long passages and speeches. Howard Johnson said, “When I was a young punk out on the road selling cigars, my father asked me if I had addressed the customers by name. I told him no, that I just couldn’t remember 50 to 100 names. He told me to train my memory by will power. So I made a business of training it, just like he said.” However, no amount of customer-relations skills could stem the flow, as the cigar business continued to lose money and would never regain its once profitable base.

When John Hayes Johnson died of pneumonia in 1921, he left his family heavily in debt, with $30,000 owed by the company. Howard Johnson, who had been successfully selling cigars on commission for the company since his return from the war, continued alone after his father’s death for three years until he realized that it was an unsustainable business. He signed a personal note assuming the debt. Realizing that he needed to provide for his widowed mother and unmarried sisters, he began “working at a small patent medicine store with a soda fountain and newsstand that was losing money in Quincy, Massachusetts…Johnson borrowed $500 to purchase the store from the [late] proprietor’s son and began his journey to gain access to the prosperity that was being generated by many entrepreneurs in America.”

On September 3, 1925, he open the newly purchased store at 89 Beale Street, the former Walker-Barlow drugstore in Wollaston, where he had a marble soda fountain and sold newspapers, cigars and three flavors of ice cream. Within a short time, Howard Johnson “soon had the [corner store] bringing in $30,000 a year, with 75 boys delivering papers for him.” Conveniently located near the Wollaston Depot that was on the Granite Branch of the Old Colony Railroad, it had commuters traveling daily to Boston for business, shopping and pleasure throughout the day, so the store was well placed for business.

Here follows a brief four-generation Johnson-Wright family genealogy:

John and Charlotte Johnson were born and died in Sweden and were the paternal great-grandparents of Howard Deering Johnson.

John Matheson (1785–1868) was born in Lochalsh, Scotland, and died in Boston, Massachusetts. Flora McQueen Matheson (circa 1793–1874) was born in Scotland and died in Boston, Massachusetts. They were the maternal great-grandparents of Howard Deering Johnson.

Joseph Johnson (1827–1895) was born in Stockholm, Sweden. He was married in 1858 to Catherine McQueen Matheson (died in 1911), who was born in Arichat, Richmond, Nova Scotia, Canada. He worked as a mariner and sea captain. He was naturalized as a United States citizen in 1854 in Boston, Massachusetts, indicating an immigration year of about 1848.

Charles Wright (circa 1830–1870) was born in Pennsylvania and is presumed to have died in Butte, Montana. In 1856, he married Anna Wright (born circa 1834). He worked as a railroad agent in Montana for several years. Following her husband’s death, Anna worked for a time as a keeper of a boardinghouse in Butte, Montana, and possibly remarried, as her daughters were said to be raised in Salt Lake City, Utah. Their daughter Olive Belle Wright had come east to study at the New England Conservatory of Music.

John Hayes Johnson (1865–1921) married Olive Belle Wright (1867–1939).

Howard Deering Johnson (1897–1972) was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts, to John Hayes and Olive Belle Wright Johnson and died in Milton, Massachusetts.

Howard Deering Johnson married four times, and his wives were as follows:

Pauline H. Long, married in 1921. She divorced Johnson in 1927 for desertion.

Dorothy E. Smith of Quincy, married in 1929, died in 1930. She was the daughter of Robert D. and Jessie A. Wood Smith, mother of Dorothy Verne Johnson.

Bernice Louise Johnson of Methuen, married in New York City in 1931, divorced in 1938, mother of Howard Brennan Johnson. She later married Reginald J. White of Providence, Rhode Island, president of J.J. White & Company.

Marjorie C. Smith Burgin, married in 1949. She was divorced from Thomas Skudder Burgin, a former mayor of Quincy, Massachusetts

John Hayes and Olive Belle Wright Johnson also had four daughters:

Barbara Johnson married Dr. David D. Montgomery, and their daughter was Peggy Montgomery.

Margaret Johnson married Dr. L. Starrett White, and their children were Sally White and Nancy White.

Katherine M. Johnson

Olive K. Johnson

Howard Deering Johnson had done well enough in business that in 1929 he was able to purchase 114 Summit Avenue in Wollaston, a neighborhood of Quincy, Massachusetts. The street surmounted the crest of Forbes Hill, which had been developed in the late nineteenth century by the Wollaston Land Associates. The house was designed by noted architect John F. Kelly and built by Pearson & Anderson, well-known local builders. The house was designed as a Colonial Revival three-bay house, with a large dormer in the attic, and it is set so high on a terrace at the crest of the hill that the panoramic views of North Quincy, Boston and the harbor are superb. This house would be the Johnson home for the next decade, after which Johnson’s phenomenal success motivated him to seek a larger and even more prestigious property.

Howard Deering Johnson (1897–1972) was photographed in 1949, nattily attired in a suit complete with a “HDJ” gold tie clip.

By the late 1930s, Johnson was doing very well in business thanks to the numerous restaurant and ice cream stand franchises, and he was looking to move to a more affluent and socially prominent town. He gravitated toward Milton, Massachusetts, a town adjacent to Quincy but which retained much of its bucolic rural aspect well into the mid-twentieth century. In his book Who Killed Society?, Cleveland Amory (1917–1998)—an acerbic wit whose once wealthy family lived on Brush Hill Road in Milton in their former summer house after having sold their Back Bay townhouse following the Great Depression—described in detail the negotiations concerning the purchase of a house between Howard Deering Johnson and Norwood Penrose Hallowell at their large Brush Hill Road mansion.

The Hallowell family hailed from West Medford, Massachusetts, where their estate, Noddebo, had been home to the family since the mid-nineteenth century. In the early twentieth century, three sons of Norwood Penrose and Sarah Haydock Hallowell moved to homes on Brush Hill Road in Milton, Massachusetts, and created, in essence, a Hallowell enclave on the prestigious semirural road. Robert Haydock Hallowell lived at 1336 Brush Hill Road, John White Hallowell lived at 1425 Brush Hill Road and N. Penrose Hallowell lived at 1372 Brush Hill Road, which was in 1939 on the real estate market and being advertised by Marsh & Rice of Dedham, as he and his family had decided to move to Park Avenue in New York City.

In what was considered by Cleveland Amory to be a “textbook story of the warfare of celebrity and Aristocracy,” the tale concerns the sale of their Brush Hill Road home by Mr. and Mrs. N. Penrose Hallowell. One more in a long line of old Boston family houses to see the change to a new day, the house was sold, after some deliberation, to none other than Mr. Howard Johnson, of roadside restaurant fame. Mrs. Hallowell, a gentle person, thought it would be nice for the Hallowells to have some personal contact with the Johnsons in the course of the signing of the papers. At first, not knowing quite how to do this—she could not, of course, invite the Johnsons to a meal since she didn’t know them—she decided at length to have them to tea.

Mr. Johnson arrived, bringing with him young Master Howard Johnson Jr., at that time a young gentleman not quite ten. Everything went extremely smoothly. Mrs. Hallowell poured the tea from her customary position on the sofa. Mr. Hallowell sat in his old chair by the fire. The Johnsons, father and son, sat across the room, and the papers were signed. The tea, English muffins and S.S. Pierce marmalade were satisfactorily consumed. Suddenly, however, a wave of sentiment overcame Mrs. Hallowell. She looked around the room at everything she loved—the portraits, the tapestries and the books—and then she looked back at Mr. Johnson. “Oh, Mr. Johnson,” she sighed, “I do hope that you and Mrs. Johnson will be as happy here in all the years to come as Mr. Hallowell and I have been in all the years that have passed.”

The Hallowell-Johnson House was located at 1372 Brush Hill Road in Milton, Massachusetts. The stately Georgian Revival house was purchased by Howard Johnson in 1939 and was described as having twenty rooms, with seven master bedrooms and five baths. The mansion was demolished in 2004 for Fuller Village at Brush Hill, a senior living community. Courtesy of Harold I. Pratt Jr.

There was a silence. Furthermore, it was soon apparent that it was a silence that was not going to be broken by Mr. Howard Johnson Sr. Finally, however, it was broken by Master Howard Johnson Jr. “There isn’t any Mrs. Johnson,” he said, obviously trying to be helpful. “One’s dead and one’s divorced, but Daddy’s got a girl friend.” He had said the latter in such a hopeful spirit that everyone was by now stunned. And there was ...