Host of the Highways

HOWARD JOHNSON

THE travel-weary U.S. motorist has been conditioned to think of food--and a chance to let the kids out of the car--when he spots a roof of bright orange tile along the highway. This "landmark for hungry Americans" is the trademark of Howard Dearing Johnson, a onetime cigar salesman who has become a part of Americana (teenagers call his places "Hojos") by catering to the common denominator of U.S. taste and haste. Johnson, 63, not only controls the world's largest restaurant chain (607), but has set up motor lodges in 24 states, now sells frozen and canned foods (clams, chicken croquettes) in supermarkets from Maine to Florida. This year 310 million customers will pour $200 million into Howard Johnson tills, $120 million of which will go either directly or through franchise returns to Howard Johnson's family-owned operation (including 296 restaurants).

Founder Johnson has turned the presidency over to his 28-year-old son, Howard Brennan ("Bud") Johnson, but he continues to run the show. He cruises' the highways in a chauffeured black Cadillac bearing the license plate HJ-28 (for the number of his ice-cream flavors) and a silvery replica of his soft-sell characters, Simple Simon and the Pieman, on the hood. He discovers half a dozen new restaurant and motel sites a year, claims that the success of his rapidly spreading motels is due to the fact that he builds them on sites that seem a natural place for restaurants.

UNHERALDED and often unrecognized, Johnson swoops down on his installations, taste-tests meals, listens to customers' chatter. If he finds a dirty rest room, an undersized portion or a lippy waitress, he may call up an executive in the middle of the night to dress him down. Johnson also occasionally samples Manhattan nightclubs with his fourth wife, but has sold his 60-ft. yacht, no longer collects paintings. "My hobby," he says, "is to talk and eat food." His favorite food is ice cream, which he stoutly (205 Ibs.) maintains "is not fattening." He eats at least a cone a day, keeps ten flavors in the freezers of his seven-room Manhattan penthouse and his $110,000 home in Milton, Mass.

Grammar-school-educated Howard Johnson has good reason to love ice cream. As a youth, he sold cigars for his father around Boston, gave it up to buy a drugstore in home town Wollaston, Mass., soon was $40,000 in debt. "What I really wanted," says Johnson, "was to have a product I could call by my own name." He settled on ice cream, made it attractive by doubling the butterfat content, using natural flavors, serving heaping cones. In 1929 he opened his first restaurant in Quincy, Mass., lost money --but continued to add new ice-cream flavors and open ice-cream stands. He won the public with billboard ads of his son and daughter holding big cones and saying: "We love our daddy's ice cream."

Unable to get banks to invest in restaurants during the Depression, Johnson hit upon the idea of granting franchises for restaurants, rigidly controlling their design and operation, and selling them ice cream and other food made in central commissaries. Today, 311 Howard Johnson restaurants are fully or partly owned by investors, including executives, widows, doctors, and such VIPs as Newshen Marguerite Higgins and North Carolina Governor Luther Hodges.

MOTORISTS flock to a Howard Johnson because they expect to find fairly uniform--if often bland--food, courteous--if not always swift--service, predictable and not too high prices, and clean rest rooms. Many customers are tugged in by their children, who make up 30% of Hojos' customers, are wooed with special bibs, bendable straws and their own menu.

To improve the flavor and attractiveness of the food processed at his 14 central commissaries, Johnson has hired Pierre Franey, former head chef of Manhattan's gourmet-minded Le Pavilion restaurant. Franey's job is to jazz the menu a little. With him in charge, Johnson hopes to get around the shortage of good cooks by making food in batches, freezing it in polyethylene bags holding a serving each. Each local restaurant simply quick-heats the serving on infra-red or radar ranges, hopefully keeping some of the original flavor. Johnson thinks that U.S. food tastes are becoming more sophisticated, but he knows better than to get too far out in front of his customers. "If you say Halibut Dante, the average American will never buy it, but if you say halibut with cream and tomato sauce, he'll not only buy it but say it's great." As for himself, Johnson prefers to eat at such expensive places as Manhattan's Pavilion and the Four Seasons, where the chefs cook to order.

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