Friday Night Video

I bought some old postcards when I visited Jake last weekend. He took me to a used bookstore that had a bunch of them in the back. It’s hard to say what attracts me to certain cards. Sometimes it can be something as simple as the message on the back, or the look of the handwriting. Usually, there’s some sentimental attachment.

One of the cards I bought was of an old Howard Johnson’s restaurant. I would say that this particular restaurant is the one that used to be in the town I live in, but I kind of doubt it. It almost doesn’t matter though, they all looked pretty much the same.

I have fond memories of these restaurants. It’s not like we ate at them a lot. Far from it. But they represented landmarks along the way of several of our family trips.

Once upon a time, they were the only place you could stop to eat while traveling on many turnpikes and highways. This was back in the day when families on long trips would actually stop and sit down to eat. This would give the kids a break from annoying each other in the station wagon, by allowing them to get out of the car and stretch their legs, before annoying each other while sitting in vinyl covered booths.

One of the the things I liked best was seeing these restaurants at night. They often had a bright neon sign out front, many of which had the Pie man, leaning over, offering a pie to a boy whom I assumed to be Simple Simon. The boy’s dog sat by his side and drooled. These signs were pretty huge and I remember the neon being especially bright.

Here’s a photo I scarfed from the Internet. Enjoy it now because if I get threatened with a lawsuit, it’s coming down.

There was one Howard Johnson’s on Cape Cod that had a sign like this and it was animated, which made it even more impressive. Along with the neon sign, this particular restaurant had a cupola on the roof which had glass windows and was lit up at night with a bright white light. It always reminded me of a light house.

These bright lights always added to the magical feeling I had when I was a kid and we would be riding around on our vacation at nighttime.

I had an aunt who worked at a Howard Johnson’s. She was a hostess- which always seemed like a perfect fit to me in a particular kind of way that’s too hard to explain here. This was the same aunt that I wrote about somewhere in here. Once in a while, she would give us a big block of frozen Howard Johnson’s hot dogs, which we kept in the tall freezer in the back entry niche. To this day, I think those were the best tasting hot dogs I’ve ever had.

Here’s a video- more of a slide show really, that someone named Alan put together.