You know the orange roofs.
We all do.
That’s because the Howard Johnson motel caps, with their boxy spires and jutting motor patios, are part of America.
They’re as integral to the national landscape as those golden arches and the dusty dark blue of America’s favorite jeans.
They are the loud, brassy reminder that in the U.S. of A there was once a time when a person could establish a national tradition with little more than an outrageous idea and a heaping spoonful of gumption.
And for more than 50 years — through a world war and a cold war and a war on drugs — that orange roof meant more.
It meant 28 flavors of ice cream.
And mounds of fried clams.
But this isn’t the America it once was. And Howard Johnson motor lodges are changing with the times.
Say so long to the orange roofs.
Say hello to a sleek corporate logo.
HoJo restaurants and hotels aren’t owned by the Johnson family anymore. They haven’t been since 1980, when Howard B. Johnson (son of the original Howard) sold the company to a British corporation. Since then, HoJo hotels, and there are 600 of them, have been owned by several holding companies.
Currently, the lodging franchise is owned by Hospitality Franchise Systems Inc.
But that’s just the hotels.
No more orange roofs for them.
The new logo is blue, with a thin orange stripe underlining the name Howard Johnson. Grammar buffs will notice that the name is no longer possessive.
The company is instituting a tiering system for its properties. What used to be motor lodges will be called inns. The company’s fancier properties will be called plaza hotels.
“Consumers wanted us to improve our image and reawaken this Rip Van Winkle of the hospitality industry,” said Eric Pfeffer, the chief operating officer of the Howard Johnson hotel chain. “Howard Johnson is keeping up with the times.”
Don’t talk about keeping up with the times to Blair Mahoney, the owner of the orange-shingled HoJo restaurant in Chester, Pa.
He’s not shedding his orange roof.
See, the very few HoJo restaurants left in America are no longer owned by the same folks who own the hotels. They are owned by a different franchise company.
So what happens to the orange roofs of the hotels has no bearing on what happens to the restaurant shingles.
And Mahoney says he’ll be damned if he’s going to give up his orange roof. Or the blast-from-the-past weather vane that shows the pie man offering a child a yummy treat.
“It’s a piece of Americana, and there isn’t much of that around much anymore,” Mahoney said.
He’s certain that the roof is as much a reason that his customers keep coming back as is his devotion to the old-fashioned Wednesday and Friday fried-fish-and-clam night.
“Yep, you can still get all you can eat here for $4.99,” Mahoney said, with a chuckle. “It’s a tradition I intend to keep.”
One couple in their late 40s were sitting in the HoJo last week drinking chocolate milk shakes.
“They’re changing the symbol?” the woman asked when she was told of the disappearance of the hotels’ orange roofs. “How could they do that?”
Her partner spoke up.
“Things change with the generations,” he said, throwing up his hands.
“They are thinking of the customers of the future. Not us.”
They didn’t give their names.
“Boy, is nothing sacred?” asked journalist David Halberstam, who wrote a book called “The Fifties,” when he was told that the orange hotel roofs are on their way out.
He said HoJos were the granddaddies of franchising.
They started out in 1925 in Quincy, Mass., where Howard D. Johnson opened a little ice cream fountain. By 1935, Johnson realized that the new-fangled invention called the automobile was going to change everything.
He decided to open ice cream parlors along the roads that families traveled. Johnson gobbled up the rights to put his restaurants along the Pennsylvania Turnpike in 1940, and in 1954 he started adding motels to his properties.
“To my knowledge, it was the first recognizable chain,” Halberstam said. The Holiday Inn motel chain developed right around the same time, he added.
“That orange roof has a particularly powerful resonance generationally,” Halberstam said.
He said the loss of the orange roofs would signify an end of an era.
“But,” he added, “who’s to argue with some 29-year-old with a master’s degree from Harvard Business School who has done a study of anonymous fellow Americans? Who can argue with modernity?”
Halberstam grew quiet over the telephone for one moment and then said:
“Me, I’d leave it orange.”
