Here's a casual question that anyone may answer, or not. It was inspired by a couple of posts seen on Facebook which triggered some memories.
It's been a couple of decades since any were around, but did you like Howard Johnson's restaurants, or maybe just the ice cream or something else about them, back when they were everywhere? As a family, we ate at them fairly frequently - in Columbus, on the Pennsylvania Turnpike and other such highways, in Fort Lauderdale, and finally in Cleveland and Cincinnati.
When I moved to L.A., I was into everything else and didn't go to one for years...not even the one that was at Hollywood and Vine for most of the years I lived there - which is surprising, but I wasn't into it then. But while in Florida for a short time in 1980, there was one near where friends and I were staying, and we sort of rediscovered the goodness of certain menu items and the desserts. I got hooked, and when I returned to L.A. I stopped in now and then at one near the 405 and Marina Freeway interchange, behind the Fox Hills Mall, and that was a nice one where I'd sometimes eat or just pick up a pint of the ice cream.
Moving east, I again rediscovered them by coming across a few of the older ones in Connecticut, and the Times Square one. We visited that one a couple of times when it was about to close. That was 20 years ago. I now look back on them in much the same way I view the great L.A. coffee shops and other such places everywhere, as the kind of wonderfully ubiquitous thing that has largely disappeared from the landscape.
