When I think of memories from my youth, I think of all the restaurants that I ate at as a kid.
Having the parents that I had, and being an only child, I would have to say that I was pretty blessed.
We would go on vacations every summer that would last for a couple of weeks. My dad was surgical in planning the trip out like a military operation.
We would stay in hotels most of the time, and drive from one end of the nation to the other. Every night, we would eat at a Howard Johnson’s.
That was the beauty of those places is that they were everywhere. You could drive to any part of the country and find one. So, every single night on these trips we would eat at HoJo’s.
We actually made it a game one year as to whether not we could eat the entire menu between the three of us on one trip.
When we told the waitstaff at the final place we stopped at, they were genuinely impressed. Those will be memories I will carry with me until the day I die.
However, with most things, time marches on and Howard Johnson’s eventually faded into obscurity. The last location in Michigan closed in the 1990s.
Moving into adulthood and finding other places to eat at, I began to regard HoJo’s as a fond childhood memory that I could never return to.
Unless I visited one town in New York.
Apparently, there was one lone zombie location that was still open. You see, if you open a franchise location and it wasn’t a corporate owned location, you could operate it for as long as you wanted.
So there was one left in Lake George, New York. From what I cold gather, stepping into it was just like stepping into a time capsule.
However, a myriad of problems forced the location to close recently. I have to admire the will of the owner and the people in that town to keep the place open for as long as possible.
We need places like this to remind us that there used to be a time when the world wasn’t so damn complicated.
