Howard Johnson Co. - 1980 dated Specimen Stock Certificate

Specimen Stock printed by Security-Columbian United States Banknote Corporation. Incorporated in 1961.

Howard Johnson's, or Howard Johnson by Wyndham, is an American chain of hotels and motels located primarily throughout the United States and Canada. It had also once been a chain of restaurants for over 90 years and its name was widely known for that alone. Founded by Howard Deering Johnson, it was the largest restaurant chain in the U.S. throughout the 1960s and 1970s, with more than 1,000 combined company-owned and franchised outlets. Howard Johnson hotels and motels are now part of Wyndham Hotels and Resorts. Howard Johnson's restaurants were franchised separately from the hotel brand beginning in 1986, but in the years that followed, severely dwindled in number and all but disappeared by the turn of the century. As of 2018, only one Howard Johnson's restaurant remains: in Lake George, New York. The food and beverage rights to the restaurant are currently owned by Wyndham Worldwide. The line of branded supermarket frozen foods, including ice cream, is no longer manufactured. As of 31 December 2018, it has 338 locations with 42,181 rooms. In 1925, Howard Deering Johnson borrowed $2,000 to buy and operate a small corner pharmacy in Wollaston, a neighborhood in Quincy, Massachusetts. Johnson was surprised to find it easy to pay back the money lent to him, after discovering his recently installed soda fountain had become the busiest part of his drugstore. Eager to ensure that his store would remain successful, Johnson decided to devise a new ice cream recipe. Some sources say the recipe was based on his mother's homemade ice creams and desserts, while others say that it was from a local German immigrant, who either sold or gave Johnson the ice cream recipe. The new recipe made the ice cream more flavorful due to increased butterfat content. Eventually Johnson created 28 flavors of ice cream. He is quoted as saying, "I thought I had every flavor in the world. That '28' (flavors of ice cream) became my trademark." Read more at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Johnson%27s

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