Did You Know?
At its peak in the late 1950s, Howard Johnson's operated more restaurants than McDonald's and Burger King combined — with over 1,000 locations serving their famous 28 flavors of ice cream to road-tripping families across America.
Before GPS, before in-car DVD players, before anyone had ever heard of a smartphone, the American family road trip was the greatest adventure a kid could imagine. Every summer, millions of families loaded up the station wagon, tied the luggage to the roof rack, and pointed the hood ornament toward the horizon. What followed was equal parts chaos, boredom, wonder, and magic — and every single mile of it was unforgettable.
The Station Wagon: America's Family Chariot
No vehicle defined the mid-century American family quite like the station wagon. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was the minivan before the minivan existed — roomy enough for a family of six, a cooler, two suitcases, and a dog. The Ford Country Squire, the Chevrolet Nomad, the Buick Estate Wagon, and the Chrysler Town & Country were rolling symbols of postwar prosperity, their wood-paneled sides gleaming in the summer sun.
The "way back" — that rear-facing seat over the tailgate — was prime real estate for the kids. You sat backwards, watching the road disappear behind you, waving at truckers, making faces at the cars following behind. There were no seatbelts back there. No car seats. No safety regulations worth mentioning. And somehow, everyone survived and remembers it as the best seat in the house.
Dad drove. Mom navigated with a paper road map folded and refolded until it barely held together. Getting lost wasn't a failure — it was part of the adventure. You might discover a roadside watermelon stand, a curious historical marker, or a swimming hole that wasn't in any guidebook. The detour was sometimes the destination.
The Games That Kept Everyone Sane
With hundreds of miles of open highway ahead and no screens to stare at, kids in the 1960s invented their own entertainment — and they were surprisingly good at it. License plate bingo was a staple: who could spot a plate from the most states? A cross-country trip might yield forty or more, and Alaska or Hawaii was a trophy worth bragging about for years.
The alphabet game — finding each letter of the alphabet in order on road signs, billboards, and storefronts — could occupy an hour or more. "I Spy" never got old. "20 Questions" stretched across state lines. And then there was the classic: I'm going on a picnic and I'm bringing... each player adding an item in alphabetical order until someone forgot the chain and was eliminated.
When the games ran out, there were the Burma-Shave signs. From the 1920s through 1963, the Burma-Shave company posted sequential sets of small red signs along America's two-lane highways, each bearing one line of a humorous rhyme, with the final sign reading "Burma-Shave." At their peak, more than 7,000 sets of signs dotted the roadsides of 45 states. Spotting them was a genuine thrill:
Don't stick your elbow
Out so far
It might go home
In another car
Burma-Shave
They were silly, clever, and perfectly timed for a car moving at 35 miles per hour. When the Interstate Highway System made those old two-lane roads obsolete, the signs disappeared — and with them, one of the most beloved quirks of American road culture.
Howard Johnson's: The Orange Roof on the Horizon
If Burma-Shave signs were the entertainment, Howard Johnson's was the reward. That unmistakable orange roof with the aqua cupola was a beacon of civilization on an otherwise endless stretch of highway. Founded by Howard Dearing Johnson in Massachusetts in the 1920s, the chain grew to become the largest restaurant chain in America by the 1960s, with more than 1,000 locations lining the nation's turnpikes and highways.
What made HoJo's special wasn't just the food — though the fried clams, chicken pot pie, and grilled frankfurters were genuinely beloved. It was the 28 flavors of ice cream. In an era when most roadside stops offered vanilla, chocolate, and maybe strawberry, Howard Johnson's was a wonderland of choices: pistachio, peach, black raspberry, butter pecan, and more. For a kid who had been staring at cornfields for four hours, that ice cream counter was paradise.
The chain also operated motor lodges — a step above the average roadside motel — where families could pull in, clean up, and sleep in a room that felt reliably familiar whether you were in Ohio or Georgia. Howard Johnson's understood the family traveler before anyone else did, and for two decades, it was the undisputed host of the American highway.
The Road Itself: Eisenhower's Gift to America
The family road trip as we know it was made possible by one of the most ambitious infrastructure projects in human history: the Interstate Highway System. President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Federal Aid Highway Act in 1956, authorizing the construction of 41,000 miles of limited-access highways connecting every major city in the country. By the early 1960s, the interstates were transforming travel — cutting drive times dramatically and opening up destinations that had once seemed impossibly far away.
Before the interstates, a family driving from Chicago to Yellowstone might spend three days navigating two-lane state roads through small towns, stopping at every traffic light. The new highways made it a two-day trip. Suddenly, the whole country was within reach of a family with a week of vacation and a full tank of gas. Gas, by the way, cost around 30 cents a gallon — and a friendly attendant would pump it for you, check your oil, and clean your windshield without being asked.
"Are We There Yet?" — The Eternal Question
No road trip was complete without the backseat chorus: Are we there yet? How much longer? I'm hungry. She's touching me. I have to go to the bathroom. Dad's answer was always the same — "Not much further" — regardless of how many miles remained. Mom would pass back a sandwich wrapped in wax paper from the cooler. Someone would inevitably get carsick on a mountain road. The dog would stick his head out the window and refuse to come back in.
And yet, when the car finally pulled into the driveway of a rented cabin at the lake, or rolled through the gates of a national park, or stopped in front of Grandma's house after 600 miles — the exhaustion and the squabbling melted away. You had arrived. You had done it together. And the journey itself, every mile of it, was already becoming a story you would tell for the rest of your life.
The family road trip of the 1960s wasn't just a way to get from one place to another. It was an education in geography, patience, and the art of finding wonder in the ordinary. It was America at its most itself — wide open, full of possibility, and best experienced at 60 miles per hour with the windows down and the AM radio playing.
Did your family take road trips when you were growing up? What's your most memorable moment from the back seat? Tell us in the comments below.
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