In 1925 in the Wollaston neighborhood of Quincy, Massachusetts, Howard Deering Johnson opened a small soda fountain that would grow into the largest restaurant chain in America by the 1960s, pioneering the concept of standardized roadside dining for the automobile age. Johnson's initially gained fame for its rich ice cream with 28 flavors, later expanding into a full-menu family restaurant chain positioned along major highways. The chain's emphasis on predictable quality, recognizable branding, and roadside accessibility established the template for the highway restaurant culture that would culminate in the fast food dominance of postwar America.

Howard Johnson's roadside restaurants became landmarks in American road-trip literature and poetry, appearing in the work of Jack Kerouac and the Beat poets who documented the highway dining experience as a central feature of mid-century American life. The chain's orange-roofed restaurants, visible in John Dos Passos's prose and later in the poetry of Charles Bukowski, symbolized both the freedom and the homogenization of American mobility, themes that continue to resonate in contemporary poetry about travel, consumer culture, and the vanishing distinctiveness of American roadside landscapes.