My grandmother had the same dining room chairs for as long as I can remember. Wrought iron looped backs twisted down the middle with wrought iron legs. The seats were just plywood but she made cushions for each one with little ties to keep them in place. They were soda fountain chairs from Aldo’s, the store/soda fountain/post office my great grandparents ran. I remember being very little and climbing up to sit at the soda fountain where you could still get an egg cream but that was five hours southwest in the Catskills and the soda fountain really got started just down the street.Sunday I met Anthony Sammarco, author of “A History of Howard Johnson’s; How a Massachusetts Soda Fountain Became an American Icon.”I don’t think I’ve ever eaten at a Howard Johnson’s. I feel like I must have at one point in my life. I certainly know what they look like, iconic orange roof, the turquoise shutters. I get the orange roof and that it would be recognizable from the highway, but turquoise shutters – really? And they used to say my taste in fashion was questionable.It seems crazy that I wouldn’t have eaten at one but we didn’t travel a lot when I was young. We went back and forth to family in New York but we were a back roads and a picnic kind of travelers – no Howard Johnson’s or even McDonald’s on the Molly Stark trail back then.Howard was a fascinating guy though. According to Anthony he paved the way for McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Denny’s and the like. He was the very first guy to franchise and he did it practically on the eve of the Great Depression.He actually got people to pay him $2,000 (initially) to put his name on the restaurant and use his how-to bible so every dining experience would be exactly the same whether you ordered your roast turkey or Ipswich clams off Route 66 in the Southwest or Route 93 in the Northeast. And he only charged $1 a plate, well at first – I’m sure inflation eventually hit Hojo’s just like it did everything else.When you put it that way it sounds like hustle, but it’s really quite remarkable because it worked.But before his Simple Simon and the Pieman logo became a national phenomenon, he had to open his first restaurant and that was, relatively speaking, just down the street in Wollaston Square, just outside Quincy. It was there he discovered the magic of the soda fountain using a recipe for ice cream that came right out of Lynn.William Hallbauer, a German immigrant who lived in Lynn, had an ice cream shop in Nahant and sold what was considered by everyone, it seems, the best ice cream around. He had figured out how to make ice cream freeze without those annoying ice crystals so it was smooth and creamy. It should have been smooth and creamy, his trick was using 21 percent butterfat. Yikes, how could it not be good! Howard was so sure he had a winner he forked over $300, which in 1925 was a handsome chunk of change, for the recipe and opened up a string of ice cream shops of his own, including ones in Lynnfield and Revere Beach.Eventually he opened the first of nearly 1,000 restaurants that would bear his name and launched his famous 28 flavors. And just in case you’re wondering: banana, black raspberry, burgundy cherry, butter pecan, buttercrunch, butterscotch, caramel fudge, chocolate, chocolate chip, coconut, coffee, frozen pudding, fruit salad, fudge ripple, lemon stick, macaroon, maple walnut, mocha chip, orange-pineapple, peach, peanut brittle, pecan brittle, peppermint stick, pineapple, pistachio, strawberry, strawberry ripple and vanilla.Baskin Robbins probably thought it was pretty cool with its 31 flavors but they were nearly 30 years down the road in the making and like everyone else had Howard to thank for paving the way to franchiseville.Howard also gave the world clam strips (because apparently folks outside New England could not stomach the bellies), the children’s menu and the novel idea of a family friendly restaurant.Not bad for a guy with an eighth grade education and a knack for knowing wh