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The Old Howard Johnsons Story from Ms. Weir

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  As usual, the chosen illustrations for HJ in the original link are completely inappropriate, showing a Times Square-area cocktail lounge and a 1960s-era gabled building used for Motor Lodge offices and only rarely for restaurants:   What Killed Howard Johnson’s? Jane Weir, American Renaissance, October 8, 2019 Former French President Jacques Chirac died a few days ago, and once again Howard Johnson’s was back in the news. In the summer of 1953, when young Jacques was taking a summer course at the Harvard Business School, he worked the counter at a local Howard Johnson’s, where he was a dab hand at making banana splits. Years later, he liked to say that the company founder, old Howard Deering Johnson, came by one day and commended the future president of France as “an excellent sodajerk.” The obituaries mangled the tale as they usually do when Howard Johnson’s turns up in the news. The Daily Beast had Chirac “scooping ice cream at a Howard Johnson’s
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Linda LeBoutillier's Obit in the Daily Local Yokel, February 2021

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I simply will not get Linda LeBoutillier out of my mind. Did we ever speak with each other? Surely she was over at my house, at my sister's birthday or something? Did not take good care of herself, from the looks of things. But wait, she was ill.  Obit mentions her last husband, but there were a couple of others. Pace her old pal Scott K.'s description, she did finish Bryn Mawr.  High school group photo. Far right, second row.   LINDA LEBOUTILLIER OBITUARY  Linda Anne LeBoutillier 69, of Downingtown, died Tuesday February 23, 2021. She was the wife of Francesco X. Moscia with whom she shared 26 years together. She was the daughter of the late Roberts and Zelinda Paolini LeBoutillier. She attended Henderson High School, graduating as valedictorian class of 1969. She graduated cum laude Bryn Mawr College class of 1972, and received a Masters of Arts English and Creative Writing from Southern New Hampshire University. Most of her career was working in sales, purchasing, m
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Bootleggers Beware

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These cowling-less planes will get you, soon o' late.
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They Finally Laid Me Off

International Megabank, formerly the Megabank Holdings Group, and before that Mega Turnblot Solomon Capital Markets Inc (I created the logos for all), finally got around to laying me off on January 17, 2008. This was a long time coming--say, seven or eight years. I would have got the axe earlier but I was being paid so little it probably didn't seem worth their while to make the effort. You know--like that 7-dollar-a-month online periodical that you signed up for five years ago and never read. Throughout my career there my contempt for the place was palpable. Yet I cherished the thought that I was inside a big, big whale that would never drown, because whales never drown (do they?). I should have caught the warning signs last summer when International Megabank's stock dropped from 60 to 50 to 40 in the course of six weeks. This was long before the shady-mortgage crisis had made its way to the front pages. Since then International Megabank's stock has gone to 20, and
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The Movie Was Better

Two years now, and I have been stalled on the novel I drafted 3-4 years ago, decided was unwieldly, and decided to tighten up. "Decided" here means I had a velleity to tighten it up into a swiftly moving current of irresistible reading pleasure. I did not do this, though I still fully intend to. The story was simple enough. At a young age, though not a particularly tender one (who's tougher than a 14-15 year-old, I ask you) I was dragooned into being a panelist on a proposed kiddie show in New York. The writer/producer of this kiddie show seemed to have impeccable credentials. He had been a writer for two well-known daytime television programs, one an NBC game show and the other an intellectual children's show syndicated out of Boston by WGBH-TV. Soon after I was invited to join the cast, it became obvious to me that our impresario was a confused pederast who had brought me aboard as a sort of "beard." All the other kids involved in the show were boys--boys
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How I Was Fired By Bill Buckley by Joseph Sobran [Exposure of Bill Buckley as a Closet Zionist and Fake Conservative] In October 1993 I was fired by National Review, the magazine I'd written for since 1972. It wasn't unexpected. Bill Buckley had threatened to fire me a couple of years earlier, and he writes in his book In Search of Anti-Semitism that he'd nearly fired me on yet another occasion, of which I'd had no inkling. So this time, when I wrote a column critical of him and disputing his account, it was a near certainty that the axe would fall. Since my firing, Bill has privately circulated a selection of our private correspondence -- some of it deeply affectionate on my part -- and my columns about him. I have only one real quarrel with it: it's not in chronological order. This has the effect of making me look like a hypocrite for professing affection privately while publicly attacking him. The critical fact is that my letters and columns praising him were wr
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Our Itinerary, April 2005

a good time was had by all
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