I really enjoyed Jacques Pepin's autobiography and was surprised to discover that working at Howard Johnson's was a major, formative experience in his life.
Pépin heaps praise on Howard Johnson (the person), and has no kind words for his son, whom he blames for the restaurant’s decline. Mainly lack of adaptability as fast food hit the country, but then also drastically cutting quality in ingredients.
Pépin claims that he would take home frozen restaurant food (as it was shipped to the restaurants), reheat it, and serve it to his NYC “foodie” friends, including renowned French chefs, without them being able to tell. I actually believe this since most of the pre-prepared food were stocks and sauce bases which freeze just fine, and also take the most time to prepare.
Aside: Holy crap, are those french sauces hard to prep at home.
During lock downs I got into french sauces. The mother sauces, specifically the fond brun, are quite time consuming to make. I'm talking 2-3 days worth of time.
I mean, the pay off is amazing. I've had guests literally licking the china. But my lord, is it hard to do.
It's not as good as home made, but it's ~85% the way there, 90% with filtered tap water (in my experience).
Do be careful with a demi glace though, you do need to get their product for that. Just trying to reduce the water by half for the fond brun and calling it demi glace doesn't taste the same, at least to me.
During that interview, he mentioned that, as a special event, with Paul Freedman (author of "10 Restaurants that Changed America", they cooked one dish from each of the 10 restaurants for about 100 people.
Some of these dishes were from really high-end restaurants like Le Pavillon (where Pepin also worked).
"But the dish that everybody loved was the fried clams from Howard Johnson’s."
Back in the 60's, our family took extensive road trips during summer vacation, our dad taking the tribe on cross-country adventures towing a vacation trailer behind our Travelall. Two things I remember seeing all over the country were a Stuckey's restaurant/store and Howard Johnson's. Being kids, we would constantly whine about stopping at them when we passed by but we never did. Since we stayed in the trailer, we didn't need hotel rooms, and we generally ate our meals in the trailer, as well. Now, they're just dusty memories of those idyllic times long ago.
I guess they will not be able to open the "Howard Johnson's Earthlight Room" on an orbiting space station as predicted by 2001: A Space Odyssey, after all.
Wait, the Bell Picturephone was real! https://ethw.org/Picturephone I had known for years that my grandpa Alistair Ritchie worked on this at the Labs, but the book “The Idea Factory” colored in the story with great detail on how advanced the system was AND how few units they ever sold. Everyone wanted to see the other party, but no one wanted to be broadcast. One Bell exec iirc planted a headshot of himself in front of the camera.
The last one closed in 2017 though. Even though a restaurant remained in the Lake George location, it wasn't operating as Howard Johnson's, per the article. It's sorta like how Voyager keeps leaving the solar system, I guess?
I’m pretty sure it’s been gone for at least two decades. This article written in 2005 already mentions it having been closed and operated as Terrace Inn. After that the whole site was torn down and rebuilt as an office building.
Somewhat related, I know of a Woolworth's that has been untouched since its closing in the 90s in a tourist city somewhere on the East Coast. I toured it by myself after a store owner friend gave me a key to the basement. I wanted to enjoy it more, but the constant dread of getting caught overwhelmed the fascination of this thirty year old time capsule.
Howard Johnson's had fried clams, did not know that.
While I find fried clams repulsive, my secretary loves them, especially in her home state of New Hampshire.
I found them at Red Lobster a few years ago, and insisted that she try them because she complained so much. She admitted they were quite good, but there were no "bellies" (a particularly repellent portion of the dish).
> Howard Johnson's had fried clams, did not know that.
Funnily, I suppose there's many people who know about Howard Johnson's serving clams, even though we know almost nothing else about the chain.
This is thanks to Zappa's song/musical story Billy the Mountain, prominently featuring Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan (the force behind The Turtles) on most memorable performances.
Excerpt:
They left that night, crunchin' across the mojave desert
Their voices echoing through the canyons of your minds
"Ethel, want to get a cuppa cawfee?"
"there's a Howard Johnsons! want to eat some clams?"
The first noteworthy piece of real estate they destroyed was Edwards Air Force Base
And to this very day, 'wing nuts' and data reduction clerks alike
Speak in reverent whispers about that fateful night when
Test stand number one and the rocket sled itself got LUNCHED!
By a famous mountain-in and his small, wooden wife
Lol, no. It's because they sold HJ fried clams in the frozen food section of supermarkets for decades, and it was a featured item on the actual restaurant's menus (like IHOP = pancakes).
Frank Zappa is cool but even his most ardent fans have to concede that his songs and lyrics are pretty obscure.
Your comment is implicitly backed by a false dichotomy. Some people (based in USA and old enough, for example) will know about it from direct experience. Other people know about it only from Billy the Mountain.
> She admitted they were quite good, but there were no "bellies" (a particularly repellent portion of the dish).
I mean for, you, maybe. But throughout the eastern US, clams in all sort are not an obscure food item. Steamed clams are a common preparation (which is famously referenced in one of thr most memeified Simpsons scenes) and that is served as the whole clam not just the “strip”.
Also HoJos was pretty much responsible for popularizing the strip only variation throughout the US.
Whole fried clams may not be popular outside of the Northeast, they’re not exactly obscure.
As for HoJo style strips, it’s not like you can’t just get a fucking box in any supermarket freezer aisle. These are a Midwest food more than a New Hampshire food. Your secretary was humoring your “insistence”.
Looking at the other comments, it’s amusing how this post has pretty much drawn out the xenophobic middle American rubes of HN.
There are clam strips and fried whole belly clams. The latter are definitely better but you apparently don't like clams in general.
That said, as I get older I find most deep fried things are better not deep fried so I'll pretty much take steamers (steamed clams) by preference these days.
Living in the UK, of the 3 I only get access to good (and bad) fish and chips. I used to live in the Boston area and fried clams or steamers were a particular thing my dad used to go nuts for. I loved them too and miss them dearly. I had no idea that HoJo's sold them. In fact I think I only remember going to a HoJo's once in my life
Mussels are a reasonable alternative to steamed clams and I've had those on a number of occasions in London. Not sure how available they are more broadly.
As much as I like mussels, they are NOT the same. (They are readily available in my area and moules marinere are something I do enjoy, especially in a nice pernod cream...) But New England fried belly clams have a taste that just can't (or more likely won't) be replicated elsewhere. Along with a good cheese steak but that's a whole 'nother thread ;)
They were clam strips from what I remember, and I am with your secretary. Clam Strips are a waste of calories :)
But I was rather surprised when friends from Atlanta GA visited and I took them to a place in New Hampshire, which I am sure your secretary has bee at many times. They thought Fried Clams were repellent, which was a big surprise to me.
The ended up getting scallops, but they did not believe were real because they were so large.
I'm in my sixties. I haven't been in a Howard Johnson's since I was a kid, but I distinctly remember the smell when walking into one, the smell of fried clams. It told me that we were on a vacation trip.
If you wouldn't mind my asking, do you happen to know where HoJos sourced its ice cream from? Did HoJos really make those 28 flavors or simply slap a label on some other creamery's work?
Also, if you can you should totally do a Reddit AMA. It's stories like your grandfather's I find interesting.
Thank you for sharing. Wish I could say I had a story to share, but I lived a pretty sheltered youth. I do remember it being called "Ho Joes" by everyone back then.
That's too bad. I have fond memories of my 5th grade math teacher taking me there many times for ice cream because she used that as a reward for whoever had the best grades that week, or something like that. Oh well.
In high school teachers would take me to their house on my lunch break to fix their home computer then buy me a steak and cheese on the way back to school. Definitely some red flags there.
When I was about 15 (this was in the 1980s) I had been hanging out at a local computer shop, trying to figure out what I might want to buy for my hard-earned paper route and lawn-mowing money. The shop owner, who I would guess was in his 30s, offered to drive me to the next larger city to look at some stuff that he could not get for some reason. On the way there (or maybe on the way back) he took me to White Castle for food. We didn't have a White Castle and he really liked their food.
I guess you might say there were red flags there, but he didn't do anything remotely weird, then or later. He was apparently just wanting to help out a kid who was interested in the same stuff he was. Nowadays I don't think anyone would dare.
I vividly remember the first time I was spoiled by a family member at a restaurant. I was 8 years old, in Houston to go to Astroworld, and over the protests of my parents, my grandmother bought me a large chocolate shake at a Howard Johnson's. I had never been in a restaurant with actual tables to sit down and eat before, and I wouldn't experience it again until I was being honored by the plant manager at my dad's employer my senior year of high school for receiving a national merit scholarship.
Your memory has got me thinking. Eating out wasn't common in my childhood in the 1960s in the UK. My memories of sit-down meals at locations outside the house are mainly the Christmas dinners that the Marconi Marine branch in Liverpool organised for employees, and the summer trips that sort of happened based at school (double decker buses arrived, took us all out to somewhere like Blackpool or Loggerheads in Wales, and there was always a fish and chip sitdown when it was time to come back). And school dinners of course after around 1970 when I went to the big school which was further away.
Things opened up a bit in the 1970s and 1980s. I think it is a reflection of growing real disposable income, more restaurants and the cheaper chains opening.
But speaking of upstate New York: the fact that you can stay in Big Pink [1], where Dylan and The Band stayed and / or recorded -- that would be something.
> There are some days, like when a previous Howard Johnson’s owner drives to Lake George just to shake LaRock’s hand and wish him luck, or when a couple arrive from New Jersey just to eat fried clams at a linoleum HoJo’s counter again, when none of that feels important. There are other days, however, when LaRock tries to predict the weather while waiting for tour buses full of French-Canadians, and in those moments, and it feels like he is the captain, first mate, and chief steward of a ship that’s already sunk.
Per the article, it's $10 per foot² of space leased. So I am guessing that to lease the whole place it would therefore be 7500ft² * $10-per-ft²-per-year / 12 months-per-year = $6250/month .
> In his book “Ten Restaurants That Changed America,” historian Paul Freedman credited the company with pioneering “several key concepts in the American way of dining out: roadside locations, a family-friendly ambience, franchising, predictability and serving comfort food long before that term was invented.”
This, incidentally, is a superb book. I greatly enjoyed it and I’m not even American.
When I was growing up Howard Johnson's were everywhere. Their hotels were in every mid-size town as well. In the mid seventies there were over 500 hotels and 1000 restaurants. Just like Sears Roebuck it was classic Americana and you could easily make the assumption that it would be there forever, but by the year 2000 it had mostly disappeared. I admit to not knowing why.
Their hotels weren't anything remarkable but the restaurants were special. Perhaps tastes changed and once the restaurants retreated the hotels followed.
You're getting "flack" because you've got the cause and effect backwards: immigrants are regularly suckered into purchasing or investing in losing schemes, with the hopes of attaining the "American Dream" that they've heard so much about.
Running an independent hotel is an exercise in devaluing one's own (and one's family's) labor. Immigrants are one of a handful of demographics who are desperate or anxious enough to go in on it.
I think there's a pretty clear distinction between foreign investment in real estate for tax or money laundering purposes, versus vague xenophobia towards the people who live in and serve your community.
If restaurants in general are on such margins that behaving badly is the only way to keep them in the black and immigrants are capable of spotting this as quickly as native citizens or more so, then what you're observing is capitalism crowding out good places and replacing them with garbage, and immigrants gambling on the prospect of taking failing places and making them succeed in the only feasible way.
If you then take this situation and spin it as wicked immigrants ruining everything, you're in the wrong and pushing a narrative for your own purposes. There are analogous situations in the context of inner-city crime and whether that's down to racial or economic drivers, and people who ignore economic drivers to attribute everything to easily spotted racial signifiers. Pushing a narrative.
In my region of the USA, there are popular hotels and restaurants, even small chains of them, that were purchased by immigrants and then showed a dramatic decline in quality. Seriously, is there any way to address this without offending someone? We can talk about cases where the influence of immigrants from certain countries improved the quality of certain businesses, so we should be able to talk about the opposite.
To simply imply that immigrant owned == poor quality is lazy and incorrect. I am sure there is more to the story than that, and in order to have a proper discussion we need the rest of that story.
It has a basis in truth, although it is more of a 90s thing. Now many franchise operators are immigrants, with more money now. At one time something like 30% of motels were operated by Patels.
I spent a while today thinking about how to discuss this productively. I began listing various businesses in my area that had been bought by immigrants over the past 40+ years. In some cases, they maintained or even raised the quality of the business and became well-regarded in the community. In other cases, they trashed the business. What emerged as the list grew was that the pattern of good versus bad management was closely following ethnic stereotypes. At that point, I quit. I think it may be impossible to have productive discussion about this issue, because it will inevitably lead into sensitive territory.
It is sensitive territory, but the main point is that correlation does not equal causation. I imagine if there is a correlation between immigrant owned and poor quality, there might be some cultural factors at play. An immigrant taking over a Howard Johnson's for example, might not "get" why Americans valued Howard Johnson's in the first place, and the end result might be, from an American's perspective, a significant drop in quality.
Who knows. I just use that as an example. But my point is you have to look deeper, and just broadly stating that immigrant owned equals poor quality is lazy and quite frankly comes across as ignorant.
> just broadly stating that immigrant owned equals poor quality is lazy and quite frankly comes across as ignorant.
Wait, you misinterpret my post. I did look deeper than just the quality of being an immigrant. The point is that those who did well tended to be of certain ethnicities, and those who did poorly tended to be from certain others. The sensitive aspect would not be their immigrant status, but in the perceived reinforcement of negative ethnic stereotypes. I never implied that "immigrant owned" by itself is necessarily a negative.
I understand, but I still say you have to go deeper before a discussion takes place. Why are ethnic stereotypes being reinforced in this instance? Are the cultural elements or other factors at play? It _is_ a sensitive topic, and a complex one, which is why talking about it casually feels irresponsible, because it is so easy for some people to draw the wrong conclusion about what is being said.
Same thing with convenience stores. I had near me a local, independent convenience store that was really more of a small grocery store than a convenience store. They had a meat/deli counter where you could pick up some steaks on the way home, or get a lunch sandwich made to order on the way to work. They had a small but decent quality selection of produce. Potatoes, tomatoes, onions, lettuce, apples, bananas.
A few years ago the owners retired and sold to an Indian family. All well and good, but they eliminated the meat, deli, and produce and added smoking glassware, vape juice, and cheap knives. Also they seem to have a problem with programming their checkout system, because everything rings up for $0.10 - 0.15 more than marked.
Hotels are tax schemes that happen to rent rooms. The operator puts about 5% down and syndicates the rest. The investors are there for a share of accelerated depreciation, which means the operator keeps it for about 10-15 years.
After that, it either gets recapitalized or someone like those immigrants show up and buy the place with a silent partner. The “uncle” provides the money, the operator invests a lot of sweat equity.
Half the economy runs on this sort of crap. It’s the same reason strip malls eventually degrade to a kung fu place, big lots and an auto parts store.
US real estate investment companies do the same thing when buying hotels (especially the big ones that immigrants do not have the funds to buy). And they are staffed/led by American people.
Many Americans participate in the business of buying a business and then lowering its quality. Maybe they borrowed too much to buy it and the debt service is causing cash flow issues. Maybe the goal was always to trade in reputation for short term cash. Maybe it is an REIT that wants to hit a certain ROI so it stays competitive in people’s 401k, or helps a city’s underfunded pension fund try to meet an unrealistic target.
Restaurants are simply a bad business to have. They are intrinsically unprofitable as there's almost no way to have a sustainable competitive advantage. So yeah, only way to operate them is to trick clients, trick employees (and pay them below minimum wage), and cut corners everywhere - immigrants are naturally better positioned to do it because they can hire their own folks, usually illegals, speaking to them in language no one else can understand, concealing their dodgy practices. Paying under the minimum wage comes naturally because how else do you pay to an illegal working for cash?
Nothing to be surprised here. Restaurants won't be fixed until big corporations figure out how to operate fancy places the way they figured low-priced one like McDonald's - it's hard but not undoable and i believe will happen at some point - then competitive advantage of scale will price out even immigrants.
And hotels are fine. Hilton and Marriott are not immigrant-owned, and nothing is wrong with them (apart from the wifi that usually sucks).
I was just at a Cracker Barrel in Wisconsin and it seemed like there was a lot of cost cutting going on. I miss the days when we’d all complain about gigantic portions in American restaurants.
Waffle House is a billion times better than Applebees. They Cook the food in front of you versus microwaving some frozen shit. AND it’s open 365 24/7 pretty much even when there’s inclement weather. I always know what to expect… the hash browns are the best shredded hash browns around. Applebees is a dying company only popular in smaller areas.
That honestly sounds like exactly the things that annoy me, those chain restaurants and franchises with always the same audience and food. Visiting is equivalent to going to a FedEx: You know what to expect, but you don't go there for pleasure.
That's good and expected for fast food (i.e. McDonald's), but fast food is something you do on the go: Using drive through or picking up, or when I was younger sitting in only transitionally with my friends to gulp down the fast food in the middle of our night out.
Luckily at least in the cities there are still a wide variety of individual restaurants, often better than where I'm from, especially (but not exclusively) if it comes to non-local cuisine. The chains take up space but they are still easy enough to ignore.
The popular situation in which someone would go to one of these restaurants is this:
It's 1975 in America. You're on a family road trip. It's hot, you've been driving all day, and you've got two whiny kids in the back seat. Everyone is getting hangry, and you need somewhere comfortable to pause. You want somewhere where you can sit, get something that the kids will eat without fuss, and maybe an ice cream would be nice. The obvious answer is Howard Johnson.
Drive throughs didn't exist at this time, and even if they did, you wanted to get out of the damn car anyway.
I was one of those whiny kids, lol. Always the high point of our cross country trips in the old ‘72 Impala when my dad would get tired of driving and say “What do you kids think about hitting a HoJo’s?”
Thanks. As mentioned elsewhere, I did not know that aspect of "roadside restaurants". It makes sense as a "pit stop" kind of thing with families, and seems to fill a similar role to the big gas station+restaurant combinations you find along the Autobahn for example.
Another aspect is that if in Europe you've been driving for 8 hours, you may well have crossed a country border (or multiple), and everything is very different anyway. McDonald's again being your best bet if you want anything really predictable in that case (and you can even order without speaking the language usually).
It's a "town" that almost nobody lives in. It exists solely because of a poorly-conceived connection between two major highways. Millions of people stop to get gasoline, food, use the restroom, or stop at a hotel there just because they have to stop anyway at two stop lights. There's no reason the highways couldn't be directly connected today, but local lawmakers would never allow this because it would destroy their only economic purpose.
That said, as someone who passes through Breezewood regularly due to living relatively close by, it's been looking increasingly decrepit, well before COVID. A number of the businesses shown in the photo on Wikipedia are shuttered. I expect it's because smartphone apps make it easier to check if there's a restaurant of interest at a more logical stopping point.
Is it? As someone who noticed how tolls soared since the inception of the private-public partnership in lieu of Pennsylvania running it, I'm not surprised given the repeated toll increases... just hoped it wasn't the worst.
It's currently $100.20 to drive OH to NJ across the turnpike without EZ-Pass.
As I understand, the state government basically passed a law requiring the turnpike to pay the state government tons of money and now they're sucked dry for cash, and that's why the rates are skyrocketing.
Breezewood is a spot, as you said, where two major highways intersect. As such, millions of drivers pass right through there each year. Building a few gas stations and quick-stop restaurants makes perfect sense. Nobody "lives" at the Eiffel Tower, or at Hartsfield-Jackson, or Wembley Stadium, but restaurants there sell a whole lot of food.
The amount of stuff built in Breezewood is disproportionate compared to a typical highway exit because it is one of the few pieces of uncontrolled highway in the interstate system.
Similarly populated areas with a normal highway interchange don’t look anything like Breezewood.
Much like your examples, these things are typically built proportionally to the surrounding population.
Breezewood has fascinated me for decades. I have such fond memories of the "half hour of freedom and fast food" on road trips as a kid. It's like a living reminder to just stop for no reason some times and enjoy the plainest things. One day before I die I'm going to spend a whole day there just because.
I think you are correct, seems like it was replaced by drive through sand fast food.
but with electric cars coming, perhaps with a bunch of chargers and an hour to kill these kinds of restaurants make sense again… (though many interstate rest stops now have fast food courts…)
I second this. We only ever ate at HoJos on road trips, but the long wait for food is what I remember most. 8 hours in the car followed by an hours wait for food. I guess the consistency of the menu is what kept us coming back. Fast food is what doomed them in my mind.
What you are looking for in a restaurant is not the same as everyone else. There are plenty of people who are more than happy to have their same comfortable meal over and over, these places are catering to those folk. Repeat business is better for profitability than always having to acquire new customers, and this model encourages that repeat business for the customers that it fits well with.
I guess I don't understand why that needs chains. In the parts of Europe that I am originally from, there are far less chain restaurants than here. And as I hinted, it's still pretty common for folks to have "their" restaurant in the neighborhood and to eat there all the time, same food or not. Maybe mixing it up some time with another restaurant, maybe not.
HoJos were catering to travelers, not to locals(which is why they are on the side of highways generally). So the idea is you're in some new territory on a road trip, and you see a name you know and trust and know you can go in there and get a meal that you'll enjoy. Yes, sometimes exploring unique local food options is what you want to do. Other times, it isn't. Maybe you just spent 8 hours driving in the car with 3 kids, and you need to get food into them that you know they won't reject. Or you're a business traveler and aren't interested in sightseeing, and just want to get a quick meal near your hotel.
I'm sure it happened, but I'd imagine very few customers lived within a couple miles of a HoJo and would eat there regularly.
That's a good explanation, thanks. So it's basically McDonald's but with more "substantial" food suited to sit in with families.
That makes sense to me. Almost no matter where I traveled in the world, I sometimes wanted to just get some food in me and move on, say because I was transitioning through a place or simply did not have the energy for more. As a then single guy, McDonald's was always a good option for that: You know what you get and it's quick and easy.
These days, a lot of chains like these have become less necessary, since Yelp and the like are everywhere. But in pre-digital days you didn’t know which local restaurant was good and which would send you to the clinic.
I don't honestly think it's necessary by any means, and don't personally like them. But they do eek our their existence through appealing to the "familiar" for their customers, because no matter where you're at, you know X will taste like home.
I don't personally subscribe to that, i'd much rather see what a new place has to offer, but i'm not everyone.
Pho. I know exactly what to expect and what I want to order walking into any Pho restaurant in the country and they're all owned and operated by different people.
On the other hand, as a Thai food lover, I can honestly say I've never had Pad Thai that either tasted the same or was even prepared the same between restaurants.
Whole peanuts, halves, crushed, peanut butter? Mixed in or on top? Egg or no egg. Same with cilantro. How wide of noodles? Etc.
I try not to be picky so just ask for Pad Thai, Thai spicy. Usually good, but definitely not consistent.
A chain like say, Applebees will at least give consistently OK food that tastes about the same across restaurants, IMO.
Maybe not. Many Asian restaurants use unique, exclusive suppliers. I don’t know about Pho places, but many neighborhood Chinese restaurants are really outposts of a fully vertically integrated enterprise. Even vegetables come from specific farms in Central America and have a distinct supply chain.
This is an interesting point. Perhaps chains give a sense of cultural cohesion across the many states, in a geography that encourages a vision of a culture that spans the states.
In Europe, are there chains that project a sense of cultural cohesion across the nations?
The financial model is different in Europe. Real estate interest have wired that tax code in the US to the point that it’s often cheaper to leave a building vacant and get paid by the government re tax benefits than to rent it.
If you find yourself in Manhattan, it’s easy to see. Storefronts with 50k people walking by every day are vacant and the rents are absurd.
Even in my little city, commercial leases are nuts. My wife tried to open a bakery, but the high value spots aren’t available, period unless you enter into a multi unit lease. She ended up doing a bakery trick and flipping the business a few years later.
That’s exactly what I want - to know what I’m going to get.
When I travel for business and now that my wife and I are traveling more for leisure, we look for an Embassy Suites. We know we are going to get a two room suite, a decent breakfast, a nice happy hour every day and good customer service.
We did the AirBnb once. While it was definitely a decently nice place, we missed the gym, cleaning, restaurant downstairs, easy access by Uber (we were in a gated community), etc.
In fact, my wife and I are planning to be digital nomads for the next couple of years starting later this year. We will definitely be staying in Hilton chains - Embassy, Homewood, or Home2Suites - we will be comfortable and the two room suites give me a place to work.
Not to mention the side benefits of points you can rack up with the cobranded card.
Other brands may be as good, Hilton is just what I’m familiar with.
Yeah. McDonald's didn't have drive-thrus when I was a kid. My mom would take me there once or twice a year and it was always a highlight. I would always get a happy meal with an orange drink. I loved their orange drink.
> those chain restaurants and franchises with always the same audience and food. Visiting is equivalent to going to
... a teleportation booth, according to an amusing (or terrifying) SF story from decades ago. You could come out in any other location served by the franchise. Homogenized spacetime mumble handwave ...
Sorry, forgot whodunnit. Maybe Analog magazine around 1990.
https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/apprentice-my
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/28/opinion/howard-johnsons-a...