A Friendly Goodbye

I need to say a goodbye. But before I get to the goodbye in question, I need to talk about the others that came before.

In the beginning there was Howard. Howard was in my hometown of East Orange, NJ, on Central Ave between Munn and Freeman Avenues. The old joke was that Howard had 28 flavors of ice cream and one of food. But oh, that ice cream! As far as I can remember, Howard Johnson’s was my first go-to place for ice cream…and clean bathrooms on the road. Before fast food restaurants and fast food food courts took over highway rest areas, Howard Johnson’s billed itself as “the host of the highways.”

But times changed, and Marriott bought out Howard Johnson in order to get their highway properties and motels. So it was goodbye to Howard and his coffee milkshakes.

Not to worry though, there was Bond’s. Bond’s was a local North Jersey chain, home of the Awful Awful…“Awful Big and Awful Good.”

Then, in 1969 the Willowbrook Mall opened up in Wayne, and it was there that I discovered my first Friendly’s, and had my first Fribble.

Funny thing about that Fribble…it used to be an Awful Awful.

You see, for decades Bond’s licensed the name and the formula to two other regional ice cream parlors: Friendly’s in Massachusetts and Newport Creamery in Rhode Island. This deal worked out well as long as they all kept to their own states, but if either of the other two decided to do business in New Jersey, they had to change the name of their drink.

And it was out of that necessity that the Fribble was born when Friendly’s decided that the Jersey market was too big to ignore. And for a span of a few short years I could get both an Awful Awful and a Fribble within five miles of each other.

Until Bond’s went under in the early 70s, and it was time to say goodbye to them. But any time I went to Willowbrook, I made a beeline for Friendly’s.

I arrived in Syracuse as a freshman at Syracuse University in 1974, and discovered a new ice cream home just off campus. It was Baskin-Robbins. Unlike the other places, it wasn’t a restaurant that also sold ice cream, it was pretty much just an ice cream parlor, and I patronized that ice cream parlor for all eight of my undergrad years, all three of my later grad school years, and the remaining five that I worked at SU. A Friendly’s had also opened on campus during that time, but it didn’t last long. There were other Friendly’s locations in the area, but without a car, they were pretty much inaccessible to me.

Then two things happened, and I’m not sure what the order was. One was that Baskin-Robbins pulled out of the Syracuse market. Another goodbye. The other was that I got a car (or married someone with one). This meant that every Friendly’s in the county was available to me.

Friendly’s was what Howard Johnson’s used to be…an ice cream parlor that also sold food. Or was it a restaurant that also sold ice cream? I knew that pretty much wherever I went in the northeast, I could find a Friendly’s. They were everywhere, and they were almost always packed. I could tell you where every Friendly’s was between my home in Syracuse and my mother’s place in Jersey. Cortland and Binghamton in New York; Clarks Summit, Tannersville, and Easton in Pennsylvania. If I needed a Fribble on the road, I knew where to get it.

But then dining habits changed. People stopped doing “casual dining” and opted more for either fast food or places like Applebees or Friday’s, and the business that Friendly’s counted on dried up, leading them to close locations, and shrink back to a fraction of its former size.

And this is where my friendly goodbye comes in…or, more properly, my Friendly goodbye. This past Sunday it was announced that most Friendly’s locations in Central New York were closing…including two that were relatively close to my house.

This is going to seriously cut into my Fribble habit.

But maybe I could take a trip to Rhode Island and get an Awful Awful.