The sign was lying on its side, its letters twisted, but its big sunshine-yellow words clicked with the auction-goer.
“Ground Round a family fun place to eat and drink” were deeply carved in the sign. He remembered going to the restaurant in the 1980s, and spoke of it like it was a member of the family. He hadn’t been there in years before it closed.
“Maybe if I’d kept going it’d still be open,” he said, jokingly. I vaguely remembered the name but knew that I had never been to the restaurant. Another auction-goer had left an absentee bid on the sign – either for the memories it also held for him/her or to sell it at a profit. Since most of the folks who attend auctions are dealers, I suspect that the sign would be sold.
It was one of three large commercial signs waiting to be sold at auction recently. Alongside it were a sign for Aristocrat Ice Cream, which I had never heard of, and another one that was cryptic.
It’s amazing how small things can spark a memory of a place we visited, food we ate or a song that made us feel. I suspect that Ground Round fills that spot for a lot of people who ate its cheap steaks, chicken fingers, beer, clams and scrod.
Howard Johnson opened a chain of Ground Round restaurants in 1969, making it a pioneer in casual dining. Its menu featured only 12 items, including “burgers in a basket, snack food and pitchers of beer.” In several TV commercials from the 1980s, Ground Round pitched its $3.99 steak dinner with fries and Texas toast (I do remember when Texas toast was the “toast” of any steakhouse) and more.
Ground Round was known for its silent films and cartoons, baskets of peanuts whose shells you could toss to the floor, free popcorn on your table, Bingo the clown and a penny-a-pound promotion where parents would pay the cost of their kid’s meal based on their weight on a scale (one writer noted that she found it humiliating to be weighed). It was a very popular restaurant with a very loyal following (there are nostalgic stories on the web from people who remember the joy of going there as kids). By the 1980s, there were 200 of the restaurants around, mostly in the Northeast and Midwest.
Ground Round filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2004, and the company-owned restaurants were closed overnight. Customers were asked to leave before they could finish their meals, and some took home doggy bags. A group of its franchisees bought the company and took over the operation, which is based in Freeport, ME. Today, only about 25 or so Ground Rounds still exist.
Aristocrat Ice Cream, one of the other signs, was made in Philadelphia. A newspaper ad shows that it was being sold in 1944. An official with the maker touted its ice cream as a winner at the then-new drive-in theaters in 1950.
The third sign was tucked behind the ice cream sign. I was curious about its contents, so we pulled the heavy ice cream sign forward so we could see. The sign held two words “Stop” and “Look” and the remnants of two others: “ke” and “25.”
It reminded me of an early sign for a convenience store. I figured that the remnants were likely “Coke” and “25 cents.”
“That’s right,” the auction-goer said. “You should be on the Wheel of Fortune.”
