Get Hitched
Before minivans and SUVs,
families hit the open highway in travel trailers. How one wayfarer rediscovered
their lost allure, stumbled on a tribe of true believers, and decided to take
the road less traveled
By
Mary Melton
4/1/2002
Photograph by Dave Lauridsen
I
met my fate on a Friday at dusk. It was in an RV campground above Santa Cruz, a
place fragrant with redwoods. He was stocky and energetic, with thick brown
hair and a predilection for long denim shorts and hiking boots. He later
described himself to me as "a Ritalin child" who battled addiction as
a young man, got sober, and was born again. After spending time with him, I
surmised that he may have been born again twice—once in the name of the Lord,
and once more in the name of travel trailers.
His
name was Craig Dorsey. Behind him, nestled among towering trees, gleamed his
latest project, a 1953 Southland Runabout. Formerly a commercial art director,
he had turned his weekend hobby—restoring vintage travel trailers—into his
livelihood. This was a safe bet after it took him less than an hour at a Pomona
car swap meet to sell his first baby, a 1956 Mercury 14-footer with Formica
countertops. He told me how he paid $250 for a '46 Spartan Manor full of nudie
magazines and ten gallons of rat droppings, then rebuilt it into a
mahogany-paneled movie-star palace. He recalled how tough it had been to let go
of that exquisite '51 Spartanette with whom he'd shared 700 painstaking hours
of toil and trouble. He explained how it could take days to scrape off green
house paint, which looked like it had been applied with a broom, to reveal a
metal finish. He had the tan of someone who had spent too much time polishing
reflective aluminum under a harsh sun.
"You
want to see inside the Indian?" he asked. Sure, I said. I walked through
the portal and haven't looked back since.
Travel
trailers are those rolling homes-away-from-home, usually made of aluminum or
wood, that hitch to a car or truck. I'd seen my share of them during jaunts in
the desert or off lonely train routes while I zoned out on Amtrak. Although I
live in a 1950s house and am enamored with camping and the outdoors, I never
gave them much thought. The old ones looked shabby, and the new ones monstrous.
I didn't know anything about their history, that during their heyday, the '30s
to the '50s, thousands of different trailer models roamed the highways. That,
encouraged by our ideal climate and ties to aerospace, many were manufactured
in Los Angeles. The travel trailer had been a potent symbol of Southern
California's mobility and adventurous spirit.
And
if a core group of fanatics based here has anything to say about it, perhaps it
will be again. I discovered this when I stumbled onto the Web site for Vintage
Vacations, the travel trailer restoration workshop in Santa Ana run by Dorsey.
When I called him on a whim, he invited me to experience one of his new
acquisitions, a 1940 Indian, at an upcoming rally.
Had
nothing changed in this trailer since FDR gave fireside chats over the radio?
The linoleum floor was original, as was the scratchy mauve couch with matching
toss pillow. The quality of the workmanship on the bentwood paneling was
astounding. I played with the screen-door latch, sat at the dainty vanity. I
closely examined the closets and pictured the gabardine shirts that once hung
inside. I peered into the petite icebox, placing my hand on the cool metal. I
opened the pantry, expecting a Moon Pie to emerge. I clicked the reading lamp
on and off, bathing in its glow. It was ship cabin and Pullman car and mountain
retreat rolled into one. I was in love.
I
was also sleepy. I used my wool jacket as a blanket, but it was the golden
walls that enveloped me that brisk night.
Early
the next morning I wandered the campground, passing row after row of pre-1960
trailers. I fell for the metal identification tags on their sides, with names
like the Traveleze and Rod and Reel, the Vagabond and Gypsy Coach. From their
windows emanated soft clouds of warm light. The rally goers were waking up in a
forest under their own roofs, with their preferred coffee on the stove and
flapjacks on the griddle. They were unfolding vintage canvas chairs and rolling
out striped awnings; they were throwing checkered cloths over picnic tables and
unpacking Bakelite flatware.
Across
the grove was John Agnew, a Teamster from Highland Park, in his 1954 Silver
Streak Clipper, and Phil Noyes, a producer from Mid Wilshire, in his 1957
Corvette. There was a retired hand surgeon in a '35 Bowlus Papoose, one of four
in the world, and a car collector with a home-built trailer that came with a
scrapbook showing the honeymooning couple who had taken it to Niagara Falls in
1936.
The
trailerites, about the swellest bunch of people I'd ever met, taught me about
the hard-to-find wood models from the 1930s and the easier-to-find flat-sided
tin ones from the '50s, called "canned hams," that you could pick up
in the Recycler for 300 bucks. They traded polishing techniques and towing
disaster tales, ate potluck and watched Lucy and Desi in The Long, Long Trailer
as the film seeped through the bedsheet screen onto the shiny surface of
Dorsey's Southland Runabout. By Sunday morning, I must have looked vulnerable.
"So,"
Agnew asked me, "when are you going to step up to the plate?"
AMERICANS
BEGAN STEPPING UP TO THE plate—that is, buying travel trailers—in the '30s.
Before that, campers visiting our new national park system were likely to sleep
in canvas A-frames or primitive pop-up tent trailers. The itinerant population
looking for work during the Depression fabricated crude homes-on-wheels using
salvaged plywood and truck chassis. We began to crave leisure just as a
burgeoning airplane industry was shaping metals into the most aerodynamic forms
possible. Taking cues from planes, travel trailers evolved from wood
contraptions into riveted aluminum bullets—would that they moved that fast.
One
of the industry's early innovators was glider designer William Hawley Bowlus.
He had been the plant manager at Ryan Aircraft when the San Diego company built
the Spirit of St. Louis. In 1934, at his Bowlus-Teller Trailer Company in San
Fernando, he devised a tapered, aluminum-framed tube wrapped in a skin of
lightweight alloy. Before "trailer trash" became an unfortunate part
of our vernacular, he made expensive toys—a basic model started at around
$1,050—aimed at the wealthy.
Too
expensive, perhaps. Bowlus overspent on fancy materials and went bankrupt. One
of his salesmen, Wally Byam, took over production. Byam was a showman, and he
called his company Airstream because the trailers rode "like a stream of
air." Byam's first mass-manufactured trailer, the Airstream Clipper,
charged out of a brick factory in Van Nuys in 1936. "Man, it sure did look
a lot like the 1935 Bowlus Road Chief," write Bryan Burkhart and David
Hunt in their 2000 history Airstream.
Byam
led trips around the world. Airstream owners formed Wally Byam Caravan Clubs,
with members wearing blue berets adorned with patches bearing his mug. Though
Airstreams were the most visible travel trailers out there, and rightly
heralded for their iconic design, hundreds of other manufacturers filled
tourist camps—by 1940 there were 35,000 such places in the United States—with
their own visions. A surplus of airplane materials after World War II led
trailer companies to open in El Monte, Long Beach, Cypress, Gardena, Sun
Valley, and elsewhere. In 1950 John and Donna Crean of Compton began selling
venetian blinds for travel trailers through their California Coach Specialties
Company; in 1964 they changed the name to Fleetwood, and it is now the largest
recreational vehicle manufacturer in the world. Travel trailers would peter out
by the '70s, a little too "mountain cabin" when consumers wanted something
more "three bedrooms and a satellite dish." Of the 300 trailer
companies that operated in 1936, only Airstream has survived.
There
has been lots of talk in recent years about the rediscovery of Airstreams, how
collectors in Japan and celebrities like Tom Hanks, Sean Penn, and Tim Burton
covet them—and inflate their value. MTV put one in the lobby of its Santa
Monica headquarters; chef Fred Eric is opening the Airstream Diner in Beverly
Hills in April. Hard-core trailerites would never say it out loud in a
campground full of Wally Byam fanatics, but many find the Airstream played out,
even a little gauche. I've heard one go so far as to say that Airstreams are to
trailers what condos are to castles. They're too cookie-cutter. Their aluminum
interiors are too cold—the exact quote is "butt ugly"—when compared
with the cozy woods of their bygone competitors. Where's the sense of
discovery? The neglected treasures—those are the mysteries. They hide out, in
weeds behind beauty salons, on the fringes of Kmart parking lots, under freeway
overpasses. A 16-foot 1963 Airstream Bambi might set you back $14,000. On the
other hand, you can spy a 14-foot 1963 Shasta behind a cinder-block wall and
knock on the house's front door, only to be told, "Take it, just get that
thing out of my backyard."
I've
been chatting with travel trailer owners for a while now, and have determined a
few things: They tend to be men in their late thirties who were car collectors
in their twenties. They are handy with a jigsaw and relate to propane tanks.
Like truckers on CBs, they know each other's eBay handles; they don't hold much
of a grudge when a pal outbids them on a 1948 Trailer Topics magazine or an
original Spartan sales brochure. They have understanding neighbors. Some own only
one and call it ah, my dream trailer, while others own a few dozen and have yet
to find Mr. Right. When they chug a trailer up an incline, they're never sure
if the car passing on the left is going to give them a thumbs up or the finger.
Trailers
signaled leisure and wanderlust. If it was the American dream to own a home,
then how cool was it that you could own a home in which you could see America?
Transcontinental roads were new in the '30s, and people were unafraid to pull
over and ask a farmer if it would be all right to camp out for the night.
"Home is where you stop," said Wally Byam.
Trailers
may remind us not of those fabled good old days, which were so bad for so many,
but of something else. "They are just so cocoony, womby, engulfing,"
says David Wilson, the founder of the Museum of Jurassic Technology, as he sits
in his parking lot office, a splendid 34-foot 1951 Spartanette. Maybe that's
it: Travel trailers provide us with something that we've been missing since the
day we were born.
IT'S
CALLED "THE GLOW," THE BUZZ OF LIGHT thrown by honey-colored wood
that radiates from travel trailer windows. "It's unlike any other
light," says Phil Noyes, who cowrote an upcoming book, Trailer Travel: A
Visual History of Mobile America, and is producing a PBS documentary on the
subject. "That glow makes you want to be around them and in them."
I
experience the glow again at the next year's rally, held at a campground in
Newport Beach. (This year's will also be at the Newport Dunes Resort, from May
16 to 19.) I meander the aisles by day, bewitched by a 1953 Happy Home
transformed by its owner, a surfer and personal trainer, into a tiki
wonderland. There are many friendly faces from the previous get-together, but
there are also some strangers.
Tourists
and looky-loos are roaming around. I suppose this is Craig Dorsey's hope—to
garner interest and raise the profile—but some of the trailerites are
grumbling. They fear they might get boxed out by the well-heeled
Johnny-come-latelies. They point to Roseanne, for instance, who is overheard
making an offer (of $11,000, to no avail) on the tiki trailer.
Saturday
night, my husband and I visit with Phil and John and their pals Steve and Ed
outside John's lovely Westcraft. We sit around a campfire on '40s rattan
furniture. John's girlfriend, Yipsy, is mixing chi-chis in the kitchen. The
guys are chatting about cherry trailers they'd seen that day and a few that
were not ("I don't think he's ever going to get that cat smell out of
there"). They're not thrilled with the remodels bursting with Betty Boop
and Route 66 kitsch, but as John puts it, "There's room for
everybody." Working full-time, they lament, means that they rarely can
enjoy camping like this. The guys would have more time if they weren't always
buying and selling trailers, I needle them.
‘As
for those good old days, "there's no better time than now," says
John, who is black. "In the '40s, I wouldn't be polishing my trailer, I'd
be polishing your trailer. I wouldn't be kicking back having cocktails with a
pretty Mexican girl by my side, hanging out with a bunch of white guys in a
campground." A few drinks later, I'm beat. I don't have a trailer to sleep
in this year, so we bid them good night. As we walk through the hushed
campground, the glow is intoxicating.
We
are staying at a Best Western on Pacific Coast Highway. The $89-a-night room is
at street level, and the traffic appalling. It is prom night in Newport Beach,
and about a dozen drunken seniors party in adjoining rooms until dawn. The
mattress, the pillow, the bedspread—the horror. The front desk is
unsympathetic. Our complimentary breakfast consists of stale Danish and nasty
coffee. This is no cocoon, it's a flame-retardant mausoleum. The glow! How I
yearn for the glow!
A
few months later, while driving across the Mojave, my husband and I glimpse a
travel trailer parked behind a junk shop. We screech to a halt. I've never
heard of the model: a 1950 Glider, made in Chicago, with a tag that proclaims
it "Graceful as a Bird in Flight." It is a beauty. A woman named
Betty Sue has called it her desert home for the last 40 years, and no offense,
gentlemen, it shows: The inside is spotless, with birch cabinetry, a little
Dixie stove, and an icebox. A back bedroom closes off with a sliding door, and
there is even a tidy bathroom stall with a showerhead and a mint-green
toothbrush holder. It needs a couple of new windows and a paint job. They want
$2,000 for it, but we think we can talk them down to fifteen. We have no idea
where we'll put it, or even how we'll get it home. But none of that matters
now.
It
is time to step up to the plate.