• U.S.

MODERN LIVING: Trailer Life

4 minute read
TIME

On an ocean-front street in Miami Beach last week, 500 dealers swarmed around 16 brand-new trailers to see what was new in mobile homes for 1953. Most startling sight at the annual exhibition of Mid-States Corp., biggest trailer company in the U.S., was a lumbering, 65-ft. Executive Cruiser, with bar, built-in TV, movie screen, radiotelephone, conference room, and sundeck from which a model dived into a portable swimming pool. Price: $75,000. But the trailer that interested dealers most was the National, a smaller model with which Mid-States President William MacDonald, 44, hopes to boost his sales 36% next year to $30 million.

Designed by Raymond Loewy, the National comes in two sizes (27 ft. and 33 ft), is priced at $3,000 and $3,500. Built on a steel frame instead of the usual wood, it has sheet steel sides and top, a built-in stove, refrigerator, closets, bathtub and picture windows and sleeps four.

In bringing out his 1953 models, Trailer Maker MacDonald was reinforcing his position as top man in an industry which in 22 years has grown from almost nothing to a $248 million annual gross. MacDonald typifies the trend. A onetime bus driver, he bought a trailer company in Chicago in 1945, grossed $300,000 the first year. Now he owns seven companies that will gross an estimated $22 million in 1952, with almost 10% of the market.

Rolling Along. After a hefty boost from the wartime and postwar housing shortage, trailer makers kept right on rolling; more than 150 manufacturers last year turned out 65,000 units. Where once the trailer was a jerry-built, often homemade affair, it is now a solid living unit scientifically designed for comfort. Once, half of those who bought trailers were tourists; now almost all the nation’s 1,750,000 trailer owners live full-time in their mobile homes, parked in 12,000 “trailer parks” (never “camps” to the trade) from coast to coast.

Many live in trailers in order to get from job to job (defense workers and servicemen account for more than 52% of the market). But more & more retired couples, tired of housecleaning chores and high living costs, are moving into homes on wheels. “Many people have the idea that only gypsies or tramps live in trailers,” said one housewife on wheels in Arizona. “We are semi-retired and have a business employing 1,000 people.”

Settling Down. The old idea of roaming the country in a trailer, and pulling up for a night on a hill with a view, is far from an accurate conception of trailer living. Some localities ban roadside parking and many states have laws governing the maximum length of trailers, prohibiting them from driving at night or on weekends, etc. Going from New York to Los Angeles in a 35-ft. trailer, a traveler must get individual permits from no fewer than six states, and detour around one (Iowa) entirely.

Instead of roaming, most trailer dwellers settle down in parks, pay rents of $20 a month and up. For their money, they get water, electricity, laundry, and telephone service, a small plot of land, bathroom facilities, and access, in some parks, to such recreation facilities as swimming, tennis, shuffleboard or badminton.

Once in a park, most people stay quite a while. In one California park, 85% of the inhabitants have been there two years or more. Many build outside rooms on to their trailers, put up white picket fences and start vegetable gardens. Many trailer parks are model towns, with a mayor, town hall and garden clubs. Some trailerites don’t even own cars; there are companies which haul trailers anywhere in the U.S.

Commuting by Yacht. The biggest and flashiest trailer parks are in California, where 300,000 people live in 4,000 parks. In Palm Springs’s swank Rancho Trailer Park (284 spaces), the current gag is: “You can tell a poor trailer owner because he washes his Cadillac himself.” Near Balboa, overlooking the Pacific, is the 230-space Lido Trailer Park, a sort of Palm Beach on wheels. There trailer spaces rent for as much as $100 a month, and trailerites moor their yachts in slips along the front of the park. Many have two trailers, one to live in, the other for short jaunts about the country.

But the ultimate in trailer living will arrive when Paradise on Wheels, Inc. opens near Phoenix, Ariz, next year. This will be a 160-acre park with lots for sale at $795 to $1,000, and a 2,200-ft. shopping and recreation center designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.

Even with trailer parks increasing at the rate of 2,000 a year, space is still tight. And now that they are landlords to more than 1% of the population, park owners think their future is secure in good times or bad.

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