No more than 20 percent of Americans traveled on a plane before 1965, prices far too steep for most until the industry was deregulated. So how did they scratch that post-war itch, the need to take to the road, to be elsewhere, ex-pats in their own nation, to go to the heart of the country instead of waiting for cheap representations of it to come to them, carnivals and fairs and preachers. Some really took to the road, and the Hell’s Angels and other motorcycle gangs were formed from the wanderlust of WWII vets. But for the more-moderate explorers, the trailer was the portable home. In 1953, James Jones wrote for Holiday magazine about traveling thousands of miles in a trailer, perhaps not going from here to eternity, but not an insubstantial length. The opening:
“THE FIRST TIME you tow a house trailer you keep jerking the wheel to compensate for that crazy sway in the back end. It takes a long time to get enough used to it to ignore it. The first haul I ever made with mine—a trip that, although I didn’t know it then, turned out to be the first leg of a junket that would take me clear across the country and back and consume a year and a half—was to Memphis, Tennessee, from my home in Illinois. That’s about 400 miles, and it took me four days to make it. A year and a half later, on my way home from California, I hauled from Tucson, Arizona, to El Paso in one day. I had left a green-eared neophyte, and I was coming back a veteran. There is no pride in the world more rabid than that of a confirmed and dedicated trailerite. The next winter I took my trailer to Florida in four days, just about 1,200 miles.
In between those trips was a year and a half spent living a couple of months in one town after another, one state after another, one trailer park after another, all the way from Memphis to the West Coast, and always in my own home.
On your way somewhere, you roll into a strange town in the evening just at dusk. You know you can’t make the next town before dark, so you find a park. You talk to the man and pay him, park your trailer, connect up your water, sewer and electric lines, step inside and turn on the lights—and discover with a kind of weird surprise that you are home. The same identical home you closed, locked and left this morning. You take the radio and books off the couch (where you have to keep them, traveling) and set them back up on their shelves and look around. No matter how many times you repeat this experience, you never get over that weird surprise at finding everything here, just as you left it. You’re ready to cook your own supper with your own food on your own stove. All around you are people in other trailers, both transients and permanents, doing the same thing. You can’t help but feel a kinship with them. After supper, you can unhitch your car and go downtown to see a show, at home in a strange town you maybe never saw before. And the next time you pass that way, it won’t be a strange town any more.
With a trailer there’s no house-hunting when you move, no high rent stickups. A year ago the average trailer park charged five dollars a week for space. A dollar a day for overnight is standard.
Curiously enough, a lot of people who own trailers don’t have cars and cannot drive. When they move, they hire someone to haul the trailer for them. Many of them don’t even move. Some people live for years on the same lot in the same park and if they ever do move to a new town, they sell the trailer and leave it there like a house and buy a new one when they get where they’re going.
I learned all this at the park in Memphis, where I got my first such hauling job. Mr. Leahy, the rotund but hardheaded little Irishman who owned the park, knew I didn’t have much money and, knowing I was a writer, I think he worried about my ability to come in out of the rain. He put me onto the job of hauling a lady’s trailer up to Blytheville, Arkansas, for her, about seventy-five miles, for twenty-five dollars. That was my start as a professional hauler, and I picked up a good bit at it during the next year and a half.
The lady from Blytheville, it seemed, didn’t get along with her husband. They fought all the time, and he—a crack master mechanic—would periodically go on a great drunk when marriage proved too much for him. She always retaliated by hiring someone to haul the trailer up home to Blytheville where her mother lived. She didn’t go home to mother’s; she took home to mother’s, a much more effective maneuver. The husband would come back to an empty lot and no place to sleep and have to rent a tourist cottage from Mr. Leahy. He would stand this extra expense and lonely freedom about a week, then his pride would vanish and he would go up to Blytheville and get his wife, who was waiting for him fearfully, afraid he wouldn’t come, and they would have to hire someone to bring the trailer back. Mr. Leahy always saved their trailer space for them. Ten days after I hauled her up, I made another twenty-five dollars by going up and hauling them both back. They spent the trip in the back seat of the Jeep with their arms around each other. I left Memphis soon after that so I missed the next trip.
Trailer parks differ across the country.“•