Nation of Nomads?

No one knows who devised the automobile trailer, but everyone who participated in the mass movement of the American people onto the highways in the early 1920's remembers the occasional ones which careened past on the road. Lopsided, homemade wooden boxes looking like outhouses on wheels, they usually provoked snarls or sneers from motorists forced to cut out around them. As the automotive industry progressed, trailers remained virtually static. As late as 1932 they were rarities. Then, suddenly, public resistance broke down. All over the U. S. improved trailers rolled onto the highways. Last week as June and the national vacation season simultaneously got under way, trailer manufacture had become by all odds the fastest-growing U. S. industry, with implications of tremendous significance for real estate and housing.

No one knows how many trailer manufacturers there are. Estimates range from 300 to 2,000. Among the numerous small shops turning out trailers one at a time, there are a handful of real factories manufacturing them in volume on assembly lines. All are working at top speed, unable to meet the demand. Since 1933 demand for trailers has at least trebled every year. Last year there were some 250,000 on U. S. highways. Last week Covered Wagon Co. of Mt. Clemens, Mich., largest manufacturer in the business, doubled the size of its paint shop to keep pace with a production schedule up 600% over last year. Covered Wagon is still unable to fill more than one out of five orders. According to the most conservative trailer men, there will be a U. S. market of at least 400,000 units a year by 1940.

The modern trailer is no longer an ugly wooden box. Anywhere from 14 to 30 feet long, it is a streamlined lozenge of light metal with curtained windows, chromium fittings, a simple swivel joint at the bow where it couples with the automobile. Inside, it is as compactly luxurious as the cabin of a small cruiser. A 14-footer may have three davenports which convert into beds, a stove, icebox, sink, large closets, table. A 20-footer may have two rooms, shower, chemical toilet, desk, chairs, breakfast nook. All sizes are neatly outfitted, with wood veneer on the walls, linoleum or rugs on the floor. All have running water, insulation, electric light, heat. Cost for factory-built models ranges from $400 to $1,200. The more expensive models this year are outselling the cheap ones three-to-one.

Covered Wagon Co. has a history typical of the industry. Founder and president is bland, ruddy-chopped Arthur George Sherman, 46, son of a manufacturing biologist in whose plant he went to work in 1911. In 1928 he bought a trailer to take his five children camping. It was supposed to unfold into a tent in ten minutes, actually took hours. Exasperated, Biologist Sherman built a trailer which looked like an egg-crate but worked. His family still found it impractical for sleeping, however, because they encountered what U. S. trailermen now call "Trailer Tappers." "So many curious people banged on my trailer to investigate," says Trailerman Sherman, "that I began to see that trailer manufacture might be a profitable pursuit."

In 1930 he exhibited an improved model in the Detroit Automobile Show, got a batch of orders. Presently he had 20 men working 'for him in Detroit, began advertising in the National Geographic Magazine, Field & Stream. By March 1935, when the full impact of the trailer boom suddenly hit him, he had 13,000 sq. ft. of factory space. By last week he was using some 160,000 sq. ft. in a modern factory at Mt. Clemens. The business has almost ended the town's joblessness, employing more than 1,000 men. Working 24 hours a day, six days a week, they hope to turn out some 10,000 trailers in 1936, which will sell for some $4,000,000, eight times the 1935 gross income.

Second largest manufacturer is Detroit's Silver Dome, Inc., which last week tripled its floor space to 72,000 sq. ft. Producing 15 trailers a day, it was unable to fill three-fifths of its orders. President is slight, 38-year-old Norman Christian Wolfe, who, like Trailerman Sherman, pioneered in trailer advertising.

Other recognized and booming trailer concerns in the Detroit zone are Vagabond Coach Manufacturing Co. of New Hudson; Palace Travel Coach Co. of Flint; Aladdin Co. of Bay City; Raymond Products Co. of Saginaw; Roycraft Co. of Chesaning; Kozy Koach Co. of Kalamazoo. Most of them merchandise their trailers through local dealers like the automobile industry. Commercial Investment Trust finances installment sales.

A trailer business of a different sort is largely monopolized by Aerocar Co. of Detroit and Curtiss Aerocar Co. of Coral Gables, Fla. These two completely separate concerns control patents originally obtained by Glenn Curtiss, specialize in custom-built trailers costing from $1,000 to $5,000. Known as the "Rolls-Royces of the industry," Aerocars have been bought by W. K. Vanderbilt, Joseph E. Widener, Philip K. Wrigley, many another tycoon with an itching foot. U. S. Ambassador to Denmark Ruth Bryan Owen toured Europe in one. Oilman Henry L. Doherty owns two, also owns much Curtiss Aerocar Co. stock.

Trailer users are divided into three types: vacationers, retired couples with little money but much restlessness, people who live in trailers permanently, of whom there are said to be 100,000 moving about with the climate like nomads, parking in vacant fields or in trailer camps. So great has been the trend to trailers in the South and Midwest that the old tourist-cabin business is hard hit. Making the best of it, owners have opened fields where for a small sum trailers may park, plug in on a light cable, a waterline.

More important than their effect upon tourist cabins is the effect trailers might have upon real estate and housing. Modern trailers are cheaper, more adaptable, more comfortable than many summer resort cottages. As permanent homes, they at present have the advantage of avoiding property taxes. Trailermen therefore hold that it is not very far-fetched to believe that the increasing popularity of trailers may delay the much-mooted housing boom. So sure of this idea is famed Engineer William Bushnell Stout* that he has designed a super-trailer called the "Stout Mobile Home." Made of metal, it is towed behind the automobile to wherever the owner wishes to live. There he unhooks it, jacks it onto cement blocks, unfolds it like an envelope into a four-room bungalow. Calling this a perfect "machine for living," Designer Stout declares it is the opening wedge for eventual nationwide acceptance of prefabricated houses scrapped from year to year like automobiles. In this fantastic notion he has the support of no less a seer than Economist Roger Babson, who announced last January: "Within 20 years more than half the population of the U. S. will be living in automobile trailers."

--Builder of the first internally-trussed airplane; first U. S. metal military plane; first all-metal, multimotored transport plane; the Scarab automobile; exterior of Union Pacific R. R.'s streamlined M10001.

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