Immobile Mobiles

In Scottsdale, near Phoenix, Ariz., one day last week, a trailer-towing car tooled into the Oasis Mobile Home Park. The driver and his wife gazed appreciatively at the neat flower beds and the swimming pool, the recreation hall and the nine-hole putting green, the croquet court and the three shuffleboard courts. The weekly schedule of activities, posted by the "sunshine girl" or social director, revealed plans for potluck dinner, pinochle games, bridge night, dancing, and classes in ceramics and art. The well-fitted trailers--preferably called mobile homes--were leashed to water lines and TV lines, phone lines and plumbing lines (no clotheslines, thanks to built-in washers and dryers). Most of them were attached to cabanas and ramadas (a kind of carport). Some were three-bedroom affairs. All had living rooms and fully equipped kitchens. All had wheels that were decorously hidden behind shrubbery, brick walls, or flowers.

Suitably impressed, the visitor and his wife, a couple in search of a permanent settling place, inquired at the manager's office about rates. Watching the newcomers from his little garden, Trailerite Mack Gottschalk sighed with satisfaction. "It's a trailerite's heaven," said he. "When a trailerite dies, he'd like to come to something like this."

Nice Folks. It takes a heap o' claustrophilia to make a trailer a home, but more than 3,500,000 Americans are addicted to what they fondly call Wheel Estate. There are nearly 1,500,000 trailers on the road or lodged at some 18,500 parks in the U.S., and trailer living has gotten so popular that Michigan State University offers degrees in trailering (engineering, design, park management, etc.). It used to be that trailer living was the sole preserve of the unwanted and the rootless. Today, although trailerites have their share of spoilsports, mobile home promoters eagerly point out that most trailer people are nice folks: servicemen, vacationers, professional people and retired couples.

Though their parks are scattered in all 50 states, most for nontransients are located in the warmer climates of Florida, Texas, Arizona and California. But climate alone is not enough to lure the trailerites. Many are like the Lawrence Traylors, in their late 50s, who got lonely living in an apartment where "we could live and die, and nobody would care." So the Traylors moved to Mobile Manor in Arcadia, Calif., where they found "country-club living" in a handsomely furnished trailer (with color TV) and in the gregarious camaraderie that is the chief feature of trailer parks everywhere.

Along with companionship goes a kind of self-imposed exclusivity. Many parks cater chiefly to retired people, or to white-collar workers, or to couples with or without children. Scottsdale's Oasis Park draws the older, well-off people (no children, no pets). The trailer lots run to 3,000 sq. ft., on which owners park homes that are as much as 55 ft. long and 10 ft. wide (though manufacturers have models that are 85 ft. by 12 ft.). Best sites are located around the swimming pool-clubhouse circle, cost $60 a month v. $50 a month for outer-circle spots. Oasis also has a Catfish Row--way on the outside--for newcomers who can try out the park for a year before they move in. All the emphasis is on making the mobile home livable--and immobile. Residents labor over gardens, fill their yards with colored gravel (one man who used navy blue gravel was cordially invited to leave), delight in building elaborate additions. A "Chinese" cabana, for example, has peaked gables, Oriental bells, shrubs and decor, costs $24,500 (trailer extra).

Traveler's Urge. Curiously, the trailers are so big and expensive (up to $17,000) that only trucks are powerful enough to haul them for any sizable distance. Owners generally have long ago forgotten the trailer's original purpose--mobility--and are satisfied to stay in one place. But some still like the feeling that they can move on if they get the urge, and these buy small "travel trailers." At vacation time, they merely lock up the big trailer, hook the little one onto the car, and drive off. Conceivably, a family can have a whole telescopic Chinese nest of trailers that get smaller and smaller, depending on what kind of sub-vacations it has in mind.

To most trailerites, the home park is vacation enough, what with the planned activities, the relative economy, and the relentless companionship that trailer life affords. Besides, they like to keep busy improving things--adding split-level effects, extra rooms, breezeways, foundations. To the casual observer, the finished product seems remarkably familiar. It looks, in fact, like a house.

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