[A/S] Blast from the Past

["ganderson35" <g_anderson@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Blast from the past clad in shiny
silver Vintage trailers are hot items 

Chris Dixon, New York Times 
Wednesday, December 31, 2003 

Standing in the open screen door of her shining, 1953
Aljoa Sportsman camper, Mo Collins, 38, watches
her 8-year-old son, Collen, as he runs through the
woods with a posse of other children. Comfortable
that he is safe, she steps back onto the pink
linoleum floor of her aluminum and birch- wood trailer,
with its Tiki-theme curtains, and pours herself a cup
of coffee. 

But the year is not 1953, of course; it's 2003. Collins,
an actress on the Fox program "Mad TV," and her
husband, Jimi Englund, 38, a musician, are among a
growing number of vintage-camper fans who are
finding their way onto America's roads in rolling stock
built back when Studebakers and Packards plied the
highways. 

While lovers of 1950s modernism have made the
Airstream into a well-known design icon, other
trailers, with names like Silver Streak, Vagabond and
Spartanette, are much less well known. Sometimes
far less expensive than their modern counterparts,
and in many cases surprisingly easy to restore, they
often have stunning, handcrafted birch interiors,
miniature Philco and Marvel refrigerators with
pull-down handles, and porcelain-enameled Dixie
stoves and ovens. With a little money and ingenuity,
they can also have nearly every modern convenience
you could want. That is, if you want them. 

The trailers' appeal, said John Anderson, a television
producer whose 1948 Westcraft trolley top looks as if
it could have just rolled off the lot, is that "you're living
the way people lived in the '40s and '50s." But, in
fact, everything from the wiring to the paneling has
been replaced. Hidden behind the vintage touches --
like a porcelain bathroom sink, antique ice- box door
and gleaming varnished cabinets -- are a modern
refrigerator, a 12- to 120-volt power system, a
six-gallon hot water tank and a fully modernized
water-holding system. The camper, which Anderson
found on a Canadian roadside for sale for $600, is
also wired for solar power, though he has not yet
installed the panels. (He drew the line at television:
The trailer has only a historically correct AM radio.) 

To share their passion for vintage trailers, owners
come together in weekend campouts like the one
last month that Anderson and Collins were attending
in an Anaheim (Orange County) RV park. 

At many of the rallies, families will show up not only
with an old camping trailer, but with a vintage
automobile to pull it, like the 1957 Chevrolet Bel-Air,
the 1959 Mercury Voyager wagon and the 1938 REO
fire truck parked near these campers at the Canyon
RV Park. The old-style trailers and cars, occupying
40 or so spaces, are a startling contrast to the
modern RV behemoths that take up most of the rest
of the vast, oak-shaded campground. 

The rally's organizer, Craig Dorsey, who runs a trailer
restoration company called Vintage Vacations, was
there in his own two-bedroom, two-bath 1949
Vagabond Liberty coach, which he found on EBay
and bought for just $463. "I wasn't setting out to
make it perfect," Dorsey said. "The sole purpose was
to set it down in Julian," a town in the San Diego
mountains that has a 90- acre, 120-site vintage travel
trailer retreat, "so that we could go down there on
weekends and have our little cabin in the mountains."

Dorsey, a former art director for television
commercials, didn't start out restoring trailers for a
living. He bought his first trailer, a tiny 1956 Mercury
"canned ham" model (so named because the shell
resembles the time- honored Hormel tin), in 1996 for
a few hundred dollars and restored it in his spare
time. He said he never used the trailer, and ended up
taking it to a swap meet where he was astonished to
get $3,500 for it. 

Then one day he was "working with the director from
hell," he said. "It was one of those situations where I
just came unglued. I walked over to the producer,
shook his hand and said, 'I'm done.' I called my wife
and said, 'Honey, I'm going to restore trailers.' " 

Though his wife was less than pleased about the
idea, Dorsey said, his business has grown in the four
and a half years since he opened up shop in
Anaheim. To date, he said, he has partially or fully
restored more than 40 trailers and is nearing the
point where he has more work than he can handle by
himself. 

A stunning Silver Streak that Dorsey is restoring at a
cost of nearly $200,000 has a $9,000 Bose
flat-television surround-sound system; freshwater and
sewage tanks; a stainless steel shower and toilet; a
modern refrigerator (though it has a retro-looking
door); a full inverter that powers 120-volt appliances;
and heat and air conditioning. "You'll get the same
things on this you would in a Prevost" motor home,
he said. 

Among the trailers Steven Butcher, a partner in a
Ventura restoration company called Funky Junk
Farms, has recently restored is a 1948 Westcraft for
a fly fisherman. It has a DVD system and all the
components run off a 2,000- watt, battery-powered
inverter. "I like mixing new technology with something
old," he said. "You can even add solar panels to run
your inverter. It looks like the 1940s until you open up
the cabinets." 

In the trailer Collins and Englund share, Butcher
pulled up the worn linoleum flooring, confirming that
the baseboard wood underneath was in good shape,
and then laid a new coat of pink-colored linoleum that
he said was very close to an original pattern. To add
to the authenticity, he carefully aged it with a power
sander. 

Not everyone goes to such lengths, of course. Matt
and Genevieve Buffington bought their 12-foot 1965
Aristocrat Low-Liner for $1,000 and put about $1,200
more into it in paint and replacement of worn
woodwork, doing the work themselves. "We didn't
have the big, beautiful wood interiors," Buffington
said. "We've instead gone totally atomic." 

Now even their two children are fans of midcentury
design. At one point, Buffington said, the family drove
to an exhibition on modernism in San Diego and "our
kids would stand outside and say, 'Would you like to
see our trailer?' It was a huge hit." 

For many vintage-trailer owners, the biggest problem
is stopping at just one. Parked a few campers over
from Dorsey, Toni Miltenberger, 60, was enjoying a
cup of coffee in a brilliantly shiny 1958 Streamline 27.
She and her husband, Chuck, restored the trailer
themselves after paying $4,000 for it on EBay. Now
they're restoring two more trailers -- a 1950 Westcraft
Coronado and a 25-foot Silver Streak. On a weekend
campout like this, people walk from one
old-fashioned trailer to another, marveling at the
perfectly functioning 50-year-old refrigerators,
matched sets of original curtains and old copies of
Life magazine, as well as the home theater systems
run by solar power inverters hidden in the cabinets. 

But the real appeal of the trailers is much simpler,
Collins said. "You can just feel the fun that has
happened in there," she said. "The birch wood smells
like 50 years of campfires."