Trailerama

By Phil Noyes

Photos, postcards, and ads featuring vintage trailers—from humble family vacations to Hollywood stars.
 
Trailerama provides a visual wonderland filled with imagery featuring these vintage vehicles, fondly recalled for their associations with fun, adventure, family vacations—and of course, movie stars on the set. From greeting cards to postcards to Hollywood photos, the travel trailer is put on grand display in this kitschy celebration culled from the coffers of Trailer Travel’s Phil Noyes.
 
“Filled with colorful images of trailers. Culled from ads, postcards, sheet music, and more, they run the gamut from the earliest mobile coaches in the 1930s to the roving behemoths that came to dominate the market in later decades…Noyes documents the country’s still smoldering love affair with life on the road.”—Los Angeles Magazine

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781423621430

Book preview

Introduction

Let me start by saying this book is not a history lesson, nor am I a historian. I am just a guy who loves vintage trailers and all the wonderful ephemera that has come out of this industry over the last hundred years.

I am the guy at the flea market who is sitting in the dirt with a box full of a thousand musty snapshots looking for just one that may feature a travel trailer on some long-forgotten adventure. Maybe a faded black-and-white Polaroid with the snaggletooth edges of a happy family midway through a cross-country adventure, with their home-on-wheels swaying along behind them; or a Kodachrome slide of little Bobby and Jenny posing in front of the family’s new Airstream parked in their 1950s suburban driveway. I also spend an inordinate amount of time and money on eBay searching for just one more bit of trailer-related paperwork, and have been known to go a little crazy during a bidding war for something so obscure that most people wouldn’t give it a second look.

But I am not alone! Oh, no. . . . There is a small army of crazy, like-minded trailerites out there sitting in the dirt and scouring the Internet for vintage goodies, and our ranks are growing! We get together at rallies and swap stories and buy and sell and trade those odd finds that mean so much to us. We drag our vintage trailers with us, and of course all our camping gear is vintage and usually specific to our trailers. God forbid your 1947 Westcraft would have a lounge chair from the sixties under the awning (made from original painted duck canvas, of course), and the horror if somebody shows up who has thrown out all the original appliances and traded them for something modern!

We like our stuff with a story and a soul . . . a little rust is OK and some patina is always a plus. But what is it that feeds our passion? Why are we so in love with these old trailers? For me, they’re akin to a time capsule. Each trailer and every scrap of paper, each little toy, and especially the snapshots, are windows into our collective pasts. I can spend hours looking at old brochures and ads, just marveling at the hand-drawn images that we so rarely see now, or the lovely models in their fabulous bathing attire toweling off after a shower in their 1930s Land Yacht.

This book pays homage to all things vintage trailer, and I hope that all you nontrailerites will