1937 Fortune Magazine
(Selected painting by J.W. Golinkin from “Fortune” Magazine, March 1937)
With so many different kinds of trailers on the market, it is obviously impossible to say anything about one trailer that would be true about all, except that a trailer is a more or less habitable flat mounted on two, three, or four wheels.
No flat rule can be laid down as to price and quality. Cabin length is another shifting factor, the range running from fourteen to twenty-five feet. Generally speaking, the industry hasn’t yet stabilized at a point were an intelligible correlation between price and quality can be drawn. Some low-priced jobs, for example, are better buys than more expensive ones for the simple reason that more attention has been paid to the structure than the fittings.
Trailers have the emotional appeal of boats.
It takes ingenuity to cram living quarters for four people in a space sixteen feet long by six feet wide, and the trailer builders have proved themselves ingenious in devising what are, in effect, land yachts. At first wood went into the chassis and frames; what the road didn’t shake to pieces, the dampness and the termites ate away. At one time the ditches of west Texas were littered with the bones of California bound trailers that couldn’t stand the gaff. The bunks were upper and lower shelves; you had to be an acrobat to sleep in them. You washed from a basin on a shelf. The door was set in the back, which was a nuisance – because the dust swirled in; and a danger – because it meant stepping out into the traffic. When the industry went to side doors in 1933, it was as revolutionary a step, comparatively, as freewheeling. The side door made possible a shrewder arrangement inside, a division between kitchen and sleeping quarters.