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.