Vintage Trailers Harken to a Simpler Time
RV Business
In the farthest corner of the campground at Wickham Park, past the anonymous white boxes known as recreational vehicles, Chuck and Peggy Kern sipped morning coffee outside their pink-and-white 1963 Shasta Airflyte camper. The couple had joined about a dozen other vintage trailers for an informal weekend gathering.
The Shasta resembles something out of an Atomic Age fantasy - a midcentury ovoid of a spacecraft replete with twinkling lights and a pair svelte aluminum wings jutting from its rear roofline. Vintage trailer fanatics recognize Shastas and hundreds of lesser-known makes of this era as “canned hams” due to their distinctive shape.
Chuck conceded that the trailer, affectionately known as “Sweet Pea,” is his wife’s baby, her creation.
“Peg drove from Clearwater to Boston to pick up the Shasta,” he said. “She had never pulled a trailer in her life.”
Peggy spent about seven months resurrecting the little trailer, sanding its birchwood interior and coating it with amber shellac until it glowed like honey.
“The birchwood makes you feel like you’re in a little cabin,” said Peggy. “I wanted to camp again because my dad had a slide-in truck camper. I looked at the new ones, but they’re all plastic and smell like plastic.”
And, Chuck added, there’s that unquantifiable thrill that owners of Big White Boxes don’t experience: the waves and thumbs up from passersby.
Maybe it’s nostalgia. Maybe it’s a response to the excesses that precluded the country’s economic downturn a few years ago, but vintage trailers are hotter than Georgia asphalt. Designer websites like Pinterest are packed with images of gleaming Airstreams, pint-sized teardrops and canned hams bedecked with striped awnings, wicker chairs and flower pots. A TV show called Flippin’ RVs features a young couple who meticulously transform derelict trailers into showpieces than can fetch upwards of six figures.
Perhaps the most evident bellwether of the current vintage trailer craze is the resurgence of the Tin Can Tourists, an organization founded in Tampa in 1919 and known for the tin cans soldered to the radiator caps of members’ vehicles. The TCT were primarily northerners who would tow their primitive campers to Florida in the winter, eliciting snide comments from locals about those “tin can tourists.” The name became a badge of honor. Over the decades, the number of TCT members dwindled. By the mid-80s, the group all but disappeared. As vintage trailers began to gain popularity in the mid '90s, the TCT was revived. Today, the group’s Facebook page boasts more than 23,000 members.
Even longtime RV enthusiasts are catching the vintage camping bug.
Jean and Susie Brodeur are on their third Airstream, a 1966 vintage that gleams like a freshly spit-shined mirror. The retired couple rents out their home in Largo and spends as much time as possible living like vagabonds with their cat.
“I had newer Airstreams, but I decided to finally go vintage,” said Jean. “A lot of people who have vintage rigs are interested in doing things themselves, although some people buy trailers already restored. There’s a lot of camaraderie when your camping. And a lot of freedom. After here, we really don’t know where we’re going.”
Originally published here.