Independence Day, for Wayne and Helen Sutherland, came twice last year:
once when the rest of the country celebrated it, and once in September.
It was then they sold the four-bedroom Iowa house in which they had reared their children and moved, for better or worse, into a trailer. A classy trailer to be sure-it came with a microwave-but a trailer nonetheless.
Friends and family members were flabbergasted. ”They thought we were nuts,” 70-year-old Wayne says, smiling.
”It`s really hard for people to comprehend,” agrees Helen, 66.
An otherwise unremarkable couple, the Sutherlands-with a couple of quick pen strokes and the more difficult distillation of years worth of worldly possessions-had committed themselves to becoming geriatric gypsies. Two lifetimes of toil destined to wind down inside, or on the highway in front of, a 270-square-foot aluminum box.
They couldn`t be happier.
”We were only in our own home 18 days the year before. So I said, `Let`s go for it,` ” Helen says, seated in a swivel lounge chair in what might be termed the living room of their home.
Their 34-foot trailer is parked, for now, on the grounds of a former airport on the south side of this north Alabama city. Outside, an odd manifestation of the American Dream presents itself: Trailers, thousands of gleaming silver travel trailers just like the Sutherlands`, stand neatly in rows, like something a turn-of-the-century futurist might have envisioned.
In front of them sit beefy Americanmade tow vehicles-predominantly vans, Blazers and Suburbans-that have pulled them here from all across the continent. Atop most every trailer flutters an American flag.
It was more than the call of the open road that lured the Sutherlands from the beaten retirement path. For starters, the box they live in is not just any box. It`s an Airstream, a brand of travel trailer that doesn`t hesitate to call itself the Cadillac of the industry and claims phenomenal brand loyalty. And, more important still, with Airstream ownership comes the chance to join a club with members that just can`t gush enough about it.
The Wally Byam Caravan Club International consists of about 17,000 trailer families, as they are known, more than 40,000 people all told. The vast majority are retired. All own an Airstream. And for one week every year, from June 28 to July 4, they gather for the international rally. This year, about 5,000 people in 2,600 trailers got together in Huntsville, the club`s 31st annual gathering.
”I really hated to leave what I was doing, but Wayne had worked so hard for so long,” says Helen, a retired real estate broker and developer. ”Now I have ambitions in Airstream.” Wayne, retired after 46 years as a serviceman with Iowa Power, is second vice president of the club`s Iowa Unit, and Helen is its treasurer.
”It`s the best thing that ever happened to Wayne in retirement,” she says. ”They found out he knew how to hook wires together, so he`s been on the electric committee for five years.”
Just the other side of the Sutherlands` screen door, Wayne and two other men are talking, preparing to dismantle thousands of feet of power lines that have been set up for the rally.
”You see those three fellas?” Helen says. ”They didn`t even know each other when we came here, but now they`re very good friends. They`re not working very hard, but they`ve got something to do. . . . We`re not sitting in a rocking chair. If you just stay in your home town and sit in a rocking chair, your interests get smaller and smaller.
”People here have been all over the world. Our interests have just broadened enormously since we got our Airstream. . . . We`ve been all over these United States and all the provinces of Canada. And we don`t just drive through a town, we live in a town.”
Perhaps more important, she says, since the big move, one son has told her, ”Mom, I don`t think we need to worry about you. Every place you go, you have built-in friends.”
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”Wally Byam,” explains John Hockenberger, a retired jeweler from Rudolph, Ohio, at the rally, ”was the one that manufactured the first Airstream.” But Byam did more than just build these deluxe homes on wheels, an Airstreamer will tell you. Byam also led early caravans of his trailers to Costa Rica and Canada, to Italy and Austria, Uganda and Ethiopia. Had he lived, he would have turned 90 the day of the parade: Wally Byam was born on the 4th of July.
The legacy of Byam, who died in 1962, survives in the company, located in Jackson Center, Ohio, and in the club, a separate entity. His legacy survives, too, in the club`s logo, which features the head and shoulders of Byam, in profile and wearing a beret, against a backdrop of a globe.
Harold Holloway, at the Huntsville rally, once went on a caravan with Byam, a former advertising man and magazine publisher who began designing trailers in the late 1920s after readers complained that someone else`s trailer construction plans he had published were useless.
”He was a really good Joe,” says Holloway, 83, of San Diego. ”He liked everybody; everybody liked Wally.” Wally`s world, Holloway says, was small.
”All he thought about was caravaning. . . . He perfected his trailer on the road.” Caravans range in size from a few trailers to scores that travel together to a predetermined destination or event, usually taking their sweet time getting there. Some last as long as six months.
Byam`s 1960 book, ”Trailer Travel Here and Abroad,” recounts his exploits and reveals his philosophy about the ”high art” of trailer traveling. Its subtitle is ”The New Way to Adventurous Living!”
People who travel in a trailer, he wrote, ”never have to push themselves or exceed their physical limits. They can see the country-or the world-without sacrificing the warm comfort of the same bed every night and the conveniences of their own kitchen. They don`t have to live by a schedule set by the New York Central or TWA-they can set their own. They travel in their own home!
True, this home has wheels under it, but so what?”
Holloway is one who said, ”So what?” early on. An auto parts dealer in Iowa when he made his first Airstream trip, to Mexico, he says, ”In 1957, I had a store in Des Moines. In 1958, I went on a caravan with Wally Byam, came back and sold my store.” Holloway moved to San Diego and got his real estate license. Once he had established the business, he could take time to caravan. It was similar for Harold Turner, a friend of Holloway`s. The Boone, Ia., native owned a hydraulic-jack repair business, but retired at 56, not long after buying his first Airstream. ”The last day of 1965, I threw my tools up in the air and haven`t looked at `em since,” he says.
They try to explain the allure of the club. ”There`s other clubs,”
Turner says, ”but there`s no other club in the business that is better organized. We have our own security, our own doctors.” Plus, he says,
”They`re good people. You could put your bet on any one of them.”
”They`re all doers,” Holloway says. ”They`re not stick-in-the-mud types.”
The majority of club members don`t live full-time in their trailers. Some, however, tell of being on the road nine months a year or more. ”But we still maintain our homes,” says Lavern Goodman of Baton Rouge, a retired investigator for the Louisiana Department of Labor. ”We go back home and wash clothes, take a bath and get on the road again.” Many subscribe to services that forward mail and take phone messages.
If they see another Airstream while traveling, club members check its club registration number, prominently displayed on the trailer. A cross-indexed blue book can tell them whose rig it is. If they want, they can say hello on CB channel 14, which club members monitor.
Literally hundreds of scheduled caravans and rallies are listed in the June issue of Blue Beret, the club`s magazine, published 10 times a year. Some of the rallies coincide with events that virtually define North Americana: a fiddlers convention in Alabama; a lamb festival in Oregon; a college football bowl game in Florida; an antelope hunt in Wyoming; an air show in Oshkosh, Wis.; a rodeo in Manitoba, Canada.
A group within the group is the Free Wheelers, designating Airstream owners who are single. At the Alabama rally, there are about 400 full-timers, who, like the Sutherlands, have ditched their stationary homes entirely. There also is a New Jersey college sophomore, the daughter of an Airstream dealer, who lives not in a dorm but in her own trailer on the lot of daddy`s dealership.
”You become friends because you are an Airstreamer,” Goodman says.
”You automatically become friends. . . . We don`t have anybody in this group that we don`t know, because you can walk up to anybody.”
And Goodman`s husband, Sinclair, repeats a story going around about a woman whose husband died while they were on a caravan. She returned home, buried him posthaste and was back with the group before caravan`s end.
At its essence, Holloway says, ”It`s kind of a family, religious kind of a deal. It gets in your blood.”
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The trailers are spartan only in size. Try to imagine an affordable apartment in Manhattan-say, 8 feet wide and 25 to 34 feet long-and you`ll have an idea of what most of the people are dealing with. Some older Airstream models are shorter.
But the interiors, though decorated in basic motel-room styles, lack for little. ”We`ve got every convenience you want,” Lavern Goodman says. ”We have microwaves; we have ovens; we have central air; we have heat; we have a shower, beds, lots of storage space. There`s not a thing that you have at home that we don`t have in these trailers.”
Airstreams don`t come cheap. New models cost $27,000 to $49,000, though many used trailers are bought and sold. The company says 60,000 of the 100,000 built since 1935 are still on the road.
Airstream motor homes are rare and even pricier: One brand new model at the Huntsville rally wore a sticker price of $135,044.84 and the word ”sold” on a window. ”It`s like driving a 37-foot sports car,” says Ron Burgess, general manager of Avalon RV and Marine in Medina, Ohio, which also sold 40 new trailers at the Alabama gathering.
At the rally, only the people who arrived early to work on some of the 150 or so rally committees were allowed to use their air conditioning because of the tremendous drain on the electrical supply. Six miles of plastic pipe were put in to provide water.
Hosting a rally is quite an undertaking, and Airstreamers are proud that they are nonetheless courted by cities eager for the commerce of upward of 4,500 tourists. Two years ago, Marcia Cobun, marketing manager of the Huntsville Convention and Visitors Bureau, traveled to Boise, Idaho, where the group was meeting, to give Huntsville`s bid.
”We`re still counting,” she says, ”but just from information from other cities where Wally Byam has met, we have the potential for from $3 to $8 million (spent in Huntsville). . . . Already we`re working for 1991. We`d really like for them to come back.”
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Already this year, the Sutherlands have been all around Texas, to Oklahoma, Missouri, Des Moines, Wichita and Nashville. ”In the last year, there were only three nights we haven`t slept in the trailer,” Wayne says:
two with a son in Cedar Rapids, and one in a hotel in San Antonio.
”You go into resorts, condos, hotels, you don`t know people there. And hotels!” he scoffs. ”At least if you`re sleeping in dirt here, it`s your own.”
On the road, their rig gets about 11 miles a gallon. ”I do not drive,”
Helen says. ”I sit there. I`m the copilot.” She says they stop about every hour: ”What we like to do is stop in a shopping mall. If we see one on the highway, we stop, go in and go mall-walking for an hour or so.”
Their calendar is booked well in advance, including a January rally at the Rose Bowl and perhaps the 1990 rally at the Indy 500. ”It gives us so much to look forward to,” Helen says.
They were trailer travelers long before they bought their first Airstream. Helen remembers trying to visit friends at a Byam rally.
”We drove up to the gate with our little Shasta. No way could we even get in. We thought some of the people were stuck up, but it`s not true.” At the very first rally they attended, she says, they didn`t know a soul. But Helen sat outside the trailer and began playing her accordion. Soon, a guy came over with a banjo, and, before you could say ”turkey in the straw,”
there was a whole band of Byamites.
The clanishness of club members, she says, is merely a reflection of the trailer that brings them together: ”It costs the most, and, look, see, it`s made like an airplane. It tows real easy. And you probably noticed how beautiful they are, all parked in rows.”
