ABSTRACT

During the year when I was born-1946-the booming, postwar "trailer coach" industry actively promoted house trailers in magazine ads like this one from the Saturday Evening Post:

When I was seven, my parents, with two young children in tow, moved us all into a house trailer, hoping to find the comfort, privacy, and efficiency that the "trailer coach" industry had promised. But real life, as we soon discovered, did not imitate the worlds we learned to desire from magazine ads.