It should have tipped me off of what to expect at this particular show when I noticed a few mid-60’s Corvettes passing me the opposite way on Rt. 579 back towards Pennsylvania. After a few wrong turns, I finally found the location of the car show in a parking lot behind some buildings in an office/shopping complex off Route 31 in Pennington. Judging by the size of the small trees bordering the lot, the whole development could not have been more than a few years old, and the bagels pictured on the signage of the host business appeared to have the same color and texture as the faux cultured stonework adhered to the buildings. By the time I arrived, the show consisted of four late model Corvettes parked in a row with their hoods up, and a copper-colored 1972 Chevrolet Monte Carlo. A green and white 1973 Ford F-150 pickup truck was maneuvering to leave the parking area in front of the bagel shop just as I arrived. The owners of the Corvettes wore hooded coats and huddled in sling chairs next to their rides, and on the opposite side of the lot a DJ sat hunkered down in a lawn chair next to large speakers hooked to a laptop playing 1950’s rock and roll tunes. He barely moved in his down jacket as the tune “Barbara Ann” by the Regents played over the system. Perhaps lethargy had set in from consuming too many free bagels earlier…
I slowed my own truck down long enough to snap a photo and take a good look at the exiting Ford, and then kept driving. I find car shows where guys park Corvettes they recently purchased to not be very interesting unless you also have a Corvette to park and show off. Corvette owners at events like these are inclined to sit in their sling chairs and ignore us non-Corvette owners while they discuss among themselves how cool it is to own a Corvette. You often see newer model Corvettes parked and displayed at a “classic” car show like this. Some individuals work very long and hard hours to be able to purchase this assembly line ticket into the Corvette fraternity, and the senior fraternity members rarely sell their classic chick magnets on the open market. A clerk at the Department of Motor Vehicles once told me classic 1950’s and 60’s Corvettes only change hands because of a death or divorce. He himself had lost 2 to the latter.
Just because I'm leaving doesn't mean I'm ignoring you... 1973 Ford F-150 4x4
So much for the classic car show and MP3s of Fats Domino. I decided to check out a side road leading out of the eastern portion of the office complex towards the Borough of Pennington and came across something that WAS unusual: a large, polished aluminum travel trailer from the 1950’s. It resembled an immense, silver loaf of bread on wheels with a streamlined nose. Ignoring the Corvette owners and generic bagel shop two lots away, I had to park and examine this jet-age oddity more closely.
An insignia affixed to the side of the trailer identified it as a Spartan Manor, this model being a product of the Spartan Aircraft Company of Tulsa, Oklahoma, with a manufacturing date of 1950. Despite a few dents here and there, the impressive pop-rivet construction and polished surface looked remarkable for a 60 year-old travel trailer, especially one that most likely was considered obsolete by 1965. Further research showed that the Spartan Aircraft Company was once owned by J. Paul Getty, and produced airplanes designed and built for wealthy private pilots and sport fliers like Howard Hughes. After World War II, the company utilized it’s airframe technology and switched to manufacturing well appointed, all-metal travel trailers. Like the aircraft Spartan previously produced, these upscale models were intended for the wealthy and quickly became known as the “Cadillac” of travel trailers. The price for a Spartan Travel Trailer was upwards around $4000 dollars, at a time when the average house in the US was $8000. Considering what I recall of the Interstate highway system and road widths being like in the mid 1960’s, I can only imagine what it must have been like to pull an aluminum whale like this down the highway back in 1950. Full of furniture and appliances, this shiny, bulbous monster would have required a large Cadillac or Lincoln at minimum to pull it, and a very good braking system to stop it once it got rolling. I estimated the length to be at least 28 feet long; how in the world could you back this thing up into a driveway using a 1950’s sedan without power steering or power brakes? This was more like having the fuselage of a wingless B-29 attached to your rear bumper than a travel trailer.
Taking a peek inside through the front windows, it looked like the interior had been converted into a pre-school recreational area, with padded floors and walls and a host of brightly colored objects children could safely use to burn off energy with out inflicting head trauma on each other in the process. It appeared the whole operation was meant to stay put on the corner of the parking lot it occupied, and no signage indicated it was used as a rolling pre-school indoor gymnasium. Seems like a good idea; it would be much easier to bring the kids to this location than to pull this small house from neighborhood to neighborhood. I was impressed, however, that sometime between 1950 and 2010 this behemoth at least made it half way across the country from Tulsa, Oklahoma to a parking lot on the edge of Pennington, NJ. I wondered what other parts of North America it may have rolled over and through during it’s lifetime.
The big, shiny blimp on wheels...
Across the parking lot, one more Corvette owner decided to call it a day and started up the engine of his dream machine. I suppose the original owner of this Spartan Manor travel trailer may have felt much the same way in 1950 about his gleaming status symbol as the gentlemen sitting in the sling chairs next to their ‘Vettes felt on this chilly afternoon in 2010. I think I ‘d like to have met the first owner of this big shiny beast, though. Hopefully, he wouldn’t be the type to ignore you.
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