Photos 1 and 5 by Clifton Bertram
When I was a kid, the first tent trailer my father bought to take his young family camping was a beat-up vintage fifties number with a once-shiny aluminum body. Unlike most trailers today, the tent portion folded out of the trailer base and over onto the ground resulting in a tent-like configuration whose floor was on the ground, with a double-bed set-up on the bed of the trailer. (If you're having trouble picturing this, check out this 1964 Apache tent trailer, which had a similar layout.
Best of all though was the fact that below the bed of the trailer were two compartments with exterior doors that were meant to access cargo. Fortunately for us, when the tent was erected, the doors were within the tent, which allowed us to put a foam mattress in one of the compartments, as well as bedding and pillows - the perfect second bed to put my sister and I on summer-long family camping trips. To this day, sleeping in that cargo compartment, with my pillow-comforted head sticking out of the cargo bay and resting on the lowered drawbridge-style door.
Looked at from a Modernist perspective, our aluminum-bodied vintage tent trailer was very much a mid-century phenomenon. In the aftermath of WWII, alumimum - which had been rationed as a strategic resource - became plentiful again, and there were dozens of aircraft fuselage manufacturers and second-tier subcontractors with the tooling and expertise to produce churn out recreational trailer products as effectively as they had Grumman Hellcats.
The golden age of midcentury recreational trailering was born, with the standard being borne by industry leaders like Airstream, but venerable manufacturers like Spartan Aircraft (builders of Spartan Trailercoaches) and Modernistic Industries (the Aljoa trailer) easily contributed as much.
For those interested in learning more about vintage modern aluminum trailers, Douglas Keister's Silver Palaces is well-thought of by those in the community, and on-line, one of the best resources is Doug's Vintage Trailers.
(top photo an Airstream Trailer rented as 'capsule accomodation' at 10,000 Waves Spa in Santa Fe, NM; bottom photo, your humble narrator in his cargo bed, source of many fond childhood memories)
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