Home on the Road: The Motor Home in America (review)

Home on the Road: The Motor Home in America. By Roger B. White. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000. Pp. xii+220. $24.95.

In 1985, Roger White served as curator for At Home on the Road: Autocamping, Motels, and the Rediscovery of America at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History. Since then he has been gathering everything he could find about the history of the motor home from the perspective of manufacturers and users. Now he has drawn from these extensive files to create this well-researched book.

Home on the Road, a narrative of "self-propelled camping vehicles" (house cars, pickup campers, converted buses, and such) adds to the historical literature of automobile pleasure and vacation travel. Although White's book provides the first history of motor homes, David Thornburg's Galloping Bungalows (1991), a history of house trailers, covers similar ground, and Warren Belasco's Americans on the Road: From Autocamp to Motel (1979) treats the subject in a broader context. White traces the history of the motor home through the "early adopters" at the beginning of the twentieth century to the 1990s, when Winnebago produced its 250,000th motor home and the Family Motor Coach Association registered its 250,000th family member. Along the way, he provides anecdotes and reminiscences of many people who saw America from the inside of a motor home.

The earliest motor homes were either the products of backyard tinkerers or belonged to wealthy people who could afford such elegant vehicles as a 1910 Pierce-Arrow touring landau, which sold for $8,250. These were the same adventurous members of the elite, like T. Coleman du Pont or Henry B. Joy, who supported the Good Roads Movement and modified their cars to experience the joys of auto camping. Many early mobile homes were custom made for large families, such as bus manufacturer Roland Conklin's 1915 "Gypsy Van," a 25-foot, 8-ton vehicle whose interior retained the feel of an English country house. The Conklin party of nine included a chauffeur and steward. Then there was cereal man Will Keith Kellogg's "Ark," built by the Bender Body Company of Cleveland in 1923, replete with mahogany paneling and Spanish leather.

White seems most fascinated by these oddball custom motor homes and their wealthy and often eccentric owners. When the motor home becomes a mass-produced consumer product for the postwar middle class, he seems to lose interest. He provides little discussion of the advertising or marketing of motor homes, or any indication of who buys them and why. He does not analyze the business decisions that led to the development of particular styles of vehicles or the rise and fall of consumer enthusiasm for different types. He turns his attention, instead, to the personalized vehicles of the 1960s counterculture, such as Ken Kesey's "Merry Prankster" bus (now in the Smithsonian's collection) and the "Road Hog" of the Hog Farm Caravan.

Home on the Road is well illustrated and well documented, with dozens of memoirs and reminiscences of motor home pioneers--the acknowledgments run to over four pages. It provides us with a rich body of source material and reminds us of the many ways that Americans have manifested their love of the open road and automobility.

Judith E. Endelman

Ms. Endelman is director of historical resources and chief curator at Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan.

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