BY JIM ALLEN [email protected] PHOTOS: JIM ALLEN- By the early ’60s, they had a line of
streamlined trailers built similarly to air-
craft. This was no surprise since the Los
Angeles area had been a center of aircraft
manufacturing, and workers with the req-
uisite skills abounded. If you were going
to build a high-end trailer, aircraft-style
riveted was the type of construction that
defined the market segment. Better-known
trailers in this segment included Airstream,
Silver Streak, and Avion, but there were
many others.
Trailers were already big, but the mo-
torhome was just coming into the start of its
popularity. It was easy enough to contract
with a truck manufacturer for a bare chassis
and build a motorhome onto it. Some were
what we now call a Class A, where a totally
new coach was added over a bare chassis,
and some were the Class B that built the
coach behind a cab. Both styles are still
produced with enough fans of either type to
keep them both in production.
The Jeep Forward Control truck, intro-
duced in 1957, was a cabover version of
the Jeep light-truck chassis. It was innova-
tive, and the only such thing on the market
with four-wheel drive at the time, but sales
had been disappointing. They were built
in GVWs starting with a fairly light-duty,
short-wheelbase^1 ⁄ 2 -ton; an SRW 1-ton that
was a bit overrated; and a 1-ton dualie that
fourwheeler.com FOUR WHEELER SEPTEMBER 2019 65
|>Well, with this clearance and those angles, you
aren’t going four-wheeling in it, even if it did have
a driving rear axle. The operating history of it is
unknown, but there are numerous travel stickers
on it, and it looks like it did the Route 66 run
as far east as Adrian, Texas. It’s pretty clear the
owner figured out this was just a mobile flop-
house for local venues.