Thirty Years in a Housetruck

Chapter One: Getting Out

The year was 1974. I was renting a small rear house in Los Angeles and working as a TV repairman. I had known that I wanted to leave LA since I was in my teens, but hadn't quite figured out how I was going to do it. Reading magazines such as Mother Earth News, and books like the Domebook and Foxfire series and the Whole Earth Catalog inspired me to join the back-to-the-land movement, as it did many young adults. I was seriously obsessed with geodesic domes, and made models of them from soda straws and popsicle sticks.

Then Lloyd Kahn published 'Shelter', which contained "Domebook 3'. In Domebook 3, Lloyd revealed that domes weren't the perfect habitation. They leaked, were noisy inside, made ominous creaking noises when the wind blew, and were not a efficient use of materials.

I guess that my vision would have been crushed, except that I found a few pages on Nomadics in Shelter, including a few photos of house trucks and buses, and some brief descriptions of life in the same. This interested me.

About the same time, I was having regular correspondence with a high school buddy who was in the Army, stationed in Mainz, Germany. He had married a native of Eugene, Oregon, and invited me to come up to try out the rural lifestyle when his hitch was up.

In order to make the move, I needed to rent a moving van. Checking with U-Haul, etc revealed that a one-way truck was going to cost about $600. I decided that it might make more sense to purchase a used truck for a bit more, and then resell it once I had moved. I located a used cabinet maker's delivery van with a 20-foot box and purchased it in October 1974 for the sum of $1,000. Once I owned this vehicle, I realized that it wasn't all that much smaller than the kitchen and dining room of the house that I rented, which is where I spent most of my waking hours anyway (the dining room contained my four-track recording studio). The 8-foot ceiling made it seem that much more like a small studio apartment. The housetruck section of Shelter worked on my brain, I worked on the truck, and the rest is history.

Building my home on a truck chassis was in part the only way that I was going to be able to afford my own home. Without a high paying career, I would have been consigned to renting for the rest of my life. On the slight chance that I could get the credit to purchase a home, I'd have been tied to a 30 year mortgage and been a wage slave until I was too old to enjoy a meager retirement.

After putting up with landlords, experiencing discrimination due to being a young single man, and being evicted after doing much remodeling at my own expense on my rented home because the landlord's son wanted it for his own bachelor pad, owning my own place was a requirement. Building it on a truck chassis mean that I could "take it with me".