When I went off to college in Southern California in 1984, I discovered that my school had a student trailer park on campus[1] with $75/month rent and a culture that was very accepting of my brand of weirdness[2]. It sounded good, so I bought a 1969 Roadrunner camping trailer for a couple hundred bucks and started to fix it up.
Curtains made from Hawaiian-shirt fabric and lots of car emblems.
I was 18 and living on my own for the first time, so there's the Robert Crumb cookbook[3] above the refrigerator and lots of car emblems on the cabinet door. Strangely, even though I loved junkyards back then as much as I do now[4], I did not get these emblems from the junkyard. Instead, I traded a plastic robot hand[5] to a friend who had a box of emblems that he had scavenged from various Oakland junkyards.
Sorry about the blurry photos. The film-photography era sucked.
So, I took a power drill and made lots of holes in a cabinet door for the mounting pins on the emblems, then held them in place using a hot-glue gun. It looked great and made my trailer feel like home.
A few years later, here's what it looked like in my neighborhood.
This proved to be the ideal home for me, and the car emblems on the cabinet doors served as inspiration for later projects, such as my 1965 Chevrolet Impala sedan performance/installation art piece[6].
References
- ^ student trailer park on campus (articles.latimes.com)
- ^ my brand of weirdness (www.youtube.com)
- ^ Robert Crumb cookbook (www.amazon.com)
- ^ do now (autoweek.com)
- ^ plastic robot hand (www.amazon.com)
- ^ 1965 Chevrolet Impala sedan performance/installation art piece (murileemartin.com)
