“I watched my dad and I thought the only way to make money was you had to be in business for yourself. So I thought nothing of starting a business. I mean that was just the thing to do.“

Childhood

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Phil: So, I’m Phil Metzler, recording this for the Goshen Historical Society—this oral history with Glen Miller and with Doug Risser. Could you just start off, Glen, by just sharing when you were born and where?

Glen: Oh, okay. Well, I was born in Elkhart, Indiana. You could see the Miles Laboratories from the back of our house. In nineteen—well, that’s where we wound up; I was really born in Mishawaka. But that was our first house that my dad owned. And the school was right across the alley, so that was pretty convenient.

But the most interesting part of my life was when my dad had a farmer that offered him a barn if he would tear it down. And that was near Capitol Avenue in Mishawaka, Indiana. So my dad tore the barn down, built a house on Capitol Avenue, and had no interior plumbing; had a pump at the sink; my mother had a kerosene stove; the toilet was outside; had a half acre of ground, which she planted. My dad got a firehose; we had a creek running through the back of the property. He dammed up the creek at the back of our property; put a pump in there; pumped water in the firehose—which I had to change in between the rows that my mother was growing vegetables—and watered the garden. 

Then my young brother, Charles—ten years younger than I—when he was born, they couldn’t get anything to agree with him, so they finally settled on goats. And the doctor okayed the goats’ milk. So my dad got a goat, and I had to milk the goat and feed the goat.

Doug: So what year were you born?

Glen: Twenty-one—1921, yeah. January 23rd of ’21.

Doug: Okay, so you have a big birthday coming up in January, then.

Glen: Oh yeah.

Doug: (Laughs) And who were your parents?

Glen: Milo E. Miller and Erla Miller.

Doug: Okay.

Glen: And when he built this house—tore the barn down—he built this house, there was a lot of voids. There I was—I think I was a nine-year-old kid, “the boy”—and my dad just didn’t realize my age, I guess. He said, “You know, Glen, if you’ll shingle that house, I’ll build a shop for you in the back of the garage.” Well, I was a good six weeks shingling that house. He taught me how to strike a chalk line. But anyway, when I got done, then he built me a shop in the back of the garage, and it had a vice and a hammer, and a big window in the back that I could look out to the back of the property. 

In addition to that, they got a cow. Now I had a cow to stake out, and a goat to milk. But I didn’t have a water problem, because they get right down to the creek. So he bought a pig—you’re going to butcher some piglets. And he said, “Glen, if you will go over to the neighbors—which is about a quarter of a mile away—with your wagon—at that time they dumped the garbage raw into the can—and gather their garbage and feed the pigs, you can have your choice of pig. And when it grows up and we sell it, you can have the money.”

Well, so I’m hauling a couple of garbage cans on my wagon over there—about three or four times a week, gathering up garbage. One day I come back, and my pig had a knot on the top of its head. And the next day it was dead. And my dad, being the businessman he was, said, “That’s too bad, Glen—that’s the way business goes sometimes; keep feeding them.” So that’s what I did.

Doug: How old were you at that time?

Glen: Oh, I was probably nine or ten.

Start of the Trailer Industry

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The main story I would like to tell you is how the trailer business got started in Elkhart County. It was in the heart of the Depression. My dad was an interior decorator, but people weren’t painting the inside of their houses. He developed a product for car tops. The car tops were vinyl with wood framing underneath. And they would dry out, and then they’d develop a leak, and then you had to replace the framing. 

So he went to Flint, Michigan, at the parking lot, and checked tops as they came in and offered to dress their top for them—for so much money—and they would pay him on the spot, and he would get the license plate number, and after they all went to work he’d go through the parking lot and paint the tops. 

Well, he wanted to take his family with him. So one time he built a trailer—a camping trailer—in our driveway on College Avenue. And it had canvas sides and they folded out, and there was a double bed on each side. My folks slept on the one, and we three boys slept on the other one. It had a tub up in front that drained out the bottom, and a portable water tank. 

So we took that up to Flint, Michigan, and parked in the school lot—because the school lot had an outside pump and an outside toilet. And we were there about three or four days, and a carload of guys pulled in and wanted to buy the trailer to go deer hunting. So he sold them the trailer for ninety dollars. And then he started—but it was with an agreement that he could live in it until he got another one built. So he started building another one right on the spot. Well, these boys told somebody else about it, and they came by and bought the second one. 

So we came home to Mishawaka. He went to the lumberyard and rented a spot, and started building trailers. And that was probably in ’33—1933. Well, that grew—the place they moved to Elkhart on Harrison Street in a barn, and he got acquainted with Wilbur Schult, made Wilbur Schult his sole distributor, and started building trailers there. 

He made plywood outside and covered it with vinyl. He would send me across the street to the bakery to get a gallon of honey—that’s what he glued the vinyl on with. And when it would get warm, it would run out the bottom of the trailer and the flies would gather around it. So he got that corrected, finally. 

But in 1936—well, he had a big plant building three a day for Wilbur Schult in the old carriage building. Wilbur Schult came to him one day and said Milo, I’m either going to buy you out, or start a plant on my own. So dad sold out to him, went down and rented the basement in the same building, and was going to start another trailer factory. And Schult found out about it, and bought the building and kicked him out. So we went across town on Beardsley, and there was a building over there that had “Elkhart Coach, Elkhart” on the side of it. That’s where the old Elcar was built. He rented the upstairs of that building and started another trailer factory, and called it Elkhart Coach.

He sold that out to a guy by the name of Jerry Wiles(??), in Chicago. Then we—in 1936, we moved to Huntington because Huntington had a car barn for the Erie Railroad that wasn’t being used. My dad rented that and we started another trailer factory called National Trailer. And times were so tough that the sales manager he had, built some living quarters—a place to sleep, in the stockroom of that business—and that’s where he slept and had his clothes, and where he bathed, and everything. He lived in there for a while until he was able to rent a room downtown.

Anyway, they were building three a day. I think I was a junior in high school. And I was working at the trailer factory, hanging the doors and doing all the hardware, and putting in the cookstove and the heating stove. And school was getting ready to start. So I went inside to my dad, and said, “If you won’t hire somebody—they’re building three a day—if you won’t hire somebody to do that, I’ll do it for so much per trailer.” And I cut the price from the hourly rate—from the eight-hour hourly rate—and he agreed to it. 

So school would let out and I would take off for the factory and do in three hours what it used to take me eight. Well, my dad caught on to that pretty quick. So he started charging me $7.50 per month for room and board (laughs).

Then he put the whole factory on piece-rate. And he outgrew those quarters. So we moved to Elwood in 1939, because there was a glass factory there that was huge. And he started a factory that was around 450 employees and it was building twenty-two units a day—this was during the heart of the Depression—and he couldn’t keep up with the orders. 

And I had three and a half years in high school, and I didn’t want to go to another high school. So I had enough credits to graduate—so I just went back in ’42 and got my graduation. 

Anyway, while he was at that plant, the sales office was separate from the factory office. In the one—after I seen the employees going from the plant over to the main office—and I stepped out of the door one day and I said, “Hey Dolan”—Dolan Young was this guy’s name—“Come here, I want to talk to you.” So he came in and I said, “What’s going on?” 

“Well,” he said, “Your dad gave us preferred stock for Christmas, and we got taxed on it, and we can’t afford to pay the tax. So we’re selling it back to him at fifty cents on the dollar.” Well, we had a dealer in Detroit, and he and I were good friends—Frank McDonald. Frank built trailer parks, and boomed as a dealer, you know, and had lots in Florida. And I would go to Florida with him—so we were real buddies. But anyway, I called Frank McDonald and told him what was going on, and said, “I want to borrow some money, Frank.” “How much do you want?” And I said, “Three thousand.” “It’s yours,” he said.

Service in the Air Corps

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Doug: This would have been when you were about eighteen years old?

Glen: Yeah! No, I was older than that—you know that was probably 1941, maybe.

So, then in ’42, I went into the Air Corps. I knew I was going to get drafted. So I went—they said Since you don’t have a college education, you got to take an exam. So I had to go to Ft. Wayne and take the exam, which I passed. So I got in the Air Corps. And that was in November—I left November of ’42.

Doug: I think I heard that you had to kind of go back a second time to do your physical?

Glen: Well yeah. When they inducted me, I lacked about a half a pound of weighing enough. So the sergeant said, “Come back tomorrow morning, early. In the meantime, go to the mess hall and get four bananas. Eat those tomorrow morning and before you go to the bathroom, come in first thing and I’ll weigh you again.” So I passed the weight test (both laugh).

I served in the Pacific from November of ’42—of course we had to go through school, you know, for pilot training. But I got out in March of ’46. When we first went over, we went to Hollandia, New Guinea; then we went to the island of Biak, which is just off the northern tip of New Guinea; then we went to Palau, which was just above Biak; and from Palau we went to Leyte in the Philippines; and from Leyte we went to Okinawa; and from Okinawa to Tachikawa, Japan.

You probably can’t print this, but Tachikawa, Japan, was training grounds for the Japanese Air Force. And under the runways was a factory building, building ammunition. And the town was nothing but a bunch of geisha houses, because of the military being based there. So we had nice quarters and the whole works—and hangars, you know. And so we flew out of there.

Doug: This would have been after V-J Day? After the peace—

Glen: No, the armistice was signed—I think—on September the 5th.

Doug: Right. Was this before that, or after that?

Glen: Well, I didn’t move up there until the sixth, I think. It was signed on the fifth, and I flew eleventh airborne—you can’t print this, anyway—and on the sixth, and their job was to make sure the GIs that were coming in there went to the Pro stations after they had their fun in the whore houses.

So, that was my experience. Then that’s how the trailer business got started.

Doug: Okay. You did a couple of different things as a pilot. What were some of the different things you did as a pilot? What types of planes did you fly?

Glen: Oh. Well, the main thing was probably the C-46, and that was a freight—but they brought B-25’s over to Biak aboard ship, because they don’t have the range to fly them over. And they would assemble them there, and then I got a part-time job of taking them up and testing them after they assembled them. Well, the crew chief that assembled the plane, that was his plane. And at that time, the trim tab for the tail was a wheel, right here (gestures), just vertical, and I used to take off with that trim tab—that controlled the back elevators. Well, once in a while, they would get that twisted, you know? So I started going out to the line, and I would say, “Is it ready to go?” And he would say, “Yes Sir.” And I would say, “Okay, get aboard.”

Well, if he fumbled around a little bit, I didn’t take it—I knew there was more to do.

Doug: So you have a few—you have a photograph here of some stuff (directs attention to medal display).

Glen: Oh, the ribbons. I don’t know if I could even tell you what they are for anymore. That photograph there—the one in uniform—was taken in Japan.

Doug: Okay. Then the plane—what plane is that a picture of?

Glen: Oh, that one—there is a C-46 and a B-25 there. Hold it up, I want to see that. Oh, this is the front of the B-25, and the gunner’s in here, and that’s the side view, you know. I think that’s a 46. The 46 was strictly freight.

Doug: So that was a picture of you then, that was taken in Japan.

Glen: Yeah, I weighed all of 138. 

Doug: And then a number of medal— 

Glen: Well, my youngest daughter insisted I do that. They’re not all on there because it lacked the space to do it, but—you know these are the ribbons that you wore. There are three more medals that I’m entitled to that are not in there. 

Doug: Very impressive.

Glen: (laughs) They’re not to me.

Businesses

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Doug: So then after the war, when you came back—now did you have a girlfriend while you were—

Glen: I was married!

Doug: You are married the whole time?

Glen: Yeah, I got married in January of the former year.

Doug: So before you went into the Air Corps—

Glen: Yeah, I was married almost a year when I went in. When we came back—I had a brother four years younger than I—we were the best of buddies—and he and I started the ready mix plant in Goshen. That would have been about ’47 or ’48—probably ’47.

Doug: And that was the one out on Logan Avenue, you said?

Glen: Logan, you know where Logan is? You know, it’s now filled up. Then, it was an industrial—Shasta Trailer was being built back there, then. And Logan Fuel was back there. 

Well, that—I had to borrow—I had to go to Salem Bank—I don’t think you can print this—I had to go to Salem Bank, because I needed forty thousand to start that ready mix plant. And Ed Stout was the head loan officer, and he said, “No, I can’t loan you the money, Glen. He said that will never go in Goshen.”

So I went to Elkhart and got a hold of a guy by the name of Lloyd Minnix(??). He loaned me the forty thousand. And we kept the employees on during the winter, and paid them full wages, so they could live, and we would have them for the spring. Well, I couldn’t meet the payments. So I got a letter from the First National Bank of Elkhart—they were going to take all the trucks and the ready mix plant. 

And I got all excited. I knew a guy by the name of Bill Kerfin(??) who owned National Plywood, and he supplied us at the trailer industry. And he had an office in Chicago—he lived in Chicago. So I jumped in the car and went to Chicago—called him, of course—and he took me to his bank. It was a huge bank, right downtown. We walked up these steps—I never will forget, real wide, and had a couple of guards standing up at the top—and into the president of the bank’s office. And Bill Kerfin said, “Tell him your story.”

And I did. And he leaned back in his chair and laughed. He said, “You’re from a small town, Glen. They don’t want your ready mix plant. Go back and get the papers, take them in, and throw it on his desk and say, There you are.” He said, “They’ll redo your loan to your satisfaction. Figure out what you want, and they’ll redo it.”

So that’s what I did, and that’s what happened.

Doug: So you would’ve still been in your twenties, back then, if it would’ve been in the late forties?

Glen: Yeah, that would have been about ’48, probably. We sold out to Lewis in ’54.

Doug: So you were the first ready mix plant in Goshen?

Glen: Oh yeah.

Doug: So, did that help contribute to the growth of Goshen as a community, do you think? Did having a ready mix company in Goshen—how did that affect the local economy? Was that necessary? The fifties were a time of—

Glen: Oh, the ready mix plant really boomed, Doug. Yeah, it was—I made a mistake by selling it to Lewis Fidler. But the circumstances at the time kind of forced that sale. But, you know Lewis, he moved that plant. He built a plant out by his gravel pit. We were buying sand and gravel—what I should have done was merge it with him. But, that’s all hindsight, you know.

Doug: Have you been out to Fidler Pond since that has opened?

Glen: No, I have not. No. Then—

That’s the best part of my life, I guess.

Doug: Yeah. I know you said those were all Elkhart County area experiences. But then in later years, you spent time around a lot of different places working for other people, running plants in California and Florida and—

Glen: No. I never did much in Goshen after I sold the ready mix plant. I got a job with Skyline; they had a plant in Howe, Indiana. It was a remodeled chicken house; they dug the floor out and recessed it enough that they could run a line of trailers down through it. Well, Art Decio and a carload of his honchos showed up one day and said, “Glen, we’re going to build you a new plant. Where do you want it?” I said, “Well, there’s a vacant spot up by the toll road.” So they bought that spot and built us a new plant. 

The new plant could get fourteen in the line. It was run sideways line, you know. And Riblet built a frame shop down there, next to that plant. After we were going—you’d get fourteen in a line, and the rule of thumb is if you get fourteen in the line, you get fourteen a day out. Well, we were getting twenty a day out. And you know, we were behind on orders. We didn’t have room to store the material—we had trucks lined up all the time every day, delivering material. So Art told everybody at Skyline, “Leave Glen alone.”

So that was a really successful operation. I think I left that in—I think it was ’79.

Doug: That’s where they were building single-wides?

Glen: Single-wides; twelve-wides. Yeah.

Doug: And didn’t you do something to increase the size of the unit there?

Glen: Oh. Yeah. We started building a fourteen-wide. That meant the rack—you had racks that lowered on a twelve-wide to work on the roof. That meant those racks had to expand 1 foot on each side. And Skyline was working on that, to do that. And I was standing out there looking at that one day. We had a guy whose name was Bill Lyons, a maintenance man. Bill was single, kind of dirty, but he was kind of a genius on maintenance. 

He come up and he said, “What are you looking at, Glen?” So I said, “Well, I’m trying to figure out how to spread that rack a foot on each side, so it got two more feet to build a [fourteen-wide] trailer.” And he said, “Well, do this, this, this”—so all he did was put a cam up there that you pulled a lever, twisted the cam, and spread them out, you know? They were already built for that. Then pull it the other way, and it pulled them back together. You had to redo it a little bit—you had to put in some driveshafts, you know?

So from then on, the ironworks in Lagrange that furnished me all the material to do that, Skyline got all of this for all their plants—got the parts from them. So that was good for them.

Doug: So who were some of the industry leaders that you worked with who might have had an influence on you—or you had an influence on them? You mentioned Wilber Schult—

Glen: Stewart Gardner; Stewart Coach.

I started a factory of my own in Syracuse, but I had to sell it. And why did I have to sell that? Oh—because my brother stayed in the service; they called him back in the service, and so I had to go back to Goshen and run the ready mix plant.

And I was with North American Marine for a while—their sales manager. I remember in—why can’t I think of the year? Bob Myers(??)—Bob Myers, and his wife’s name was Toni—And we got to be the best of friends.

But anyway, I went into—I had a list: the type of boat, and the colors, and the whole thing, for the year in advance. So I went into the office and told Bobby, I said, “I think you got a depression coming.”

Doug: This was for what product? Was this for—

Glen: This was a boat company.

Doug: A boat company.

Glen: Yeah. I said, “I think we better cut production and make just what we know we could get sold.”

“Oh no,” he said, “Go ahead and make up a—go ahead and make up the future order. We’re going to be okay.” 

So I said, “Okay, I’ll see you through the first show.” So after the first show—I forget what I did, but I left. Three months later, that plant was broke. They discontinued operation.

Oh, I know what I did. I got with the guy that was importing stuff from Japan. And I opened up a plant that had mobile home and boat hardware. And I opened it up in a building that was used as a storage building for a moving company down on Third Street.

Doug: This is in Goshen?

Glen: Yeah, in Goshen. And it proved out real well for me.

Doug: You were involved with houseboats at one point?

Glen: Oh, I designed a houseboat from the ground up. And my brother, Charles, had a plant in Middlebury making trailers—boat trailers. And he had room, and I built it there. This houseboat had floats on it, and you could pull them in and make it a ten-wide. Ten? I think it was eight—make it an eight-wide for traveling—no, a ten-wide for traveling. Once you got there and unloaded the trailer, the two floats pushed down on each side and made a twelve-wide out of it. So it had a walkway around the whole cabin.

Well, I had a dealer in Florida. I think he probably—between a couple dealers, they sold about a half a dozen of them, and then the bottom dropped out of the economy. And I dropped that and did something else. But anyway, there was an outfit in Tennessee that bought one of them and saved it. And after the economy started picking up, they started building the same boat, and boom! But I never patented anything that I started.

And the plant in California, Marner and I owned that together.

Doug: And Marner was what relation to you?

Glen: Marner was a half-uncle—he was a half-brother to my dad; Marner Miller? He had Travel Equipment.

Doug: Yes. And he also had the ambulance company at one point.

Glen: Well, that was part of Travel Equipment. Yeah, that’s another story—I remember when he was thinking about selling it, and I advised him not to. 

Anyway, that plant in California was really unique. They would take a Dodge minivan and spread it 14 inches. They would cut the thing in two on the passenger side, full length—front axle, rear axle, everything—and then put it back together fourteen inches wider. That way you could make a bus out of it and sit two people on each side, instead of two and one, see.

Doug: So this would have been early in the van conversion business.

Glen: So we were doing that. We did the same thing with a mini motorhome. We put the chassis up there, cut into lengthwise, widened it out fourteen inches, so our mini motorhomes were fourteen inches wider than a regular one. Well, I think it took me eight months to make that company profitable. 

Ebe Yoder was my sales manager, by the way. And Marner, one day—Marner was paying them—TEC was carrying the insurance, and Marner was doing the payroll—simply because he had an office and a way to do it. He called me one day and he said, “I’m out of money, Glen. Close the plant.”

Well, you know, he was meeting and buying the materials—he was furnishing the cash to buy the materials. So I called a guy in Nappanee that was trying to get to be the biggest in the industry. And—what was his name? He would come out to see Abe, once in a while. Anyway, I told him “You ought to have a business in California.”

He said, “I’ve been thinking about that, Glen, what have you got in mind?”

I said, “I’ll tell you what. You come out; I’ll take inventory; you pay me for the inventory; and it’s yours.” 

So, he said, “I’ll be out next week.” So he showed up with a guy and his wife and a kid in the car—so I knew he was going to buy. Well, the sale didn’t amount to anything, it was only $380,000 worth of material and stuff. But at least it salvaged Marner a little bit.

And then, I called back—and so I didn’t have anything to do. So that’s when I started doing options again. 

Options came out in 1973, and I don’t really know why they came out with it. Mid-1973. I even went to Chicago at that time—took lessons. So every time I didn’t have anything to do, I would do options on the market. So I’ve done them all (laughs).

Tonsillectomy

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Doug: Yeah. I don’t know if you want to record this, or not, but Diana Miller was telling me that you had your appendix—or I guess it was your tonsils—taken out when you were a kid. And there was a story associated with that.

Glen: Well, you know, they looked at kids different back then. That would’ve been—we lived on Capitol Avenue. I was probably about eight or nine years old. They had an Elkhart doctor—Dr. Miller. And my folks had some business in Michigan. So they made arrangements with Dr. Miller to take my tonsils out and circumcise me. 

And they dropped me off at his office, and they took off for Michigan—well, they would hang you if you did that today, you know? So they left me at his office. He took my tonsils out, and his knife must have slipped because he cut off the uvula too, and circumcised me. 

They put me in a room to recover. And my folks made arrangements with my aunt and uncle to pick me up and keep me there until they got back from Michigan; they would pick me up and take me home. Well, they came to the doctor’s office, and they forgot where they put me. I was in a little room, almost just nothing but a closet back there. So they finally found me, and they took me home. Then my folks stopped and picked me up and took me back to Mishawaka. But I don’t think they allow that today (both laugh).

Daughters

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Doug: So you—I know you had two daughters, because one of your daughters, Pam, was in my class in high school. 

Glen: Yeah. 

Doug: And then she died quite young, if I remember right.

Glen: I think she was forty-eight. I’d have to look it up. I believe she was forty-eight.

I remember we were walking down the shopping center—we would come back from California and stay at her house; she had a big house in Evanston. She had her own business. She had an antique shop that she had a black guy running. And she had an accounting business, and the office was in that house, upstairs. She was just remodeling the place to move the office in. 

And she had cancer of the blood. But she was on a medication; it was keeping her alive and pretty well. And then she had to have some extensive dental work done, and that upset the white corpuscles in her body. And we’d come up from Florida, and they took her in about midnight one night in downtown Chicago, in the hospital. We went down and sat there all the rest of that night, and until the afternoon of the next day, and then watched her die.

They couldn’t stop it. The dental work upset the white corpuscles; started eating up the insides of her body, and they couldn’t do anything about it.

Doug: Yeah.

Glen: So—

I got a younger daughter, you know, four years younger than she. Her name’s Margo. Margo—well, she turned seventy? She just turned seventy, didn’t she? She just turned seventy. Her birthday is in October. Margo married a guy—Margo worked for Kemper Financial. And I—I couldn’t keep her in college. I got her up to the junior year, and about the second month in her junior year, she called me in my office in Florida and said, “You know, dad, I’m gonna quit this and go get a job. I give up.”

I said, “Well, Okay Margo.” So we went to Chicago and got an apartment, and carpeted it, and bought the furniture for her. She moved in and got a job at Kemper Financial. After about—I think it was close to four years—she was in charge of the brokers—had a private office, in charge of the brokers.

Florida

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Doug: So it sounds like your family has quite a history of being—

Glen: Oh, they were all entrepreneurs.

Doug: Entrepreneurs, yeah—risk takers.

Glen: I would hate to try to count up all the startups I had. They weren’t all successful.

I had a bad habit of starting something, and as soon as I got it going good, I would get tired of it. We were going to Florida in the winter after I sold the plant in California to move back to Elkhart. When we moved back to Elkhart, we bought a house over there that wasn’t built yet, and I wanted to pay for it with a credit card from Merrill Lynch. But Merrill Lynch didn’t allow that, so I had to get some cash to pay for it. But anyway, then we started going to Florida. Well, the next thing I know, I had a sign shop going; an accounting firm going; another office that I owned; interest in a bank; and an embroidery machine business. And I couldn’t come home.

So we got an apartment down there, and my wife came home and sold this one. We moved the furniture down. Then we moved once in Florida. And I finally sold all the—I remember the office that I bought, one of the banks had some help in there. And three months after I bought it—it was owned by a Canadian—he came over and wanted to know if I wanted to buy the office. And I offered him eight thousand less than what he was asking, and he took it. 

Well, three months after I bought it, the outfit moved out. And I had an attorney, I said, “Why don’t you come over and look at that office. You can have it for nothing down, ten years to pay for it, and 10 percent interest.” And he took me up on it. And then the young man I had running the accounting firm died unexpectedly, and it was right during the beginning of the tax season. And I had a guy in town, who was at the sign shop getting a sign, because he wanted to open an accounting firm—from Canada; Louie. So, that guy in the sign company called me, and I said, “Send him over.” And Louie came over and I said, “Louie, if you keep me out of trouble, I’ll give you the business, and you rent the office from me. Eventually you can buy it.”

So he—that was that arrangement. And he did. I only had two guys gave me a hard time, who knew that I was the majority owner, and I had to pay them off.

So I’ve had an interesting life, Doug.

Pine Manor

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Doug: I’d like to know a little bit more about your connection to Pine Manor. Because Pine Manor—after you came back from the service, that had been in the Ernie Martin family, I guess.

Glen: Right, Martin—Ernest Martin.

Okay. Well, my dad was in a trailer business in Elwood; he had a half-brother in Iowa, Annas. Do you remember Annas Miller?

Doug: Sure.

Glen: So he bought a farm out there by the airport, because he figured eventually he would sell out in Elwood, and move back to Goshen. Well, right at the time he—

Lamar Martin fell on hard times. And Lamar Martin owned all of the land on both sides of the road, from Kercher Road to Waterford. Remember?

Doug: Um-hm.

Glen: Remember when all that land on across the road from Pine Manor was vacant? Well, my dad when he sold out of his trailer business—because you know, during the war, they couldn’t manufacture for resale; they had to manufacture for the Army—which he did. Anyway, he bought Pine Manor from Lamar Martin, which included this 450 acres back here, for $75,000.

Well, I guess in ’45 that was probably a lot of money. But it had three big brick houses on it, you know. Then he sold out to somebody, and he brought Annas back. They started a hatchery and a processing plant for turkeys.

Doug: Um-hm. Yeah, I remember when—I think it’s where the first Walmart in Goshen was built—that that originally had been a turkey farm, out there in that area. And then, so that really is—

Glen: Well, across the street was a former mayor of Goshen. He had a meat market.

Doug: Ray Messick.

Glen: But they were raising about forty thousand birds a year there on that empty lot. About where Nipsco is now, remember? Nipsco built on this property. That’s an aerial view before they built. But, then my dad sold out for some reason. He got rid of the whole thing. I never did figure that out, because I never had anything to do with it. They at one time wanted me to come to work for them, but I don’t want to work for uncle Annas—with uncle Annas. 

And that thing—those two big barns—Annas made turkey barns out of those and burnt them both down. 

That road you see is [State Road] 15, that goes across the front of it. That’s before Howard Werner built his house back there, you know.

Doug: And at the top of the picture, running across there, would be Kercher Road?

Glen: Yeah, there you can see the railroad there. They raised turkeys back there.

RV Industry

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Phil: Glen, you were personally involved in quite a few different enterprises.

Glen: Yeah.

Phil: You had your hands in quite a bit. How many do you think it was all together, over the years?

Glen: I think I counted up one time, I told [Donna] thirty-three, but I think it was more like maybe twenty-eight or thirty. I haven’t really sat down and listed them. I thought, you know, I watched my dad and I thought the only way to make money was you had to be in business for yourself. So I thought nothing of starting a business. I mean that was just the thing to do.

Phil: So as you look at the RV industry here and—

Glen: Oh my, that’s really consolidated. Yeah. That’s really consolidated. But you know what? There’s a little guy over here in the industrial section—I think he’s got about equal to a four car garage—building one of the little old-fashioned trailers.

Are you acquainted in the industry at all?

Phil: Not much.

Glen: Well, at one time down on Logan Street, Shasta had a trailer factory there. If you built that Shasta today, I bet you you couldn’t keep up with the orders. It’s entirely different—

(Glen asks Donna to get book on the history of the trailer industry)

Doug: I remember Shasta was famous for the little wings at the back that they put on, and my wife’s brothers worked there for about two or three days and figured out that working in the trailer factory wasn’t for them. And they quit, and they didn’t even worry about getting their pay—they just gave up on it.

Glen: Yeah.

Doug: That’s where the recycling is now.

Glen: The trailer industry’s problem today is they can’t get them delivered. I wondered why they kept saying the trailer industry is booming, the dealers are begging for them. But there is a big lot sitting over here waiting for the trailers to be delivered, and one of the guys told me that over two hundred guys quit delivering trailers.

Yeah, I think they shut my air off—that’s the reason I’m talking so much (all laugh).

Phil: So this is the book you wanted to—

Glen: Yeah, this is on the RV industry. This is Hesselbart. When they first started the Hall of Fame over in Elkhart, he was in charge, and he wrote that book. My dad’s in there, known as the “school teacher of the industry.” If you go over to the Hall of Fame, they’ll want to show you a movie. And when they turn out the lights, the sound comes on, and it says, “Here’s the gentleman that started the industry in Elkhart County”; and my dad’s picture comes up. 

So I go back a long ways. At one time, I knew all those guys personally in that book. As a kid, because I worked at the trailer factory as an assistant to the sales manager, and they’d take me to the travel—what’d they call that? The Travel Trailer Industry Association, or something like that. They had their own association, you know. And all those guys, who started trailers, I knew them personally.

Phil: What do you think your dad brought to this location, that helped all of this industry spring from?

Glen: Well, he brought the trailer manufacturing industry to this area. You know Bock frames? I remember when Bock had a building there on Main Street—on the corner of Lusher and Main—building frames for my dad’s trailer factory just a couple blocks down the line. Dexter Axle? You got axles, you know—axles, wheels. That industry has really grown. But—it’s really consolidated like the automobile industry did. The big one now is—

Doug: Well, there are three big ones now.

Glen: Yeah.

Doug: Three big ones now are Thor, Forest River, and Winnebago. And those three own most of the—

Glen: Yeah. Well, you got Winnebago. You know, that’s an old-line RV. I got a—he’s married to one of my nieces—Charles’s daughters—they decided they wanted a Winnebago. Well, the only one that had the model that they wanted was a dealer in Florida. That dealer paid their plane fare down for them to pick up the—so they went down to Florida and got the Winnebago and drove it home. [Just recently] in the last two or three weeks.

But the trailer industry is booming because of the virus. People don’t want to stay at the hotels.

Phil: So what do you think is ahead for the industry, then?

Glen: What?

Doug: What is ahead for the RV industry? What’s the future?

Glen: Well, my personal opinion is that after this virus thing gets settled, they might hit another lull. They hit a lull every once in a while. I used to watch the boat business. When the boat business slowed up, I’d slow up the operation of the trailer factory. And I think it’s an industry that comes and goes.

I think it’ll—you know, how can they build the amount of trailers they’re building now? And you know who’s buying them is the young people coming up, because they can finance them for fifteen years. Well what are they going to do when some of those come due? I think they’ll get slowed up one of these years. As soon as they get the current disease settled a little bit.

I’m glad I’m not in business today.

Additional Reflections

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Doug: So, 100th birthday coming up here—

Glen: Ohhh—if I make it. You know—

Doug: My wife is planning a big party, so you’ve got to make it (Glen laughs).

Glen: I’d like to make it—for Donna. I’m glad Donna’s here. If Donna wasn’t here, I’d be in a nursing home. And talking about nursing homes, you took out a long-term care policy?

Doug: Right, um-hm.

Glen: I have too, but it costs me $12,000 a year. Over twelve. I pay it, but I don’t know why. If I go in there, I’m not going to last a year (both laugh).

Phil: Well, Glen, is there anything else you want to—

Glen: Oh, I think I’ve done enough talking. I’m enjoying life. I don’t have any financial problems, and I have a wonderful second wife, Donna. My gosh, God really blessed me there.

Phil: Well, we certainly are grateful for you taking the time to share some of your memories and insights from your almost one hundred years of living here.

Glen: I’m grateful. I hope the people that view it enjoy it. And I’m surprised that Doug promoted it (laughs).

Doug: Well, I’ve heard enough of your stories over breakfast and like that over the years, so I thought that those stories were worth retelling.

Glen: My brother, Lamar, married his high school sweetheart—this was when he was in Elwood. Then went into the infantry; he was in Europe. And he had it tough during the war. Well, when he was due to come home—the war was over; due to come home—this gal had moved back to Tennessee. And she was in a car on her way to Ripple Depot to pick him up, and got in an accident and it killed her. 

And I remember the family picked her up and buried her, because Lamar’s time didn’t permit him to go to the funeral. I remember we brought Lamar back to the graveyard in Tennessee. He stood there and looked at that tomb about ten minutes. Then he said, “Okay, let’s go.” So we left.

But the infantry experience ruined his lungs. So I remember talking to him—he and I were the best of buddies. And he moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma. I remember one—we went out to see him a couple of times, but I remember one time I was talking to them on the phone. I said, “How’s it going, Lamar?” “Well,” he said, “You know, I’m going to die pretty soon, but I’d rather not know.”

I’m in about the same position he was (laughs). I’d rather not know.

Doug: Well, thank you so much, Glen, for sharing your stories with us.

Glen: You’re welcome.