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Description :
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Walter King is known as the father of the pickup camper. He helped to popularize pickup campers with the innovations he developed. Chief among them were the first cab-over camper and the first large-scale production line for campers. King, who grew up in Boys Town, Nebraska, journeyed to California in the late 1930s as a young man. It was there that he developed his love of the outdoors. While in California, he designed and built a teardrop trailer. In the fall of 1944, he and a couple of buddies hitched up the tiny trailer to a pickup truck and took off on a hunting expedition to Montana. The trio soon found that cooking outside the trailer and trying to fit three bodies inside during inclement weather was more than a little challenging. At one point, King wondered why they weren’t using the truck as part of their camping accommodations. When King returned to California, he began sketching ideas for a camper that would nestle into a pickup truck’s bed. Materials were in short supply in the latter years of World War II, but when the war ended in August 1945, King was ready to build his camper aided by a finely tuned set of plans he had been working on.
As materials became available in the first weeks after the war ended, King devoted all the time he could to building his homemade truck camper so it would be ready for elk hunting season that fall. He completed the camper in time, but on this hunting trip King brought along his wife instead of his two buddies. He and his wife could now sleep and cook in comfort, freed from the confines of the teardrop trailer. At one point, the couple encountered a crusty old sheepherder who enquired about their tidy little camper. A conversation and negotiations ensued and soon King found himself in possession of five $100 bills that the sheepherder gave him as a deposit for five campers King agreed to make as soon as he returned to California.
After returning to California, King hastily set up a modest production line in Torrance, and commenced to build the campers. A few months later, the sheepherder and four of his friends showed up at King’s factory with their pickup trucks and took delivery of their campers. Within a few months, orders started coming in from Montana and Idaho, obviously from people who had seen King’s campers. Sensing that things were going well, King attended a sports and hobby show in Long Beach, California, and exhibited his camper. The only other recreational vehicles at the show were a smattering of travel trailers, so King’s creation got a lot of attention. During the show, one of the attendees suggested that King could improve his product by utilizing the unused space over the cab and commissioned King to build what would be the first cab-over camper.
King expanded his product line in the early 1950s by offering small travel trailers and in the 1970s by offering motorhomes. The company officially closed its doors in 1987. Pictured is a 1949 Sport King camper and a 1952 Ford F-2 truck. Promoted as “the World’s Greatest Trucks,” the F-Series Ford was an able platform for a pickup camper because of its long-standing reputation of durability and reliability. The duo is owned by Milton Newman. Photographed at the Travnikar Compound, Penryn, California.
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