Piece of the past is gone

The obituary in the Fort Wayne paper caught my eye.

Jack Root had died.

And suddenly I was about 8 years old.

Frugality was what drove my parents toward family camping. That was true for most families in the 1950s.

By camping, a family could make vacation travel more affordable. The other big dividend was that camping could also make travel more fun.

But first you had to become equipped, and in 1956 that was no small feat.

Today, camping equipment is a staple at any big box general retail store. And a dozen or more companies send out thousands of catalogs featuring tents, backpacks, sleeping bags, and countless other bits and pieces of gear.

Not so when our family caught the camping bug.

The closest thing to an outdoors store that I remember locally was Gene Romack's gun shop, which the Portland postman ran out of an old garage behind his home.

But Gene's focus was hunters and maybe the occasional fisherman.

Family campers - folks who didn't want their wildlife experience to involve too much roughing it - were viewed with a little disdain.

And that was justifiable. We weren't interested in sleeping in the woods and digging a pit toilet; we were looking for state parks with numbered campsites and sometimes even hot showers in the public restrooms.

Jack Root knew what family campers were looking for, and though his background tended toward roughing it, he was shrewd enough to recognize there was a market to be served.

How my father heard of Jack Root and the Heilite trailer I will never know.

But one day the whole family made the trek up to Fort Wayne to see them both.

Jack, who was big in scouting, was struggling to get his business going. He and his wife, Jackie, were living with his parents and selling the California-made trailers from the family garage. The total inventory at the time was, as I recall, one trailer.

That should have sent off some alarm bells for my father, but the Roots were a charming sales team.

Jack was this hearty, can-do, backwoodsy guy. And Jackie was the first woman I ever met who could be described as glamorous. Thin and vivacious, she wore her hair in a ponytail and she wore blue jeans, a real fashion statement in an era when women were seldom seen in slacks.

I immediately had a crush on her, and I've always suspected that her part of the sales pitch helped seal the deal for my dad. He bought the trailer.

He wasn't the only one. Soon the Roots had a thriving business, and Heilite owners were devoted to their brand. Before long, the Roots started organizing weekends bringing Heilite families together at various campgrounds.

And a few years later, they opened their store in Fort Wayne, responding to a growing market for outdoor equipment including skis. Jackie disappeared from the picture at some point; I've always assumed there was a divorce, but I've never known for sure.

As for Jack, he kept camping and merchandising for decades.

And the old trailer? Last I knew, it had retired after a long stay in my brother's garage in Minnesota.

But who knows? It may be bouncing down some lonesome road looking for a place to settle down for the night.[[In-content Ad]]