Imagine Todd and Kristin Kimmell, circa 1992, posing for a photo with their 1925 Chevrolet motor home at the start of the crazy adventure that would soon make them fixtures—in fact, self-proclaimed founders—of the vintage-trailer-craze movement. “Very Munsters,” suggests Todd.
The couple remain the collectors and curators of what they’ve long labeled the Lost Highways Archives and Research Library. They’ve been inspired to resurrect the vintage collection’s mission and materials, in storage for the last 25 years, since recently relocating from Philadelphia to artsy-trendy Collingswood. Bordering Kristin’s native Haddonfield, Collingswood is a closer commute to her job as a celebrated Haddonfield School District elementary art teacher. Jointly, their repository represents what might be the world’s greatest assemblage—largely ephemera “brochures by thousands”—devoted to campers, trailers, recreational vehicles and motor homes.
“I started as its savior, then became its jailer,” says Todd, an RV renaissance man, historian and printmaker. “Only now is it coming out of hibernation again.”
For the Kimmells, storage has always been tight. At one time, the solution was a historic, circa-1895, seven-bedroom William Price mansion and finished carriage house in Philly’s Overbrook Farms section. Even by then, an earlier crunch had forced them to donate and sell their fleet of vintage vehicles, except for two, including a remarkable 1936 Schult Sportsman. With the collection now more manageable, they could have slowly sold off ephemera on eBay, but that was never the plan, so much as making it all available in perpetuity in an institutional setting—a permanent installation, say, in the Smithsonian or more regionally in the National Antique Automobile Club of America library in Hershey, Pennsylvania.
For now, the hunt remains for targeted organizational and/or fixed display space in the Garden State. Todd’s held what he calls “imagineering” sessions for his so-called Wheelhouse project, which he had hoped would land in a vacant South Jersey municipal garage. He proposed raising $250,000 to remediate and repair the building in exchange for a $1-a-year lease as multiuse, multifaceted community arts space.
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“A now copyrighted Disney term, the word imagineer was initially coined to describe Arthur Radebaugh (1906–1974), whose work we rediscovered in the Lost Highway’s portfolio,” Todd says of the inspiration for the brainstorming traced to the American futurist, illustrator, airbrush artist and industrial designer who often worked for the automotive industry.
Now that the Collingswood municipal building has been condemned for demolition to build affordable housing, the search for another suitable underutilized building is on. The space would allow them to organize and digitize thousands of bits of archival material aimed at developing “an amazing user-friendly database,” Todd says. “When finished, it’ll be based in New Jersey, but available to the world online.”
Once physical space is secured, a call will go out for volunteers to spend some fun, “wild even,” time together, organizing and sharing discoveries—“a beehive concept,” Todd says. “Within a more permanent building, among the makers, crafters and artists, there could be a live main-event area, and, like a hermit crab, I’ll find a corner, and that will be for Lost Highways.”
On a personal-survival note, Todd Kimmell has also crawled out from what he terms “a decade of bad things.” He shouldn’t be alive after a battle with what specialists diagnosed“fevers of unknown origin,” then two rounds of cancer and a liver transplant. He had to sell his successful moving company, Mambo Movers, to pay medical bills. “And people kept asking me why Lost Highways wasn’t moving along,” he says.
With his new lease on life, and hopefully one forthcoming in a local building, he notes the collection has only ever cost money, but made none. “But it’s emotionally satisfying,” he says.
For the Kimmells—he’s 68; she’s 57—the move across the Delaware has transformed their lives. They make breakfasts and involved dinners; they stay up to watch old movies. “Kristin’s my vision of as close to the perfect Jersey girl as you could imagine,” he says.
In high school, she and her friends were into vintage cars and bicycles. Introduced to Todd and his kooky collections by a friend, Kristin says when the new couple came across a 22-foot 1940s travel trailer and boldly stepped inside, “it was very much like Dorothy stepping into the Technicolor Land of Oz. Style-wise, it immediately spoke to both of us….Equal to all that was the promise of adventure!”
The couple explored Main Street America while moving art and antiques for Philadelphia dealers to shows, often peering into rural properties for the telltale signs of a parked vintage trailer. “We became devoted to documenting the disappearing early trailer parks and campgrounds,” Kristin says. “We’d ask to explore their old files and bring home boxes of brochures and photographs, miscellaneous ephemera.”
These days, the Kimmells, who still participate occasionally as guests of the now largely West Coast-based movement they inspired, are unpacking their own lives, box by box, as stored in a collection they’ve never stopped augmenting. Now, they add to it “quietly and steadily,” says Todd, noting that worthy materials still surface. “There are some things that travel below the radar of other people,” he says.
