Whatever you call it?mobile home, trailer park, manufactured housing?the retro living module is undergoing a renaissance The country music I grew up with loves to wax poetic about family traditions.
There?s Hank Williams Jr., whose warbling, smoke-tinged voice explains away his drinking and smoking as a simple hazard of the bloodline. There?s Garth Brooks, who justifies showing up in boots to a posh cocktail party by blaming it ?all on his roots.?
But if I ever penned a tune inspired by my rural upbringing, my family?s legacy would sound a little bit different: We know a thing or two about buying and selling mobile homes.

My dad, David, spent the better part of his teenage years working on a Clayton Homes lot in Richmond, Kentucky: setting up the new arrivals, hauling the units, getting down into the nuts and bolts of the houses. He was a high school student when he began at the company during the mid-1970s, and continued on as he put himself through Eastern Kentucky University as a first-generation college student. The ?Clayton era? is a distinctive epoch in his personal, and our family, history. Years earlier, his older brother, Randy, purchased a mobile home when he returned from service in the Korean War. Randy had a new wife, a young daughter, and no real credit, so a traditional home loan was impossible. They set up the unit in my grandparents? backyard, where the foundation and water hookups jut out of the ground to this day.
And the sales lot where my dad ...