"This company," Kuolt says, "got off the ground goddamn slowly." Of course, there was no way Kuolt could have foreseen the tough road ahead. Nor would he have been overly concerned if he had. He had the idea; the adrenalin was flowing and he was ready for anything.
"Chehalis was the first preserve opened by Thousand Trails," Jerry Andres is saying. "Preserve," he explains, is the preferred way of referring to what is usually called a campground resort. "What you're seeing here," he continues, "are some of the 425 campsites available to our members in this one location." Thousand Trails's members, he says, are largely drawn from middle-class, blue-collar America. The head of the household, on the average, is about 50 years old, has a couple of kids, and an income of around $20,000 a year. Most members own motor homes, pickup campers, or travel trailers.
During the spring of 1970, Milt Kuolt and his three sons set up long, folding picnic tables in the parking lots of three local shopping centers where travel-trailer shows were being held. Kuolt was in his element. Here were hundreds of recreational vehicle people come to gawk at the latest offerings in mobile comfort. After the shows, Kuolt had more than 1,500 responses to a questionnaire he'd drawn up. Not only did Kuolt find in most of the responses the mirror image of his own dreams, but more important he now also had a customer list to fuel his initial membership drive.
One of the most frequently mentioned requirements was the need to find a campground within a one- to two-hour drive of the camper's home. Kuolt realized that his Chehalis property was, therefore, ideally situated to attract campers from both Seattle and Portland. The die was cast.
In late 1969, Kuolt left his job at Boeing and began to punch some roads and campsites into the woods at Chehalis. "Everything I had went into the business," he says. "Any personal asset I had, like jewelry, was turned into cash, and I got a second mortgage on my house. It was all on the line and then some."
Kuolt figures that he put in roughly $40,000, not counting the value of the property itself. In addition, he took out a $90,000 personal note with a branch of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce by pledging various small pieces of real estate he owned as collateral.
Kuolt and his three sons spent two years whacking away at his dream in the tangled undergrowth. They cleared most of the sites by hand and then started in on the clubhouse. Some nights Kuolt slept under a table in an old barn that he called his headquarters. In July 1972, he sent letters to everyone who had answered his question-naire. He offered them a lifetime membership for a $295 initiation fee and dues of $60 a year. "Up till then," he says, "everybody was selling the pride of ownership, not the right to use. It wasn't easy. There wasn't much to get excited about. I told everyone who came for a look that I would try to add more things, like a pool and tennis courts, but that I couldn't promise. What you see is what you get."
Following a practice widely used by recreational land developers, Kuolt offered a "premium" to anyone who toured the site. At first, it was simply a hamburger and hot dog barbecue held in a nearby meadow. A year later, an electric camp light and a set of barbecue utensils were added. In its most recent incarnation, the premium lives on in the form of a sleeping bag and cash awards to members who successfully encourage friends to join.
It would have been relatively easy if all Kuolt had to do was dangle carrots before eager potential members. But between 1972 and 1976, Thousand Trails's critical formative years, the task of gaining members became more and more complex. The way to greater membership sales was to add amenities to Chehalis and, at the same time, add new preserves. But this was a chicken-or-egg predicament, since new development required cash from new memberships, and vice versa.
John Cox and his wife, Frances, were floating around in the heated Olympic-size pool next to the club-house. John and Frances are both 58. They live in Clatskanie, Oreg., but they aren't there very often now. John, a retired steam engineer, and Frances have been members of Thousand Trails for four years and spend most of their time traveling between the 14 preserves in a 26-foot Chinook camper. They were swimming with their granddaughter, Nicole, who's 3 years old and lives in Eugene, Oreg. "Wherever you go," Frances says, "you always meet somebody you know. You're never a stranger. They say we're all a family and that's the best way to describe it."
Kuolt knew there was only one way to break out of the chicken-or-egg trap. He had to do as much of the work as he could by himself and borrow money wherever he could.
But bootstrapping is a risky business. Kuolt, for example, did convince a local builder to accept a modest amount of cash and the balance in the stock of the fledgling enterprise in exchange for the pool at Chehalis. On the other hand, Kuolt once jumped on a backhoe intent on repairing a broken water main but, in the process, burst two more pipes and effectively cut off the water supply to all of Leavenworth. Still, these events were barely noteworthy compared with the tribulations Kuolt suffered borrowing money.
