Silver city takes shape on campus

By Trevon Milliard Chronicle Staff Writer

Jerry Shulton and four other white-haired men fiddle inside a power box at the far end of a soggy grass field between 11th Avenue and Bobcat Stadium. It’s raining - the air a biting cold. Clumps of snowflakes clog the sky. But Shulton can’t wait any longer.

ERIK PETERSEN/CHRONICLE Suzanne Cronin, from Texas, greets a visitor at the door of the 1988 Excella Airstream camper she lives in full time. Cronin is one of thousands of campers who will be spending time in Bozeman in the next few weeks as part of the annual Wally Byam Caravan Club International rally. A gray skullcap is pulled past his ears and a tough-skinned, green army jacket wraps his chest. His camouflage pants have splotches of the same dull green.

Shulton and his crew have 300 feet of electrical lines sprawled on the field leading to this box, not yet connected to power.

“We don’t hook up to the hotspot until the boss comes around and checks all the connections,” Shulton said. “We’re the peons.”

They did all this yesterday, but couldn’t finish the work because it started pouring, Shulton said. They had to pick up all the electric lines and store them for the night so they wouldn’t be taken.

“That’s copper wiring,” said Charles Vaughn, another crew member. “That’s a lot of money to be laying down on the ground in a field all night.”

The field is empty, but it soon won’t be. In days, it will be a housing lot holding about 200 aluminum Airstream trailers. The Wally Byam Caravan Club International is having its 51st annual rally in Bozeman, bringing 900 campers to seven different lots on Montana State University’s campus, creating a silver city as the club calls it.

“We’ll have every square foot of the parking lots covered when everything is over,” said club president Jerry Collins of Boise, Idaho.

Making a city like this doesn’t come easy.

A crew of 275 volunteers arrives weeks before the rally, which officially starts June 28 and will have 2,000 club members. The volunteers gather early to build the Silver City’s infrastructure. It will take the crews 20 days to pave the way for the seven-day rally, Collins said.

“When near a thousand Airstream campers come from every state of the union and every Canadian territory, they’ll have every normal household amenity,” Collins said.

The club, consisting of mostly retired men and women, relies on their own members to volunteer for the crews that set up water lines, sewer disposal, electricity, parking arrangements and a traffic system. Many were professionals in these fields for years.

Since Monday, these crews have been working through the wet weather to get their rally up and running even though it might not be high and dry. And it’s caused some setbacks.

All of the club’s hoses, generators and electric lines were transported in three semi-trailers this Monday, but efforts were stalled until Wednesday when crews, like the electricians led by Fred Steurer, from St. Louis, were out in full swing wearing rain jackets and protective apparel.

“The rain caused some problems but nothing we can’t overcome,” Steurer said. “The problems aren’t mechanical, just physical. Who wants to be out in the wet cold?”

Steurer ensures that every camper has electricity whether it’s by way of land lines or diesel-running generators.

“We have 32,000 pounds of cords and electric panels,” he said, “not including generators that weigh 10,000 pounds a piece.”

Campers will use either land lines providing 3 amps just to keep batteries from being drained, or they’ll use generators that crank out 30 amps, which is required for air conditioning units.

Steurer laughed and said, “That doesn’t seem to be a problem yet.”

The club has 12 generators used by about 65 percent of the campers, he said. To use a generator costs each camper $255 extra on top of the mandatory rally fee, which is $260. Those who use land line electricity don’t have to pay anything extra because the rally fee includes 3 amp electricity, sewer, water, parking and entertainment.

Steurer was a television electronics engineer for 33 years with the Pulitzer Broadcasting Co., he said.

Getting water to campers is a lot like electricity. It takes a lot of hose.

It will take about 2 miles of water pipe, said Willie Fleming, from Texas, who oversees water for the Airstream club.

All of the water comes from fire hydrants. Fleming and his crew hook 2-inch pipes to the hydrants that campers connect to with their garden hoses. At their Dayton, Ohio, rally, they had to use 13 miles of pipe because of their awkward setup, he said.

In Bozeman on Wednesday, no one at the MSU campus yet had water.

“I’ve got the pipes unloaded,” Fleming said, “but we haven’t done anything yet.”

That’s because they can’t glue the PVC pipes together when they’re wet. The glue won’t stick, he said.

Ronnie Erb, of Perryville, Louisiana, runs sanitation for the rally. He wore a green poncho and a black baseball hat with a plastic red rose sticking out the side. He calls his work crew the Rose Committee.

“It’s because you can smell us coming from a mile away,” he joked.

The Airstream club has hired a local sanitation business, Potty Princess, to pump the sewage from camper holding tanks that can be 30 to 60 gallons. Erb is the liaison between club members and the company. He spent the rainy Wednesday traveling to every parking lot with his clipboard organizing sewage disposal.

Paul Ryan, of Birmingham, Iowa, runs parking for the rally, organizing where all 900 campers will park. Rain has complicated an already complex job. Many of the lots are soft ground, not pavement or gravel, and were too wet for campers Wednesday, he said. These vehicles are real heavy and will sink.

It’s not too big of a problem yet because only about 80 campers have arrived, he said.

If the wet weather continues when the caravans come in, then Ryan has a problem. About 400 campers are coming June 25 and 26, he said.

“Every camper is scheduled for arriving on a certain day,” Ryan said while holding a binder listing all of the 900 arrival times. “It’s all grided out.”

Bill Crowson, of Killen, Alabama, is in charge of traffic and said 80 campers were supposed to come in today, but gladly they didn’t.

“If they did, we’d have no place to put them,” he said.

Crowson’s main job is controlling travel through Silver City, making sure “rigs get here from I-90” amongst other things.

“It keeps me busy,” he said. “I already had one car accident.”

Rain has made his life harder, as it has for everyone preparing for the rally, he said.

“But we’re having fun regardless of the weather,” he said. “We can’t control the rain, only our attitudes.”

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