HOW TO LIVE LIKE A RETIRED MILLIONAIRE ON LESS THAN $250 A MONTH.

By Richard L. Hayes '20.Beverly Hills (Calif.): Trail-R-Club ofAmerica, 1968. 96 pp. $2.50. Paperback.

This book contains highly charged praise about the joys - and bargains - of togetherness in a mobile home park. No fewer than 80 pictures, some full-page, tell the "Fascinating True Story of 'Country Club' Living for Retired People of Modest Means," as the subtitle informs us. The illustrations show tea parties and dances and masquerades, shuffle board contests, pitch-and-putt golf courses, swimming pools, beach picnics and horseback riding, reading lounges and recreation halls, bridge for foursomes and poker for men only, palm trees and well-cultivated lawns for foregrounds, and ocean and mountains as backdrops.

If something less than romantic, you are hard-headed with a yearning for facts, here they are. In 1967, 220 factories produced 240,980 mobile homes sold through more than 7,000 retail outlets with a total value exceeding $1,375,000,000. The average cost for a unit in the East is $2,300; in the West, $5,700; deluxe models, $12,000. In use today are 1,750,000 mobile homes occupied by 4,500,000 persons. The United States has 22,000 mobile home parks and 1,700 campgrounds for travel trailers. For upkeep, read the title, but actually it need be only $245 a month.

Is this the life for you? Here are the reasons for living in a mobile park as given by persons who have smiled a yes: Less upkeep 44%, lower purchase cost 38%, mobility 33%, compactness 27%, lower cost than renting 26%, no other housing available 3%, other 14%.

The book informs us that residents of mobile homes exhibit a spirit of adventure and that they are "very sociable, but certainly not noisy or irritating to their neighbors." The habit of talking to oneself is broken within the first half-hour after arrival. There is always something going on from early morning until bedtime. It is the sort of togetherness which would scare the daylights out of a hermit.