• last week
Tells the story of a wild van party thrown in the middle of a fictitious resort town and the people who dreamt it up. | dG1fUXNPeW9jU21INTg
Transcript
00:00The majority of those now attending van-ins and truck-ins, to put it mildly, are not true
00:10custom van enthusiasts.
00:12They're a group that uses the van as a tool to join others in acting in uncommendable
00:17ways.
00:18I love those uncommendable ways.
00:21That's what made truck-ins so much fun.
00:27I had a reputation of being rebellious.
00:31I like to smoke dope and drink beer.
00:34I worked in Chicago, but come the weekends, the other side of me came out.
00:41Do what you want.
00:42That's really pretty much what it was.
00:43The rules were, there are no rules.
00:49In 72, everybody's getting out of the military.
00:51You're still 18 and you're working in the steel mill like me or whatever and you're
00:55making more money than you ever dreamed possible at 18.
00:59I found a van, a 64 Chevy van for 400 bucks.
01:02A guy pulls up next to me in a really nice custom old van and says, hey, you want to
01:06join a club?
01:07And he hands me a flyer.
01:08So I did.
01:09I joined the Midwest Vans in 74.
01:12It was all a perfect storm of everything and we had the vehicle to be in that storm.
01:22They considered us misfits, hooligans, wild men from Chicago.
01:29That's how they termed us.
01:31It was May 1977, Memorial Day weekend.
01:35It was at a campground at the time called Andy's Hideaway.
01:39Had this idea, let's build a town.
01:42Let's have a truck-in at this imaginary resort.
01:45We had a casino.
01:47There's a disco.
01:48Had a church too, yeah.
01:49There was a pubic barber shop.
01:51We knew that there were going to be at least a couple of vans.
01:55And when 6,000 showed up, that was probably when the shit hit the fan.
02:03The best way to put it is, the truck-in at Andy's was, it was a woodstock event.
02:12It was called Sleaze Lake.
02:15It's like Disney World on acid.
02:21There's no lifer like a low-lifer.
02:42Man, I don't know if I should have talked about smoking dope, but...

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