George Allen / EducateMHC Blog Mobile Home & Land Lease Community Advocate & Expert

Blog Posting # 703. Copyright 26 August 2022. EducateMHC

Perspective. ‘Land lease communities, previously manufactured home communities, and earlier, ‘mobile home parks’, comprise the real estate component of manufactured housing! EducateMHC is the online national advocate, realty asset class historian, trend spotter, education resource, textbook supplier for land lease communities throughout North America! To input this blog and or connect with EducateMHC, telephone (317) 881-3815 and or visit www.educatemhc.com
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SECO 2022. Have you registered to participate this year? The dates are 3-5 October 2022, in Atlanta, GA. Google SECO for more information. When you see me there, ask for a FREE 3”X5” plastic wallet card containing ‘Four Steps to Selling & Financing New Homes Within Land Lease Communities’, & the ‘Six Right Ps for Marketing New Homes Within LLCommunities’.


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MH FACTOURY Summit 2022. Too late, you missed it! This was the annual two day program of ‘New home sales within land lease communities’ seminars and guided tours of five manufactured home plants in northern Indiana. Debuting in 2016, the IMHA/RVIC of Indiana hosts this annual event at the RV/MH Hall of Fame in Elkhart, IN. It’s the only such program in the U.S. today, mating the HOW TOs of knowing what homes to buy, how to buy and finance them, and how to market and sell them to prospective homebuyers/site lessees. For more information, phone (317) 247-6258. Frankly, every state should host a program like this!

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Raw land for development ‘for sale’. While at the Hall of Fame induction banquet on 15th of August, I renewed my acquaintance with Don Gedert, long time (since 1967) land lease community developer, owner, and independent (street) MHRetailer in western Indiana. He shared the following ditty on the verso side of his business card:
• “I am fully aware my youth has been spent, my ‘get up & go’ has ‘got up & went’.
• But I really don’t mind when I think, with a grin, of all the places my ‘get up’ has been.
• When I was young, it was wine, women & song; now it’s beer, Medicare & ‘what else can go wrong’?”
Don owns five parcels of raw land ready for development, near Cloverdale, IN., he wants to sell. For more information contact Sam Karozos via (317) 371-0128.

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‘GIVE & GET’. Ever heard of it? Well, if ever tapped to be a board member of a charitable organization you will. It’s a policy most boards consider and oft make part of their bylaws. Goes like this: ‘…Give & Get refers to how much $ board members are expected to ‘give’ as a part of their service on the board; the ‘get’ part refers to how much $ they’re expected to help raise!’ Now you know.

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Regular readers of this weekly blog posting know I’m spending most of 2022, and first half of 2023, transcribing more than 400 letters I sent home to Carolyn from Vietnam, back in 1968 & 69. I recently shared a paragraph describing little known but critical actions Marines take at night, when manning defensive positions around their base camp, out in enemy territory. Well, here’s a similar paragraph, this time describing how Marines ‘gear up’ when moving from secure environs into unknown territory.

“Ever wonder what I carry when I gear-up for possible combat? I’ll give you a quick rundown. My helmet, liner and camouflage cover together, have a bottle of insect repellant, an ammo charging guide, and Chap stick attached to it with a rubber strap. My flak jacket has a K-Bar (12” fighting knife), three full ammo mags (magazines), with gas mask and case attached to it. Then my web belt has six full ammo mags, a first aid pack, lensatic compass, two full canteens, rifle cleaning gear, bayonet, 25 cal. automatic backup pistol, along with three fragmentation hand grenades, a tear gas grenade, an area map, platoon commander’s notebook, two more full ammo mags, personal ID, a photo of you and Susie, two small tins of peanut butter (for quick energy), and two full bandoleers of ammunition ( 280 rounds), and my rifle with one magazine in the well. Ammunition wise, all this comes to at least 496 rounds of M-16 ammo and 100 rounds of pistol ammo. Would you believe, I have a reputation for traveling ‘light’? I do, as I carry fewer frag grenades than anyone else, and a little less ammo. All told, I figure I weigh about 210 pounds when I go out ‘loaded for bear’. And then there’s my large field pack….”

Of course I have one dog tag laced onto one boot, and a second tag around my neck on a chain. Also on that chain is a P38 (a.k.a. John Wayne can opener), the small gold signet ring you gave me shortly after we met, and a steel-jacketed 7.6mm rifle round salvaged after a firefight.

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Looking for a new book to read, by someone in the manufactured housing industry? Well, that might well be Rick Jebb’s Mexican Sunset memoir. Here goes….

Anyone who’s lived a life of adventures, successes or historical note should pen their memoirs (‘short stories’); better yet, their autobiography (i.e. collection of memoirs) for posterity, family, friends, and interested parties.

As the late writer William Zinsser reminds us, “one…of the deepest impulses is to leave a record of what we did and what we thought and felt on our journey.” (P. 74 in the Writer Who Stayed)
Well, up to a point, that’s what commercial real estate broker Rick Jebb does in his collection of memoirs, subtitled, ‘The Vision Quest of a Modern Day Explorer’. Therein, Rick describes his early life in Florida and then Illinois, onto his adventures as a teenage canoeist and student at colleges in Mexico, Arizona, Florida, and Illinois.

“In the wilderness, my life was more than just childhood bliss. It had been the place where trial and challenge required me to make sacrifices and face my pain.” P.9 (&) “I recalled so many splendid nights I had slept beneath the stars, two hundred campfires I had known in the last eight years.” P. 217. Rick’s personal and home life was far from being settled; he faced father abandonment at an early age, relocation from FL to IL, untimely death of his stepfather, and dealt with a learning disability only by incentivizing himself to focus on mattes at hand.

During his first 20 or so years, author Jebb struggled with”…the fear of not living up to the standards of my family and my community….” (&) “…picking a path in life. That was the real challenge. There were so many options, and the more I saw, the more I learned, the range of possibilities kept expanding.” P.157. Fortunately, Rick had friends along the way, access to money, and a spirit of adventure.

Describing life experiences in terms of education, family, drugs, girls, booze, and travel, consumes the bulk of this narrative. In latter pages however, Rick focuses on his inner journey, subconscious, periods of euphoria, and indecision. “…my innocence had been lost beyond my understanding of any prior experience. Now, an awareness resided within me of some deeper truth that tainted every geography, each time and place where I had experienced aspects of the world for the first time, revealing a collision of dimishment’s (sic) when the remaining sweetness of my childhood seemed to have been scrubbed off me, along with my skin. This feeling only added to my exaggerated discomfort.” P.269.

The good news, in this reviewer’s opinion, is how Rick concludes this collection of teenage and young adult memoirs, believing his variegated life experiences were finally “…leading me towards God’s will and away from mine….” P.277.

On a personal note, I disagree with Rick Jebb’s characterization of the Viet Nam war as one “…we had never won.” P.244. As a combat veteran of that conflict, I agree with the prevailing view of peers who served there and then, that ‘We were winning when I/we left!’ It was only the politicians in Washington, D.C. who lost this war.

Mexican Sunset is available from Amazon.com

George Allen
EducateMHC