From the Ground All the Way Up

Unfurling blueprints onto his big oak desk at his estate overlooking Upper Newport Bay, John Crean gushes about his new housing development springing up in Hemet: The houses are being framed in steel, not wood. They will have quirky details like cutouts in the kitchen counter-tops for trash. And, perhaps most unusual of all in Southern California, these homes won’t cost an arm and a leg.

“Crean Acres,” as he is calling his development, is no ordinary housing tract. And Crean, 75, is no ordinary builder.

The founder and retired chairman and CEO of the nation’s largest maker of recreational vehicles and mobile homes is tackling his new venture with the same innovative passion as when he began designing and manufacturing travel trailers in 1950. Crean turned his Fleetwood Enterprises into a $3-billion-a-year Fortune 500 company.

Last year, Builder magazine named the mobile-home pioneer one of American housing’s most influential leaders of the past century, a list that includes William Levitt and Frank Lloyd Wright. Crean’s post-retirement entry into more traditional housing is an unexpected but not altogether surprising coda to his rags-to-riches life story.

It is a story that includes a brief stint producing Hollywood movies and co-hosting a campy cable-TV cooking show taped before a live audience in his garage. Crean is also one of Orange County’s highest-profile philanthropists. For years, he’s made it a practice to give away half his income to a variety of charities and organizations--including the millions he made when he sold his stake in Fleetwood two years ago.

Except for the crystal chandelier above him, the cherrywood-paneled room that is his home office is a woodsy, man’s-man sanctuary that includes a rifle-filled gun case--all gifts from friends, he is quick to point out. “I’m not a gun person at all,” he says. There’s a picture of the tanker Crean served on in the Merchant Marines during World War II and photos commemorating his encounters with Presidents Nixon, Reagan and Bush.

Casually dressed in an open-collar, blue sports shirt, he punctuates his conversation with phrases like “garsh,” and “oh, mercy, yes” and “oh, hell, no.” And a few choice cuss words. In fact, he swears so much that his wife says it’s “just John speaking his native language.” Crean, though, is as genial as he is blunt-spoken--a man who inspires one friend to say: “When you’re with John, you feel like you’ve arrived at a party.”

The details of how ordinary people live have been key to Crean’s thinking about his projects--the ones on wheels and the one he’s building now in Riverside County. The 132 homes, which he’s targeting for the 55-and-older crowd, will include big front porches, oversized two-car garages with built-in workbenches, extra-wide interior doorways, landscaped front yards, and side yards large enough to park a boat or RV. “We’re building them where they’re ready to move into,” says Crean. “All you have to do is bring your bed and your dishes, and you’re ready to go.”

“When I look at a product, I look at it like I’m going to use it personally: What do I want? What do I need?” He learned long ago that people appreciate “all these little goodies and extras, and that’s what sold them.”

To help keep building costs low, framing and trusses for the houses are being preassembled in a factory Crean has set up in Ontario. And the bottom line? While similarly sized houses in the area sell for about $165,000, he plans to sell his 1,400-square-foot, three-bedroom homes for about $110,000.

With their steel frames and trusses and block foam insulation instead of the usual fiberglass batt, he says, the tile-roofed houses will be stronger, safer, more fire-resistant and better insulated than traditional houses. In his recent autobiography, “The Wheel & I,” he maintains that the housing business is “overdue for a revolution.”

“Most of the changes in construction in recent years have been aimed at maximizing profits for developers, cramming as many people into as little space as possible,” he writes. “They aren’t adapting the technology that’s available to make a home that’s more livable and of greater value to the homeowner.”

Crean has always been a take-charge guy. When his autobiography, written with journalist Jim Washburn, didn’t find a major publisher, Crean simply published it himself. “We’ll sell, I imagine, 25,000 books to the RV industry and the trailer people,” he said.

With its leather binding, gilt-edged pages and gold-ribbon place marker, the book seems a bit ostentatious for Crean, who, despite great wealth is as down-to-earth as when he and Donna, his wife of 52 years, were young marrieds in a tract house in Garden Grove.

The book’s dust cover says more about the man: It shows Crean in military-style haircut looming larger than life over Fleetwood’s top-selling RV--the Crean-designed Bounder. He is wearing a red, white and blue blazer, shirt and tie combo that mirror Old Glory in the background.

Crean may be conservative in his politics--Orange County Republican Party chairman Thomas A. Fuentes is a longtime friend--but liberal in other ways, say those who know him.

“John is probably one of the most liberal thinkers I know,” said Barbara Venezia, Crean’s co-host and partner on their cable cooking show. “He has gay friends, straight friends. He has a great tolerance for differences in people, and that’s why I think he’s interesting and why so many people like him.”

Crean’s four-acre estate, known as the Village Crean, boasts 18 garages and a 40,000-square-foot, three-story main house whose pillars and grand staircase resemble those of Twelve Oaks in “Gone With the Wind.” Yet he and Donna live in only a 3,000-square-foot, ground-floor section they refer to as their “apartment.” They built the massive home a decade ago with the intention of offering the house and grounds to organizations to use for fund-raising events. Crean can easily afford to eat in five-star restaurants yet is happier dining at a nearby Denny’s. He occasionally shows up at black-tie charity events, yet he’s more at home in his woodworking shop or tinkering with the engine of his boat, which he pilots himself on annual fishing trips to Mexico.

That’s not to say the Creans, who have four children and 14 grandchildren, don’t enjoy the perks of their wealth. Crean’s “boat” is a $7-million 112-foot luxury yacht--the Donna C-- named after his wife, whom he presented with a 21-carat diamond ring on their 50th wedding anniversary two years ago. And when he wants to go for a spin, he has a choice of 18 cars in a collection that includes a ’29 Packard, a ’49 Plymouth, three Mercedes, a limo and a Hummer.

Crean may be happiest, though, behind the wheel of his RV, a 36-foot Bounder, which he and Donna take on road trips several times a year. At campgrounds, the man whose company built many of the RVs his fellow travelers are sleeping in typically goes unrecognized.

The North Dakota-born son of a Depression-beleaguered farmer who moved his family to Compton in 1930 when Crean was 4, he was a high-spirited, trouble-prone kid who engaged in shoplifting and petty theft for kicks as a teenager.

He grew into a heavy-drinking, hot-rodding carouser who was once jailed after trying to outrace a La Habra police car. Another time, he and a drinking buddy attended a service at Aimee Semple McPherson’s church in Los Angeles, where they grabbed handfuls of money from the collection plate and used their ill-gotten gains to buy more beer.

By the time he was 25, Crean had accumulated four drunk-driving arrests and was, he realized, an alcoholic.

In 1950--the same year he began designing and making a Venetian-blind system for travel trailers--he discovered Alcoholics Anonymous. He still attends AA meetings twice a week and says he hasn’t had a drink in 50 years. “When you go to these meetings and you see these new guys coming in so [messed] up exactly the way you were, it keeps you reminded that that’s the way it is,” he said.

Crean retained his wild streak, even as his success in the business world grew. “By nature, I was always going to have a good time, no matter what, which I think is something that a lot of people should take a page out of,” he said.

He tried sports-car racing in the ‘60s and set the Tijuana-to-La Paz Baja speed record in a dune buggy in 1967. The headline-generating feat resulted in the first Baja 1000 later that year.

Not every venture panned out as well. Like his movie-making efforts in the ‘70s. He produced three films, including the Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton fiasco “Hammersmith Is Out.”

“At Home on the Range,” Crean’s weekly cable cooking show, was an unexpected local hit that generated a cult-like following. The 30-minute show, taped on a kitchen set in his hangar-like 4,000-square-foot garage, ran from 1992 to 1998 first on local-cable access and then on KOCE, the PBS station in Huntington Beach.

The show was originally titled “The Village Cooks,” but Crean and Venezia changed the name after Crean’s pal Joey Bishop told them they were more like “the village idiots” and suggested the title, “At Home on the Range.”

With the deadpan Crean in his starched chef’s hat doing the cooking and the ditsy Venezia as his sidekick and “professional stirrer,” they produced 228 episodes of the show. Crean was not above using recipes off Bisquick boxes; ketchup was a favorite ingredient.

The unlikely kitchen duo went on to make weekly appearances on ABC’s short-lived “Home” and ended up being featured on a variety of other shows. “At Home on the Range” continues in reruns on KOCE.

Crean’s longest-running and most successful venture was Fleetwood Enterprises. The key to Fleetwood’s success, Crean writes, was “giving the customers good value and treating the employees fairly,” which included Crean’s pioneering employee profit-sharing plan. Crean said the least enjoyable part of writing his story was chronicling the maneuvers that led him, as Fleetwood’s chairman emeritus, to be voted out of the boardroom. The vote followed his objection to a proposed merger of Fleetwood with a competitor that he felt would harm the company. After his retirement, Crean cashed out all of his Fleetwood stock, worth $176.8 million, and gave half of it away.

Now, two years later, he is launched on his new venture.

The 132 houses at Crean Acres will go on sale in the spring.

“You know, I was out to Hemet last week and saw those first five foundations go into the ground and I was so damned excited,” he said. “It was no different than when I was a kid on the Fourth of July.”

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The self-published “The Wheel & I” ($25) is available through the Web site https://www.hotrange.com.