Hooper’s background was somewhat shaded in that early in his career he purportedly had been a cab driver with a co loured past . In the last decade he worked as a fibreglass lay-up operator in a boat manufacturing plant. In 1988 he raised some money from a lawyer and two accountants in Hamilton and started a modest company producing ten all-fibre glass truck campers a month. These Hooper-designed units were well received by the few dealers who handled the handled the product and sales were brisk. The main difficulty of weight distribution and leakage of rain into the unit had apparently been solved by Hooper.