When you think recreational vehicles, midtown man-hattan does not come to mind. It does not have the parking, or the right demographics, for 25,000-pound motor homes or 40-foot travel trailers. Yet this is where Wade Thompson, 63, chooses to run Thor Industries, the world's biggest recreational vehicle manufacturer. He's got a modest three-room office, decorated with paintings of Airstream trailers, on the sixth floor of an office building near Grand Central Station. Instead of spacious skies and amber waves of grain, Thompson looks out onto tight streets and flickering traffic lights. He's been an off-site chief executive ever since he bought his first RV maker in 1977, when he rented a one-room apartment with a single light and a black-and-white TV above a pizza parlor in Butler, Ohio (pop. 921) and commuted every week from New York. Another oddity about Thompson: He doesn't own an RV. Driving a behemoth on the open roads, with lawn chairs strapped to the back, is not his style. He'd rather zip two hours north to his country home in Niantic, Conn. in his souped-up 2004 Mini Cooper, all 143 inches of it.
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