Our Central Valley
To someone seeing it for the first time, that big bulldozer on the west side of Highway 99 in Turlock might be mistaken for an actual piece of construction equipment.
At least one inquiry from a foreign country to the office of United Equipment Company raised that very question several years ago.
“The sheik,” company President Mitch Hogsdon quipped when reminded of the story his sister Brenda recalled several years ago during an interview for the book California Back Roads.
In 2008, Brenda Schmidt shared a story about a phone call the company got from an equipment manufacturer in Saudi Arabia. She recalled the foreign firm had seen the big bulldozer in news photographs, and wanted to know the shipping dimensions. The Saudi Arabian company thought the two-story bulldozer was an actual working piece of equipment. “They were kind of disappointed when we told them it wasn’t real,” Brenda said in 2008…