The West's hottest roadside attraction - giant thermometer - Window on the West - Illustration

Sunset, August, 1993

Question: What would you do if you ran a restaurant in a little Mojave Desert town, whose main claim to fame was scorching summer heat? Build the world's tallest thermometer at a cost of $750,000, you say? Make it 134 feet tall, I foot for each degree reached on the hottest day ever recorded at nearby Death Valley (a North American record)? That's exactly what Willis Herron and J.

O. Failing, co-owners of the Bun Boy Restaurant in Baker, California, did last October. Now drivers on Interstate 15 have a beacon to mark the roughly halfway point between metropolitan Southern California and Las Vegas, as well as a reminder of why they bought a car with air conditioning.