Our Central Valley
By STEVE NEWVINE
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.
The bulldozer has functioned as a two-story office building for United Equipment Company since 1976.
Mitch says the idea for constructing a new building to attract attention for the growing equipment rental firm came from his dad, company founder Harold Logsdon, back in the mid-1970s. At the time, Highway 99 was going through an expansion to accommodate an ever increasing traffic flow.
The building was designed to replicate a Cat D5 bulldozer. The building was constructed with steel, aluminum, plywood and redwood. It is twenty-one feet high, twenty-eight feet wide, and sixty-six feet long. It provides two stories of office space.
Back in the seventies, a lot of companies were moving to locations close to the expanded highway. United Equipment joined in with the influx and created an office that would also serve as a three-dimensional billboard.
Mitch says his dad flew warplanes in World War II, and started thinking about an equipment company when he was stationed in the valley following his military service. He built the company up through the decades and jumped at the opportunity to move to space along the newly expanded highway.
Harold gave his architect the green light to pursue a design for a building with the look of familiar piece of earth-moving equipment.
While the company has expanded in the past half-century, they still use that office. Mitch says the bulldozer office has been a win for the company. “It gives the company a little notoriety and that’s good for business.”
Painted bulldozer yellow, the building combines functionality for a business office with authenticity and attention to detail. The dozer blade is a room housing the facility’s water sprinkler system. The dozer appears to be pushing dirt, and on careful inspection, one can see that even the dirt and rock appear to have been placed with care and attention to detail.
Mitch says the building has a worldwide reputation. He recalls seeing pictures of the big bulldozer on the desks of equipment executives in Tokyo when he traveled there on company business.
The building still attracts a lot of curious folks from all over the state. People have walked in to ask whether the building is a real office, or to see for themselves that is it not a real piece of construction equipment.
“We’ve heard stories of kids who were sleeping in their parents’ cars, awakened by Mom or Dad to see that giant bulldozer out their window,” Mitch said. “We still hear stories of parents pulling that prank on their kids.”
Chances are hundreds of thousands of people passing through this stretch of Highway 99 in southern Stanislaus County have no idea of what other things Turlock has to offer. But one thing is for certain: they will likely never forget that big bulldozer.
Steve Newvine writes books about California that are available at the Merced County Courthouse Museum gift shop.