What Baker is known for

Baker is a Mojave Desert stop of 442 people at the 2020 census, on Interstate 15 between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. It is known for a 134-foot thermometer that diner owner Willis Herron raised to his region’s own heat record. The sign was lost twice and bought back to keep it lit.

Mojave land and a highway stop

Mojave and Chemehuevi people held this stretch of desert before the Tonopah and Tidewater Railroad, built to haul borax out of Death Valley, put a station here in 1908 and named it for company president Richard C. Baker. By 1990 the town survived on Interstate 15 traffic, 90 miles from the Las Vegas Strip.

In 1990 a kitchen fire destroyed Willis Herron’s Bun Boy restaurant. He rebuilt it, reopening in 1991, but a rebuilt diner was still just a diner. Baker had fuel, food and a bed for the night, the same offer as every other exit on the interstate.

A thermometer keyed to a record

Herron hired the Young Electric Sign Company to raise a 134-foot thermometer beside the diner, its height and display keyed to Death Valley’s 134-degree record of July 10, 1913. Thanksgiving winds of 70 miles an hour snapped it in half before it ever lit. He rebuilt it with concrete poured through the steel, and it lit for the first time on October 9, 1992.

Dark, then relit

Herron sold the attraction, and new owners let it slide. By 2012 the sign stood dark, its last owner citing an $8,000 monthly power bill. In March 2014 the Herron family bought the property back, and Willis’s widow Barbara spent her own savings and relit the sign on July 10, 2014, the record’s 101st anniversary.

Why it worked

Baker had no scenery of its own, only a highway between two cities and a diner like a hundred others. Herron did not wait for the market to hand the town an identity. He built one from the region’s own weather record and bolted it beside his restaurant, tall enough that drivers a mile off could not miss it.

Wind took it down before it ever lit, and neglect nearly finished the job years later. The measure was not the first lighting. It was the family paying to relight it rather than let the sign be scrapped.