Never a More Wretched Hive of Scum and Villany

The perspective and content of this photo requires me to get a little geeky. When I first looked at it, I immediately connected it to a scene from Star Wars -- Luke and ObiWan are on their way to save the universe, and in procuring a ship they stop on a cliff overlooking the spaceport. ObiWan warns: "Mos Eisley spaceport. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy."

The actual city, I don't know -- it appears to be in Arizona, given the content of other images in these slides, and the number of tall buildings would indicate it's not a tiny town. The odds of finding a Corellian starship for hire are probably low, though.

Lectra Haul Versus Ford Mustang

This undated photo, from the 1960s, shows just how big a Lectra Haul is. That, on the right, is a mid-1960s Ford Mustang. If the people standing next to the Mustang were to stand on its roof, they might just reach the top of the Lectra Haul's tire. This is actually a small one; although this was big in the early 1960s, as the decade progressed massive moving machines were growing in size at an alarming rate. This one could carry 85 tons, but by the end of the 1960s their manufacturer, Unit Rig, had moved on to bigger, more immense machines capable of carrying hundreds of tons at a time.

Now, for this photo's origins -- this came from the same set of slides as the 4H parade, but the rest were all rather scattered about...no real order. So, I'm scanning them in no particular order. I do know it was taken in the 1960s, based on other slides with marked dates. A large number of the slides are taken in Arizona or California, although pictures of houses and interiors are quite clearly in Arizona. The background doesn't look like Arizona to me, though: distant oil storage facilities, overground pipelines, lots of 'nothin, it looks more like Oklahoma or Texas. Turns out, Arizona has an oil industry, so its likely that an oil company would have bought a Lectra Haul from Unit Rig (which also manufactured electrically-powered oil wells and equipment), and left it parked out where tourists could gawk at it.