Word: havasu
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...never been happier. I wouldn't trade places with God." So says George M. Foster, 57, who sold his flourishing Los Angeles ice cream and catering business two years ago to become the operator of a boat marina at the fledgling Arizona town of Lake Havasu City. Foster's spirit is typical of the 2,500 settlers in three-year-old Havasu, an "instant city" built by the California-based McCulloch Oil Corp. along part of the 45-mile lake behind Parker Dam on the lower Colorado River...
Located 235 miles due east of Los Angeles, and surrounded by miles of scorching and sparsely inhabited desert, Havasu stands in an unlikely place for anything as ambitious as a new town. Indeed, the rest of the nation's two dozen such communities are sprouting close to major population centers. Yet McCulloch Oil reported last week that...
...Havasu land sales rose to $18 million in 1966, accounting for the bulk of the company's $23 million revenues and much of its $2,800,000 profits...
...Gamble. Havasu (the name means "blue water" in Navaho) lures newcomers with its sun (annual rainfall is a mere five inches), space, desert air and trout-filled lake, made to order for thousands of fishermen, campers, water skiers and motorboat racers. It was the lake that caught the fancy of McCulloch Oil President Robert Paxton McCulloch, now 56, when he first flew over it in 1958. McCulloch, who is also the world's largest manufacturer of chain saws and No. 3 maker of outboard motors, was searching for a freshwater site on which to test his engines. After buying...
...acres and an abandoned World War II airstrip. Before McCulloch was able to buy an adjoining 12,990 acres (at $73 an acre) from the state of Arizona, he had to convince state officials that his plan would increase tax revenues. To create 25-sq.-mi. Havasu City, he gambled $500,000 on surveys, plans and engineering, even though the prospect looked so risky that C. V. Wood, 46, onetime Disneyland general manager and Convair chief industrial engineer, who is now Havasu City's master planner, told him bluntly: "You're out of your mind...