Caltrans to Pay $32,500 in ‘Okie Girl’ Sign Dispute

State highway officials agreed Tuesday to pay $32,500 to the owner of a barbecue restaurant near Frazier Park to end a yearlong dispute over freeway directional signs for the eatery.

Okie Girl restaurant operator Mary Lynn Rasmussen had sued the state Department of Transportation after officials refused to place her business name and logo on motorist information signs next to a remote stretch of the Golden State Freeway 75 miles north of Los Angeles, near the county line.

Officials had contended that the restaurant name and the logo--depicting a reclining, shorts-clad woman--was potentially offensive to residents of the nearby San Joaquin Valley who fled the Dust Bowl drought of the 1930s. A Superior Court judge in Bakersfield ordered the signs erected in July. Rasmussen had sought $50,000 to compensate for lost business but accepted Tuesday’s settlement during negotiations before Kern County Superior Court Judge Richard Oberholzer.