When Bruce Wry was a marine stationed in Vietnam, he spent some time studying the local language. He never would have guessed that, forty years later, the Vietnamese he learned during the war would come in handy for selling cheese at the Minneapolis Farmers’ Market.
“It’s nice. When the Vietnamese come here I can talk to them,” he said. “Over the years the ethnic mix has changed. Once, you didn’t see any Russians, now, there are a lot of Russians. The Hmong, if you got it for two dollars they want it for a dollar, if you got it for a dollar they want it for fifty cents.
“There was one Amish family that sold cheese. They came up here and they only sat in their chairs, didn’t offer samples or anything, you know. They were right across from me, they were cheaper than me. They lasted about a month. You’ve got to sample and talk to people.”
Every weekend, he’s on his chrome bar stool at stall #248 in the long, tin-roofed arcade at East Lyndale Avenue North and Third Avenue North, sandwiched between Koa Vang produce and the Sleeping Cat Organic Farm, where the aromas of basil, cilantro, mint, and lemon grass intersect. In the multicultural hurly-burly of vendors, Wry is a standout: a towering, friendly fifty-six-year-old in an orange foam hat that resembles a thick wedge of Swiss. He sells twenty varieties of Wisconsin cheese, driving in every market day from New Richmond, Wisconsin. He’s not a farmer, but a reseller who understands merchandising and the value of brand identity.
“‘The hat?’ I started wearing this, I don’t know, six, seven years ago. Kids call me ‘the Cheesehead.’ They get up in the morning and say, ‘Let’s go down and see the Cheesehead.’ I hear that from a lot of people. And I laugh all the way to the bank.
“They know I’m from Wisconsin. It gets bad during football season. People ask me, ‘What the blank happened to the Packers last week?’ from a block away. My wife used to wear the horns, for the Vikings. People would say, ‘I don’t want to buy from you,’ so I’d ask if they wanted to buy from my wife. People would ask her, ‘Are you horny?’ Then she wouldn’t wear it anymore. That was that.
“People want me to wear this so they can tell where I’m at when they walk up and down the aisle,” Wry said, but the rubber headgear proved impractical during this summer’s record heat wave. “If I fell over from the heat, there’s nobody here that’d want to give me mouth-to-mouth. They’d say, ‘Too bad, that’s the end of that story, you’re gonna die.’ ”
Wry has had one full weekend off in twenty-seven years and maybe three days off besides that. He gets up at 3:30 in the morning for the Thursday market on Nicollet Mall. For the weekend market, he gets to sleep in until 4:00 a.m. He drives fifty miles before dawn, when there’s hardly anybody else on the road, in his battle-scarred, rust-pocked blue GMC van. It’s got half a grille missing, and the right-headlight-and-turn-signal assembly is held in place with probably half a roll’s worth of duct tape.
On a good day, Wry sells five hundred pounds of cheese. A regular refrigerator, packed tight, holds around two hundred pounds. About eight pounds of each day’s inventory goes to tasters. Just as Wry has regular customers, he knows the moochers on sight.
“We have people who sample every week who have never bought in seven years. And the worst is downtown. On the Nicollet Mall. You know ’em. Here he comes again. They take enough to feed a whole family. But you have to give samples because some people walk on a little ways and come back again and buy.”
Wry counts people watching as one of the great fringe benefits of his job. “That’s why I enjoy selling here. I fall in love a hundred times a day,” he said. “Downtown it’s worse. You wonder where some of these gals are working at. They’re sure showing it off.”
Wry’s customers aren’t looking for exotic varieties; he doesn’t offer anything fancier than Gouda. “Everyone thinks it’s from Holland. It’s from Holland, Wisconsin, about fifty miles south of Green Bay,” he said with a broad, knowing smile.
“Provolone, Muenster, feta—they don’t move. You can’t carry everything. If they ask ‘Do you have blue cheese?’ I just tell ’em, ‘No ma’am, I just carry happy cheese.’ ‘You got any goat cheese?’ ‘No, they’re too hard to catch.’ ”
People sometimes ask for help choosing the right cheese for a certain wine, he said, “but I don’t know a damn thing about it. I haven’t drank in so many years. I’ve had twenty-seven years of sobriety. See how it falls in line with my job? Otherwise I probably wouldn’t be doing it. I couldn’t get up that early.”
Does Wry have a personal favorite among his wares?
“Extra-sharp cheddar,” he said. “The older, the sharper it gets. Women, wine, and cheese get better with age. That was told to me by a woman. She was pretty old.”
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