Bob Collins
The ‘original’ cheese curd stand at the Minnesota State Fair will be history soon.
Dick and Donna Mueller started the cheese curd craze with an iconic yellow building on Dan Patch Avenue, but they’re ready to retire.
“I think we’re part of the history and you want to continue it with your family if you can,” Mueller told KARE 11, which reported the story first.
But the State Fair reportedly won’t allow their son to take it over, citing policy.
No curds? Oh, no whey!
Fair general manger Jerry Hammer told MPR News’ Tim Nelson that he knows the change has left some hard feelings, but the Muellers weren’t as clear as they could have been about their intentions.
But Gerry Johnson, who has run the Swivel Spray booth in the grandstand area for 30 years, is retiring also. Her daughter told me in an email today that she, too, has been prevented from turning the location over to her children.
“We were all so disappointed,” daughter Janet Hathaway said. “We’ll always be State Fair fans.”
“We generally appreciate the longevity of the prior operator, but we want to look in a new direction if that opportunity presents itself,” Jim Sinclair, deputy fair GM told KARE. “There will still be plenty of cheese curds on the fairgrounds.”
But not those cheese curds.
Let’s think about this with this observation: Sweet Martha can’t go on forever.
Does tradition count for nothing?
The cheese curd stand will be turned over to a bacon vendor.
