MPR: Testing A Town's Metal

Testing A Town's Metal
By Dan Gunderson
September 1999

Faced with a struggling farm economy, one small North Dakota town is taking a novel approach to economic development.Regent is attracting national attention, thanks largely to the vision and drive of one man whose massive artwork is stopping traffic.

IT ALL STARTED with tearless onions, and a powerful desire to keep a small town alive.

Greff: Like any other small town, we're a dying community. We don't have the big business,and farming which we depend on is dying.

Giant grasshoppers eating wheat.
Click for larger view.

Gary Greff is an eternal optimist who refuses to accept what some see as the inevitable. A few years ago he gave up his teaching job to develop and market tearless onions. He envisioned a processing plant and new jobs for Regent. The onion venture failed. But another idea sprouted from Gary Greff's fertile imagination.

When a local paper wrote about a farmer who built a stick figure holding a large round hay bale, Greff saw a way to take advantage of a 30-mile highway linking Regent to Interstate 94

Pa and Ma stand more than 40-feet tall, their 23-foot-tall son sports a propeller hat and holds a sucker. A daughter and a dog may soon be added.
Click for larger view.

Greff: I said, "You know, if he got a little publicity on that, imagine if I created sculptures along this highway. And they couldn't just be normal size. They'd have to be the world's largest, because everybody's not going to stop for normal."

Dreams are action plans for Gary Greff. What he saw was what he calls the "Enchanted Highway". Using salvaged materials and volunteer welders, he soon constructed the Tin Family a few miles outside of Regent.

Pa and Ma stand more than 40-feet tall, their 23-foot-tall son sports a propeller hat and holds a sucker. A daughter and a dog may soon be added.

The prairie wind tousles an unruly shock of black hair, and his face is alight with excitement as Gary Greff describes one of his creations.

Greff: She's got barbed-wire hair, auger earrings, hubcap eyes. We've got some wire brushes from a street sweeper for flowers.

Since the Tin Family was greeted by skeptical chuckles in 1992, Gary Greff has added a 70-foot-tall silhouette of Teddy Roosevelt , a 9,000 pound grasshopper crouched amid 20-foot metal stalks of wheat, and a family of pheasants caught in mid run along the fence

He says local critics abound, but he shrugs it off. This, after all, is about more than art. It's about saving a small town.

Greff: Like we built the pheasants in halves. They were laying out in the field. Everybody thought they were dinosaurs. I always thought I could see the pheasant, but I always had in the back of my mind, if it doesn't look like a pheasant I call it modern art. But they'll never make a statue to a critic. So with that in mind, I keep going. Who cares? I don't need their support. I'm my own individual and I've proven I'll stick with what I start and I'm going to complete it.

Each grouping along the enchanted highway costs $10,000 to $15,000 to complete. The work occasionally grinds to a halt when the money dries up.

Teddy Roosevelt, "Roughrider"
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Gary Greff not only builds these figures, he also maintains them. Today, he's fixing the white wood fence around the Tin Family, and trimming the grass. He works fulltime on the project, living off his savings.

Greff envisions 11 sculptures - one about every three miles - enticing people off the interstate and leading them down the enchanted highway to Regent.

Greff: My goal is to change Regent into the metal-art capital. With that in mind, we're going to redo the storefronts with metal artwork. We've got a metal art theme park planned. I've got a sample metal tree I made, I'd like to see a metal-tree golf course.

Greff foresees the day when metal artists from around the world will come to Regent to hone their craft and teach others.

Of course, to make that all happen will take hundreds of thousands of dollars Gary Greff doesn't have. So, he has another dream, a dream sparked by recent visits from life and people magazines.

Greff: I keep thinking maybe that guy's out there saying, "This guy's got a vision. I've got the dollars. I want to talk to him." And I keep thinking, "Oh please just let one guy see this; just let one guy out there who's got more than he can... I'll guarantee a guy'll make money out of this. It ain't gonna be immediate tomorrow money but he will get his money back a hundredfold.

There's a trickle of tourists down the enchanted highway now, but by next year Greff hopes to complete a sculpture visible from the interstate. His goal is to attract 200,000 people a year to Regent, and laugh in the faces of pundits predicting the demise of rural America.

Greff: Just because you're a small town doesn't mean you have to die away and go into extinction. A small town can succeed. All they have to do is let their minds go and say, "We don't have to count on anybody but ourselves."

Gary Greff hopes to finish work on a flock of geese this fall. Next spring, work begins on a 120-foot-tall picture frame.

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