The Happiest Person I Ever Met

By Bryan Gruley

Gary Greff builds giant roadside sculptures on the undulating plains of southwestern North Dakota. Twenty years ago today, my story about him appeared on the front page of The Wall Street Journal (apologies if it’s behind a paywall). It’s one of my favorite stories ever, because Gary — unemployed and living in a trailer at 50 years old — might have been the happiest person I have ever met.

In January of 1999, I traveled to Regent, N.D., population 268, to write about a peculiar legal dispute in the telecommunications business. I was driving on a two-lane road winding through a stark white landscape when I crested a rise and, in the valley below me, spied a grasshopper the size of a city bus.

I pulled over to where the hopper crouched in muddy snow, a brooding sculpture of grays and blacks cut from pieces of oil-well tanks and other scrap. Two smaller offspring squatted nearby. I walked around, the only sounds the crunch of my boots and the wind whistling through the hoppers’ steel skeletons. It was spooky. I loved it.

Nine miles down the road, a covey of pheasant sculptures resplendent in red, green and amber towered over the road, and beyond them, a gigantic tin family. Roadside sculptures are hardly unusual in the upper Midwest, so I wasn’t thinking I had a second story to write. But I did have time to kill before I met my telecom sources, so I called Gary from a payphone attached to the outside of Regent’s city hall, a boxy building with walls of corrugated…