ASHLAND – Dave Hochstetler doesn’t mind being a little cheesy if that’s what it takes to make people smile.
Hochstetler, a 63-year-old Essex House resident, can often be found standing along the sidewalk on Main Street in downtown Ashland donning a Wisconsin cheesehead hat, to which he has affixed a toy rat.
“I wear it to race tracks and everywhere else I go to, and people get a kick out of it. Everybody gets to know me as ‘the cheese man’ around here,” Hochstetler said. “It’s always nice to have fun.”
Hochstetler said the hat is unusual enough to make many passersby slow down and smile, laugh or wave. Sometimes they stop to talk.
Though he’s not from Wisconsin, Hochstetler has long been a Green Bay Packers fan. He said his food hat collection includes a pizza hat, a hotdog hat and a hamburger hat.
“I get a lot of hats,” Hochstetler said. “I’m looking all the time.”
But the cheese hat is his favorite, mostly because it turns heads.
Hochstetler once wore the hat to Grandpa’s Cheesebarn, where he said the staff loved it.
“They thought I was advertising for them, and I said, ‘No, I’m not advertising,'” he said.
He’s not paid to wear the hat, and he doesn’t sell them, though Hochstetler suspects he could make a little money that way.
But the smiles are reward enough.
“Anytime I can make people laugh and be happy, that’s what I do,” Hochstetler said.
