Meet the pauper who crowned a turkey sandwich

For several days he passed by the food truck at 8th and Nicollet, watching as the last of the lunchtime crowd devoured the juicy, slow-roasted turkey sandwiches. He wore a clean white shirt and khaki cargo shorts and spoke in a gravelly, garrulous voice.

"Got any scrappins?"

At first, Drew Levin and Danny Perkins, owners of the truck "Turkey to Go," had no idea what the man was talking about. They eventually realized he was looking for leftovers.

"We couldn't turn ourselves into a soup kitchen, so we just said we couldn't help him," said Levin.

After a few days, Levin and Perkins began to expect the man, and his friendly call: "Got any scrappins?"

"He is a super nice guy," said Levin. "When he'd scrape together some money, he'd buy one. He loved them, and began to tell everybody about it."

Because they didn't know his name, they began to call him Scrappins.

No booze, no drugs, I just want the cities all time best turkey sandwich (with BBQ sauce). Turkey to Go, the very best sandwich in town.

It was the man's own homemade version of sandwich-board advertising, an accidental guerrilla campaign. People started to notice. If a man was literally willing to beg for these sandwiches, they must be good.

"New customers saw the sign and stopped by to try us," said Levin. "So we gave him a couple of sandwiches to thank him."

They learned that the man's name was Larry, and that he was homeless but sometimes stayed with a woman who exchanged a room for some work around the house. He was a former military man and car salesman who'd lost his job, he said.

This week, Levin and Perkins realized that a growing group of regular customers might wonder where their truck is while they sell their goods out at the Minnesota State Fair the next couple of weeks.

Levin said the idea falls in with the actions of the Minnesota Turkey Growers Association, which makes yearly donations to curb homeless hunger.

In tough times, sometimes the economy must lurch forward, on hardscrabble labor and a currency made of turkey.

So this week Larry sat on a bench outside U.S. Bancorp building with a neon orange sign, telling anyone who wanted to know how much he loved Turkey to Go.

"Those sandwiches are delicious!" Larry said in a booming voice. "They are like Lay's potato chips: You can't eat just one!"

Perkins had brought Larry five sandwiches for his work that day, which he stashed in a bag next to him.

"Scrappins!" he said.

He lowered his voice, just a little. "I used to sell Cadillacs and Hummers. I made some bad decisions, that's all. Now I don't want to embarrass my former employers. So just call me Scrappins."

I asked Larry his age: "Sixty and a half!" he said. "I'm basically homeless!

"I'm was a paratrooper! I jumped out of planes, though I didn't want to!"

Scrappins said that he could practically live on the turkey sandwiches, and that he practically does, though he wishes more people would give spare change to him instead of to "those grungers down there who probably have never served in the military."

You probably don't have to guess where he plans to eat there.