Duel Frye has been a locomotive mechanic and worked in a lumber mill. Oddly enough, those jobs set him up for his latest gig: being a hand model.
Frye was scrolling through his phone when he saw a funny meme about a disappointed dad who was delighted to discover his son was a hand model for Jack Daniel's whiskey.
"I said 'I can hold things and have weathered-looking hands that have personality!' " said Frye, of Hinckley, Minn.
So he searched "best bar in Minnesota," and came up with Skaalvenn Distillery and Cocktail Lounge in Brooklyn Park. Then, he took a photo of his hand and included it in an email, partly to make his girlfriend, Lexi Hamalainen, laugh.
He wrote, "Someone recently told me I should be a hand model, and it honestly makes sense. ... I'm terrific at holding things. I really don't know if every whiskey [distillery] employs such a specific person, but if your fine company were to ever consider a hand model that symbolizes Minnesota's vitality, I'd ask you to consider me."
At first, Skaalvenn owner Tyson Schnitker thought one of his friends was pranking him.
"It's one of those emails where you get it and you think 'Is this a joke or is this guy just a creep?' " he said. "I needed to find out."
He called Frye and the two bantered back and forth, discovering they had the same type of humor. That's when Schnitker decided to take Frye up on his offer. He invited Frye to the distillery and took photos of him holding Skaalvenn liquor bottles — along with some family heirlooms Frye had brought along: a wrench and an ax.
Skaalvenn posted several of the photos and Frye's original email on its Facebook page, which garnered hundreds of likes.
"It was a lot of fun," Schnitker said of working with Frye. "He told me when he's going around town, people ask to look at his hands.""
Frye is enjoying his 15 minutes of hand-model fame, in part because it cracks up his girlfriend, now fiancée.
"Now she's just dying of laughter with tears in her eyes," he said. "This was my destiny."
