You Cannot, Under Any Circumstances, Nap in This Wisconsin Cheese Shop — the Law Says So

The Law That Reads Like a Punchline

If you ever find yourself browsing the municipal code of Plover, Wisconsin — and honestly, who among us hasn't — you might stumble across Ordinance 14-B, Section 7, which states, in language that has not been updated since 1952, that it is unlawful for any person to "willfully or negligently enter a state of sleep or unconsciousness within the premises of any licensed dairy retail establishment during hours of public operation."

In plain English: you cannot fall asleep in a cheese shop.

The fine, if enforced, is $15 — which, adjusted for inflation, is roughly $175 today. No one has been cited under this ordinance in living memory. The town's current city attorney, when contacted about it, reportedly paused for a long moment before saying, "Yes, that's real. We know."

But here's the thing about bizarre local ordinances: they don't write themselves. Every absurd law has an origin story. And the origin story of Plover's cheese-shop sleeping ban is, improbably, more entertaining than the law itself.

A Hot Summer, a Slow Afternoon, and One Very Tired Salesman

To understand what happened, you have to understand what a cheese shop looked like in a small Midwestern town in the late 1940s. These weren't boutique operations with tasting flights and artisan crackers. They were working retail spaces, often attached to or adjacent to small dairies, where local farmers sold their product directly to townspeople.

In the summer of 1951, a traveling goods salesman named Harold Butz — yes, that was actually his name, and yes, local historians have confirmed it — stopped into what was then called Kowalski's Dairy Goods on Main Street in Plover. It was a Tuesday afternoon in August. The temperature outside was pushing 94 degrees. Harold had been driving since before sunrise.

He sat down on a small wooden bench near the front counter, apparently intending to wait for the shop owner to finish with another customer.

Harold fell asleep.

This would have been a minor, forgettable incident — the kind of thing you'd laugh about and move on from — except for what happened next.

The Cheese, the Cat, and the Cascading Disaster

The Kowalski shop kept a large orange tabby cat named Reuben, who served the traditional dairy-adjacent function of keeping rodents away from the product. Reuben was, by multiple surviving accounts, an extremely bold animal.

While Harold slept on the bench, Reuben — apparently mistaking the salesman's jacket pocket for a promising hiding spot — climbed onto Harold and began investigating. Harold, startled awake in a disoriented panic, lurched to his feet and knocked into a display shelf holding approximately forty pounds of aged cheddar wheels.

The shelf collapsed. The cheddar went everywhere. One wheel struck a glass case containing the shop's more expensive imported cheeses, shattering it. Another rolled through the open front door and into the street, where it was immediately run over by a delivery truck, spraying cheese across the sidewalk and the shoes of three bystanders.

The total damage to Kowalski's inventory was later estimated at what would be around $1,800 in today's money. Harold, horrified and deeply embarrassed, offered to pay for the damage. A legal dispute followed anyway.

Why They Wrote a Law About It

The town council of Plover, faced with the aftermath of what local newspapers at the time called "the cheese incident" (they were not a sensationalist press), did what small-town governments occasionally do when confronted with an unusual problem: they passed a law to make sure it never happened again.

The ordinance was proposed by Councilman Dale Fitch, who argued — apparently with a straight face — that allowing members of the public to sleep in retail dairy establishments created an unacceptable liability risk for shop owners. The council voted 4-1 in favor. The lone dissenting vote reportedly came from a councilman who felt the whole thing was "excessive."

The law has been on the books ever since.

Why Nobody Has Repealed It

This is perhaps the most Wisconsin part of the story: the ordinance has survived for over seventy years not because anyone actively wants it, but because no one has ever bothered to bring it up for review. Municipal code revision is unglamorous work, and antiquated laws tend to persist simply because they're not hurting anyone.

The current mayor of Plover, when asked about it by a regional reporter in 2021, said she was "aware of the ordinance" and described it as "a fun piece of local history" before declining to comment further.

Kowalski's Dairy Goods closed in 1978. Reuben the cat presumably died decades ago. Harold Butz passed away in 1989 at the age of 81, though whether he ever returned to Plover is not recorded.

But the law he inspired is still there, tucked into the municipal code, waiting for the next tired traveler to make the same mistake.

Don't say you weren't warned.