The longest-running member of the Delta Gamma family isn’t a sorority girl.

He’s a bearded man with tattoos and a motorcycle, and he has cooked gourmet food for the girls of Delta Gamma for every day of the last 14 years. Terry Glessner sees his job as the Delta Gamma chef like having a house full of daughters.

“He’s almost like a house dad for us,” said Abby Reinertsen, a senior business marketing major who used to be the chapter president. “He just puts a lot of care and thought into each of the girls.”

Terry and his wife Wanda Glessner have both worked on College Hill as chefs for almost 17 years after they moved to Pullman to babysit their grandchildren.

They started as dual chefs in the Pi Beta Phi fraternity – Terry would cook the main courses, and Wanda would do the baking. When their daughter and son-in-law left Pullman, Wanda and Terry stayed behind.

Eventually they went on to different and separate houses, and then they had to learn each other’s craft.

“When I first started learning to bake, my breads were flat… It was sad for a while,” Terry said. “But now I can say that I am an excellent baker.”

Wanda now works in the Kappa Delta sorority, and the couple still enjoys lunch together every day.

Wanda’s goal of keeping the menu fresh and the food delicious has been very well-received at Kappa Delta, she said.

“They’re happy with their cooks, and they let everybody know it,” she said.

After 14 years in Delta Gamma, Terry said he has seen the house and College Hill grow and evolve a lot in terms of safety.

“The girls were a lot wilder at that time. The whole hill was,” Terry said. “From that point, it’s just smoothed out and smoothed out into what it is now.”

Terry described the Delta Gamma girls as classy. His job gives him the opportunity to get to know the girls in the sorority, which is an aspect he loves, he said.

“I’ve never come to this job on a day that I didn’t want to come,” Terry said.

The sorority members give him advice on his menu planning, and Terry said he solicits their advice often so they will always be satisfied with the menu.

This strategy has led to him cooking some interesting meals, he said. One Jewish member asked him to cook something for Passover, and with six recipes Terry made a whole Passover-themed dinner that Wanda said brought the girl to tears.

His recent innovative yogurt bar featuring different flavors of yogurt and a fresh fruit topping bar has been very well–received, he said.

“If they don’t like what I’m doing, I don’t like doing it,” Terry said. “To me, if they’re enjoying the food, that’s the whole thing.”

Varying up the menu is part of the fun of being a chef, Wanda said.

“It’s so much more fun to keep them guessing,” she said.

Reinertsen said keeping the menu new and fresh was something the chefs practiced and she never got bored with the dishes because they were never repetitive.

Wanda said the most important thing to her is that the food tastes good. Under this philosophy, meat loaf has become one of the most popular dishes she prepares.

“And you know why?” she asked. “Because we make it good.”

Although he’s now a successful chef, Terry has had two previous jobs. He worked in construction for 15 years and in industrial tire work for 11 years.

After recurring back injuries, he couldn’t work in industrial tires anymore, and he didn’t want to get an operation. So Wanda, who was a chef at a restaurant at the time, brought Terry in to cook as well. Ever since then, they’ve been cooking together for a living, he said.

After getting involved in cooking, the couple helped a chef start a few Italian restaurants and then went on to open their own bed and breakfast and catering house. During this time, they served celebrities, gatherings of up to 800 people, and catered Civil War reenactments with period food.

“He’d do a pig for them. I’d make these homemade beans that cooked all day,” Wanda said. Terry added that he had cooked dozens of entire pigs.

Diverse experience like this translated well into life on College Hill, where tastes from cultural backgrounds are always changing and never predictable. But both Terry and Wanda said they like the challenge.

“I’ve done a lot of different jobs and probably made a lot more money, but this job as always been more fun and one that I never hated going to,” Terry said. “I’ve never had a day that I hate going to work.”