Guest Author, my Daddy
A bald-headed man took up a homestead in Northern Montana west of where the Musselshell and the Missouri meet. The man called himself “Beetlehead”. When the year 1920 rolled around, he was getting up in years – about fifty. He had never had a hair on his head, and he had never married. Other men might ride fifteen miles horseback to go to a dance at a country schoolhouse and meet young ladies. Beetlehead went for other reasons. He’d rather fight than court.
“Ain’t nobody can whip Old Beetle,” he boasted. “When I get a challenge, I just duck my head in between my shoulders and plunge in headfirst.”
But one day Beetlehead met his match! A woman! He got married.
“How did a thing like that happen?” Bee Knapp, a neighboring homesteader and bachelor asked.
“It’s on account of Blood Pudding,” Beetlehead replied. “Old man Johnson comes by every time a fellow butchers and gets a bucket of blood. He takes it home and his wife cooks up a batch of pudding.”
Knapp nodded.
“Well, I went home and tried that blood pudding. Made me feel ten years younger. Felt so young I proposed to his daughter and she accepted.”
Bee Bell Knapp went back to his homestead shack and thought things over. Whether you live in the mountains or on the prairies, marriage is one of those things that’s catching. The marriage virus was going around. Bee Knapp had escaped it for thirty years, but in 1926 it caught with him. Twenty years later, I caught the marriage virus. Mr. Bee Bell Knapp became my father-in-law. A person never can tell where the virus will strike next.
Natural immunity is rare indeed.
Bee Knapp & his bride
I love that story and picture.