It was a Friday night in late October of 1962. Tom Larson, my East Men’s Hall roommate, and I were returning on foot to the SDSC campus in Brookings after a few games of snooker and ten-cent beers at B&G billiards, otherwise known as Gussie’s. I was on the football team, and we either had an open date or I didn’t make the traveling squad for a game that required air travel. Little did I know that something so insignificant could bring about a monumental event in the course of my life.

As we approached the student union around 11:15, we decided to catch the tail end of the campus record hop “mixer.” We approached two girls who were sitting together in a dark corner of the Bunny Ballroom.

“Would you like to dance?” I asked the blond.

“I have a cast on my arm.” She responded.

“I didn’t ask you to dance on your hands. What’s your name?” I asked.

“Betsy,” she replied. I could sense that she really didn’t want to dance, so I suggested that we head downstairs to The Jungle for donuts and coffee. Small talk included hometowns and college majors until Tom’s and my anticipation for the next day’s pheasant opener dominated the conversation. At this point Laddie mentioned how much she enjoyed pheasant hunting. Like boys, girls can tell you what you like to hear. As it turned out, Laddie didn’t know a shotgun from a blow dryer. An invitation to join us on the hunt followed, and they eagerly accepted. We walked the girls back to their dorm and told them we would pick them up around 11:00 the next morning.

When we picked up the girls the next day, I was mildly concerned about their attire as it looked like they were dressed for a picnic. Betsy’s nice blue and white outfit was hardly the right attire for corn rows, sloughs, and sand burrs let alone pheasant blood. Tom and I had visions of the girls carrying our birds and zig-zagging in the corn rows between us. I can’t imagine what these girls had in mind, but they were incredulous when we revealed our plan. However, the girls were good sports. As their arms and legs were pretty well scratched up from the corn leaves halfway through the hunt, we decided that the girls could sit in the car while we filled out our bird limits.

When Tom and I got back to the car with our birds, Laddie jumped into the backseat of my 1948 Plymouth while Betsy remained in front. As the front would have been crowded with Tom, Betsy, and me, Tom climbed into the backseat. On the trip out, both girls had been in the back. I don’t know that the girls were being forward, but they did instigate the seating change. The hunt had a happy ending. The Pheasant Café served a pheasant dinner for fifty cents if the birds were provided, and we treated the girls to supper that evening.

Betsy and I dated off and on for the remainder of the school year, but the plot didn’t thicken until Elizabeth “Betsy” Hodgson invited me to Wessington Springs for the 1963 pheasant opener. The weekend started with a Friday night pot luck supper at the Templeton country church south and west of Springs. I felt like every woman there was eyeballing what Betsy had brought home as I looked over the tempting hot dishes of beef, pork, and chicken.

Well, the church wasn’t Templeton Catholic - bad news for this ”No meat on Friday boy.” As I didn’t want to insult the nice Templeton ladies, I decided to dig in and enjoy it. When I confessed my Friday meat-eating sin at the campus Newman Center the following Saturday, Father Richard told me I hadn’t committed a sin, and that it was time I started to think for myself.

The pheasant hunt was a success. Merlin Hodgson, Betsy’s father, and Grandpa George Hodgson led the twelve o’clock noon charge. Thirty-five minutes later, before we finished walking through Uncle Cecil’s cornfield, seven of us had our twenty-eight birds. But this isn’t the end of the story.

When we got back to the house with the birds, Grandma Blanche told us men to stretch out and relax. She then led the ladies, Betsy included, to the basement where they dressed the birds assembly line style. Betsy and I were married on June 12, 1965. She hasn’t cleaned a pheasant since that eventful day in Wessington Springs,