Ellen M Bishop
Marian Birkmaier is still at home on the ranch.
the clothing ourselves,” Zollman said.
”You took what they had. Sizes didn’t
always fit real well. But they were big
enough that I can still wear mine. I’m
going to wear mine this year.”
“We went to a little western store in
Joseph where they had lots of different
kinds of western wear,” Marian Birk-
maier recalled. ”We got a hat, a pair
of boots, one pair of gabardine pants,
and a shirt—one was brocade, for rid-
ing and wearing during the day and
the other was sateen, for the dances.
That was it, except that Harley Tuck-
er’s wife, Bonnie brought the brocade
shirts for us back from a trip she took
to Denver.”
Then, as now, the young woman
who sold the most tickets was crowned
queen. But in 1949, they had only one
frantic week for ticket selling. Zollman
Ellen Morris Bishop
Ruby Zollman relaxing in her Joseph home
and two of her friends drove a jeep all
over the county. “We sold tickets every
day that week,” she said. “We drove
from Hurricane Creek to Lower Imnaha
and all the way up to the Pallette Ranch.
We knocked on every door. And I tell
you, there were a lot of doors.” Every
night an anonymous donor filled the
jeep’s gas tank. “The community stood
behind me 100 percent,” Zollman said.
Master storyteller Mack Birkmaier
recounted the humorous tale of how
moths completely disrupted the 1949
Coronation Dance. “We had lights
strung across the dance floor outside,”
he said. “Then it started getting dark,
really dark. We looked up and there
were moths and light-colored smaller
moths called millers collecting on the
lights. They sort of looked like big hor-
net nests. Then the millers began fall-
ing off the big globs of moths that were
clinging to the light bulbs. They started
flying up the girl’s dresses and drop-
ping down everyone’s shirts. It sort of
stopped the whole show.”
The 1949 court’s duties included
riding horses in the parade, and also
making a dramatic, galloping entrance
at the start of the rodeo. “Marian and
I both had to borrow horses,” Zollman
said. “My family had moved into town
during the war (WWII). So we didn’t
have horses—and I didn’t have a sad-
dle.” A classmate lent her a saddle, and
a local cowboy who was going to com-
pete in the rodeo said she could use his
calf-roping horse. “It’s going to be at
the rodeo grounds all the time, any-
way,” he said. Zollman was set.
The 1949 rodeo was only the sec-
ond show ever held in the newly
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