Helping cowgirl in distress leads to rodeo romance
Click Here for the Post https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2018/oct/14/helping-cowgirl-in-distress-leads-to-ro/It wasn’t until Bud Grant proposed marriage to Marsha Rochelle that she conceded to go on a date with him.
Bud had come to her rescue the first time they met. Marsha, who did barrel racing, was unloading her horse from a trailer in Simonton, Texas, in 1969 when the horse’s hoof got tangled in a mat.
The first time I saw my future spouse:
She says: “All I could think of was, ‘Wow, he is so nice. He saved my horse.’”
He says: “She was real trim and real pretty — had long dark hair and she looked like a good cowgirl to me.”
On our wedding day:
She says: “Our friends put about 50 pounds of rice in the camper that we stayed in.”
He says: “When the preacher said, ‘Do you Marsha take Bud to be your lawful wedded husband,’ and she was supposed to repeat, ‘She said, ‘Do you Bud take Marsha to be your lawful wedded wife.’ She was so nervous. Everyone laughed.”
My advice for a long happy marriage:
She says: “Love. You’ve just got to love each other and work everything out.”
He says: “Love and do everything together.”
“I happened to be parked by them,” Bud says. “That horse came out of that trailer and turned a backflip and got away and ran off from her, and I caught it. She came up to get it and I went, ‘Man, that’s a pretty girl.'”
Marsha was grateful to be holding the reins again, but she wasn’t interested in the cute guy who had brought them back.
“All I wanted was my horse, my vehicle and a trailer and a rodeo,” she says.
She saw him almost every weekend after that at one rodeo or another. Sometimes they would chat a little, and he asked her a few times to “ribbon rope” for him.
“The guy would run out and rope a calf and it would have a ribbon on its tail and the girl would run out and grab the ribbon off the calf’s tail and run back across the line,” Bud explains. This was all timed. “Marsha ran the ribbon for a bunch of guys and she was the fastest thing I saw so I asked her if she would ribbon rope with me, so we started doing ribbon roping at rodeos.”
He got acquainted with her family on those occasions.
“I always liked her mom and dad and brother,” Bud says. “I always thought they were good people and I always made a point to visit with them.”
Bud asked Marsha to go out with him a couple of times, but she said no.
He did go out with one of her friends, however, and that date set things in motion.
The girl told Marsha on a Friday morning that the night before, she had gone out with the nicest guy — so nice, in fact, that she thought he might be “the one.” Marsha asked who this fellow was, and the friend told her it was Bud Grant. Marsha went to the rodeo that Friday night, in search of Bud.
“Me and my buddy didn’t go to that rodeo that night, we went to a different one,” Bud says. “When I got back from that one Saturday morning a buddy of mine called me and he said, ‘Boy, you’ll never guess who was at the rodeo last night looking for you?’ I said, ‘Oh, really?’ That kind of gave me a hint she was after me.”
He found her that night at the rodeo.
“I rode up next to her and we were riding around talking and I said, ‘Marsha?’ and she said, ‘What?’ And I said, ‘Why don’t we get married?’ and she said, ‘OK,'” Bud says.
Marsha registered no surprise, he remembers.
“I had no idea how it would turn out,” she says. “I didn’t really know him. I guess it just felt right.”
When they left the rodeo, she was in a vehicle ahead of his with her family. He pulled up next to her and she rolled down the window.
“She said, ‘We live right up here. Why don’t y’all stop and drink a Coke?'” he says.
He and his roommate stopped at her house and spent the next few hours talking with her and her family.
Their first date, which happened post-proposal, was to see the R-rated Woodstock at the drive-in movie theater.
“That was our first date and I took her to a movie where they were saying bad words,” Bud says.
They had only had two or three more dates by the beginning of October.
“I was working at an electrical company and I got laid off and the Loretta Lynn Rodeo Company that put on rodeos over on the East Coast, their superintendent called and wanted me to go to work for them setting up rodeos and working for them during the fall circuit,” he says.
He and Marsha had been planning for a June 1971 wedding, but after this news Marsha insisted they move up their wedding date.
They exchanged their vows on Oct. 11, 1970, in a Presbyterian church in Hooks, Texas.
Bud’s family had met — and loved — Marsha but they weren’t able to make it to the wedding because they had already committed to work on a rodeo that day. The newlyweds stopped by to see them the next day, on their way to Hampton, Va., where the first Loretta Lynn event was to take place.
In 1972, Marsha and Bud moved to Benton and started a company erecting metal buildings. A few years later, they opened another company, American Building Systems. Their son, B.J., also works with them.
They’re no longer involved in rodeos, but Bud likes to hunt and fish and sometimes he convinces Marsha to do those things with him.
“We’re still together almost all the time,” she says.
“It’s worked out pretty good,” Ed says. “We’ve been married 48 years.”
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Marsha and Bud Grant met when he returned her runaway horse, which had bolted from her as she was unloading it from a trailer. They worked together in rodeos after they were married. Bud, who started trick riding when he was 6 years old liked to show off a rope trick, called the Cowboy Wedding Ring, spinning a rope around the both of them.
High Profile on 10/14/2018
