BETSY “COMMANDER” NELSON, 99-105, left Out To Pasture  Retirement Home for a walk with Jesus on Sunday, March 2,  2014 and never came back.

She was born in Bass Lake in a shed that no longer exists on July 5, sometime between 1909 and 1915. She always thought it was a Tuesday, but nobody really knows. Her mother had died in childbirth 18 months before she was born, and Betsy never forgot it.

She attended Bass Lake School when it occupied a building someplace. She left and went on to marry a distant cousin, Jack “Commander” Nelson.

He preceded her almost everywhere, including on the tandem bicycle he was piloting when it collided, in 1975, with Hank Smunson’s combine in a corn field near the roadkill dump.

“He loved riding through late September corn,” his close friend Bessie Jrankel recalled.  Jack “Commander”

Nelson was born  in February, 1895 in Saskatchewan, Alberta,  Canada , the son of Ack and Jan “Commander” Nelson.  He attended Moose Knuckle Prep and in 1915 graduated from the University of Northern Southern Middle Canada where his work on latent wolverine traits in the local sheep population led to the repeal of the Draconian Herd Laws of 1875. Jack fled the harsh Canadian landscape for Minot, North Dakota to pursue his dream of riding a bicycle through row crops. In 1917 he completed the first-ever Trans-North Dakota bike ride through fields of durum wheat. Bitterly disappointed when Crop Cycling failed to make the cut for the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, Jack left his beloved sport, the sport he invented,  to resume his work with violent sheep. He won a professorship at the upstart Bass Lake University in late September of 1938.

When the United States entered World War II, Jack claimed Canadian descent and fled to his parents’ basement to sit out the war. When he emerged, in 1953, the brown-eyed girl he’d left behind at the Sinclair station on Out-on-the-Highway Road was still sitting there, next to the pickle barrel. Her mummified body had escaped detection through the pickle rationing of 1943-45. Jack attended the interment of his former flame along with a smattering of well-wishers from the Bass Lake Henry Ford Fan Club.  

It was young Betsy Nelson, a distant cousin, who at 44 -50, had retained her youthful shoe size and used one of them to render the strapping Jack unconscious. When they arrived at her compound on Trout Lane Extended, she locked him in her basement until he agreed not to ride off on her bike. The couple struggled for several years before falling deeply in love. After the thrill of nightly tussles with the Bass Lake Police Authority had subsided, Jack and Betsy “Commander” Nelson settled down to raise a family.

Unconvinced that their advancing years placed any sort of hurdle in their familial path, they forged ahead with nightly “corn jaunts” through the surrounding fields on the “bicycle-built-for-two” of popular song.  Their dreams of kindred bliss ended on September 18, 1975 when Jack guided their Schwinn Tandem into the center of Hank Smunson’s Massey Ferguson 830 combine.  Jack was chewed up pretty good and subsequently became part of Hank Smunson’s farmland.

Betsy went on to complete years of relentless grief, earning her the title of Saddest Woman in Bass Lake, 1976-2005, when she discovered puzzling at Out To Pasture Retirement Home.

Betsy is survived by a half-daughter, Jacqueline (Jacqueline) Nelson (Nelson). Burial at Bass Lake Cemetery and Frisbee Golf Center will follow a carry-in lunch sometime in Spring. A carry-in dinner will follow.