Bismarck Tribune

By VIRGINIABy VIRGINIAGRANTIER

She has one of those of those faces that can turn cowboys into cow mush.

And that long, wavy, dark hair.

Reba, Reba, Reba, where have you been all their lives? Sweet, gentle, Reba.

Maybe on top of a bucking bull. That's where she's been some of the time.

"I can do anything a boy can do," said Reba Buccholz, 20, the grinning new Miss Rodeo North Dakota.

Her father, Stan Buccholz, remembers when he was in a rodeo office one day when his about 12-year-old daughter walked in and signed up for the bullriding. He let her do it. And she went a couple of rounds.

Buccholz has a picture of herself at 3 on top of her first horse, Odie, a little Shetland pony. She wasn't sitting on it. She was standing on top of it, holding the end of the lead rope. The daring-do position was her idea not the photographer's.

Rough and tumble is good, but she's willing to do the glam-and-glitz thing, too.

Before she got into "queening," as she calls this job of rodeo queen, she didn't even wear makeup.

Now she does and has the long, manicured nails and the styled hair.

But a former beauty pageant winner's suggestion that she go on to regular beauty pageants after she does the rodeo queen thing didn't get the nod from Buccholz.

"I'd have to lose weight,"said Buccholz, who currently has a muscle-and-curves look, weighing in at 160 pounds.

She doesn't want to do that, nor does she think she needs to.

And, besides, she'd absolutely refuse to wear a bikini in front of people. She won't even do that when she has access to a hotel swimming pool.

Buccholz won the 2007 crown in a contest of five contestants held in early October in Minot.

Buccholz, at the time of the state contest, was the reigning "Miss Rodeo This Old Hat," a Mandan competition.

In Minot, she won the horsemanship competition, and the speech and photogenic categories. And the crown.

She took home to Bismarck a 3-foot-high trophy, a saddle, jacket, jewelry, a $500 college scholarship and use of a new pickup during her reign.

And the crown. Very important.

Her mother, Valerie Keller, said Reba was 3 when she told her that one of these days "when I grow up I'm going to get me one of them crowns."

It's also important to one of her siblings, her little brother, Daniel Keller, 9, who said now that the boys at his school, Northridge Elementary School, know his sister is a rodeo queen, "They don't beat me up."

(Reach reporter Virginia Grantier at 250-8254 or at virginia.grantier@;bismarcktribune.com.)