Ed Kemmick/Last Best News
Kenny and Nadine Biggs, seen her in their West End home, have been in love with each for most of their lives. But they needed a lot of patience before they could finally get together.
When Kenny Biggs left Townsend to join the Marines in 1945, he was carrying a snapshot of the girl he loved.
She had had the photo taken at the state fair in Helena a year earlier, when she was just 14. In the photo she is a fair-skinned, dark-haired girl wearing lipstick and a tentative smile.
Her name was Nadine Biggs, and that was the problem.
Kenny’s family had moved to Townsend from a farm in Kansas, not far from St. Joseph, Mo., and Nadine’s mother’s family was from the same area. Her mother thought Kenny and Nadine might be related, so she didn’t want them dating, and she surely didn’t want them getting married.
They would have to wait almost half a century — Kenny carrying that photo in his wallet all those years — before they finally wed.
But let’s start at the beginning.
“It started in 1943,” Kenny said. “April 1943.”
That’s when his family moved to Townsend. They’d gone there to visit his father’s sister, and his father, who had asthma, couldn’t believe how much better he breathed in the high country of Montana. So they left Kansas for good.
Kenny heard of a girl named Biggs pretty quickly, and he took a shine to her the first time they met.
“I had my eye on him right away, too,” she said.
But Kenny was in high school and she was only a seventh-grader. High-schoolers did not ask a seventh-grader out, he said.
So he waited until she was a freshman. And on the first day of high school in 1944, the day after Labor Day, he asked Nadine out. He remembers they went to the Town Talk and each had a hamburger and a milkshake.
“The total cost was 90 cents,” he said. “I had a dime left out of a silver dollar.”
Though her mother objected, they continued to date.
“We got around that,” Nadine said. “He’d send friends around to pick me up.”
This is the picture of Nadine that Kenny carried in his wallet for almost 50 years. The actual photo was less than half this size.
Kenny joined the Marines right after high school in 1945, and when he came back on leave in 1947 he was bearing an engagement ring. But Nadine’s mother was adamantly against the union, and Nadine was obedient.
“I’ve had a lot of people say, ‘Why didn’t you just go do it?’ These young people say that,” she said. But in those days you listened to your parents, she said.
At least until you were a little older. After she graduated from high school in 1948, she moved to Helena and was living on her own. The 18-year-old girl wrote a bold letter to Kenny, proposing to elope.
“I just told him I didn’t care what Mom said. If he wanted to get married, send me the money and I’d come,” she said.
But when you were traveling with the Marines — Kenny served in the Mariana Islands, Guam, Saipan and China — mail delivery could be spotty. He never saw her letter, though the photo remained in his wallet.
“I showed that to a lot of Marines,” he said.
When Nadine heard nothing back from Kenny, she assumed he didn’t want to defy her mother’s wishes.
“That was pretty much the end of it,” she said. “I just figured he didn’t think it was a good idea.”
Kenny, after the failed attempt to give her an engagement ring, felt the same way. Kenny briefly returned to Townsend after his stint in the Marines, but Nadine was in Helena by then and they didn’t see each other. They both got married and started new lives.
This photo of Kenny was taken in the late 1940s, when he was in the Marines.
He moved to Omaha, where he went to work in the yard of a big meatpacking plant.
He became a cattle buyer, worked in the company’s headquarters in Chicago until 1962, then moved to Abilene, Texas, going into the meat business for himself. He had a successful career, starting up a handful of other businesses and chartering a bank with five associates.
Nadine worked in the legal division of the state Highway Department in Helena for many years, then moved to Boulder and worked as an administrative assistant at what is now the Montana Developmental Center.
Kenny’s nephew worked there, too, and he told his uncle that Nadine often asked about him. His nephew offered to give Nadine Kenny’s address, but she told him no, your uncle is married.
But by 1991, both of them had lost their spouses, and Kenny went back to Townsend to visit his sister. He called Nadine in Boulder and they spoke for the first time since 1947. They went on a date, driving down to Butte for a dinner of lobster tails. Kenny came back later that year for a school reunion.
“That’s when we kind of decided to pick up where we’d left off 44 years earlier,” he said.
He moved from Texas to Helena in 1991 and Nadine still lived in Boulder.
“We drove back and forth over that mountain 100 times or more,” he said.
They finally got married in March 1993, and Kenny built them a home in Townsend on the Missouri River. They also had a place in Arizona because they both loved to golf, but when physical problems ended their golfing days, they sold the house in Arizona.
They decided to sell the place in Townsend, too, because both of them had been seeing specialists at Billings Clinic. They moved to Billings in 2001.
Kenny still has that picture of Nadine, though he no longer carries it in his wallet. Did his first wife ever see the photo and ask questions?
“No,” he said. “That’s one thing we never did. I never got in her purse and she never got in my wallet.”
Kenny is 87 now and Nadine is 85, and they say they couldn’t be happier.
Shortly after they wed in 1993, Nadine started researching their family histories, to see if, in fact, they were kin.
“We weren’t related, as far as we could determine,” Kenny said.
Nadine put it in slightly different terms.
“I couldn’t find anything,” she said. “I’m still looking.”
