{"id":2935,"date":"2014-07-16T14:45:49","date_gmt":"2014-07-16T20:45:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=2935"},"modified":"2014-07-17T11:55:47","modified_gmt":"2014-07-17T17:55:47","slug":"couples-devotion-proves-that-true-love-is-patient","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2014\/07\/couples-devotion-proves-that-true-love-is-patient\/","title":{"rendered":"Couple’s devotion proves that true love is patient"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Couple\"<\/a>

Ed Kemmick\/Last Best News<\/p>

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.<\/p><\/div>\n

When Kenny Biggs left Townsend to join the Marines in 1945, he was carrying a snapshot of the girl he loved.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Her name was Nadine Biggs, and that was the problem.<\/p>\n

Kenny\u2019s family had moved to Townsend from a farm in Kansas, not far from St. Joseph, Mo., and Nadine\u2019s mother\u2019s family was from the same area. Her mother thought Kenny and Nadine might be related, so she didn\u2019t want them dating, and she surely didn\u2019t want them getting married.<\/p>\n

They would have to wait almost half a century \u2014 Kenny carrying that photo in his wallet all those years \u2014 before they finally wed.<\/p>\n

But let\u2019s start at the beginning.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt started in 1943,\u201d Kenny said. \u201cApril 1943.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s when his family moved to Townsend. They\u2019d gone there to visit his father\u2019s sister, and his father, who had asthma, couldn\u2019t believe how much better he breathed in the high country of Montana. So they left Kansas for good.<\/p>\n

Kenny heard of a girl named Biggs pretty quickly, and he took a shine to her the first time they met.<\/p>\n

\u201cI had my eye on him right away, too,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

But Kenny was in high school and she was only a seventh-grader. High-schoolers did not ask a seventh-grader out, he said.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe total cost was 90 cents,\u201d he said. \u201cI had a dime left out of a silver dollar.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though her mother objected, they continued to date.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe got around that,\u201d Nadine said. \u201cHe\u2019d send friends around to pick me up.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Nadine\"<\/a>

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.<\/p><\/div>\n

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\u2019s mother was adamantly against the union, and Nadine was obedient.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve had a lot of people say, \u2018Why didn\u2019t you just go do it?\u2019 These young people say that,\u201d she said. But in those days you listened to your parents, she said.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cI just told him I didn\u2019t care what Mom said. If he wanted to get married, send me the money and I\u2019d come,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

But when you were traveling with the Marines \u2014 Kenny served in the Mariana Islands, Guam, Saipan and China \u2014 mail delivery could be spotty. He never saw her letter, though the photo remained in his wallet.<\/p>\n

\u201cI showed that to a lot of Marines,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

When Nadine heard nothing back from Kenny, she assumed he didn\u2019t want to defy her mother\u2019s wishes.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat was pretty much the end of it,\u201d she said. \u201cI just figured he didn\u2019t think it was a good idea.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019t see each other. They both got married and started new lives.<\/p>\n

\"Kenny\"<\/a>

This photo of Kenny was taken in the late 1940s, when he was in the Marines.<\/p><\/div>\n

He moved to Omaha, where he went to work in the yard of a big meatpacking plant.
\nHe became a cattle buyer, worked in the company\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Kenny\u2019s nephew worked there, too, and he told his uncle that Nadine often asked about him. His nephew offered to give Nadine Kenny\u2019s address, but she told him no, your uncle is married.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s when we kind of decided to pick up where we\u2019d left off 44 years earlier,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

He moved from Texas to Helena in 1991 and Nadine still lived in Boulder.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe drove back and forth over that mountain 100 times or more,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

\u201cNo,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s one thing we never did. I never got in her purse and she never got in my wallet.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kenny is 87 now and Nadine is 85, and they say they couldn\u2019t be happier.<\/p>\n

Shortly after they wed in 1993, Nadine started researching their family histories, to see if, in fact, they were kin.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe weren\u2019t related, as far as we could determine,\u201d Kenny said.<\/p>\n

Nadine put it in slightly different terms.<\/p>\n

\u201cI couldn\u2019t find anything,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019m still looking.\u201d

\"CapreAir_Variable\"<\/a><\/div><\/div><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2937,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[322,1001,1003,1004,1000,1002],"class_list":["post-2935","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-billings","tag-billings-clinic","tag-kenny-biggs","tag-marine-corps","tag-montana-developmental-center","tag-nadine-biggs","tag-townsend","prominence-top-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2935","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2935"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2935\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2937"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2935"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2935"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2935"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}