A local Happily Ever After Story

As she sat at her work station, she looked around her pensively to see who might be watching. Supervisors were known to quietly walk behind workers at times to check productivity. The building was a large, warehouse type structure with few windows, and the ones it did have were cloudy. She knew what she was thinking of doing was not allowed, and she wasn’t normally the kind of person to break rules or question authority. It was just so tempting.

It was 1944, WWII was raging, and so many of the young men who lived in her hometown of Nettleton, Mississippi, had gone into the military services. Thoughts of young men were hard to shake out of her 16-year-old mind. She tried to keep herself busy by attending school during the daytime and working for the war effort at night in a garment factory which was converted to produced U.S. Army uniforms. But the uniforms just made her think of the young men overseas who would be wearing them.

Her name was Lanita Nicholson, but everyone called her Nita.

She and her friend, who also worked at the factory, had discussed the idea before but, for some reason, she decided this was the day she would put a note in the watch pocket of a uniform. Little did she know that, about a year later, Kennith Varnum, who was stationed in Italy, would be the one to receive a new uniform and her note.

Kennith was assigned to a secret section of the Signal Corp. While in Italy, he went to a movie with a buddy, and the note fell out of his pocket. His buddy encouraged him to write to her, and his letter arrived at her home between Thanksgiving and Christmas of 1945. She sent him a Christmas card and they wrote to each other regularly while he was overseas. He would later, with 11 other soldiers, plot D-Day on an island off the coast or Normandy, France. Kennith’s oldest brother, Willis Irving Varnum, was killed on D-Day. World War II ended on September 2, 1945, and Kennith returned from the war and went to his home in Greenhead, Florida, on Thanksgiving Day, 1946.

In January, 1947, Kennith took a bus from Florida to Mississippi and arrived in Nettleton. Nita’s brother, Elmer Grady, Jr., walked out of the local dry-cleaning establishment and seconds later, Kennith walked in to ask if anyone knew the location of the Grady Nicholson home. He was told that Grady’s son had just walked out! Kennith and Nita met for the first time, face to face, that day.

He visited her again in June of 1947. They became engaged and he purchased their wedding rings in Dothan, Alabama. In September, 1947, on Kennith’s third visit to see her, driving his new 1947 Willys Jeep, he took Nita to a church in Columbus, Mississippi, where they were married on September 21, 1947. They then returned to Kennith’s hometown a week later, where they lived for the remainder of their married life. Kennith worked for International Paper Company and then for Hunt Oil Company for 43 years.

They had two children, Janice and Jerry. Jerry still lives in Bay County and owns the family property in Washington County.

They were married for 55 years before Kennith passed away at age 80 on June 8, 2002. Nita remained in their home in Greenhead until she passed away at age 92 on August 24, 2020. She still had, among her possessions, the note she placed in that Army uniform pocked in 1944.

Note: An account of this story, written by Lanita Varnum, also appears in the 2006 edition of “The Heritage of Washington County, Florida.”