They met as kids at an orphanage. Decades later, they’re still each other’s Valentine.
Peggy Griffin was only about 10 years only when she spotted her lifetime sweetheart — the cutest boy in the orphanage.
She was sitting on the swing set in 1946 when Billy Griffin swooped into her world — one year older, a three-sport athlete, immediately sought by every girl on campus.
“I figured I didn’t have a chance he would ever look my way,” she said. “Turns out I did.”
One Sunday in chapel, he asked a friend to ask if he could walk Peggy home — one of the acceptable forms of dating at Raleigh’s Methodist Orphanage in the late 1940s.
“The first thing he did was take my hand,” she recalled. “I was hooked for life, literally. For the first time in my life, somebody special thought I was special.”
The king and queen of cornhole
This year, the Griffins will mark 70 years of marriage, and they still hold hands around The Templeton of Cary, the retirement home where they both play on the Senior Olympic team.
“He was the king of cornhole until he showed me how to play,” she joked. “Now I’m the queen.”
The Methodist Orphanage of Raleigh might seem an unlikely spot for young romance, housing 325 children who’d lost at least one parent. Peggy and Billy both arrived there because their fathers died young of a heart attack, leaving their mothers unable to provide.
But this was no gloomy workhouse from the pages of Charles Dickens. The campus sprawled over 69 acres, offering a swimming pool, a tennis court and a concrete bowling alley.
It stood roughly in the spot of Fred Fletcher Park on Glenwood Avenue, and the 325 orphans there found lifelong brothers and sisters after their biological siblings got scattered. At 89, Billy Griffin still calls alumni on their birthdays. The orphanage became the Methodist Home for Children in 1955.
‘You’re my life’
But back then, the orphans could hardly leave campus. They worked at the dairy farm, or raising hogs, or ironing clothes and cooking meals. For a date, you could sit in the living room under a house parent’s supervision, for a maximum two hours.
So around the time they graduated, Billy walked Peggy to the center of the basketball court, where he’d been a scrappy guard and she’d been a cheerleader.
They stood alone at center court, right on top of the M.O. logo, and he took her hand again.
“He kissed me and he asked if I would marry him. I said, ‘Absolutely! You’re my life.’ And he has been ever since.”
Peggy came out of the orphanage not knowing how to drive or cash a check. But they figured out life together, making their way through the world that gave them such a rough start, tending to the holes that life left for them to fill.
They worked long careers, she in human resources for an electronics firm, he for a Raleigh distributor, raising two children, enjoying five grandchildren and then 10 great-grandchildren — eight of them girls.
They wrote their own book — “An Exceptional Journey: And the Two Shall Become One” — following their lives from the orphanage campus.
On nearly every page, and for nearly every minute since 1954, they’re still holding hands.
This story was originally published February 13, 2024 at 12:49 PM.