The way Helen Hensleigh tells it, she’s lucky to be here today.

The 95-year-old bridge enthusiast has been a proponent of the card game in the Flathead Valley for decades, but this came only after a difficult childhood in North Dakota — one that luckily had a happy ending.

“I was born in the bottom of poverty,” Hensleigh said. “My parents were from Austria and came to America without any money. They were told they needed someone to sponsor them to come in, and we had family members who did that.”

Her family, the Madlers, initially set up around the Dickinson, N.D., area on a hardscrabble farm that grew just enough to keep the children fed. Hensleigh, who was born in 1918, was the second youngest of eight children and the only girl to survive past childhood.

Her family was so poor that everything Hensleigh owned while growing up was hand-me-down. She walked to school, a one-room schoolhouse with 11 other students, where she never felt out of place. Everyone was as poor as she was, she said.

But when Hensleigh moved to Montana to live with her older brother and attend high school in Baker, things weren’t so easy. Hensleigh became depressed because she couldn’t afford new clothes to look nice. 

Even when a Montana State professor came to her high school looking for the best and brightest students, Hensleigh, the best business student in the school, was petrified of going to the meeting of students in Bozeman.

“I can’t go looking like this,” she said at the time. “There was no cost for this, but I still pretended to be sick so I wouldn’t have to go.”

The problems for the poverty-stricken teenager returned as Great Falls Commercial College began recruiting her to attend their business school. 

“I wanted to go, the recruiter wanted me to go and my parents wanted me to go,” Hensleigh said. “But I didn’t have any money. All that was needed was $25 for a train ticket, and we couldn’t get it.”

Not taking no for an answer, the recruiter footed the bill herself and set Hensleigh up with room and board working as a servant in Great Falls. Again, her depression and self-consciousness began to take over.

“I cried a lot; I was worried what everyone thought of me,” she said. “I thought about committing suicide. I didn’t have the guts. If I were a boy, I’m sure I would have, though.”

Luckily for Hensleigh, and for the people of the Flathead Valley, her story gets much happier.

When she graduated college, Hensleigh was offered a job for $80 a month, an astronomical sum in the mid-1930s, particularly for a woman. She worked as a bookkeeper and secretary for a business in Baker.

She soon met a man recruiting for the U.S. Navy and went on a date with him.

“I didn’t think much of him on the first date,” Hensleigh said. “He didn’t talk! But he called me three weeks later, and I agreed to go out with him again.”

Helen Madler and Lyle Hensleigh married in 1943, the middle of World War II, before Lyle had to ship out again.

Hensleigh, while the war raged on, moved to Kalispell where she was entranced with the area’s beauty. Unfortunately, many residents of the lower Flathead Valley were looking for another place to live at the time.

As part of the New Deal, Kerr Dam south of Polson was being discussed for a possible expansion to help power Montana. It would have massively increased Flathead Lake’s size, covering Kalispell with water.

“Kalispell might not exist any more,” Hensleigh said of the proposal. “There were three men fighting against the dam. I offered my help, they said they couldn’t pay me anything and I said that was all right.”

With the young woman keeping the office in order while the three businessmen raced back and forth to Washington, D.C., to stymie the dam expansion, the proposal was eventually defeated. Hungry Horse Dam was proposed as an alternative. 

When the war ended, Lyle returned from his deployment and Helen firmly refused to leave the town she had saved. Lyle had a degree in agriculture, so the two went into business with a grain elevator. 

The couple enjoyed 52 years of marriage before Lyle passed away in 1995. They had five children together and made some savvy investments.

While both were still poor, a friend offered them stock in a company he thought was poised to take off.

“He asked for $100, and it seemed like a lot,” Hensleigh said. “[Lyle] and I got in an argument, but we eventually invested. This was in 1945. We just forgot about it.”

The year after Lyle died, Helen remembered the investment and called the upstart energy company, now known as Exxon Mobil.

The initial investment had returned more than $100,000.

“We never heard a word about it, all these years,” she said. “And to think I almost fought this investment.”

A legitimate rags-to-riches story, Hensleigh still plays bridge and lives in her home in Kalispell, where she attends St. Matthew’s Catholic Church several times a week. 

Reporter Ryan Murray may be reached at 758-4436 or by email at rmurray@dailyinterlake.com.