Some years ago, I bought a cigar box at an auction. Inside was the letters and postcards of a young woman, circa 1937 or so. I pulled the box down to dust it, and found this little card inside. It reads:

My pretty little miss: I must write to you thus because I haven't yet found out what your name is but I know where you live for I followed you home last night.
Say - if you are married tear this note up and don't tell your husband. If you are single and long for a life partner I am ready to leap without looking so long as I will find you where I land. If you want to meet me carry a newspaper under your arm tomorrow. I'll arrange it. Expectantly.

Ah the romance of it all. No indication in the box whether she met the young man, perhaps at the country club dance where he might have been one of the beaus on her dance card, or just kept it close to her heart for the rest of her life.

Update: Your comments have been very interesting! I will admit, that this could be a great plot device in a novel, in fact, maybe in the novel I am writing now. My principal character is a young woman, 19 years old, in pre-wartime Boston Massachusetts. Her father died eight years before, and she helps support her mother and 12 year old brother. She lives in a brownstone on Beacon Hill and works at the Rexall store on Arlington St. I imagine a story line like this:

She has a secret admirer but knows who it is, it is Jimmy from the Schrafft’s, a shop that sells chocolates and has a soda fountain. Somehow, whenever she visits the shop, a carefully wrapped chocolate with raspberry filling is placed into her coat pocket. But yesterday morning, when she found the card before her mother and brother woke up, thoughts began filling her mind. It couldn’t be Jimmy, she had been friends with him for all of her life, it seemed. Was it someone else she knew? Who could have followed her home? She read the note again. Then Mary heard her mother at the top of the stairs, and she quickly put the note in the pocket of her long blue skirt. She decided not to put the newspaper under arm, but would go to work and show her best friend Irene the note. Mary walked thorough the glistening dawn of a cold winter morning, moving quickly to avoid the automobiles clogging the slushy cobblestone streets. She hastened to look left and right, hoping to spy the man who wrote the card. He would surely be looking for her and the newspaper under the arm. Suddenly, she thought, “Oh no! What if he does decide I am married, because I haven’t got the newspaper!”

Hmm, readers. Thinking like its 1939, a more innocent time, did she make the right decision to wait? Is there a real romantic out there, “expectantly,” who will pine and wait for her to make the signal? Or, will he forget about her, as she didn’t have the newspaper this morning. She doesn’t want to tell her mother, who is very protective of her daughter, and “all she has” since her husband died. It will be very hard for her to detach from her family if she finds love. And readers, I know who the man is (in the story.) He is not an ax murderer, jealous lover, drinker or carouser. His secret is something the FBI will be most interested in, and make any liaison with Mary very dangerous. Does she fall for him?

|