The Blue Ribbon Reunion at the Union Depot
A young man waits nightly at the Seattle train station, searching for a stranger marked by a blue ribbon on her wrist.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
For the past three or four days, the night employees of the Union depot have noticed a beardless young man of about 25 years of age come around in the evening about 8 o'clock and take his stand at the exit gate until after the limited express arrived. He would carefully examine the left hand of every young lady who passed through the gate. Several of the platform men had come to regard him as a harmless crank, but recently the mystery was explained. A very prettily dressed young woman stepped off the mail train, and as she walked down the platform, looked carefully at every young man she passed. She wore on her left wrist a large piece of blue ribbon about four inches wide. When she reached the gate, the beardless young man spied the blue ribbon, and his face lit up as he exclaimed: 'Is this Miss Evans, of Philadelphia?' 'Yes, I suppose you are Mr. Evans?' 'That's me,' exclaimed Mr. Evans enthusiastically, as he gave her a bag and led her out of the depot. The reporter afterward learned that it was a case of romance, and the last act of the love drama will be the tying of the knot.
“When she reached the gate, the beardless young man spied the blue ribbon, and his face lit up.”
Long before the digital age of 'missed connections,' this 1887 newspaper report captures a charming, low-stakes public courtship. It reminds us that even in the rapidly industrializing, busy frontier town of 19th-century Seattle, the human search for intimacy persisted through analog signals and shared public spaces.
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