The Carousel Tragedy: A Seattle Heartbreak
When two inseparable shop girls fell for the same carousel operator, a romantic misunderstanding led to a devastating, silent exit.
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.
Mame and Daise were chums; they worked in the same shop and belonged to the same set. Mame was a large, dusky beauty, while Daise was a dainty blonde. Their friendship was tested when they became infatuated with Jim, a jaunty operator at the local merry-go-round. Jim favored Daisy, secretly slipping a love note into her muff, but Mame intercepted it. Heartbroken and despairing, Mame wrote a self-sacrificial letter to Daisy, forgiving her for the misunderstanding, then took an overdose of laudanum. She was found dead the next morning. Daisy, never revealing the truth of Mame’s sacrifice, kept their friendship a secret memory.
“Mame's face was ghastly white and there were deep lines about her tightly closed mouth. There was an expression of perfect despair in her eyes, but they were dry and tearless.”
This 1912 account of working-class women in Seattle highlights the isolation and precarity of the era's youth, mirroring modern struggles with loneliness and mental health in the city's fast-paced, often impersonal service economy.
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