The Clerk Who Kept Her Marriage a Secret
A county auditor's office employee pulls off a stealthy holiday elopement, returning to her desk as a married woman without tipping off her colleagues.
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.
Mrs. Lanor Call, a clerk in the county auditor's office, has been wearing that name for three weeks after it had ceased to be legally hers. On the day after Christmas, she took advantage of a vacation to make a quiet trip to Tacoma and end her eighteen months' widowhood by being married to Mr. Crookshank, agent of an Eastern book house. She returned as quietly as she went, none suspecting that she had changed her name. She suspected yesterday that her secret had become known, and when a friend jokingly accused her of having gone away to be married, she acknowledged the fact, and was overwhelmed with congratulations. She and her husband will shortly remove to Los Angeles.
“Mrs. Lanor Call, a clerk in the county auditor's office, has been wearing that name for three weeks after it had ceased to be legally hers.”
In an era where a woman's professional identity was often subsumed by marriage, keeping such a secret allowed a brief, private autonomy. Today, the story highlights the starkly different expectations for women's work-life transitions and the surveillance we now have over such personal details through digital record-keeping.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.