KinSource - Tale of the Week - Pretty Girl Elopes With Railroad Newsboy

KinSource

Minnesota Tales

The St. Paul Globe, March 8, 1903, p. 1

PRETTY GIRL ELOPES WITH RAILROAD NEWSBOY

Alice Stensrude, of Sacred Heart, Loves Her Butcher Boy and Weds Him in Spite of Opposition of Stern Parents.

"Oh, Gene, what will mamma say when she hears of it?"

This was the first thought of Alice Stensrude, an exceptionally pretty girl of sixteen, after her marriage to Eugene Vandrin, a news agent on the Minneapolis & St. Louis railway in the office of Court Commissioner Gallick at the court house yesterday afternoon.

In the face of the objections raised by her parents Miss Stensrude had run away from her home at Sacred Heart and joined her youthful lover in St. Paul, where no time was lost in having the marriage ceremony performed.

The girl is the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. H. G. Stensrude, of Sacred Heart, Minn., her father being a traveling salesman in the employ of the Wyman-Partridge dry good company, of Minneapolis. The girl came to St. Paul some months ago for the purpose of going to school and was living with relatives here. Some time ago she met young Vandrin, a train butcher on the Minneapolis & St. Louis and it was a case of love at first sight with both of them. The young man paid such close attention to Miss Stensrude that the attention of her parents was called to the fact and she was taken out of school and sent back home.

But Cupid laughs at distance as well as blacksmiths. The couple corresponded and arranged for an elopement.

Friday Miss Stensrude left her home in Sacred Heart [ostensibly] to pay her sister in St. Paul a visit, and yesterday morning she told her sister that she was going over to Minneapolis to see her father, who was expected there.

Instead of meeting her father she met Vandrin and the pair of lovers, accompanied by D. E. Nash, a roommate of Vandrin's, went direct to the courthouse.

Court Commissioner Gallick was prevailed upon to perform the marriage and after it was all over the couple frankly admitted that they had outwitted the stern parents of the young girl, who had declared she should never marry Vandrin.

"What will your parents say when you go back home?" the girl was asked.

"Oh, we're not going back home, are we, Gene?" and the blushing young bride gazed admiringly at the wedding ring which had so recently been placed upon her finger, and together the happy couple left the court house.

"I don't know what her mother will say," said Mr. Nash, who is a mutual friend of the couple, "but there will be something doing when her father hears of it."

They will make their home in Minneapolis.