I'm Laura Norton, and this is one strange thing, the show where we search the nation's news archives for stories that can't quite be explained. On Valentine's Day, 1973, a boy named

a boy named Sean asked a girl named Deborah out on a date, indirectly.

He went for that decade's version of a text message, a note stuck in her jacket pocket.

It did the job of posing the question that he couldn't or wouldn't deliver face-to-face.

Deborah and Sean were students at Morse High School in Portland, Maine.

Morse, home of the fighting shipbuilders, was a smallish school in a mid-sized town, tucked

into the southernmost point of the state.

It was a nice setting for a teenage love story, which is

what unfolded late that winter. Sean McKenna was a senior and class president. According to

the Bangor Daily News, he took Deborah, a junior, to a party that next Friday. After that, they

were official, and things were good. That fall, when Sean went

off to college, he gave Deborah his high school class ring. It was chunky and silver,

and set with a bright blue stone. In the language of the teenager, Sean had proposed a steady

commitment, and Deborah accepted it.

She wore his too large ring proudly for a few months, but it wasn't to last.

The ring, that is. Deborah and Sean were doing fine.

As NBC News Center Maine tells it, Deborah went for a shopping trip one day and stopped in the ladies' room.

The Bangor Daily News reported that in order to deal with the sizing issue, Deborah had wrapped

Sean's ring in yarn so it wouldn't slip off her finger. But that also meant washing

her hands would create a sodden mess. Her solution was to always place the ring on the side ledge of the

sink, wash her hands, and put it right back on after she finished. But this time, Deborah forgot.

She walked right out of the bathroom and into the department store. It didn't take long for her

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