GET LOST, LONG-AGO SUITOR TOLD

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, February 11, 1993                   TAG: 9302110185
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: B-6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: RICHMOND                                LENGTH: Short
GET LOST, LONG-AGO SUITOR TOLD
Stanley Logsdon flew to Richmond to be reunited with the woman he loved, but returned to Chicago after she said she wasn't interested.
"I told him he could go back to Chicago and enjoy his grandchildren and forget about me," Mabel Thompson Boyd said. "I'm not looking for marriage, or a male companion either."
Logsdon, 72, returned Tuesday after spending five days in Richmond. "She's not interested in marriage. That's it," he said.
Logsdon was a sailor stationed at Camp Peary near Williamsburg when he met Boyd, then 20-year-old Mabel Thompson, at a Richmond dance hall in 1940.
He returned to Richmond again and again to dance with her. "She was just nice," he said.
The Navy transferred him to Norfolk and then to North Carolina. When he was discharged in 1946, he returned to Chicago.
In 1983, Logsdon's wife died. Boyd's husband died eight years ago.
Last week, Logsdon came to Richmond to find Boyd, although he didn't even know whether she was still in town. His best clue was an old, yellowed photograph showing a young brunette wearing a sailor-style dress and a sailor's cap.
The two met in an airport lobby Friday, surrounded by news reporters and camera crews after a story in the Richmond Times-Dispatch featured his search.
They spent a lot of time together in the next days.
"He's asked me to marry him four or five times," Boyd said. "I told him to go back to Chicago and get with a girlfriend there."

by Archana Subramaniam by CNB