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He Pops Question Where They Met -- on LChicago Sun-Times
LOOP | A Blue Line derailment four years ago was their blessing in disguise.
BY TERESA SEWELL Staff Reporter/tsewell@suntimes.com A Blue Line train derailed four years ago. But the 10-minute inconvenience placed two young hearts on the same track. On Wednesday, Corey Bell dropped to one knee at Clark and Lake. It was the same stop where he had asked Ashley Henderson -- the stranger with the beautiful smile -- for her phone number. And it became the place where he asked her to be his wife. Henderson thought she and relatives were headed to the Shedd Aquarium.But when Bell, 22, rode into the Clark and Lake station with a rented CTA train, filled with family and friends, red heart-shaped balloons and an "ASHLEY, WILL YOU MARRY ME? LOVE COREY" sign, she pushed back her black, shoulder-length hair and held her fingers over her eyes. Store helps out "Yes," the 22-year-old Olympia College graduate said. "I never thought it would happen like this," Henderson said later. "I didn't know he had it in him. He's always been nice and a gentleman, but this . . . I don't know what to say."Bell had the help of Robbins Bros., World's Biggest Engagement Ring Store. The company helped him pull it all off. "If you could have a fantasy engagement, what would it be?" the firm asks its clients, said spokesman John Cordova. The groom-to-be paid for the ring with the $2,500 store credit he won from the essay contest he entered this summer. The contest, coincidentally, was for couples who met on the CTA. Bell is now a Chicago Transit Authority bus driver, but he was an East-West University student when the Bellwood pair met. "It's amazing," said Bell's best friend, Steve Spiller. "A lot of people [planning an engagement] are going to have to step their game up now." Still shocked, Henderson could barely remember the words of Bell's proposal -- but he could. "I told her it's been like a fairy tale since the day we met," he recounted. " I want to make that fairy tale a reality. Will you marry me?"
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