Not long after his first marriage ended, Nick Ruggiero took up flying. He took cross-country trips in his single-engine airplane, skipping from airport to airport. One day he found himself gazing down on Meadville, Penn. He wondered who lived in the small industrial city.
When he returned to Cleveland, he was offered a job: a steel forging plant manager position in none other than Meadville. He accepted immediately.
On his first day of work, he pulled into the parking lot in a fancy car, impressing all the female employees who wondered about their new boss. Two days later, he was walking around a blind corner when he collided with a younger woman. He knew immediately she was Sue Haberland, the pretty blonde he'd been told about. She was crying.
"I looked down and I said, 'Miss Haberland, if he makes you cry, he ain't worth it,'" he remembered.
"How did you know?" she remembered wondering. She, too, was just out of a messy marriage. Later he came to her office door and asked if she'd "accompany" him to a dance that weekend.
"A gentleman — they still make them," Sue Haberland, now Ruggiero, remembered thinking. "I was very impressed."
That Saturday, they danced all night. "By looking into her eyes, I could see her soul," he remembered. "I said 'Wow' to myself." By the night's end, Nick Ruggiero had asked her to marry him.
She said no. He was undeterred. They dated. After just a few dates, the youngest of her three sons grasped at his trouser leg and asked him to be his daddy. She was mortified and thrilled. After a year and a half of courtship, the two married in front of a friend's fireplace on a blizzardly night. It was Feb. 2, 1978.
Now the Ruggieros live in a condo in South Riding. They blended their two families — a total of five sons. One of the sons owns Cre8tive Signs in Old Ashburn, where his father is manager.
Nick Ruggiero, now 74, credits his Italian mother for instilling in him the idea of treating women as queens. "Every morning, within the first 20 minutes we're up, I'm telling her how beautiful she is and how much I love her," he said.
The shadows of their first marriages still fuels their love today, said Sue Ruggiero, 61. "Because we were hurt, and we were the ones who were left," she said, "we really have an appreciation for each other."