Noelle Mitchell stared at John Scuderi through the foggy window in the back of her parents' station wagon as her family drove out of town.
"I was actually crying that night," she says, "because I was like, I wonder if we're going to live here. I felt a connection. I wondered if I would ever see him again."
The first time I saw my future spouse:
She says: “We were in Sunday School class.”
He says: “I saw her and her two sisters and I was like, ‘Hello!’”
On our wedding day:
She says: “The jelly layer in the middle of my stacked cake had melted and slid apart on the way to the church. The baker had spent a long time in cooperation with the florist and the freezer trying to put it back together, but it didn’t look anything like what I had chosen.”
He says: “We broke the tradition of don’t look at each other before you get married, I just remember finding her before we got married and saying hi to her informally and it was very nice.”
My advice for a long happy marriage is:
She says: “Be friends first. I think that’s probably the most important thing.”
He says: “Have lots of patience and lots of love. Take your time.”
She was 12 and John was 15 in the spring of 1991. Her father had taken her family to Rockville, Md., to interview to be pastor of the Aspen Hill Wesleyan Church, and they had gone to a social gathering at a church member's home. With the interview complete, they were heading home to Wilmore, Ky., to wait for word on whether he had the job.
Noelle and John hadn't talked much at that gathering -- he had wandered off with some other teenagers and she had spent most of the evening talking with his mother.
Noelle's dad did become the pastor of the church, where John and his family were members, and she and John became close friends.
They were in Sunday School and youth group together and they played tennis. He sometimes skated on Rollerblades from his house to hers after school -- 4 miles, across six-lane roads.
"We were just friends for a long time," she says. "He always had other girls that he was dating and taking to dances and stuff, but he would call and tell me about it and ask me questions."
John, though, was more forward-thinking. Their age difference -- he was 16 by then, and she was 13 -- seemed insurmountable at the time, but he realized even then that the gap might not seem so large when they were more mature.
"I was getting ready to be a junior and I knew she was really special but she was way too young," John says. "I wanted to write that down ... I did think she was a special girl but I couldn't date her yet."
He penned a letter telling her how he felt, how much it meant to him that she had listened to him and telling her he wanted her to be in his future. In the letter, he asks Noelle if she will marry him.
He dated the letter -- Aug. 25, 1992, a Tuesday, at 11:30 p.m. -- folded it, stored it in a little safe and mentioned it to no one.
In 1993, their church was closing, and John's family was moving an hour north. Noelle's family was moving more than 1,000 miles away, to El Dorado.
"The last night before my parents moved away from Maryland -- I was like 14 years old and we were not dating at the time -- we stayed up talking on the phone for about five hours," Noelle says.
John went to visit Noelle and her family at Christmas 1994, after he finished high school, and Noelle visited his family the following summer. Their friendship remained solid.
John visited at Christmas again the next year. Noelle was a high school senior, and John was attending Towson College near Baltimore.
"I was older, more mature and all right with the Lord," he says, crediting Noelle for the latter. "I decided I needed to fly down there and see her and ask her to be my girlfriend."
He gave her a necklace and a Steven Curtis Chapman CD.
"Basically, he asked if I would date him so that maybe in the future we could get married," she says.
Noelle said yes to a courtship but made it clear she would not base her decision on where to go to college on their relationship. She considered eight colleges in Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana and Pennsylvania.
"It turned out that the one with the best packages and academics was about an hour from where John lived," she says.
On weekends, John would visit her at Messiah College in Mechanicsburg, Pa., or she would visit him, or they would go together to his parents' house.
On April 11, 1998, at a scenic overlook near his parents' mountain cabin in western Maryland, John gave Noelle the letter he had written six years earlier.
"I didn't read it as a proposal. I was just thinking, 'Oh, you wrote this letter six years ago? Amazing," Noelle says. "Then I sat down and he had to get down on one knee and do the real thing."
They exchanged their vows on May 29, 1999, at Woodside United Methodist Church in Silver Spring, Md.
Noelle finished her senior year of undergraduate school while John started a career in sales. They lived for three years in Washington, where Noelle started graduate school and John worked in radio, and in 2002 they moved to Little Rock so he could work for KAAY-AM. He now works for U.S. Bank. Noelle is a professor with University of Hartford and the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.
They have three children -- Cameron, 13, Clara, 11, and Collin, 8.
"We've known each other a long time. We were really great friends, we got along well, but we didn't know who each other was going to become," Noelle says. "That's been an interesting journey."
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High Profile on 04/21/2019