Love Story: Their wedding was a moving ceremony

Ann Costiglio of Bellmore recalls why she and future husband Jack had to rearrange their wedding plans.

In 1961 my friend Tina introduced me to some boys who delivered the Long Island Press newspaper in our Queens neighborhood. One boy, Jack Costiglio, caught my eye. He lived in Ozone Park near my house in Richmond Hill.

Jack was 16 and I was 15. He went to the New York High School of Printing in Manhattan. I was a student at Bishop McDonald High School in Brooklyn. We began an on-again, off-again teen relationship. We’d hang out with our friends, usually at H&B’s ice cream parlor on Liberty Avenue.

In June 1962, Jack graduated high school and began working as a printer at Queens Litho. That fall, he asked me to go steady and we became a couple. I graduated in 1963 and got a job with the NY Telephone Co. in Brooklyn.

We got engaged in the spring of 1965 and set a wedding date — but Uncle Sam had other plans. Jack was drafted into the Army. He decided to enlist in the Air Force instead, was inducted in October and assigned to Shepard Air Force Base in Wichita Falls, Texas.

We notified the church and catering hall to move the wedding date from September 1966 to Jan. 22, 1966, at the end of Jack’s basic training. He came home two days before the ceremony.

The Air Force was kind enough to extend his furlough leave to two weeks. The morning after the wedding we woke up to knee-deep snow from an unexpected overnight storm. We then took a bus to Mt. Airy Lodge in the Pocono Mountains in Pennsylvania where we spent our honeymoon.

Jack returned to base where he was working as a printer. I soon joined him. We lived in an apartment off base and I got a part-time job at Sears. This was a big change for me since I hadn’t traveled farther than upstate New York. After becoming ill with a bone infection in his leg, Jack was honorably discharged in June 1968 and we went back to Ozone Park.

In 1973 we moved to Valley Stream, where we raised our three sons. I was very active in PTA during their school years and served as PTA president at the elementary and high schools.

Jack retired in 1983 from the New York City Department of Sanitation in Ozone Park. He then worked as a school bus driver for Veterans Transportation Co. in Valley Stream until 2006, the year we moved to Bellmore. I worked in the payroll departments at BOCES in Westbury and in the Valley Stream High School District before retiring in 2012. We have been blessed with four wonderful grandchildren and enjoy having them stay for sleepovers. We marked our 50th anniversary in January and plan to celebrate with a family party in the near future.

With Virginia Dunleavy