By Kelly Morgan,Staff Writer

LEWISTON – She was head cheerleader and he had been a hockey player, and they both came from French-Catholic families.

He’d graduated and was in the service, about to ship out to Korea, but he let a mutual friend set them up anyway.

Rita Saucier and Paul Dube met formally for the first time in 1960, when she was still a junior at St. Dominic Regional High School.

They went to a hockey game and then to Luiggi’s for pizza. Afterward, Dube extended his leave and stayed in Lewiston two extra weeks.

“It was automatic on both sides,” said Rita Dube. “I guess I liked his looks and he must have liked my looks, because from the first date we knew that we would get serious.”

Paul Dube said he was attracted to the fact that she was a “beautiful, young, active teenager.”

She would continue to date other guys in high school. “It was my senior year in high school. I wasn’t going to not date,” she said with a laugh. But they corresponded almost daily.

“Unbelievable,” he said, recalling the experience. “And no e-mail back then. It was all letters and envelopes.”

Paul Dube made it home for his future wife’s junior prom, after pulling a few strings. He was supposed to travel back to the United States by boat, but a friend in the service made arrangements for him to fly. The prom was a big deal then, she said. “I think more so than it is now.”

“Oh, the time we would spend building floats and decorating!” he added.

That year, 1961, he was stationed at Fort Devens in Devens, Mass. He drove to Lewiston every weekend.

He was released from the Army a year later in July, and returned to his hometown to open Dube Travel Agency.

They were married Sept. 8, and they haven’t looked back.

“It’s been 43 years,” she said. “I guess it must have been love at first sight.”

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