Priscilla Richardson

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Can you find true love without leaving Botetourt County? Martha (Roseberry) Ruble, 86, did.

Ruble had what many might have called a disadvantaged childhood. She never knew her father, James Roseberry, because he died during the influenza epidemic just before she was born in 1920.

"We were poor; we thought everybody else was, too," Ruble said.

His death left Ruble's mother, Jessie, with five children to raise. So she worked as a practical nurse to support the family, and Ruble ended up living with an aunt and uncle in Buchanan, Sandy and Emma Booze, from about age 11.

Ruble worked after school at DeLong's dress shop in Buchanan. After her 1938 graduation, she ended up working in Kresge's Five and Dime in Roanoke for five years. While she was in her senior year, she went to a party at Margaret (Harlow) Camper's house, where she met Arnold Ruble, four years her senior. "He went to the party thinking he was going to see someone else; instead of that he met me. That was the end of the other girl.

"He didn't graduate from high school. When he was a sophomore, he came in and threw his books down and said, 'I'm not going to school anymore. I'm not learning anything. I'm not going back.' He said this to the people he was working for, doing milking morning and nights. You could get by with that [quitting school] back then; you can't now.

"He came down to my aunt and uncle's real often; we liked each other. After I met him, there was nobody else. I never dated anyone until I dated him. He was my one and only."

They dated for about five years. "People don't do that now, but they don't last like this one, either," Ruble said. They married Nov. 7, 1942, and he left to go into the Army one week later. "We didn't know how long he'd be gone, so we just decided to make it then."

He was stationed first in Virginia, then Kansas, Louisiana and California. She was able to join him part of the time, living in boarding houses in Kansas and Louisiana. Then in 1944 he went to Europe to work in a headquarters company, but she stayed in Botetourt County.

"He sort of had it made. He wasn't on the front line, but he could hear all the noise and everything. One night they kept hearing a lot of noise on the roof; they thought it was bullets. But the next morning they got up and looked and saw it was apples hitting the roof."

Arnold Ruble had the good fortune to go to Europe and back on the great ocean liner Queen Mary. However, on the way back, "the war brides had all the beds and they [the soldiers] had to sleep on the decks," Martha Ruble said. He had an opportunity to study cabinetmaking in Europe after discharge, but "he came back to me. He said he wanted to come home," she said.

He did come home in January 1946, to the Wheatland Road home of his parents, Frank and Beulah Ruble, where the couple lived for about three years. He then built a house starting about 1948, and they moved into it in 1949. Martha Ruble helped him "a little bit, but you couldn't do to suit him. He wanted it just right. He never had training in homebuilding; he just knew how to do everything."

The younger Rubles lived near the older Rubles, so Arnold Ruble continued to help on their farm as he started his contracting business. The never had children, so she kept the books. They worked as a team.

But the team ended last year. "It's a different life, being a widow, when you've had somebody around for 63 and half years except for his time in the service. He was so easy to live with. I know he never looked at anybody else and neither did I. He told me, 'I love you, always have and always will.' His last words to me were 'I love you.' He was my one and only."