Jennie Forte & Ronnie Sickler: Reunited by the numbers

Jennie Forte doesn’t look for the stars to align when it comes to her love life. Instead, she looks to the numbers.

The Aurora woman recalls the matching shirts she wore with her high school boyfriend, Ronnie Sickler, on Nov. 11, 1978, during the Sadie Hawkins dance at East Aurora High School. She was a senior and Sickler was a junior, and the pair split after her 1979 graduation.

“For whatever reason, I don’t even remember, I broke up with him,” said Forte, who is a records technician for the city of Naperville. “He left town and went into the service and we didn’t keep in touch.”

Both Forte and Sickler got married. Both had children. And 24 years later in 2002, both had become divorced. So Sickler called from his new home in Arizona in hopes of reconnecting.

But it seems 24 years wasn’t the magic number.

“He said he would come to visit, although I was seeing someone at the time. Then he also wrote me this letter and totally poured out his heart,” Forte said. “I was taken back by it because I hadn’t seen him in nearly 25 years. And I thought, ‘Wow, he’s still holding a candle for me.’”

Distracted with her then-boyfriend, she never wrote back and the visit never materialized.

Several years later, Sickler moved back to Aurora and ran into a mutual friend from high school, asking the woman to pass on his new phone number to his old sweetheart. The pair chatted by phone a few times but, again, nothing came of it.

Then in 2009 Forte was helping plan her 30-year class reunion, and friends encouraged her to join Facebook. Soon, her old flame became her online “friend” and instant message chats ensued.

Finally on Dec. 30 of that year — 30 years after the pair last sat face-to-face — they met for drinks and sparks began to fly.

“We’ve been together ever since,” Forte said.

Sickler proposed to Forte this past Christmas Eve, and the couple quickly chose a memorable date for their wedding: 11/11/11.

“We later realized that we still had the Sadie Hawkins picture, still in that old cardboard frame they give you marked with the date Nov. 11, 1978,” said Forte. “Quickly we thought, ‘Oh my gosh, the last time we had a professional picture together was 11/11, and now the next professional picture we will have together is for our 11/11 wedding.”

Their fascination with the lucky numbers behind their romance doesn’t end there, though. To celebrate the recent anniversary of their Dec. 30 re-connection (“30 years later!” Forte will remind you) the pair attended a Chicago Blackhawks game and Sickler had special jerseys designed for the occasion.

“I opened his anniversary gift and found two matching jerseys, both with his last name printed on the back,” she said. “But then there was an 11 embroidered on one arm, then the other, and an 11 on the back. To celebrate our 11/11/11.”

Today the couple is busy planning their destination wedding, although they’re not yet sure of a location. Appropriately, however, they are leaning toward the U.S. city where numbers matter most: Las Vegas, of course.