recycling with rik
Back in the day, young Dan Zasso left New York for college in sunny Tucson, Ariz. While traveling around the West in the summer of ‘74, he ran out of money in Spokane. So he got a job and stayed.
One chilly evening in January of 1977, Zasso and a friend went to the Black Angus on Lincoln at the falls (were Anthony’s is now). The Black Angus was a local hot spot. One attraction was its polished stainless steel dance floor.
Linda Strom was there that evening, too. She and a friend had come to dance – just dance.
“We weren’t looking for romance,” Strom says, “but some guy kept asking me to dance. He was holding me too tight during slow dances, bending me over backwards.”
Zasso was watching. He told his friend that if she didn’t turn the guy down next time, he would lose faith in women. Maybe Cupid was out and about a little early that year, because when Mr. Overeager asked Strom again, she told him she didn’t want to dance with just one person. Disgruntled, he left in a huff.
Then, Strom says, someone tapped her shoulder and “There’s Dan, smiling, and he asked me to dance.” The two danced just once, but talked the whole time. They discovered they worked near each other – Zasso at Hollenback Motors, Strom at Farmers & Merchants Bank – and they made a lunch date.
That date led to another, then another. After dating for four years, Linda and Dan Zasso were married on August 8, 1981.
Nearly a decade and a half later, while comparing stories with a co-worker about how they met their spouses, Dan Zasso learned his colleague had bought the Black Angus dance floor after the restaurant moved. He was using pieces of it to repair older model Land Rovers.
Zasso had an inspiration. He asked for and got a chunk of the old floor. Then he took it to Pounder’s Jewelry, where he and his wife had bought their wedding rings. Zasso asked C.J. Pounder if a picture frame could be fabricated from the steel plate. “C.J. said, ‘We can do better than that,’ ” Zasso says. “And he came up with a design for a bracelet featuring a dazzling gold Z.”
Zasso gave Linda the bracelet at dinner at Patsy Clark’s on their 14th wedding anniversary. Engraved inside the bracelet: “Thanks for the first dance.”
“Dan doesn’t usually act romantic, he’s more outgoing and funny,” Linda Zasso says. “So, of course, I cried. I was overcome.”
She was also moved to ask Pounder’s to create a companion bracelet for her husband. Its engraving reads: “You’re welcome. The answer is still Yes.”
Yes, indeed. And one further “love” note: Recently, Dan and daughters Nicole and Erica had a pendant made from the dance floor. In a gold swirl, a stylized mother figure cradles a blue zircon and an aquamarine, the girls’ birthstones. They chose the engraving: “To our mom who holds this family together. We love you.”