Anytime Paula Scholz hears an Elvis song, she thinks of Tom Ruggeri. She worked with him for 18 years, starting as a waitress, shuttling cocktails back and forth, then moving upward at Ruggeri’s restaurant to help with the business and, as she tells it, lovingly battle in a way you’d expect from a family-run joint.

“He and I fought like cats and dogs,” she says with a laugh. It was an inside joke between them, because that’s what an Italian family does. Thomas Edward Ruggeri died on Jan. 6 at age 77. He was born in New Jersey in 1943, and he opened the first Ruggeri’s restaurant on Routh Street in Dallas in 1985.