Rock City Window Cleaner Lewis Ruggerio Is Still Punching the Clock After 66 Years

For 66 years, Lewis Ruggerio has shown up to clean windows. He started in 1960, and he’s still at it today at close to age 86, running Rock City Window Cleaning.

“Since 1960,” Ruggerio said when asked how long he’s been in the trade.

He remembers Main Street as a different world, lined with businesses that have long since disappeared.

“Main Street was full,” he said. “You had lorries, and meat markets, and a national auto… I can’t remember all the stores. It was just full of stores up through the main street.”

Over the decades, Ruggerio watched that stretch of storefronts empty out as the city changed size and shape around him. But the bigger shift, he said, wasn’t the buildings. It was the people behind the doors he used to knock on.

“I used to have customers that I did spring and fall, private houses and stuff, that stuck with me for years, until they either passed away or moved or something,” Ruggerio said. “And, of course, that generation has all changed too.”

The work itself has followed the same pattern. Ruggerio built his business on residential customers who wanted their windows washed and their kitchen floors cleaned twice a year, without fail. That kind of steady, seasonal loyalty has largely faded with the generation that valued it.

“I don’t think the younger generation is like the older generation,” he said. “They wanted their windows cleaned, kitchen floors, and everything. But today it’s a whole new ballgame.”

Still, Ruggerio hasn’t stopped working. He’s held onto a core of commercial accounts, store windows and storefronts he’s serviced for years, even as the businesses behind them have changed hands.

“I got store windows, certain people that keep me that I’ve done for years,” he said. He described picking up new accounts left behind after longtime clients passed away or retired, work that once belonged to someone else on Main Street now falling to him.

Beyond windows, Rock City Window Cleaning has also built a night-shift janitorial side of the business, servicing banks, a former iron works building, a telephone company, and other commercial clients around town.

“We do janitor work at night too,” Ruggerio said. “We do the bank up here… we have other jobs that we do, like the telephone company, janitor jobs like that.”

Asked what keeps him going at 86, with retirement decades in the rearview mirror for most, Ruggerio didn’t hesitate.

“I can’t live on Social Security,” he said. “That’s it.”

He turns 86 in March, and by his own account, he has no plans to put down the squeegee.