by Anne Beiler
“This book isn’t just about pretzels. From the simple life of an Amish family, living in community, through tragedy, betrayal, violation, and finally, reconciliation, Anne Beiler’s story will grab you and never let you go. It is, after all, a story of forgiveness, hope, and promise. It is about what Love can do.”
Gloria Gaither
Author, Lyricist, Speaker
“In the pages of this book you will experience the highs and lows of the life of Anne ‘Auntie Anne’ Beiler. It will inspire you to face your obstacles—personal, professional, spiritual—and to live the biblical principal ‘. . . with God, all things are possible’ (Matt. 19:26). It is a story of courage and faith.”
Don M. “Bubba” Cathy
Sr. VP for Chick-fil-A
“Anne’s extremely candid sharing of the highs and lows in her personal journey are a powerful real life story that will capture your attention, stir your emotions, and cause you to stop and reexamine your own life. It is a story of family love, support, and encouragement that overcomes grief, guilt, depression, and hopelessness. It is a story of forgiveness, God’s grace, and redemption.
Don Soderquist
Retired Vice Chairman & COO of Wal-Mart Stores
“Anne Beiler traversed barren lands of emotional, relational, and financial disaster, and the journey prepared her for great achievements in each of the areas of her greatest challenges. Anne’s story illustrates the overcoming strength that comes from faith, vision, and a commitment to serve. This amazing and uplifting narrative will touch the heart and motivate each reader to reach beyond failure to achieve full potential. I couldn’t put it down until I read every page!”
Tom Wilson, Ph. D.
Superintendent, Life School, Dallas, Texas
“Anne Beiler is an inspirational and exceptional woman. From unimaginable tragedy to success in business, her story is filled with faith and optimism. Anne is a blessing to everyone who has the good fortune to know her by reading this book.”
Ben Shanley
East Region Vice President, Coca-Cola FoodService
© 2008 by Anne Beiler
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other—except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson. Thomas Nelson is a registered trademark of Thomas Nelson, Inc.
Thomas Nelson, Inc., titles may be purchased in bulk for educational, business, fund-raising, or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected].
Scriture references marked NLT are taken from The Holy Bible, New Living Translation. © 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois, 60189. All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data
Beiler, Anne, 1949–
Twist of faith / Anne Beiler with Shawn Smucker.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-7852-2323-8
1. Beiler, Anne, 1949- 2. Women cooks--United States. 3. Auntie Anne's Incorporated—History. 4. Amish—Social life and customs. 5. Family—Psychological aspects. I. Smucker, Shawn. II. Title.
TX649.B446B463 2008
641.5092—dc22
[B]
2007052322
Printed in the United States of America
08 09 10 11 12 QW 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Jonas, my dear husband,
and my daughters LaWonna and LaVale,
And to the memories of Angie, our sweet angel,
and my dad, whose presence was with me
as I wrote this book.
Contents
1. My Angie
2. Into the Darkness
3. A Homecoming
4. The $6,000 Loan
5. From a Store to a Business
6. A Family Business
7. Graveside Confessions
8. Surviving Prosperity
9. The Red Light
10. No More Secrets
11. A Secret Is Told
12. Enlarging the Future
Acknowledgments
CHAPTER ONE
My Angie
I walked a mile with Pleasure / She chatted all the way
But left me none the wiser / For all she had to say
I walked a mile with Sorrow / And ne’er a word said she
But, oh, the things I learned from her / When Sorrow walked with me!
—ROBERT BROWNING HAMILTON
And just like that, the journey ended. I had covered so much ground during those years, walked so many miles. I went through the darkness, at times unsure if I would make it. I also walked the mountaintops and accomplished more than I ever dreamed possible. Do journeys always seem to end so abruptly? This one did. One moment I was caught up in running a business, and the next moment suddenly we were walking away from it: after seventeen years and building over eight hundred locations, we decided to sell Auntie Anne’s Soft Pretzels.
One moment represented the climax of that journey’s end: my husband, Jonas, and I sat alone on a stage at the annual Auntie Anne’s convention, in front of nearly one thousand franchisees, corporate employees, and family members. I felt as though nearly everyone fit into the last category: family. In many ways those franchisees and employees served as family through the years. We spent holidays with them, attended their weddings and their funerals, and sent congratulations on the arrival of children and grandchildren.
I desperately clung to Jonas’s hand. He began his adult life as a mechanic by trade, something that fit into his true calling: fixing things. Initially this worked itself out in his life when he owned a body shop, beating old cars into shape. Eventually he channeled his efforts into counseling, tuning the engines of broken lives, making them purr again. I think when most people meet him, they see his serious side, his compassion. What many people don’t see is that really he’s just a little boy, downright silly at times. Sitting beside me on the stage, he made me feel strong and capable.
Some of my oldest and dearest friends talked about when they first started with Auntie Anne’s. Their stories about broken-down delivery vans and grand opening day disasters put all of us in hysterics. But they also told stories that made me cry, stories about the changing of fortunes, how Auntie Anne’s altered their lives for good, forever.
Two of our first franchisees in the South told their story of wanting to open a location in spite of our hesitancies. “You’re too far away,” we told them. “We’re not ready to incorporate a store that far away into our infant distribution system.” Back in the early ’90s, we struggled to keep up with the business, growing mostly in Pennsylvania, and we couldn’t imagine expanding so many hundreds of miles away. We eventually resigned ourselves to their pleas, agreeing to meet them half way between their hometown and the interstate with their delivery once a month. These days franchisees receive deliveries on their doorstep, once or even twice a week. But back then we sometimes had to do things the hard way if we wanted to grow.
As other franchisees spoke kind words, my eyes fought the glare of the spotlights to search the crowd. Stories flashed through my mind as I scanned those faces. Hundreds of success stories, rags-to-riches tales that warmed my heart. Some faces brought to mind difficult times, conflict, and disagreement, but that went with the territory. There’s nothing like the combination of money, passion for a product, and competition to stir up disagreement. Then, through the searching beam, I saw Charlie Johnson.
I remember one of my first trips to California to meet Charlie, a new franchisee. He drove me around in his sports car, gave me a tour o
f his stores in San Francisco. He seemed so full of peace and compassion, a family man. I attended church with Charlie over Mother’s Day weekend and got to know him, heard his story. I soon discovered where the connection I felt came from—he’d experienced the tragedy of losing someone close to him, just like I had. When I told him the story about my daughter Angela, tears welled up in his eyes.
“I’m so sorry you lost your daughter,” he said that day, Mother’s Day. He repeated the statement many times after that: “I’m so sorry you lost your Angela.” Charlie somehow understood I never stopped thinking about her. Even before I got up on stage the final day of our convention, he approached me, said how happy he was for me, but the last thing he said echoed in my spirit: “I really think your success is somehow connected with Angie being in heaven. I think she’s pulling some strings for you up there.”
“I think you’re right, Charlie. I think Angie played a huge part in all this. I’ve always thought . . .” But I couldn’t continue. Just the thought of her, of Angie, well, I stood there shaking my head, unable to press words past the rising emotion.
A warm autumn day in September 1975, and I walked barefoot in the grass along the stone drive. My daughter LaWonna ran ahead of me, her thin four-year-old legs spinning toward my sister-in-law’s house. LaWonna’s brown hair danced. Nineteen-month-old Angie tried to keep up, her chubby bare feet and uncertain steps sending up dust. Shirl and her four children lived only a hundred yards or so down the lane, and LaWonna loved playing there with her cousins. As LaWonna dashed up to the door and knocked, Angie stopped halfway between us and looked back at me. Her little blue eyes, impatient, seemed to say, “Are you coming, Mama?” She smiled, then turned and ran.
We spent a lot of time with Shirl and her children, but on that particular morning something weighed heavily on my mind, something I hoped Shirl would understand. We sat at her kitchen table and talked over coffee while children’s voices skipped to us through the open window.
“Shirl, I’ve been having these dreams,” I said. “I keep thinking someone in our family is going to die.” I looked down, afraid she might think me silly for believing in my dreams, or perhaps she might think I doubted God’s ability to protect us. But when I looked up, her face seemed pale and drawn.
She leaned forward and whispered, “I’ve been having the same dreams, Anne.”
Sitting on the stage, looking through the crowd and remembering stories, listening to franchisees talk about the old days when Auntie Anne’s first started: everything felt like a dream. But before I knew it, someone turned off the stage lights, and a rustling began around the edges of the crowd. I thought to myself, “That’s it—it’s all over, my last convention as owner of Auntie Anne’s.”
Not yet.
Through the darkness I could hear one of my favorite songs beginning, “Go Light Your World.” The word LIGHT holds special significance for us at Auntie Anne’s, an acronym signifying our statement of purpose: Lead by example, Invest in employees, Give freely, Honor God, and Treat all business contacts with respect.
My corporate employees lit candles all along the edge of the auditorium. The candlelight spilled along the front row, illuminated the faces of my two daughters, LaWonna and LaVale, and sent a shiver down my spine. I could feel Angie. Somehow I just knew she sat there with me. Then the gentle glow of candlelight began to spread.
The light spread through the kitchen in our small trailer home on that Monday morning, September 8, 1975. My bare feet padded across the cold linoleum floor. I turned on the stove and began making breakfast. My journal entry from the day before reads:
Sunday evening we all went to church. My sisters and I didn’t sing that night, so I was with Angie in the nursery all evening, which was unusual. She played so much with her cousin Quentin . . . Came home after the service and made some eggs and things to eat. Angie was quite a character that night. I finally put her to bed at 12:30. She fussed for a while and finally Jonas went in and told her to lay down, and she settled down and went to sleep about 1:00. Checked the girls before we went to sleep, and all was well.
As eggs sizzled and bacon spattered, I heard a sound behind me—imagine my surprise, after a late night, to see Angie’s cute little face smiling toward me. She wanted to help with breakfast.
Shortly after Angie woke, the house bustled with activity: a group of guys who spoke at our church and spent Sunday night at our house packed their belongings in our small living room, then joined us for breakfast. The morning practically overflowed with life, laughter, happiness, and the growing noise of hungry men eating (knives and forks against plates) while Angie entertained them.
Before they left, we decided to pray. Jonas and I stood together, holding hands, while my daddy blessed the men before they left—Angie wedged her way in between Jonas and me, her tiny hands grasping ours. LaWonna had left a few moments earlier, dashing outside to play with her cousins.
Just as Daddy came to the end of his prayer, he paused, but instead of ending in a typical fashion, he said something strange: “And, Lord, if there is a tragedy today, help us to accept it. Amen.”
Those words embarrassed me—how could Daddy pray about tragedies with the long drive these kind men had before them? Jonas and I kind of chuckled it off as another one of my father’s eccentric moments. But those words would echo in my mind for the rest of my life; I’m sure I’ll never forget them. Why didn’t those words alert me to what was about to happen? Why didn’t I do things differently that morning?
The next few moments passed in a whirlwind of activity and good-byes and men carrying large bags through the door. Jonas helped them pack all of their things into the car and drove out down the lane—he needed to take them back to our church, where their bus waited to whisk them off to the next church meeting a few hours away. I stood in the doorway, the autumn breeze fresh against my skin. I waved good-bye to them, watched the dust kick up behind Jonas’s car. The leaves changed color during those weeks, and the lining trees along the main road just beyond our lane rattled their leaves together. As I turned to go back inside, Angie darted past me for freedom and her Grandma’s house. I watched her move away, her pajamas blowing around her like a cloud as she passed through our yard. For one instant I thought, I should call her back, dress her before she goes to her grandma’s. Instead, I walked into the kitchen—I would call Mom and let her know Angie would be there any moment. That split-second decision changed my life forever.
The glow spread through the entire auditorium as hundreds of people lit their candles. The light shone unnaturally, threw shadows against the walls. The song, the radiance, the emotion overwhelmed my senses. I found myself on the verge of fainting, forced to lean on Jonas for support to prevent myself from collapsing under the weight of too much happiness, too much love, too much sadness, and too much grief.
Then came the most tranquil feeling of all: Angie was there. I mean, I could sense her walking through the auditorium. Not in a sad way or a scary way. I simply felt her there, felt her say two things to me.
First she said, “Look what I did for you, Mama!”
I could picture her giggling, laughing in that mischievous way that only she could. What would she look like now, at the age of thirty? What would her smile look like? Would her eyes remind people of mine or Jonas’s? Would her blond hair have stayed blond?
The second thing she said was, “You did good, Mama. I always knew you could.”
And then I remembered, she wasn’t thirty. I pictured her nineteen-month-old form wandering the auditorium, peering down rows of seats, playing peekaboo with the person seated behind her, all the while her golden curls bouncing like new flowers in a strong spring breeze.
I reached for the phone to call Mom’s house and let her know Angie was on her way wearing her pajamas and that I would bring clothes for her after I got the kitchen cleaned up. I can still see my young hand reaching for that green phone: smooth, creaseless. Jonas and I were so innocent then, overjoyed to move
into that sixty-foot double-wide trailer, our lives so simple. But on that day we arrived at the middle of a decade that became both the best and the worst of our lives. The first half of the 1970s presented us with five years of happy marriage and our first two daughters. The second half became a long walk through the kind of darkness I never even knew existed. It began on that day, September 8.
Screaming. That’s all I remember. Horrendous screaming and then one single deep voice hollering: the voice of Daddy, but not the voice I usually heard when he played with the grandchildren, scaring them and chasing them around the barn. No, the voice that interrupted my hand reaching for the phone scared me because I had never heard that voice before, full of panic and a too-late despair. Then another round of screaming, this time women’s voices.
No, I thought, not Angie.
“Not Angie,” I said, pacing a circle in the kitchen, the phone hanging lifeless against the wall where I dropped it. “Not Angie, God, not Angie.” As soon as I heard those screams, everything punched me in the gut: the dreams, the premonitions, the realization that everything I felt up to that point about a family member dying actually prepared me for this moment, this screaming nightmare of a moment. I pulled on my hair with both hands. “Dear God, no, not Angie.”
I couldn’t resist. I walked to the screen door, the front door still open, still letting in that autumn day’s fresh breeze. My face pressed up against the wire mesh, my eyes not wanting to look. Running around the corner (that last precious corner where I saw Angie disappear) came Daddy. In his arms he cradled a tiny bundle wrapped in a child’s pajamas.
Just as I felt Angie’s presence at the convention the strongest, a rustling movement drew my attention down in front of the stage: a small group of employees and family, each of them part of the core group that helped me start the company, walked toward me with their candles lit. My brother-in-law Aaron was there with my sister Becky, my first employees. My mom walked toward the front, looking frail and making slow progress, but still so strong. Then I saw Fi with her dark brown hair and brown eyes, my youngest sister—she always played so much with our younger brothers when we were little, always wanted to play baseball with them or go ice skating or climb trees. When my two sisters are with me, I always feel like I can do just about anything.