by Anne Beiler
“Twelve pretzels for Mrs. Smith.”
“Two dozen pretzels for Mr. West.”
Order after order, and I rolled those pretzels as fast as I could. Jonas ran around tending ovens and making dough while the girls served customers, melted butter, counted change, and tried to keep everyone happy. We worked together like a well-oiled piece of machinery, but still we couldn’t keep up with the demand.
I remember the end of one long day in particular, and it happened to be the first day we dropped everything else from the menu and sold only pretzels: we all felt exhausted, our feet ached, and the butter from the pretzels seemed to cake our skin in a greasy film. Cleaning was the last thing we felt like doing, but my store was always sparkling clean, so shortcuts were not tolerated. Finally, as the girls put the finishing touches on the store, I counted the money.
I started crying, and the girls came running.
“What’s wrong, Mom?” they asked.
At first I couldn’t answer, I felt so overwhelmed. I just cried and put my head in my hands. Finally I looked up at them, still crying for joy.
“Girls, we made $2,000 today.”
Two thousand dollars in one day! I never dreamed of that kind of money. That night Jonas and I just laughed and laughed. We were giddy at how well that little market stand did for us, and for the first time we thought back to our friend’s prophecy, wondering, Is this what he was talking about? Where will things go from here?
At some point between 1965, when Jonas and I started dating, and 1967, our friendship developed into a romance. We went on a date nearly every weekend, usually with another couple, many times with Jonas’s brother Sonny and his girlfriend, Edna. Life seemed to pass quickly in those days, and Sonny often initiated the fun that we all had together.
He acted crazy, but in a way that brought out the happiness in all of us. The only thing he liked to do more than laugh was to make other people laugh, which would partially explain the time he and Jonas snuck into a house where some girls from church were having a party upstairs. They brought a friend with them, a possum that Sonny had just caught, and nudged it up the steps. They only had to wait a moment before shrieks and screams erupted, followed by every single girl in the house running outside. The possum ran out the door behind them, disappearing into the field. Jonas and Sonny ran to their car and laughed until their bellies ached.
Even my younger brothers were caught up in the atmosphere of fun that seemed to follow Sonny everywhere he went. In fact, my younger brother Merrill still remembers when he and Dale and Carl would watch in amazement as Sonny, sitting on the kitchen counter with his feet dangling below him, seemed to exert an incredible amount of force on his elbow and actually bend it backwards! Then he would do the same thing to his wrist, and to his hand, and to his fingers, until his entire arm appeared misshapen and his face glowed red with the effort. Awestruck, the three small boys went to bed, wondering how Sonny did it.
Shortly after Sonny and Edna were married in ’67, the four of us and another couple went away to a cabin a few hundred miles away in the mountains. My parents let me go with Jonas because we went with a married couple, and I guess also because they trusted us. Sonny and Edna didn’t stay for the entire weekend and went home one night before Jonas and I and the other couple returned.
The day after Sonny and Edna left, a loud knock sounded at the door. The four of us looked at each other in confusion—we didn’t know anyone who lived in that area.
Jonas answered the door. Someone from town had come up with a phone message for a Jonas Beiler.
“I’m Jonas.”
“I’m real sorry,” the messenger said quietly. “Your brother Sonny is dead. He was killed in a motorcycle accident just this morning.”
During the seven-hour drive back to Lancaster County, we didn’t say a word to one another, only drove on in an unbelieving silence that something so horrible had actually happened. Occasionally Jonas would weep while he drove, then compose himself and continue on in silence. When Sonny died, almost with immediate effect, a silence fell over our relationship that would take me years and years to figure out and to come to terms with.
That year was the saddest time in my life up to that point, the first time I’d had to deal with the loss of such a close friend. At the time, I worked as a waitress at a truck stop, and during my entire shift I just couldn’t wait to go home to lie in front of the family record player, put on Sonny’s favorite album, and cry. I couldn’t escape the realization that Sonny was gone and he wasn’t coming back. These were no longer the tears I cried as a little girl walking into the basement, missing my mother. No, these were the tears of a young woman entering adulthood, and perhaps a little scared of what I was finding.
A growing unease between Jonas and me made everything even worse. Without Sonny we often found conversation hard to come by. Jonas turned inward, not knowing how to deal with the loss, not knowing what to do with his business at the body shop. Many nights I went on those dates with Jonas thinking, Tonight I will break up with him. Lord, what should I do? Should I break up with him? But night after night, week after week, we went out and came home, and still we hadn’t broken up.
As the months following Sonny’s death passed, I think both of us gradually began arriving at the same conclusion: we were meant to be together. I learned to love the new, quieter Jonas and adjusted to his times of inward reflection, but after my older sister, Becky, got engaged to her boyfriend, Aaron, I began to wonder if Jonas would ever pop the question or if we would just go on as we were, dating into eternity.
Then, after a trip to Florida with Becky’s fiancé, Aaron, Jonas arrived back in Lancaster County with two things: a shattered elbow from falling off a sofa, and the resolve to ask me to be his wife. We were in the room beside the kitchen, the same room where years before I had cuddled up next to Beck and Fi after a long day’s work, the same room where we always sang together as a family, the same room where I would often lie lamenting the loss of Sonny. Sitting on the sofa at our farmhouse, Jonas finally asked me the question I had been waiting so long to hear.
“Will you be my wife?”
“Are you serious?” I blurted out in astonishment.
It was January of 1968, and I said yes (after the initial out-burst). Immediately we began talking through our future together, something we never discussed before. I guess it wasn’t proper back then to talk about those kinds of things while you were just dating; but now we were engaged, so I fired off questions at an amazing rate: When should we get married? Where should we live? How many children should we have?
We decided to wait until September to marry so my older sister, Becky, could have her wedding first, and we also agreed to live close to Jonas’s body shop, where he would continue fixing things. Finally, we both agreed that having four little girls would make the ideal family.
With two weddings being planned, that summer went quickly: first Becky’s marriage to Aaron, and then September finally came. About two hundred and fifty chatting, overjoyed family members and friends attended, although everyone could feel the absence of Sonny. I wore the dress I had made: a stiff, metallic white material with silver metallic flowers, small buttons up the front, and knee length. A beautiful dress, and one I felt very proud to have made.
As we walked down the aisle and out the back of the church on that lovely autumn day, I couldn’t believe it: I was Mrs. Jonas Beiler! Outside the church we kissed and cried, kissed and cried some more, kissing because of the joy we felt to finally be married, and crying because Sonny couldn’t be there to experience the day with us.
From the reception held at the local fire hall, we drove back to my parents’ house. In those days tradition dictated that the groom take the bride back to her house where they would go into her bedroom, she would change into her traveling clothes, and then they would leave on their honeymoon, being sent off by the whole family. As we walked into my room, the room I had shared with my sisters, we were suddenly standing a
lone in a bedroom for the first time, and I felt extremely vulnerable. I remember turning bashfully to Jonas.
“I may at least turn around while I change, mayn’t I?” I asked.
I slipped out of my white wedding dress and hung it up on a hanger. My old life had ended, and I hung it up right there in that closet with my wedding dress. Behind me, in the form of a man named Jonas, sat my future. I couldn’t have been happier.
We went downstairs and prepared to leave, but someone told me that Fi, fifteen years old at the time, sat weeping on the back porch. I was the second sister Fi said good-bye to in just a few months, and now she would have to sleep in her room all alone. It felt like too much for her to handle, so I sat with her for a while, just hugging her, not saying anything. Eventually, though, I had to leave; a new life was waiting for me.
I crawled into the car with Jonas, smiling, the family waving from the kitchen door. The engine roared to life and we drifted out the lane, dust rising behind us as we cruised off in Jonas’s two-door hardtop 1960 Pontiac Bonneville, blue metal-flake paint, the nicest car in the neighborhood. Outside the car, the leaves were changing color, getting ready to fall. But inside the car, inside of me, a certain kind of winter melted, and I thought I could feel spring coming, just around the corner.
Within only a week or two of the miraculous pretzel recipe transformation, people came from all around to try our soft pretzels. They are better than the best you’ve ever tasted, we eventually told people. No one disagreed. Little did we know at the time that we started the soft pretzel revolution—up until that point, no one tried to perfect the soft pretzel. They were sold by street vendors or as a part of an extended offering, but hardly ever as the main item of a larger shop.
The popularity of the pretzel changed our lives almost immediately. Suddenly we found ourselves able to keep a couple of thousand dollars in savings, something we’d never done before. Money wasn’t so tight, and we could afford some of life’s little luxuries like eating out for dinner or paying rent for a real house and not just the corner of someone else’s home. And I even started to enjoy the fact that everyone knew about my pretzels, at least in that small farmers’ market—everyone knew I was the pretzel lady.
Being the pretzel lady became more than just a name, though. I found myself feeling more and more passionate about the product. I believed so strongly in the delicious pretzels we sold that I felt everyone must at least try them, and I did everything I could to get a pretzel to each person who passed my store. I started yelling out to people as they passed, asking if they’d ever tried my pretzels. I even gave away dozens of free pretzels every week—I just knew that if I could get people to try one, they would become regular customers.
No matter how quickly things changed over those few short months, one thing remained the same—Jonas and I remained as determined as ever to continue giving to people in need. Keeping that in mind, I constantly encouraged Jonas to continue his counseling services, even though many times he probably would have rather come with us to market where everything seemed exciting and new. To his credit, he persevered, continuing to meet with more and more people every week. But we also knew that giving financially played a huge part in our pretzel success, and at the end of each week I sat in front of that pile of cash and divided it into three piles—one in the amount we needed to pay the bills and buy inventory for the following week; another for the money we needed to pay our taxes; and last but definitely not least, money to give to our church that equaled 10 percent of what we made. I loved watching that pile of money grow taller and taller each week.
After one particularly busy day, I stood around with my sister Becky and our friend Emy. We couldn’t stop talking about how many pretzels I sold and how people came from all over to try them. We knew the old sign reading “Pizza, Strombolis, Ice Cream, and Soft Pretzels” needed a replacement, especially since I no longer sold most of those items. The three of us brainstormed, trying to think up a new name for my pretzel shop.
We went through a number of generic names, such as “The Soft Pretzel Shop,” but nothing stuck.
Finally Emy said, “Why don’t you just call it Auntie Anne’s Soft Pretzels? That’s what everyone calls you anyway.” True, I thought to myself. I had thirty-some nephews and nieces at the time, and when our extended families were together, it seemed that everyone called me Auntie Anne.
Jonas went home and made a cute little sign to hang outside the shop. It was white and cut in a decorative shape, and the letters were three dimensional in baby blue. The name and the colors would stay with us for the seventeen years I owned Auntie Anne’s, but on that late spring day in 1988, we couldn’t have imagined that in those next seventeen years we would build more than 850 locations bearing that name. In fact, if someone would have told us that, I am sure that Emy, Becky, and I would have laughed them out of town. But that just goes to show you that at no point in our lives can we have any idea about what waits around the next bend.
CHAPTER SIX
A Family Business
Coming together is a beginning; keeping together
is progress; working together is success.
—HENRY FORD
In June of 1988 our store at the Downingtown Farmers’ Market had only been open for a mere four months, but we had already hit our stride. I enjoyed my newfound identity as “businesswoman extraordinaire,” my relationship with my girls seemed headed in the right direction (oh, what an illusion that turned out to be!), and we literally couldn’t make the pretzels fast enough. When it came to the bigger picture, everything seemed wonderful as well: Jonas and I were back in our hometown enjoying our families and old friends, we were better off financially than we had been for a long time, and Jonas’s dream of providing people with counseling had become a reality. What more could we ask for?
But you see, there was one problem. One major problem. Most of my happiness depended on all of this stuff going well, especially the relationship I cultivated with my daughters. I looked back on the years in Texas I spent under that dark cloud, and I felt so guilty about the mother I had been (or hadn’t been) to them. Now that things were smooth, I was happy. I felt that I filled the role of mother again. But happiness isn’t joy, not even close, and I didn’t realize that I walked right beside that old familiar abyss of depression.
How could I see the major arguments and disappointments with my daughters that lay just around the corner? How could I have known how big the business would grow, or how many new stresses that would add to my life? How could I have known that by 1995 I would be back at the bottom again, nearly as desperate as I was during the late seventies? The simple answer is I couldn’t have known, and I walked along in innocent happiness, trusting too much in my own ability to hold it all together.
During these days of fragile happiness, Downingtown continued rolling along. My family, and especially my sisters, Fi and Becky, continued to support me as they always had. We took turns going in early to set up the shop, and we worked so hard together that everything felt like a game again, as if we went back in time twenty-five years to the height of our teenage frolicking. In the evenings, after a hard day’s work, sometimes the three of us would sip coffee and sigh, lean back in our restaurant booth, and talk about how busy we were, amazed that we could sell so many pretzels. The next day we would start up again, enjoying each other’s company and ready to work.
One day a young Amish girl from the barbecue chicken stand came down and started chatting with me. In those days my fame had spread far and wide (to that end of Downingtown Farmers’ Market at least), and I guess she knew I owned the stand. Our new shop name, Auntie Anne’s Soft Pretzels, caught on quickly, and soon everyone who knew I owned the stand started calling me Auntie Anne.
“Auntie Anne, there’s a pretzel stand for sale at a farmers’ market in Harrisburg,” she said at some point in our conversation. “My parents go there. It’s a good market. You should sell your pretzels there. It’s called Broad Street Farmer
s’ Market.”
I just laughed.
“Oh, I don’t know. I’m having fun here at Downingtown. Why would I want to open another store?”
“Well, you should just sell your pretzels up there,” she kept insisting.
She came back two or three times, persistent in her belief that I should sell Auntie Anne’s Soft Pretzels in Harrisburg, the capital city of Pennsylvania and about an hour’s drive from where I lived. It amazed me then, and it amazes me now, that a little Amish girl would be so insistent that I go sell my pretzels at that market. Now, if a businessman approached me and reasoned with me, explaining that I made a good product and it would be a good business move and so on and so on, then perhaps I could understand. But this was not a businessperson with financial data, a five-year business plan, and numbers to back everything up. This was a teenage Amish girl, just a kid, and her persistence got a little annoying.
Finally I gave in.
“You know what, I guess I could go look,” I said, perhaps more as a way of making her feel better than as an actual commitment to go and visit the market. Curiosity would eventually get the best of me, though, so after calling the market manager, Jonas and I decided to make a trip up there the following week.
We parked on the street in Harrisburg, not a very nice part of town back then. The market master met us and showed us inside. We were not impressed in the least by that inner-city farmers’ market. The floors were dirty, the stands were old and run down, and the whole place smelled like the inside of a Dumpster. Even worse, not a soul seemed to be coming to the market. Market stand owners wandered the aisles alone, trying to find something to do.
On one side of the market sat the government buildings, office upon office upon office. On the other side of the market rose the projects, public housing, and I felt sorry for the people who had to live in those tall, drab buildings. Line after line after line of poor souls trapped in a place from which it must be so difficult to escape. At least that’s how it made me feel when I drove through the neighborhood.