Twist of Faith

by Anne Beiler

  But this woman was single-minded. She acted with complete determination, sure that she could open a location at Park City and do well. Finally I told her to go ahead and give it a try—if she could talk the management into letting us open in the mall, then she could have the location. I didn’t think anything would come of it—she was a stay-at-home mom and didn’t have any leasing connections or experience putting together rent-package proposals (neither did we, at that point, and we were far too busy to learn). A few weeks later I talked to her again.

  “Well, I met with the mall manager at Park City, and he’s not going to let us come in, but I’m going to meet with him again,” she said. I didn’t have high hopes, to say the least.

  She would take him pretzels and try to meet with him again and again. Finally at one point, after hearing of another failed attempt, I casually suggested that maybe she should just back off. It didn’t appear that she was getting anywhere.

  “Back off? No way. I am going to sell pretzels in Park City,” she said with determination.

  I never would have pushed that hard, and maybe if it was left to me, we never would have gone into shopping malls. One day in August or September, she came up to me at church with different news.

  “Well,” she said, “I’ve got a lease with Park City.”

  “You do?” I exclaimed.

  “Yes, but they want us in before Thanksgiving.”

  Jonas already had his hands full building these other market locations, but if we were going to get into Park City, we had to do it before Thanksgiving. Normally two months would have been more than enough time to open a location, but normally we were opening in markets, not shopping malls. That Park City location became our first encounter with the real world of building regulations and fire regulations and architectural drawings. Inspectors and leases and fire marshals.

  We finally met with the mall manager at the Park City Shopping Mall. He was a good old Southern boy from Arp, Texas, only ten minutes from the small town in Texas where we had lived. His Southern accent drawled out slowly, and he was firm.

  “Ma’am,” he had said, “I tell you what. I don’t see how you can make your rents selling only pretzels. But I will let you in this shopping center—I don’t really know why—and this is the only space I have available for you. You can stay for three months and then we’ll see how it goes.” The location was probably the worst one in the mall, a dark corner unit barely visible at the back of the food court. The mall manager didn’t have very much belief in the product. In fact, he didn’t think we would make it past the holidays.

  Not a smart move for us to make with just a three-month lease in a horrible location, but we went ahead anyway, unable to imagine a situation in which we would not succeed. For one of the first times, I was in awe of what we were doing: the store looked great, very professional, and had a neon sign above the shiny, new equipment. It was the Cadillac of all our locations, and I thought we had arrived.

  On grand opening day they sold pretzels faster than they could make them. Once again the product proved itself. They literally could not keep up, even with me and other family members there to help. And what of the doubting mall manager? Well, he went on to become one of our most beloved franchisees, opening four stores in Atlanta, our first stores in Georgia.

  So there we were, Christmas of 1989. Park City sold an incredible number of pretzels during the holidays, and all of the market stands stayed busy. Our store total reached ten, and even without spending a cent on franchise marketing, more and more people would call each week asking if they could open an Auntie Anne’s. By January 1990 we hired managers for our two stores, Downingtown and Broad Street, but I still tried to be at the stores on the weekends, and with our increasingly busy schedule, Jonas and I realized we simply could not keep up.

  The main area in which we needed help was in the actual building of stores. As we began to look at locations that required a more professional appearance, we realized we could not open stores in the one-week time frame that we could open farmers’ market locations. We built everything in the store, including the shelves, the walls, and the cabinets, all from scratch, and Jonas needed help. We decided to ask my brother-in-law Aaron, Becky’s husband, if he would come on full-time and help Jonas with the build-out side of things.

  Aaron worked for Stoltzfus Structures, a local shed-building company. We asked him if he wanted to be our first full-time “corporate” employee—I was nervous, though, because I didn’t even know for sure if we could actually pay him every week. In spite of the uncertainty, there was an excitement in the air when it came to Auntie Anne’s Soft Pretzels, and Aaron decided to take us up on our offer.

  Meanwhile, Becky continued managing Downingtown for me and tagging along with Aaron during the weeks. The four of us would hang out all the time, trying to figure out how to do things better and talking about our existing licensees and who was doing a good job, who was struggling, who made the best pretzels, all of that kind of stuff. There was a little diner we met regularly, and my brother Merrill would often join us as we talked about the direction the company seemed to be headed.

  We still struggled with the idea of “secretizing” the recipe. Eventually we decided to bag the mix ourselves and eliminate the need for the licensees to know the ingredients. We tried so many different strategies—from brown bags stapled shut to plastic bags fastened with a metal tie, then went through various boxes and containers to ship the mix to the store owners.

  The whole process started around March, and I discovered my sister Becky was taking over more and more of the responsibility when it came to the packaging of the mix. She would work for hours at a stretch, making one bag of mix at a time, taking orders from the store owners who called, and even arranging for some of the younger nephews and nieces to come and help bag mix—I think we paid them 10 cents for each bag they put together. For those four months at the beginning of 1990, Becky worked as hard as the rest of us, never asking for an extra cent above what she got paid for managing Downingtown. Finally one day in April while we were bagging mix in my garage with one of my nephews, I turned to her and laughed.

  “Becky, if you keep coming to work, I’m going to have to start paying you!”

  She just laughed.

  “You don’t have to pay me. I’m just hanging around here with Aaron. I don’t have anywhere else to be.”

  But we finally got to the place where I could pay her, and she became our second full-time employee. Once again my family was there for me, just jumping in as the need arose. I couldn’t have done it without them. Their presence served as a continual reminder to me: even though I wanted to control the process and have everything done my way, I couldn’t do it all on my own. I had to depend on them, and they were all very dependable.

  During 1989 and the first few months of 1990, the business became an all-consuming whirlwind that just picked me up and never put me back down. By the end of 1989, we had already opened ten locations and sold over 200,000 soft pretzels. Jonas and my two girls were caught up in it as well, and we all had our own individual responses. Jonas continued counseling, growing that side of things exponentially, as well as building store after store for me. The girls, on the other hand, weren’t doing well at all: LaWonna was never home, and LaVale became more and more withdrawn. There were still so many skeletons in my closet, too many past hurts and disappointments that I hadn’t dealt with properly. The business served as a suitable Band-Aid for the time being, but at some point that Band-Aid would have to come off.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Graveside Confessions

  When written in Chinese, the word “crisis” is composed of two characters: one represents danger, and the other represents opportunity.

  —JOHN F. KENNEDY

  I’ve traveled around the world visiting my pretzel stores in many places, from Thailand to the Philippines, from the east coast of the United States to the west coast, but no matter how many places I’ve visited, I still find Lan
caster County, Pennsylvania, to be one of the most beautiful. A feeling rises up in me when I drive these old familiar roads lined with high-standing corn, when I see the farms spreading out in a long valley before me, when I smell freshly cut hay lying quietly on a summer’s night.

  It’s good to be home, good to be back with Angie. I felt guilty when we lived in Texas, guilty that we left her lying there in the earth so far from where we moved. I visit her grave three or four times a year, and just recently I took my granddaughter Trinity, LaWonna’s little girl, along for the visit. She rode quietly beside me in the car on the way, just the two of us—I’m not sure how much she understood at the time about Angie, but she is a thoughtful girl and I think she often catches on to more than we give her credit for. In the least she knew that her mother used to have a sister, but that sister is gone now.

  I drove along those winding country roads, flashbacks jumping out at every corner. I could see my brother Jake’s old trailer home where I sat with his wife, Shirl, and told her about my dreams and fears and how we prayed for peace. Just a bit farther along I see our trailer home, where we lived so happily up until that moment I heard the screaming. I wonder if they still have that old green telephone I reached for (I’m sure they don’t); I wonder if the stones would still cut into my feet the way they did that day I ran down the lane, not knowing where to run.

  Then there’s the stone house my parents lived in, the barns still standing, the spot where Angie died looking like just another patch of driveway. I look down at Trinity and squeeze her hand. We keep driving, past more farms and through those old country road intersections, finally turning right and driving up to a small church. We park in the parking lot, and I remember how the cars lined the road on the day of Angie’s funeral, parked halfway in the grassy banks to leave room for others to squeeze by.

  The cemetery is a small one, running maybe a hundred yards along the road and ten to twelve grave plots deep with a little paved walkway down the middle. An immense green hill rises up behind us, the top of it covered in trees, and in front of us a long valley stretches out with hardly a house to be seen. It’s a peaceful place, a perfect place to stop and rest. The day is calm, and a warm summer breeze floats around us.

  Trinity and I walk together about two-thirds of the way down the cemetery, then turn left into the grass. I see my father’s headstone, the dates of his life carved in granite, but when Angie died that stone wasn’t there—he stood beside the rest of us, unable to fathom her passing. Angie’s flat headstone sits directly beside his, and Trinity and I sit down beside it. There’s a large metal locket fastened onto Angie’s gravestone, and when I flip up the top, I see the picture of her we keep there. On the inside of the locket someone etched a message in long scratched letters: “It’s okay, Aunt Fi.”

  For five or ten minutes I sit there, simply wondering what life would be like if Angie still lived with us, not in a bad way or even a sad way, but just thinking of the happy possibilities. Would she be married, have children? The questions come more from a constant curiosity than from any sort of anger or grief.

  I also try to imagine, sometimes with even more difficulty, what I would be like today. What would have become of me during those twenty-five years if I hadn’t lived with the despair that came with Angie’s death? For a while I saw Angie’s death as something that changed me in a way that should not have happened, as a defining event that charted the course my life had taken. Angie’s death was obviously a tragedy, so how could what became of my life be anything but a tragedy as well?

  But I don’t see it that way anymore. Now I see Angie’s death more as an experience that taught me many things, and I can see how her death actually changed me for the good. When I see people going through pain and crisis, my heart breaks for them because I understand the loss they feel; but I also know they will go places they’ve never been, and if they remain open, they will find God in places they’ve never found him before. If I think about death, and Angie’s death in particular, there is nothing positive about the naked fact of the death of a child. Whenever a child dies, it is a terrible loss. But these days I cannot think about the loss of Angie without thinking of the positive ways that God has changed me. It took me nearly thirty years, but in 2003 I spoke at a large gathering and found myself saying, rather unexpectedly, that I truly believed at that point that all things work together for the good of those who love God.

  Trinity sat there on the grass beside me, her long hair blowing in a gentle breeze. She looked so much like her mother did at that age, not much older than her mother was when Angie died. “Thank you, Angie. Thank you for teaching me. Thank you for living with us for nineteen months and twelve days. Thank you for helping me become a better person.”

  Yet that’s not how I always felt when I visited Angie’s grave. During those first years, after Jonas and the girls and I moved north from Texas, returning to Pennsylvania, my visits to Angie’s grave simply reminded me of my failings as a mother and a wife. As I mentioned earlier, I felt guilty for leaving her in Pennsylvania when we moved to Texas. I felt guilty that I couldn’t protect her. I wanted to know the person she would have turned out to be, not in a peaceful, happy way, but in a way that led to despair and hopelessness. I rarely visited her in those days, and that’s not surprising when I think of the way those visits made me feel.

  Still the business continued to grow, and I sank deeper and deeper into the somewhat comforting clutches of busyness. Opening stores, supporting our small network of “licensees,” visiting with potential new-store owners, searching for more locations . . . running Auntie Anne’s became the gauze that fit perfectly over the seeping wound that was my soul.

  I don’t mean to make it all sound so heavy—mixed in with the stress and the activity came lots of fun times. By the end of 1990, we would have fifty Auntie Anne’s locations in nine states. The days were exciting, thrilling, draining, busy, and absolutely crazy. My team consisted almost entirely of family members, and we had all grown up working hard, appreciating the feeling that came after a long day of giving it our best. I have so many positive memories from that summer, like the day Aaron drove off to the shore in a huge brown van dragging an overstuffed trailer. His mission: to open five shore-point locations. Or when LaWonna took over as trainer, teaching all new store owners the ropes. So many things took place that summer, it’s no wonder Jonas and I felt the need to hire someone to oversee it all.

  At some point Jonas and I finally sat down to talk about our organization. There were too many things to do between the two of us, our three new employees (Aaron, Becky, and my younger brother Merrill, who joined us early in the summer of 1990 as a deliveryman), and others who were helping on a part-time basis. We needed someone to step in and organize us, especially some of the financial areas. But we didn’t know where to begin, where to look, or what to do to attract the right person.

  Jonas came up with the idea of listing everything we needed this new person to do. “Fine,” I said. “That makes sense.” So we pulled out a lined sheet of yellow notebook paper and started writing: do accounting and bookkeeping work, manage the warehouse, oversee and develop contracts, provide direction in supporting our stores, introduce new products, help develop processes for everything from mixing a batch of dough to opening a new store . . . the list went on and on. Finally we finished and said a prayer together, trusting that God would bring us the right person.

  Initially there was one friend we considered for the post, but she wasn’t from Lancaster County, something that at the time made us a little nervous. Would a complete stranger to our area understand our culture enough to create a positive working relationship? How would this person ever fit perfectly into a role that required so many different strengths and areas of knowledge? Finally, what would it be like to work with, and give so much responsibility to, someone who wasn’t family?

  Then in July of 1990 everything fell into place. My youngest brother, Carl, approached Jonas and me and said he would
like to meet with us over a cup of coffee. We met with him, and you can imagine our surprise when he said he wanted to work with us at Auntie Anne’s. Hmmm, I thought to myself, I didn’t think of Carl as being the person to oversee things. He started going over the various areas where he thought he could contribute, and his verbal list nearly matched our written one word for word. When I got home, I pulled out that sheet of yellow notebook paper and realized that Carl mentioned every major point. He could do everything we were looking for. Jonas and I called Carl back, and he joined us in August.

  One day around the time that Carl joined us, I answered the phone in our little house and was greeted by a voice belonging to the boyfriend of one of our licensees.

  “Hi, Anne,” he said, and then he introduced himself. “There’s something important I need to talk to you about. I’m not sure if you have the right business model, and you might find yourself in some trouble.”

  Suddenly I got very concerned. I had flashbacks to the problems we’d already experienced with Frank. What was I doing wrong? Why did I keep ending up with these troublemakers? I met him at a restaurant, and we sat in the second booth on the left in the old dining room.

  He started by telling me his background.

  “I used to be involved in a franchise,” he said. “And I know what a franchise looks like. You call yourself a licensor, but I don’t think you’re licensing. The way you are running your business, I’m pretty sure it’s more of a franchising model. You really should look into it.”

  “But we’ve got lawyers who drew up all our agreements,” I said, “and they seem to think we are licensing.”

  “I’m not trying to cause trouble, Anne,” he said. “But I will tell you one thing: you are franchising. You need to talk to a franchising attorney and have them draw up a disclosure document. If you don’t have that, you could get into some trouble, maybe even a fine—I don’t know.”