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Tag: Eastland Baptist Church Bryan Ohio

Short Stories: Mom, Look What I Found

Bruce Gerencser 3 Comments
gerencser family 1960's
Gerencser Family, 1960s, Bryan, Ohio. Please note the cap gun sticking out from my suit coat. 🙂

In the early 1960s, my dad packed up his family and moved us from the rural northwest Ohio community of Bryan to the sunny, moderate clime of San Diego, California. I attended kindergarten, first grade, and part of second grade in San Diego. Unable to find the proverbial pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, Dad packed us up again and returned to Bryan. There would be a lot more packing in my life over the next decade. I can’t remember a time when Dad asked me my opinion before moving us to a new home and school. Much like the furniture, I was tossed in a trailer and moved to a new location.

From 1964-1966, I attended Lincoln Elementary School in Bryan and Pulaski Elementary School, just outside of town. During this time, we lived in a farmhouse on County Road F. The house is still standing, but the barn was torn down years ago.

We were a church-going family, attending Bryan Baptist Chapel, a new Southern Baptist church plant on Mulberry Street. I remember very little about the church or its pastor, which is somewhat surprising since we attended church every time the doors were open.

Mom always made sure we wore our best clothes when we went to church. On one particular evening, after my younger brother and I had put on our Sunday best, complete with clip-on ties, we decided to go down to the nearby creek before it was time to leave for church. So off went . . .

The creek was always ripe for exploration. Mom took the “out of sight out of mind” approach to child-rearing. I would spend hours by myself and with my brother walking the banks of the creek and hiking through nearby meadows and woods. I came to love and not fear nature at an early age. This approach to the natural world has served me well over my sixty-six years of life.

My brother and I arrived at the creek, quickly noticing a small brown-furred animal swimming in the water. At the time, I thought it was a beaver. Another time, I came upon a large black snake coiled on the bank, sunning itself. At the time, I was sure it was a cottonmouth. But on this day, my brother and I, pondering our next move for all of .005 seconds, made our way down to the creek bank, hoping to catch the animal in the water. With nary a thought, we jumped into the shallow creek (we both could swim) wearing our clothes and shoes. In short order, we captured the “beaver” and brought it home.

Mom was still getting ready for church. I was excited for my parents to see what we had caught, so I put the animal on the front porch, putting a board over the entryway so it couldn’t escape. I then went to tell Mom about the “beaver.” Of course, all Mom saw were her two sons soaking wet, covered with mud. We had ruined our church clothes and shoes, so much so that we couldn’t go to church that night.

Come to find out, the “beaver” we had caught was actually a young woodchuck (groundhog). Mom ordered its immediate release and sent us inside to take a bath. I don’t remember if we got an ass-whooping, but it wouldn’t surprise me if we had.

This is the same house where one spring day I came upon a female garter snake with her young. I quickly captured the snakes and put them in my red wagon. Certain that my mom would want to see them, I wheeled my wagon to the back porch so she could see my catch. Boy, did I get more than I bargained for! You see, Mom was afraid of snakes. She freaked out when she saw the garter snakes. “Butch, you get rid of those snakes right now,” she told me. So, I did. I dumped out the snakes in the yard, sending Mom into the house fearing for her life. She didn’t go out the back door of the house for a week.

Bruce Gerencser, 66, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 45 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.

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Short Stories: County Road F

Bruce Gerencser 4 Comments
gerencser family 1960s
Gerencser family, Easter Sunday, 1960s. My grandmother was the secretary to the CEO of Ohio Art. She often bought us toys made by Ohio Art. Notice the cap gun tucked in my suit jacket. A hitman in the making. 🙂

In the early 1960s, my parents moved from Bryan, Ohio, to San Diego, California, searching for the pot of gold at the end of the proverbial rainbow. I moved along with them, as did my siblings — as if we had any choice. Of course, we never had any choice as we moved from Bryan to Ney to San Diego to Bryan to Harrod to Farmer to Deshler to Findlay to Tucson. And that’s all before my parents divorced when I was fifteen. I would then move four more times by the time I left for college in 1976. Numerous moves, numerous schools, numerous houses . . .

After searching in vain for the pot of gold, my parents packed up their meager belongings and moved to a farmhouse on County Road F just north of Bryan. We lived there for a year or so. We never lived anywhere for very long. Someone asked me if we moved all the time because my dad was in the military. I replied, “no, he just never paid the bills.”

I have had a lot of pain and trauma in my life — both physical and psychological. But mixed in with these experiences are funny stories. Every place we moved to and every house we lived in has stories to tell. County Road F is no different. Three stories come to mind.

Mom enrolled me for second grade at Pulaski Elementary School. The morning the bus arrived to pick me up for my first day of school, I became sick and couldn’t go to school. This went on for several days before Mom took me to see Dr. Jackson at the Bryan Medical Center (now Parkview Physicians Group). Dr. Jackson quickly diagnosed what was wrong with me, wrote a prescription to take, and sent me on my way. And sure enough, by the next day, I was as good as new, ready to ride the bus to school. Years later, Mom told me that Dr. Jackson had prescribed sugar pills, a sure cure for first day of school blues.

In the spring, I was playing outside with my brother and sister. We spent most of our waking hours outdoors. Mom subscribed to the “out of sight, out of mind” school of child-rearing. As we played in the ditch near the road, I found a nest of garter snakes outside the drain tile. Fascinating, right? I went and got my red Radio Flyer wagon (actually, the wagon belonged to my siblings too, but as they will tell you, as the oldest child, I “owned” everything), gathered up the snakes, and put them in the wagon. I then pulled the wagon to the back door and called for Mom to come and see what I had in the wagon. I learned on that day that Mom was afraid of snakes — I mean really, really, really afraid. She shrieked and quickly retreated to the safety of the house. And what did her ornery little redheaded son do? He dumped the snakes in the yard. Mom “feared” those snakes for months, even though they are harmless.

While living on County Road F, we attended Eastland Baptist Chapel in Bryan — a Southern Baptist church plant. Mom always made sure we dressed up for church — no slumming it for the Gerencser children. One Sunday night, my brother and I, dressed in our Sunday best white pants, went down to the nearby creek to “play” before church. After arriving at the creek, we noticed a “beaver” swimming in the shallow water. This is the same creek where I saw a “water moccasin.” Thanks to books from the Bryan Public Library, I would later learn that the water moccasin was actually a black water snake, and the beaver was a groundhog (woodchuck).

My brother and I, wearing white pants, shirts, ties, and shoes, plunged into the water to catch the juvenile groundhog. I carried the groundhog back to the house, put him on the front porch, and put a board over the steps so he couldn’t run away. And then MOM saw us! I am sure we got an ass whipping, though all I remember is the “beaver.” I caught a beaver, just like those rugged frontier men I read about. Our escapade caused us to miss church, one of the few times the Gerencsers weren’t present and accounted for at whatever church we were attending at the time.

Bruce Gerencser, 66, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 45 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.

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Chuck

Bruce Gerencser 11 Comments

pabst blue ribbon

In April of 1972, my parents divorced. I was fourteen years old. In the fall of that year, my dad married a nineteen-year-old girl with a baby and my mom married her first cousin — a recent parolee from Texas State Penitentiary at Huntsville. In early 1973, Dad auctioned off our household goods, and in the dark of night — hoping to avoid debt collectors — moved us across country from Findlay, Ohio to Tucson, Arizona. Five months later, I moved back to Findlay so I could attend eleventh grade at Findlay High School. In late May 1974, I returned home to Bryan, Ohio to live with my mom. By then, Mom’s second husband had committed suicide and she had a new man. Mom always had a new man. Her new beau was a man by the name of Chuck Jones.

Chuck was a lifelong resident of Bryan, Ohio. I don’t know how he and Mom met, but by the time I moved back to Bryan, he was Mom’s boyfriend. She would spend days on end at Chuck’s father’s rundown shack on the north side of town, leaving her children to fend for themselves. Chuck’s father was one of the town drunks, and as you shall learn in this story, so was his son. In November of 1974, Mom had another nervous breakdown. She spent the next six months or so at the Toledo State Mental Hospital. While there she would receive electroshock therapy (now known as electroconvulsive therapy — ECT).

After finding out his children had been living without parental supervision — as if we had any such supervision since their divorce — Dad came from Arizona, picked us up, and returned us to his home in Sierra Vista.  I would live there until fall of 1975. After breaking up with my girlfriend — my first serious, I want to marry you, relationship — I left my car for Dad to sell (which he quickly did and pocketed the money), packed up my meager belongings, and rode a Greyhound bus back to Bryan. By then, Mom had married Chuck, and they had bought a new mobile home, putting it in a trailer park on US 6, between Bryan and Edgerton (where Manufactured Housing Enterprises’ manufacturing facility sits today.)

Chuck had a split personality, as is common among alcoholics. When somewhat sober, he was a decent enough man. He was a union journeyman meat cutter for Kroger in Fort Wayne. He and I weren’t close, but when he wasn’t drunk we got along well enough to make Mom happy. I wasn’t home much. I spent my daytime hours working as the dairy manager for Food Giant in Bryan. Evenings and weekends, I was either attending church or running around with my friends. On a few occasions, Chuck and I would go fishing for catfish in the St. Joe, a nearby river.

Chuck drank from the time he got up until he went to bed. He was a Pabst Blue Ribbon man. He was what you would call a functional drunk. There were times, however, when Chuck went from a tolerable drunk to a mean, nasty, violent boozer. Chuck abused my mom (physically and psychologically), and there were times she feared for her life.

One day, Chuck went on a rampage, verbally and physically abusing my mom. I was home at the time, and having had enough of his bullshit, I told him to stop. I thought at the time, that if I needed to — all 160 pounds of me — I would kick his ass and put an end to the abuse of my mother. I was angry — I mean redheaded, can’t-see-straight angry. While I blamed Mom for allowing such a degenerate like Chuck in her life, I wasn’t going to stand by and do nothing while he abused her.

Chuck briefly stumbled out of the living room down the hallway to their bedroom. When he returned he was brandishing a .38 caliber Smith and Wesson revolver. He continued his screaming fit, pointing the gun at Mom and me. By this time, Mom was crying, worried that Chuck was going to kill us. Not me. I was beyond fear. Chuck cocked the hammer on the revolver, hoping to strike fear in my heart. Instead, I said to him, Go ahead!  Stupid, I know, but I was eighteen and filled with righteous indignation. Fortunately, calling Chuck’s bluff was enough to back him up and he soon retreated to the bedroom.

Several days later, at the behest of my mother, Jack Smith, pastor of Eastland Baptist Church in Bryan, and an evangelist stopped by to “help” Chuck with his alcohol problem.  What Chuck needed, said these clueless preachers, was Jesus. If he would just ask Jesus to save him, all would be well. I have no idea if Chuck got “saved,” but the only salvation the rest of us found was to get away from Chuck. My younger sister, age fifteen, got pregnant and married her baby’s father. I left to train for the ministry at Midwestern Baptist College in Pontiac, Michigan. By the time I returned home for the summer (1977), Mom had thrown Chuck out of the house and divorced him.

Chuck lived with his dad for a time and then moved into his late mother’s house in Bryan. On November 19, 2009 Chuck died at the age of seventy. His obituary stated:

Charles E. ‘Chuck” Jones, 70 years, of Bryan, died Thursday, November 19, 2009 at the University of Toledo Medical Center, Toledo, Ohio. Chuck was born February 22, 1939 to Ewell “Pete” and Zelma (Sanders) Jones in Cloverport, Kentucky. He was an Army veteran. Chuck was a meat cutter, working for several area stores, including Kroger Company while living in Indiana and Harger Meats in Bryan, Ohio. Chuck obtained his pilot’s license at the age of 17. He enjoyed building airplanes that he then sold. He was an avid fisherman, but he also enjoyed gardening and playing on the computer. Preceded in death by his parents, half-brother, Donald Heston and sister, Irene Jones, he is survived by his aunt Dorothy Carver of Bryan and numerous cousins. Graveside funeral services will be held at 3:00 p.m. Saturday, November 21, 2009 at Farmer Cemetery with Pastor Gary Keisling officiating. There will be no public visitation.

Absent from this telling of his life was his addiction to alcohol and the great harm it caused to a woman who loved him. I shall never forget Chuck Jones. On the day I read his obituary in the local paper I said to myself, Good riddance, you piece of shit. Think I am being too harsh? Consider this: There are things Chuck did to my mom sexually, that to this day I am too ashamed to mention. Evil stuff. He was a violent, abusive man, and I have no problem saying that the world is better off without him in it. Now that I no longer have to love people because Jesus says I must, I am free to speak my mind on the people who have passed through my life.

About Bruce Gerencser

Bruce Gerencser, 61, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 40 years. He and his wife have six grown children and twelve grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist. For more information about Bruce, please read the About page.

Bruce is a local photography business owner, operating Defiance County Photo out of his home. If you live in Northwest Ohio and would like to hire Bruce, please email him.

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Bruce Gerencser