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Tag: First Love

Short Stories: Charlotte and Bruce, a Summer Romance

Bruce Gerencser 7 Comments
carl and pat brandenburg

In the fall of 1970, Dad moved us from Deshler, Ohio — a small rural community in northwest Ohio — to a moderate-sized city of 35,000 residents called Findlay. Findlay is home to Marathon Oil and a large Whirlpool plant. I lived in Findlay in eighth grade, ninth grade, and half of the tenth grade (moved to Arizona), and then returned for my eleventh-grade year. All told, I lived in Findlay forty months.

As good Independent Fundamentalist Baptists (IFB), Dad and Mom looked for a church to attend. Our first stop was Calvary Baptist Church. We didn’t stay long. My parents thought Calvary was too uptown; too upper class, for their liking. Our next stop was Trinity Baptist Church, a fast-growing congregation affiliated with the Baptist Bible Fellowship in Springfield, Illinois.

Trinity was definitely our kind of people — poor, working class, with a few rich folks sprinkled in. Wall-to-wall Sunday attendances were common. Trinity had a large bus ministry that brought hundreds of riders to church every week, as well as a large youth group — one hundred or so students from seventh to twelfth grade.

The summer of 1971 brought Uncle Carl and Aunt Pat Brandenburg to Trinity to hold a five-day Super Summer Bible Rally (SSBR). Hailing out of the Troy Baptist Temple, the Brandenburgs held youth-oriented events for IFB churches. The SSBR held at Trinity gathered all the children into the auditorium (500 kids one night) for ninety minutes of entertainment with a Jesus flavor, and a call to salvation at the end of the night.

While I don’t remember much about the program, I do remember Carl and Pat’s daughter, Charlotte. Both of us were fifteen. While I had been interested in girls for a while, I had never had a serious girlfriend. I hung out with my girl friends, but they were not my girlfriends. Charlotte would soon change that for me.

After the first night of the SSBR, Charlotte and I struck up a conversation, and it was not long before our conversation moved from “acquaintance” to “I like you” to by the end of the week good old-fashioned IFB “puppy love.” For the following four days, I would walk a few blocks to the motel where the Brandenburgs were staying, pick up Charlotte, and we would walk to Riverside Park. There we would walk along the river and sit on the banks of the Blanchard River. Mutual infatuation to be sure, but it seemed “real” to both of us.

charlotte brandenburg

Alas, Friday night came and went, and then it was time for Charlotte to return to Troy. We vowed to keep in touch with one another, and so we did with letters and phone calls. While Charlotte and I held hands and put our arms around each other, we didn’t kiss. Doing so was a crime in IFB circles. Kissing leads to premarital sex . . . need I say more?

In September, I talked my youth director into taking a busload of teens to Troy Baptist Temple to view the movie, A Thief in the Night. Of course, Charlotte would be in attendance too. We sat together, holding hands the whole time. “Was this the making of something special?” I wondered at the time.

After the movie, Charlotte and I were lingering near the church bus, lamenting my soon departure. I really, really, really wanted to kiss her. My youth director, Bruce Turner, told me it was time to get on the bus, and then he looked at the both of us as he turned away and said, “get it over with.” And so we did. A quick kiss and a promise to keep the flame burning.

Alas, absence does not make the heart grow founder, proximity does. By Christmas, both of us had moved on to other people.

I would remain a casual dater until I had my first real adult romance at age eighteen with a woman named Anita. (Please see 1975: Anita, My First Love.) We talked marriage, but our relationship did not last. After Anita, I swore off dating for a while, focusing instead on work, friends, and my 1970 Nova SS. It would not be until the fall of 1976 that I was ready to play the field again. Little did I know the field only had one woman, a beautiful, dark-haired girl named Polly. Two years later we married.

Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 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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1975: Anita, My First Love

Bruce Gerencser 5 Comments
bruce-gerencser-1975
Only picture of me I have from 1975, age eighteen.

In the spring of 1972, my parents divorced. I was fourteen at the time. Several months later, both of my parents remarried. Mom married her first cousin — a recent parolee from the Texas prison system. Dad married a nineteen-year-old girl he met at the Millstream Motor Speedway outside of Findlay. She brought with her a toddler girl. A year later, Dad suddenly decided to move to Tucson, Arizona. As was his custom, he didn’t ask his children what they thought about moving. Dad treated us like furniture, things to be moved whenever he felt like it. I hated my father for uprooting us repeatedly over the years. What made this move worse was that I had actually attended the same school for thirty-one months — a record. I loved my church and had lots of friends. I played basketball and baseball and had an active social life. None of that mattered to Dad. I later learned that creditors were chasing him, and THAT was the reason for the sudden move to Arizona. Several months after we moved, Dad’s creditors finally figured out where he was and repossessed both of his cars.

I stayed in Arizona for the remainder of my tenth-grade year. As soon as school was out, I jumped on a Greyhound Bus and returned to Bryan, Ohio to live with my mom. By that time, she was living with a violent drunk named Chuck Jones. After living with Mom for two months, I moved back to Findlay to live with a church family. After a few months living with this family, I was abruptly told I could no longer live with them. At the time, I had no idea what I had done to warrant being booted out of their home. Years later, I concluded that the husband likely thought his wife and I were getting too “close” to each other. Was he right? I don’t know, but I can certainly understand him thinking that way.

I then moved in with an older woman in the church, Gladys Canterbury. I was made a ward of the court so she would receive monthly income for my care, and I would have Medicaid health insurance. I finished my eleventh-grade year in May 1974, and then, unbeknownst to Gladys, I arranged for my mom to pick me up so I could move back home. This caused quite a bit of controversy, including threats of arrest. I was, after all, a minor and a ward of the court. However, I was also seventeen, close to the age of emancipation, so the court decided not to intervene.

When it came time to enroll at Bryan High School for my senior year, I decided I no longer wanted to go to high school. Mom was livid when I told her I was dropping out of school. I was a good student, but I just wanted to do my own thing at this point in my life. Influencing this decision was the fact that one of my friends had also dropped out of school. In the 2000s, I took and passed the GED exam, remedying one of the biggest mistakes of my life.

In November of 1974, Mom was committed to the state psychiatric hospital in Toledo, leaving her children, ages 17, 16, and 14 to fend for themselves. Dad got wind of this and came to Bryan to move us back to Arizona. By this time, Dad had moved to Sierra Vista.

Got all that? Now let me get to the subject of this story: Anita.

Once settled in Sierra Vista, I quickly found union employment as a stocker and cashier at Food Giant. As a devout Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (IFB) Christian, I also found a new church to attend, Sierra Vista Baptist Church — affiliated with the Conservative Baptist Association of America. It was while attending this church that I met a nineteen-year-old girl named Anita Farr.

Anita and I quickly hit it off, and for the next five months, we had a torrid relationship — Baptist-style. No sex, but lots of making out. While I had dated lots of girls before Anita, she was what I would call my “first love.” Whether she truly “loved” me, I still don’t know, but we were inseparable until she left for college in the fall of 1975.

Anita and I had similar personalities: talkative, bullheaded, and ornery. Years later, I concluded that had we gotten married, one of us would have killed the other and ended up in prison. Our similar personalities quickly put us on the radar of the legalists in our church. One deacon, Chuck Cofty, took issue with Anita’s miniskirts, asking me to do something about it. I, of course, didn’t have a problem with Anita’s skirts. Some members also had a problem with Anita waitressing at a local pizza place that served beer — a cardinal sin in IFB churches. While Anita could have got a job elsewhere, I suspect she loved the fact that her employment irritated the hell out of the church’s legalists.

Our first date was at the Reid Park Zoo in Tucson. We also took several trips to Mexico, spending the day walking the streets of the border towns. As I look back on our time together, we spent a lot of time driving — anywhere that was away from Sierra Vista. We would drive for hours with no planned destination, talking about God, family, and one another. Sometimes, we would take drives up into the mountains and park to watch the stars — well, that, and make-out. Both of us also loved to hike. Our hikes took us all over southeast Arizona, including to the hummingbird sanctuary in Ramsey Canyon.

Anita, on occasion, would come to my house. My siblings are fond of reminding me that I gave them money to go to 7-11 while Anita was there. I remember my dad “meeting” Anita for the first time. We were lying on the floor making out when Dad walked in on us. “Hi, this is my girlfriend, Anita.” I also spent a fair bit of time at Anita’s house. One night, we were sitting at the dinner table, and Anita said something smart to her father. Her dad stood up and smacked her, knocking her off her chair. I was shocked by her father’s behavior. I was fourteen the last time my dad laid a hand on me.

In the fall of 1975, Anita moved to Phoenix, Arizona to begin her sophomore year at  Southwestern Conservative Baptist Bible College — now known as Arizona Christian University. We intended to continue our relationship. I would drive up to Phoenix on weekends to visit Anita, staying in the college’s dormitory. However, I began to notice a different Anita. I saw that she was quite the flirt, and this, of course, made me jealous. This came to a head in late September. Filled with jealousy and pettiness, I broke off our relationship. I jumped in my 1967 Chevy wagon and returned to Sierra Vista at breakneck speeds, picking up a speeding ticket several miles from home. A week later, I packed up my meager belongings, hopped a bus, and returned to Bryan, Ohio.

Our break-up emotionally wounded me, affecting my dating proclivities and relationships with women for quite a while. While I dated several women post-Anita, I made it clear that I was not interested in a serious relationship. I would carry this feeling with me to college, thinking that I would spend my years at Midwestern Baptist College being a serial dater. However, I met a beautiful dark-haired girl named Polly, and forty-two years later, I am still madly in love with her.

Anita and I corresponded several times after I returned to Ohio. I lost touch with her, and I have often wondered how life turned out for the first love of my life.

Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 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.

Connect with me on social media:

Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.

You can email Bruce via the Contact Form.