Auntie's Awakening

He remembers finally approaching Anne and delivering a wrenching ultimatum: They needed help, or they wouldn't make it.

Six months after the accident, Anne confided to their pastor that she was on the brink of suicide, that her marriage was crumbling, but her sorrow only seemed to worsen with time. Reluctantly, she agreed to see a counselor with Jonas. "I saw myself as the one being broken," she says.

The experience, as both Anne and Jonas describe it, not only saved their marriage but transformed their lives. Grieving, Anne discovered, "takes hard work. You can't just sit and pray it away." With the fervor of the newly converted, the Beilers began counseling other couples informally through their church, and as word spread, Amish couples began appearing on the Beilers' doorstep. Jonas's parents remained Old Order Amish, and his fluency in the German dialect they speak helped pry loose the hurts buried in a culture traditionally insular and stoic.

"They have trouble with their kids, too -- drunk driving, pregnancy, abortion. People problems cross every line and barrier," Jonas says. "They trusted me. They knew I was not trying to talk them out of being Amish."

Jonas enrolled in classes to become accredited as a pastoral counselor, and fantasized with Anne about opening a free counseling center someday to serve the Amish and Mennonite communities in Lancaster.

"She went to work to support my dream and vision," Jonas says. "She didn't feel she had to; she just wanted to help."

Anne had always been the baker and bread maker among the eight children in her family; waitressing at a truck stop during her teen years had taught her a lot about customer service. She went to work at a food stand at a farmers market and learned how to make the old-fashioned fat, doughy pretzels the Pennsylvania Dutch were known for. When a friend tipped Anne off about vacant booth space at a busier farmers market in the area, she jumped at the chance to run her own stand.

According to company lore, a botched delivery left Auntie Anne with the wrong ingredients one week, prompting the Beilers to improvise in their kitchen at home, inadvertently landing on the recipe that would prove to be their gold mine. (It was Jonas, Anne asserts, who added the mystery ingredient that made all the difference. It's still kept secret.)

With no business experience or venture capital, and just a ninth-grade education, Anne had eight stores and her first franchise after a year. Word-of-mouth was her only advertising. The Beilers were able to open the Family Resource and Counseling Center in Gap in 1992, serving mostly Amish and evangelical Christian clients.

In the early days of Auntie Anne's, the Beilers moved along with some of Anne's siblings to rural East Texas to help their pastor build a church there. The televangelist 1980s were heady, scandalous years in charismatic Christian circles, and seven years into the Texas adventure, allegations of corruption and sexual misconduct tore their new church apart. The Beilers returned to Lancaster County.

One day, Anne nervously approached Jonas. "Honey, you heard about the pastor and the women and the money," she remembers stammering. "Well, I was one of those women."

The very first time she had gone to the pastor's office for help, six months after Angela's death, she recounted, "he seduced me. I was a grieving 26-year-old mother who had just lost her child, with no reason to believe I couldn't trust a pastor, and I felt like I had lost my husband, too, because we couldn't connect anymore. That first day as I left his office, he told me, 'Jonas cannot meet your needs, but I know I can.' "