Ron’s Unusual Proposal 

Ron had been working for my dad for about three weeks and one evening we took our usual drive but instead of going to the Sonic to get a Coke, Ron stopped the car on a dark street.  I started getting nervous and wondered what was going on. He was silent for a long time, and then he said, “I don’t know whether I can work as long as Jacob did for Rachel.”

 I felt like he was saying something important, but the way it was worded I wasn’t sure. I really got shaky then, finally I said, “What do you mean?”

 He said, “I mean I don’t know if I can work as long as Jacob did for Rachel.”

 I said, “Okay, I think the job is almost over. Dad only wanted you to help him paint the walls.” He turned towards me with this somber look on his face. He took my hand in his and said, “What I’m saying is I want to know if you would like to marry me?”

 And I said, “When?”

He said, “How about Christmas?”

This was two months away. I said, “Mother will never let me get married until I graduate from high school.”

 “We could ask her?”

 “And daddy. You have to ask daddy.  He may not let us get married at all.” It was too late to ask them that night, so we had to wait until the next day. So Ron came the next day and we were both so keyed up we could hardly talk. But Ron finally ask mom and dad if he could marry me.

Mom said, with a sly grin on her face, “You have to get down on your knees.” I wasn’t sure Ron would do it, but he got down on one knee and said, “Mr and Mrs. Carsten, would you allow me to marry your daughter? We would like to get married around Christmas, if that’s okay?”

 Mother said, “No, she has to finish high school. No wedding until after she graduates.”

At least she had said yes and dad was sitting close by with a sadness on his face I had never seen before. He looked all lost and lonely. I went to him and hugged his neck and said, “Daddy will you walk me down the aisle?”

 My dad was full blood German and had always been taught not to show his feeling because people would think you were weak. So for the first time in my life, I saw a tear roll down my daddy’s cheek. He said, “I’ll walk you down, but I’ll walk you right back too.”

 It would be eight months before we were allowed to marry. Not a long engagement, but long enough for Ron to get cold feet.

Ron Started Acting Friendly

Ron Started Acting Friendly

The story continues when Ron started a revival about 15 miles from our church. Of course, going to the meeting and helping out would be the right thing to do at least I thought so. Ron said if we met him in Tecumseh, we could ride with him.

So daddy and mama took me and a friend of mine named Gwen to meet him.  When we arrived and started to pile in the car, Gwen made sure I sat by Ron. It was a bench seat not the typical bucket seats of today. So in the front seat was Ron, me and Gwen, so I was sitting pretty close to him. Nervous as a cat.

During this time, Ron started acting friendly towards me, you know, talking to me some, maybe, I'm not real sure, but I think he was flirting with me a little, kind of a shocker as he was a rather quiet young man.

A few days later, I got a pleasant surprise when he called me on the phone one day and asked if I would like to go out after church for a hamburger. I tried to act nonchalant and used my best decorous voice and said, “I’ll have to ask mother if it’s okay.”

Covering the phone, I looked at mother and inquired whether I could go out with Ron Fritch to get a hamburger; all the time I was shaking my head up and down, indicating she should say yes. She grinned at me and said, “Yes, I suppose it’ll be alright but you must be home by eleven.”  

When I hung up the phone I started dancing around the room. Out of the six girls at the church, he had chosen me.

The hamburger date was the beginning of our relationship. After the close of the revival, the people asked him to start a church for them and be their pastor. He agreed.

My dad had asked Ron if he would help him paint our house, and he would pay him for it, so everyday Ron came over to help dad. It was exciting seeing him. Mother would cook a nice lunch and we would sit around the wooden table covered in a checked oil cloth and talk about the things of the Lord.

Ron had saved his revival money and bought a ’53 Chevy. After he would finish working for the day, we would go for a ride and get a Coke at the Sonic drive-in and talk.

He told me how he had been a dope addict and a thief and had almost died three times from an overdose of drugs. Several of his running buddies were either in prison or in the cemetery.  “But then one night,” he said, “my mother and dad were getting ready to go to the first night of a revival at their church when something said to me, ‘If you don’t go to church tonight, you’ll never go again.’ I didn’t know it at the time but it was the Holy Spirit talking to me.”

So with those solemn words ringing in his ears, Ron got dressed and fell in behind his parents and got into the car. “It really surprised them,” he said. “Because they had asked me several times to go and I always refused. But what I didn’t know was my sweet little mother had been fasting thirty days for me to be saved.”

When they got to the revival meeting, Ron sat on the back seat as close to the door as he could possibly get. He had come to church out of fear but the Lord had other plans for him. When the preacher gave the altar call, he pointed back at Ron and said, “Son, would you like to come forward tonight and give your heart to the Lord?”

Ron said, “I had no intention of getting religion and giving up my dope buddies and going to church all the time, but when he said those words I got up out of my seat and walked the long aisle to an old fashioned altar and gave my heart to the Lord.”

The next day some of his friends came driving by in their souped up jalopies and said, “Fritch, we got a new shipment in, we’re planning a party, come go with us.” But for the first time since he had been running with them, he said, “No.”

He continued to go to the revival and when he saw people receiving the baptism of the Holy Spirit, he decided he wanted what they had. So he kept going to the altar each night until he received.

Not long after that, he felt the call to preach the gospel. All he had was a high school education but the burning desire to tell others about Jesus was strong in his heart. He preached on the streets, in the parks and wherever he was invited to take the pulpit. He attended a Bible College for a year and then went into full time evangelism. He made it a habit to fast twice a week and spend at least four hours a day in prayer. He loved to read, so he started collecting books and studying hour after hour.

In those days Ron was skinny with reddish brown hair and freckles. He was an excellent preacher and operated in the gifts of the Spirit especially healing and miracles.

We were getting to know each other but I still wasn’t sure how he felt about me. But I was bowled over by his unusual proposal.

The Chronicles of Ronnie

The Chronicles of Ronnie

Ronnie started preaching when he was twenty-years-old. Freckled faced, skinny as a rake, he stood on the corner of Reno and Robinson in Oklahoma City, the skid row district and preached his first sermon. He said, “I mostly yelled at the winos and bums that they were going to hell if they did not repent.”

 I’m sure they pretty much knew that, in fact, they might have felt like they were there already, but Ron in his zeal felt like he needed to remind them. Got no response. Wonder why?

By the time I met him five years later, he had improved significantly. He had come to our church to conduct a revival. Our church was full of girls and a Christian boy in those days was scarce has hen’s teeth. So if you heard of one with a halfway decent appearance, all the girls in a fifty mile radius would come out to the meeting.

There were six of us girls in the church and we had dressed in our best for the occasion. One girl had even bought a new dress for the first night of revival. The rest of us looked at her with jaundiced eyes. How dare she? She was clearly the prettiest one among us and she had to add a new dress to the mix. We were sure the rest of us crows on the fence didn’t have a chance.

I tried to fix up the best I could with a homemade outfit and took my place on the front seat with the other five. I had a tambourine daddy had bought for me so I was playing it. The building was packed out and the evangelist was late, adding anticipation to the already charged atmosphere.

Finally he arrived. We craned our necks to see what he looked like. He had reddish brown hair, slim, wearing a brown suit, white shirt, and a pencil thin tie, all the rage at that time. There was a collective sigh among the girls. I continued to play the tambourine, trying not to act nervous or too obvious. When he got to the front row even with us, he stopped and said to me, “Could I borrow your tambourine?” I nearly fainted before saying, “Sure.” The other girls gave me a jealous look.

He preached a two week revival at our church and for 14 days, all six of us hauled out our most becoming blouses, skirts, and dresses. The girl with the new dress even bought a hat and wore it. Talk about unfair. Word got out and even more girls showed up at the revival. We glared at them as if to say, “Go get your own evangelist.”

Mother knew of the competition and laughed about it, but she dug in my closet and found a purple corduroy suit she had purchased for me at a rummage sale. She altered it a bit and put a lighter purple blouse with it. I have to admit it was pretty and looked good with my long blonde hair and brown eyes. I felt good about myself that night. And to top it off, the pastor asked me to sing a special. Boy was I nervous. But I went ahead and sang in my purple corduroy suit. And Ron told me later, that was the night he fell in love with me.

But I sure couldn’t tell it that night because he kept his head down while I was singing. I figured it was so bad, he could hardly bear it. After church he never said a word to me or the other five girls. We might have been invisible for all the attention that boy paid to us. The revival was over and we each had decided to concede defeat. It happened all the time. Evangelists, single ones that is, came and went on down the road and we would get reports that some girl in another town had snagged them. Why would this be any different?  We went back to our every day dresses and carried on with life. It was fun while it lasted.

But that was not the end of the story.