July 14 1997

ARTICLE TOOLS

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Part two of three parts; (click here toread part 1)

He decided that he needed all available information pertaining to this new adventure in faith. So he left Bright's California Confections under the oversight of a manager, and in the fall of 1946 he went east to attend Princeton seminary. He returned less than a year later: "It wasn't a happy situation. You can't run a successful business that far away." He moved back to southern California and enrolled as a member of the first class of a fledgling seminary named Fuller.

It was also in 1947 that he joined Mears's discipleship group known as "the Fellowship of the Burning Heart." Through this connection he and several friends, under the guidance of Mears, pledged "absolute consecration to Christ." This marked the beginning of the end of Bright the entrepreneur of epicurean delights and the birth of a new Bill Bright—the entrepreneur of the gospel.

A tortured affair
Vonette Zachary also grew up in Coweta. Despite their age difference (heis five years older), Bill and Vonette remember keeping tabs on one another.Her first memory of young Bill was when her family attended one of the Brights' famous ice cream socials. The 11-year-old Bill stood in his bare feet and overalls to open the gate for guests. "You could pick him out of the crowd," she says, "standing with one hand in his pocket, just very confident." "There was no heart throb," she says, "but I can tell you where he stood waiting for the school bus."

The relationship lay dormant until the summer of 1945 when Bright, now livingin California, took his sister to see Diana Lynn perform. "She reminds me of the Zachary girl. What's happened to her?" he inquired. His sister informed him Vonette had just finished her first ...