The couple met almost 41 years ago while cruising in downtown Kannapolis. Brenda had already graduated from Concord High School, and Charlie was a rising senior at Kannapolis High School at the time.
Brenda, her friend and her friend’s boyfriend were parked in front of the drugstore when Charlie pulled up, waved and went inside. She thought he was nice looking and asked her friend’s boyfriend if he knew him.
“Is he married?” she wanted to know. “No,” her friend’s boyfriend answered. “He said, ‘I’ll have to introduce you to him.’ ”
“Well, don’t do it now,” Brenda told him. “Sometime, it’ll be OK.”
The minute Charlie walked out, Brenda says her friend’s boyfriend started shouting for him to come over, he had someone for him to meet.
Charlie was getting ready to go on vacation to Maryland, she says, but asked for her number and said he would call her as soon as he got back. “I thought no more about it, really,” she says. “When he got back, he called, and we started going out.”
They fell in love and got married in December after Charlie’s high school graduation in 1962. Brenda had been working for a hosiery mill in Concord since her senior year, and Charlie had gone to work at Cannon Mills.
While Brenda and Charlie were enjoying life as newlyweds, the Vietnam War was heating up, and before they could celebrate their second anniversary, Charlie was drafted.
Stationed at Colorado Springs, he served in the military police, helping to break up riots in several major cities. “I was just glad he didn’t have to go to Vietnam,” Brenda says.
When he returned home, Charlie went back to work at Cannon Mills, but had only been there a couple of months when his friend, Bob London, offered him a job with Snack Time Catering. Charlie worked for him a year before buying one of London’s trucks and starting Charlie’s Catering.
Brenda quit her job at the hosiery mill and helped keep his books, and they bought a two-story house on Wildwood Drive for the family they hoped to have.
As Charlie’s business grew, he bought a second truck, which Brenda drove for almost a year, before deciding she wanted to go back to just keeping the books.
He hired another driver, and she took a part-time job at First Union Bank in China Grove, eventually accepting a full-time position in customer service at First Charter Bank in Kannapolis.
After several miscarriages in her 30s, Brenda had a tubular pregnancy and ended up having to have a hysterectomy. They had two interviews with the Cabarrus County Department of Social Services about adopting a child, but decided against it, because of the strict requirements.
“I would come out of that woman’s office and just be wet with perspiration,” Brenda says. “You had to quit work, and I said to her, ‘Well, if you adopt a child, you want to give it the things it needs. If you have to quit work, you can’t.’
“So it just seemed like that was not an avenue.”
She and Charlie reconciled themselves to life without children. They still had each other, and as their siblings began having children, they found fulfillment in their roles as aunt and uncle.
Life was good.
Then in 1986, the first in a series of tragedies would shake their world.
Brenda, who was 43 at the time, had been feeling tired and had a persistent cough. “It was like I had the flu all the time,” she says.
When she talked to her doctor about it, he suggested she have a complete physical. A chest X-ray showed the first signs of Hodgkin’s disease, a malignancy of the lymph nodes, and blood tests confirmed the diagnosis.
She took a year’s leave from her job to take chemotherapy treatment, followed by 30 rounds of radiation. Her father, Ernest Smith, who had retired from his job, took her to get the treatments so Charlie wouldn’t have to miss work.
During that time, Charlie stepped on a nail and went to a local urgent care facility to get a tetanus shot.
“He got up there and the doctor said he wasn’t as concerned about that as he was his blood pressure,” she says. “It was real high.”
The doctor put him on medication to lower his blood pressure. In the meantime, Brenda’s cancer went into remission and she started back to work.
Charlie continued to take his blood pressure medicine, but didn’t follow up with regular doctor’s appointments. “You know men,” Brenda says. “He kept saying he was fine.”
“I thought I was,” Charlie says.
He wasn’t.
On Jan. 5, 1989, Charlie arrived at one of the Charlotte industries he served with his catering truck before his usual time. “They said his truck just turned in there real slow,” Brenda says. “It just kind of rolled, and he was over the steering wheel, and it just kind of stopped.”
Witnesses thought he had had a heart attack. When they tried to get him out of the truck, they realized he was paralyzed on his left side and took him to University Hospital.
Both of his blood pressure readings were over 200, according to Brenda.
“I shouldn’t be here today,” Charlie says.
Brenda had Charlie transferred to NorthEast Medical Center in Concord, where he was in intensive care for two weeks. “The doctor kept telling me he couldn’t live,” she says. “His brain was swelling.”
While Charlie struggled for his life, with Brenda by his side, someone broke into their home and stole their valuables.
It was Brenda’s father who helped her get through this difficult time. He was a man of faith and would share scriptures to give her strength.
Charlie’s doctor gave him some medicine to dehydrate his body, hoping that it would reduce the swelling in his brain. The medication worked, and Charlie was moved into a regular room for another two weeks before being transferred to the Charlotte Rehabilitation Center.
Brenda went back to work during this time, and her parents moved into their house to help out with things there. During the three months Charlie was in rehab, he had to relearn how to walk, talk and do everything he had been doing for years.
He never regained his memory of the five years before the stroke and is still unable to use his left arm. Though his left foot turns out to the side, he can walk as long as he takes “baby steps,” he says.
Shortly after he was released from the rehabilitation center, a group of friends held a fish fry to raise money to help pay their hospital bills. While Brenda and Charlie were there, someone broke into their house a second time.
“We took the money and bought a burglar alarm for our house,” Charlie says.
The police eventually arrested the young man who had broken into their house both times, an acquaintance who was on drugs at the time, but were unable to recover any of their stolen items.
Once he was back home, Charlie gradually recovered to where he could drive, and Brenda’s parents moved into an apartment. Not long afterward, her father got sick suddenly, and the doctor he went to see put him in the hospital.
“They drew fluid off his lungs that day and did a lot of tests,” she says, “and that night, he died in his sleep at the hospital.”
They found out later that he had the beginning of pancreatic cancer.“So God spared him a lot of pain and misery,” Brenda says.
Now alone, her mother, Louise Smith, moved back in with Brenda and Charlie. Brenda continued to work at First Charter, where she was promoted to branch manager, while Charlie was forced to retire on disability.
“I felt like I was the glue that was holding us together,” she says. “And I was responsible for everything.”
It was hard for Charlie to watch his wife carry the load. “I’m the man,” he says, “and I was expected to work.”
But Brenda says it was a part of being married.
“They say in the vows, ‘for better for worse, for richer, for poorer’ and those kind of things,” she says. “I always said to Charlie, ‘As long as you’re healthy, I can’t keep you up, you’ll have to work. But now if you get sick, I’ll work my fingers to the bone.’
“And that’s the way it turned out. I mean, when I had cancer, he worked all he could.”
In 1997, eight years after Charlie’s stroke, Brenda woke up at 4 o’clock one morning and got up to go to the bathroom. When she was getting back in bed, she became dizzy and fell on the floor.
“I kept thinking, ‘I’ll just lay here and be real still, I’ll be OK,’ ” she says. And then I thought, ‘I can’t lay here. I’m having a stroke.’”
Brenda says she crawled into the hallway and called for help. Her mother helped her into the den and called her brother-in-law to take her to the hospital. “And of course, it was a stroke,” she says.
She was at NorthEast Medical Center for a week before they moved her to the rehabilitation center at Stanly Memorial Hospital.
“When I got there, I was just devastated,” she says, “to be left down in Albemarle, which felt like thousands of miles (away) when you have a stroke.”
But the rehabilitation center staff was wonderful, she says, as they worked with her on speech, physical and occupational therapy.
One night, Brenda says she tried to get out of bed and fell. “I just forgot that I had had the stroke,” she says, “and that I couldn’t use my leg and all.”
She says she was up under the bed, holding onto it trying to generate enough strength to pull herself up, when a male nurse came in.
“He said, ‘Mrs. Simpson, did you fall out of bed?’ ” she says. “I said, ‘No, I’m just checking after housekeeping. I’m under here looking for dust bunnies.’ ”
After that, she says they moved her into a room near the nurse’s station where they could keep a closer watch on her.
It was in that room, she says, that she realized the seriousness of their predicament. She had had a stroke, she had a husband who was disabled from a stroke and a mother who was in her 70s.
“So I just prayed,” she says. “I asked God to show me what to do, and I said, ‘Whatever it is, I’ll do it, because I don’t have the answers.’ ”
The next day, Brenda’s youngest sister, Susan Hudgens, came to see her and said she and her husband, Ronny, had been discussing either buying a new house or adding on to their existing house so that Brenda and Charlie and their mother could move in.
“That’s why I say God made all these plans, because he hasn’t left any of us empty-handed,” she says.
Charlie and Brenda sold their house and used the money to help Susan and Ronny build onto their house on Independence Square, adding a large kitchen and dining room area, three bathrooms, two large bedroom suites and a sun porch.
“We’re all here together,” Brenda says. “This is Apartment A, and then we have two bedrooms back this way. That is B and then back where Mother is is C, and we’re in D. Right now, we have a vacancy in B, and if you get mad enough, you can go in B and be by yourself.”
They all have titles, according to Brenda. As the head chef, her mother does all the cooking, and Brenda is over housekeeping.
“Charlie is the gardener and he’s over the greens,” she says. “And Ronny and Susan work to keep us going at Auld Golf (in Cloverleaf Plaza). Ronny also does the trimming, things that Charlie can’t do outside.”
The extra space gives everybody enough privacy to do what they want in the evenings. Susan usually watches TV in her and Ronnie’s bedroom, Brenda says, while Ronny watches TV in the den.
Charlie watches TV in the sunroom, their mother in her room. “And I either sit with Charlie, Mother or go to our bedroom and watch it.”
They also share a beach house at Garden City for when they want to get away.
Last fall, Charlie faced yet another health scare.“We thought he had diverticulitis,” Brenda says. “He would have these spells with his stomach that were so terrible, and toward the last of September, he said one day,‘I just don’t feel good today. I’m going to lay down.’ ”
Brenda was monitoring his blood pressure the whole time, and when he said he thought he was going to be sick on his stomach, she went to get him a Coke. “In the meantime, he gets out of bed and falls,” she says.
Susan and Ronny were gone, so when she couldn’t get him up, Brenda called her other sister and brother-in-law, Pam and Doug Griffin, who live one street over. Doug could get Charlie up, she says, but when he still couldn’t stand on his own, they called 911.
The doctors in the emergency room said they weren’t concerned with his stomach, she says, they were concerned with his heart. Tests showed that Charlie had had a heart attack at least six months before and that the main valve going to the front of his heart had collapsed.
Charlie had bypass surgery on Oct. 5, followed by surgery again on the carotid artery in his neck in December.
Brenda, who also retired on disability, continues to have some paralysis from her stroke. She walks slowly and is only able to use two fingers on her right hand. She calls them her pinchers.
Despite everything that’s happened to them, Charlie says he and Brenda are the happiest they’ve been in a long time. “The pressure is off of us now,” he says.
Susan has power of attorney for them, Brenda says, and they’ve already specified what personal items will go to their nieces and nephews.
Having a sense of humor keeps them going, Brenda says. “When I find myself being doom and gloom,” she says,“I try to find something funny to think about. And we kid a lot.”
Their trials and tribulations have made 59-year-old Brenda and 57-year-old Charlie stronger and more compassionate people.
“We’re more thoughtful,” she says. “I think of how many times I parked in a place and just got out and ran in the store when there was maybe somebody there I could have helped. It’s taking the time.
“You smell the roses, and you appreciate life.”
And God knew what he was doing, she says, when Charlie’s stroke affected his left side and Brenda’s affected her right.
Together, they make one good pair of hands.
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