By Lisa Chmelecki,Staff Writer

Jan Brown didn’t notice Bruce Willson when he walked into the church in the middle of her chorus practice.

He was already sitting in a pew, watching her and the other singers, when she looked up and spotted him.

Her first thought: “He needs to wash his hair, then maybe he’d be cute.”

She also wondered if he owned the red sports car that she had spotted in the parking lot earlier.

“That seems so silly, so artificial,” said Brown, nearly 35 years later. “But I was 15. Those are the things I noticed.”

Willson was a freshman at the Los Angeles Baptist College at the time. A friend had told him that the pastor of the local Evangelical Free Church had a good-looking daughter.

But that isn’t why he went there that day. He was required to do community service as part of his course load, and he knew the church was looking for someone to work with its youth group.

Willson knew right away which one she was.

The pastor’s daughter was the one with the long, dark hair, the sweet smile – the one whose voice had lured him to the room where the chorus was practicing.

He was sure of it.

“She sparkled,” he said. “She just bubbled.”

Willson only stayed for a couple of songs. Brown, then 15, didn’t think of him again until a week later when he called to invite her to a folk concert.

Brown’s mother was wary of Willson’s intentions, given the three-year age difference between him and her daughter. But her husband assured her that he was a good guy, a hard-working student who planned to become a pastor himself.

When Willson arrived the night of the concert, Brown was relieved to see that his shoulder-length, dirty blond hair had been washed.

But why, she wondered, was he driving a Toyota station wagon? Where was the MG TD sports car?

“I think my parents must have had gas in their car,” Willson said, trying to remember. “And I didn’t.”

Brown forgot about the car as soon as Willson started talking about his plans for the future, his desire to devote his life to helping people in need.

“I had the same vision,” she said.

Willson waited until the last song to grab Brown’s hand. His palm – “not clammy or rough,” Brown recalled – fit perfectly with hers.

“That’s when I knew,” she said. “I said to myself, This is my other half.'”

The couple got engaged a year later. Since Brown’s parents told her she couldn’t marry until she was out of high school, Brown took summer courses to graduate early.

They married on May 26, 1973, in the same room where she first noticed his greasy hair. And he became mesmerized by her voice.

Willson’s job as a pastor brought the couple to Mechanic Falls in the 1980s. Today, they have four kids, five grandkids and a nonprofit organization called the Hope House that has been helping pregnant and parenting teens for 19 years.