A Clergyman’s Brush With Celebrity

Story by Tom Flynn

Photo by Bob Gothard

You can’t talk anyone into performing a wedding on a beach or boat. One person you can cross off the list is the Reverend Doctor Gerald R. Fritz, known around the streets of Edgartown as Jerry. The pastor of the Federated Church may look like a ship’s captain but he’s a born and raised Cornhusker, from the plains of Nebraska.

Jerry insists that most weddings take place in the sanctuary. “We are not a wedding chapel, we are a church,” he says. “The service is a service of worship, and for me, it is the most important part of the whole process.”

Jerry has seen changes in wedding trends since first arriving on the Island seven years ago. Back then, most weddings were in the summer.

“In the last three years, I don’t think I’ve had one wedding in July or August.” Nowadays they are in the shoulder months: May, June, September, October, and even a couple in November. The reason, he believes, is the cost.

“It is no small affair to have a wedding on Martha’s Vineyard,” he says.

In 2001, he officiated at no small affair at a home overlooking Katama Bay. He was talked into it as a favor to his predecessor, John Schule. It was a wedding the likes of which he never would have seen in Nebraska.

“It was huge,” says Jerry. “It’s an old Island family. The family name is Guernsey and they live down at the end of Guernsey Lane. They had three tents set up. It looked like Barnum and Bailey had rolled into town.”

Then the Cornhusker started noticing the guests.

“I was making sure everything was set up and I saw this guest and thought, ‘My, that’s Chevy Chase! And that’s Dan Akroyd. Lorne Michaels.’ I saw faces you see in movies. There was Helen Gurley Brown [the former editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan]. I thought, ‘Whoa!’”

Pretty heady stuff if you come from Omaha. But there was more to come. “The father of the groom said to me, ‘Did you get to meet my brother-in-law?’ I turned and held out my hand to greet this man and it’s . . . Paul McCartney!”

Jerry must have appeared a bit stunned because the former Beatle clapped him on the shoulder and said, “I hope I haven’t shaken you, vicar.”

He got through the ceremony but still jokes of meeting McCartney, “I’ve never washed that hand.”