10
FIVE LONG DAYS WENT BY AND LOIS DIDN’T HEAR A SINGLE WORD from Bill. She would rush home from the department store and hurry up the front steps of Clinton Street to check the mailbox. All she found were a handful of payment notices and, one day, a note from her sister-in-law Dorothy inviting her to dinner. Her thoughts were always the same as she stepped into the vestibule and hung up her coat and hat. She imagined he was off on another binge and nowhere to be found. But by the time she entered the kitchen and put the kettle on for tea, she would be angry at herself for having so little faith in her husband and especially in her God.
After all, she asked herself, why would the Almighty raise him up to such a high spiritual place if only to let him tumble back down again? That is not the work of a loving and merciful God.
Even Ebby Thacher kept calling and asking if she had heard anything from Bill. Ebby had moved from Clinton Street back to the Calvary Mission to work with Dr. Shoemaker once his friend had gone to Akron. He told Lois not to worry, that “God’s army” was praying for their boy.
Still, before the end of the week, Lois had left four messages for Bill at the Mayflower Hotel, where he was staying. Yes, he had told her he would be spending considerable time lining up brokers to solicit proxies from company shareholders, probably working late into the night at their respective firms. However, she thought, just a call or a brief note was in order to let her know he was all right.
The call came Saturday morning. It was brief, but Bill sounded excited and upbeat. His whole demeanor seemed different. All was going well; he had written a letter that she should be receiving shortly. Then he had to run off to a weekend-long meeting with his financial team.1
The letter arrived on Monday. Bill said that in barely a week, his group already had put together more support among the shareholders of National Rubber than either management or another faction had done. He said he was already beginning to feel the rising excitement of prospective victory:
It is by far the greatest opportunity to do a fine piece of work that I have ever had, and I don’t see how anything can be too much to sacrifice temporarily. Think of it, darling—the opportunity to be president of this company and have some real income to pay bills with, a new life, new people, new scenes. No more Loeser’s—a chance to travel, to be somebody; to have you rested at last after your long wait for me to get somewhere. All these things are at stake. Is it not worth the worry, dear heart? I have never tried to do my best before, but I have this time, and I shall not have any regrets if I lose.2
Lois could tell from the bold confidence behind her husband’s words that he had no intention of losing. In fact, he not only intended to lead the takeover of this rubber machinery firm but to use it as a stepping stone to much greater things. As Lois penned in her memoirs, “After years of defeat and failure, Bill finally saw the door to victory and success opening wide for him. He wrote me from Akron that the take-over of the National Rubber Mold Machinery Company would only be his start. He said he might yet build that illustrious career he had envisioned years earlier, controlling vast enterprises and reaping great rewards. He was dreaming great dreams again and without realizing it, I became swept up in those dreams too. I would go to bed thinking all about his exciting work in Akron and wake up smiling and happy, feeling better than I had felt in years. And yet I wondered why I still had those old butterflies back in my stomach.”3
Proxy battles can often turn into mean-spirited, dirty campaigns with adversaries digging up the past and hitting below the belt—“All’s fair in love and war.” And Bill, together with his primary financial backer at Beers & Company in New York, had underestimated their competition.
Those allied with the company’s management group turned out to be no “hicks from the sticks,” as some of Bill’s proxy solicitors liked to describe them. They began spreading stories about Bill’s drinking history and his power drive and probable ambition to be president of the company. They warned shareholders not to place their trust in a drunk who had been fired from several large, respected financial institutions and was washed up on Wall Street. Lois learned that the climate in Akron was worsening when she received another letter from her husband about ten days later: “There is an enormous load of internal dissension, hate, fear, envy, etc. And it is a question of adjusting personal relationships and restoring confidence. In this case in particular, confidence is the key to the whole matter. This thing has been a racket for so many years that the townspeople haven’t a spark of confidence in it, and I am staying here so long as I am able to sell them on our good intentions as to them and to National Rubber.”4
Reading between the lines, Lois could tell that the big deal Bill had hoped to pull off, the victory that would rocket him to success, was in trouble and likely not to happen. For Lois herself, it was one more punch in the stomach, one more balloon bursting, one more slide from the mountaintop of hope into the valley of despair.
But her main concern, as always, was Bill himself. If things didn’t work out, how would he face still another terrible disappointment after building his aspirations up so high? His other painful failures had always led to another bottom with the bottle. She prayed that this time it would be different.
As hard as he tried, Bill was not able to allay the assault on his reputation. Soon the momentum shifted and things began heading south. Shareholders started changing their allegiances, Bill’s proxy solicitors packed it in, Beers & Company pulled out, and Bill found himself pacing the lobby of the Mayflower Hotel one rainy Saturday afternoon on the eleventh of May, 1935, alone, defeated, angry, and depressed. He had a ten-dollar bill left in his pocket, and the entrance to the Mayflower bar with its sleek art deco facade was less than one hundred feet from where he stood.
There was a festive air in the lobby of Akron’s finest hotel that particular Saturday afternoon as a crowd gathered for the annual May Ball given by the St. Thomas Hospital Guild. People were also arriving to dine at the Mayflower and then see a movie at the Rialto down the block where Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire were starring in Roberta or at the Clover Theater around the corner where James Cagney was featured in G-Men. But Bill Wilson was totally oblivious to the festive air and the crowds around him. His eyes were fixated on the door to the barroom. He wanted to ease the pain, remove the fear and anger.
He watched a young couple enter the cozy saloon and heard the familiar sounds of tinkling glasses and laughter echoing back at him. That maniac in his head that had been dozing for six months was suddenly awake and whispering in his ear: What harm would one little drink do? You know how to handle it now. Why not? Who would know? Besides, you’re miles from home and you could use a pick-me-up. Lois would never be the wiser.
It all made sense to a man who admitted to his wife he was still a drunk who hadn’t had a drink yet. Then he noticed his hands were trembling slightly. He felt weak in the knees and beads of cold sweat began running down his arms. In his mind’s eye he was back at Towns Hospital pleading for his life. He saw the faces of all the losers and victims at the Calvary Mission, the Bowery derelicts he had preached to, the itinerants he had dragged home to Clinton Street. Suddenly a thought struck him. They were the ones who had kept him sober all those months. He must find one to talk to now. Right now.
He glanced around and spotted, near a bank of phone booths, a glass-encased hotel directory that listed all the major churches and their ministers in the Akron area. Yes, preachers minister to drunks, he thought. Surely if he called, one of them should be able to help him.
One of them did—a Reverend Walter F. Tunks of the First Episcopal Church, who just happened to be familiar with the Oxford Group movement when Bill mentioned it and knew some of its members in town. After phoning several with no response, Bill found himself speaking with Mrs. Henrietta Seiberling, the daughter-in-law of Frank Seiberling, who had built the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company in Akron. When he explained he was a drunk from New York who needed to talk to another drunk in order to stay sober, Henrietta was taken aback at first. But her attendance at local Oxford Group meetings had brought her in contact with a number of inebriates, one in particular whose wife had become her good friend—one Dr. Robert Holbrook Smith. He, like Bill, had given up everything for another drink and was now surviving, with his wife, Annie, and their two children, on bare necessities and a history of broken promises.
As it turned out, these two drunks had several other things in common. They were both natives of Vermont, Dr. Bob Smith having been born in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, on August 8, 1879, only seventy-five miles from Bill Wilson’s East Dorset home. They had both attended meetings of the Oxford Group movement. And they had both hit their alcoholic bottoms in late 1934, although Dr. Bob was still struggling to find his way out.
Henrietta Seiberling, a religious woman who relied heavily on God’s guidance, invited Bill to her home that day. It was a modest but warmly decorated house at the entrance to the Seiberling estate and had once been used by a gatekeeper and his family. That is why it was often called the “gatehouse.” Her invitation to an odd-sounding stranger was quite remarkable in itself since she had three teenage children in the house.
Upon meeting Bill and after a brief discussion, she called her friend Annie Smith and insisted she bring her husband over to meet this charming man who described himself as “a rum hound from New York.”5 Like Lois Wilson, Annie Smith, also a very religious woman, was willing to do almost anything to help her husband. She told Henrietta that Bob had passed out on the couch but that they would come the next day around five o’clock.
That was Mother’s Day, May 12, 1935. Lois remembered going to church in Brooklyn Heights that day as she did almost every Sunday, only this time she had to listen to the minister extol the wonderful work mothers do, raising their children, caring for their husbands, and holding their families together. She left feeling blue. Even after all these years, she still had pangs of guilt for not being able to have a family of her own.
Recalling that day later, Lois thought she might have phoned Bill again that afternoon, leaving him another message. It had been several days since his last call and his most recent letter had been rather brief and not very optimistic. She was worried. She felt alone and helpless. If only she were there with him, to comfort him, to help see him through this depressing affair. For a while she thought about visiting her sister Barbara or perhaps Katherine, whom she hadn’t seen in weeks. Instead she simply sat in the living room sewing and waiting for Bill to return her call. Lois had no idea or intuition that as she sat there in the quiet waning light at Clinton Street, her husband was about to embark on a momentous, world-changing journey that would begin that very afternoon hundreds of miles away in the gatehouse of Henrietta Seiberling in Akron, Ohio.6
Bob Smith woke that Sunday morning with a pounding headache, tremors, and an upset stomach. He drove with his wife to the Seiberling estate that evening mainly to please her. After all, it was Mother’s Day, and he had already spoiled most of it for her by sleeping late and missing church. But Annie was used to that by now. She was with him on the pretext of owing Henrietta a visit, but in truth it was to make sure her husband got there. Bob also felt somewhat shamefully indebted to Mrs. Seiberling for her quiet generosity to his family and her personal kindness and concern toward him. However, on the drive over, he told his wife he wasn’t feeling very well and could only give this “mug from New York” fifteen minutes of his time. As it turned out, he and Bill talked for almost seven hours.
Dr. Smith was fifty-five, more than fifteen years older than the man he was about to meet. A surgeon by training, he almost drank his way out of medical school as a young man. Thanks to his father, who was a stern probate judge, and to a college professor he greatly respected, young Bob stopped imbibing altogether until after he graduated, completed his internship at City Hospital in Akron, Ohio, and set up his medical practice in the Second National Bank Building there in 1912. He remained in the very same office until he retired in 1948.
A tall, broad-shouldered, somewhat reserved man, Bob Smith married a lady he had met seventeen years earlier, Anne Robinson Ripley of Oak Park, Illinois, and brought her to Akron in January of 1915. She was a small, quiet woman whose charm, cheerfulness, and calm ways would stay with her all her life.
Reared in a family of railroad people, Anne found there was never enough money for the finer things in life. But she abhorred ostentation and pretense anyway. When she was admitted to Wellesley College, it was on a scholarship, not on the family fame and fortune that ushered many students into this elite institution.
Anne had been spending a holiday break with a college friend in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, when she met Bob Smith, a medical student at the time. They had gone to a local dance. He was quite shy until he had a few drinks, and then she couldn’t get him off the dance floor. He and his drinking crowd made an impression on her. The way they acted reminded her of some heavy drinkers in her own family.
Nevertheless, while they fell in love right from the start, their romance was hardly a whirlwind courtship. It would culminate in marriage only after many years of school, hard work, and Bob’s medical internship. But they corresponded frequently and dated whenever they could during this period, while Anne taught school.
Perhaps another reason for their long courtship was her healthy fear of walking down the aisle with a man she felt drank too excessively too often. She even learned about his almost being tossed out of medical school because of his drinking habit. So she waited until he finally graduated, completed his internship, set up his practice, and gave solid evidence of being sober for quite some time before agreeing to marry him.
They bought a two-story clapboard house at 855 Ardmore Avenue in Akron and proceeded to raise two wonderful children—a biological son, Robert, Jr., and an adopted daughter, Sue. Now hardworking and very professional, Dr. Robert Holbrook Smith had a flourishing practice and soon became a trusted and admired member of the community. Life was good.
In the spring of 1918, the young doctor attended a state medical convention with his wife, who was expecting their first child. He and the others at their table toasted her with a glass of wine. Annie never even thought about her husband’s past drinking problem. That was when he was young and sowing his wild oats, she had told herself. Now he was sober and successful, so she paid little heed to the incident. Besides, she thought, a small glass of wine is not really “drinking.”
That very same year Congress passed the Eighteenth Amendment—Prohibition—and Smitty, as his close friends now called him, thought it was his insurance policy to imbibe with impunity. After all, he told himself, how could anyone buy enough liquor to get into any real trouble now that the whole country had gone dry? He would soon discover how easy it was for an alcoholic to deceive himself.
He started drinking very moderately. Annie hardly noticed at first. In fact, it was almost a year before she learned her local druggist was also her husband’s local bootlegger. But within a relatively short time, the respected physician’s intake was drifting out of control. Only his past experience with booze and two “conflicting phobias” kept things in check for some time. He was afraid of running out of liquor, which he now needed in order to sleep, and was also afraid that if he didn’t stay sober enough to earn a living, he couldn’t buy the alcohol he needed to sleep. For the next seventeen years he led this squirrel-cage type of existence, which gradually eroded his abilities as a doctor, his medical practice, his reputation in the community, his spiritual beliefs and actions, and his financial and emotional responsibilities to his wife and children.
His son, Robert, Jr., was a teenager then. Before passing away on April 22, 2004, the younger Smitty recalled how bad things were by the time Mother’s Day, 1935, rolled around. “My father had almost no practice left to speak of,” he said some sixty years later. “When he wasn’t hiding out somewhere, he would be at home, indisposed. My mother would lie to his patients for him. So did Lily, his assistant at his office.
“It seemed every time he came home, my mother always tried to frisk him. She wanted to see if she could possibly keep him in good enough shape to get him into the office the next morning. But my father always had his ways of fooling her. For example, he wore heavy driving mittens during the winter since car heaters didn’t work very well back then. He would put a half pint of medicinal alcohol into one of the gloves and toss it up onto the second-story sun porch of our house.
“After mother had frisked him, he would go upstairs and get his whiskey from the porch. When he came down again, it was obvious to everyone he had been drinking. My poor mother never did figure that one out. If it wasn’t for President Roosevelt’s mortgage moratorium, we would have lost that house.”
Then, remembering how sick his father felt before leaving for Henrietta Seiberling’s home that historic night, the younger Smitty said with a smile, “He probably had his usual big glass of bicarbonate of soda before he left. I was at least twenty-one before I knew there was any other kind of medicine than bicarbonate of soda. My father had it in practically every room in our house. I found out why as I grew older when I saw how his heavy drinking was affecting him physically.”7
The meeting began on an awkward note. It was obvious that Dr. Bob didn’t want to be there as he stuck out his trembling hand to this much younger stranger. And Bill was now having second thoughts about imposing himself on these most generous people.
Henrietta had prepared dinner but both men politely declined, Bill apologizing for his lack of appetite, and the red-faced physician explaining his stomach was “on the fritz.” So their hostess led them into her library, sat them before a large brick fireplace, placed a pot of coffee and two cups on the table in front of them, and quietly left the room.
It was a few moments before either of them spoke. Finally Dr. Bob leaned forward, squirmed a bit, and then said firmly that he could only spare fifteen minutes. He suggested Bill get right to the point. Why was he there? What did he want, exactly? And what did he possibly think he could do for him? He made it clear his drinking was a personal matter and besides, he had been worked over by the best—several well-meaning ministers, a so-called spiritual healer, and even a prominent psychiatrist a doctor friend had recommended to him some time ago. So what new cure was this interloper from New York offering?
At that juncture, Bill leaned forward. He nervously apologized if he seemed to be intruding into the doctor’s private affairs. That was not his intention. He frankly admitted he wasn’t there to help him, as his new acquaintance most likely assumed. Instead, staring deeply into Dr. Bob’s eyes, he said with the utmost sincerity that he had come because he, Bill Wilson, was the one who needed help. They looked at each other for a long moment. Dr. Bob frowned, then eased back into his chair and began to listen.
Bill told his own story, playing down his spiritual experience, as Dr. Silkworth had always suggested, and describing in every painful detail the horror of his obsession with alcohol and the physical addiction that condemned him to the out-of-control drinking and irrational behavior that had destroyed his life. He even quoted some of what Dr. Silkworth had told him about the progress of the illness and its eventual prognosis—insanity or death. Being a doctor himself inflicted with the same malady, Dr. Bob found it all made sense.
Finally Bill explained that working with drunks in New York was probably the main factor that kept him sober all those months. Faced with the failure of his proxy battle, something he had pinned his hopes on for the future, the urge to drink returned with a vengeance. He felt if he could only find another alcoholic like himself to talk to, perhaps that would help him fight the obsession. That’s why he had called and was here now.
Dr. Bob later recalled realizing that Bill understood alcoholism from actual experience. “In other words, he talked my language,” said Dr. Bob. “He knew all the answers, and certainly not because he had picked them up in his reading.”8
Suddenly, this helpless, almost hopeless inebriate began to see dimly through his fog. Dr. Bob, like Bill, had tried to stay sober through religion by attending Oxford Group meetings. But, also like Bill, he had failed. Now he was being offered a new solution, one his young friend from the East had already tried and so far found successful—turning to God while also working with other alcoholics. Perhaps it could work for him too. Perhaps talking with, being with, working with this newfound compatriot, he could stay sober too.
This recognition, this coming together of two desperate drunks seeking sobriety, was no mere coincidence. As they would both acknowledge, it was an event far beyond their comprehension. It was also the beginning of the worldwide Fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous.
They talked on for hours over two more pots of coffee. Dr. Bob began to open up. He spoke frankly, as unashamedly as Bill. When they finally parted at eleven fifteen that night, they knew something had radically changed in them both. Although they couldn’t explain what it was at that moment, a spark that was to light future fires had been struck.
Much to Lois’s dismay, Bill decided to extend his stay in Akron for two reasons. First, his pivotal meeting with Dr. Bob, another failed Oxford Group drunkard, had revived the dream he had back in New York of creating a movement separate and apart from the “Groupers” as he now called them—a movement that would be focused solely on saving alcoholics. Second, with renewed confidence in his ability to stay sober in difficult times and situations, he had phoned Howard Tompkins at Beers & Company and talked him into an additional modest advance so he could try a new angle to win control of National Rubber.
Since he and Dr. Bob found themselves meeting almost daily, Annie Smith invited her new ally to be their guest at their Ardmore Avenue home. Bill gratefully accepted.
Back in Brooklyn Heights, Lois knew nothing of what had taken place at the Mayflower Hotel or at Henrietta Seiberling’s gatehouse. All she knew from her husband’s last letter was that he was in trouble, and she wasn’t there to help him. On the one hand, she was angry he hadn’t called, and yet on the other, she was fearful of his present condition. She wanted to catch the next bus to Akron, yet she wanted to believe that her God was taking care of him. She found herself tired and short-tempered from worry and lack of sleep, both at work and with her family.
Her father, who was now eighty, was retired and living in New York City with his new wife. He dropped by for a visit one evening as he did on occasion. This time it was to pick up some belongings he had stored in the attic. Lois had already told him about her husband’s exciting exploits in Akron and their high hopes for the future. Dr. Burnham simply commented that he was pleased his son-in-law finally had a paying job somewhere, even if it was out West.
But this particular night he could tell by the familiar sadness in his daughter’s eyes that all wasn’t going very well. The good doctor had promised himself he wouldn’t interfere any longer in her and Bill’s life together. Besides, he wasn’t feeling well himself and hoped to avoid any additional stress in his now rather uncomplicated existence. So he simply let his oldest and dearest daughter know as always that he was nearby if ever she needed him.9
This gave Lois some comfort. But the letter she received from Bill the following day only added to her confusion and concern. After stating that he planned to remain in Akron for a while longer to continue the proxy fight, his letter went on, “I’m writing this from the office of one of my new friends, Dr. Smith. He had my trouble and is getting to be an ardent Grouper. I have been to his house for meals, and the rest of his family is as nice as he is. I have witnessed at a number of meetings and have been taken to a number of people.”10 Bill went on to say that Dr. Bob was a prominent surgeon in town, but was in danger of losing his medical practice. His wife, Anne, was grateful that Bill and her husband had gotten together.
As Bill went on to explain his close call at the Mayflower Hotel and how his meeting with Dr. Bob had kept him sober, saved his life, and lifted his spirits, Lois felt a twinge of jealousy surge through her. It quickly turned into a strong feeling of resentment. Just when her husband needed her most, she thought to herself, some stranger comes along and does for him what her love and sacrifice all these years couldn’t do. This drunken doctor, whoever he is, not only kept her husband from drinking, but lifted his spirits and renewed his resolve to fulfill his dreams, whatever they might be at this point.11
Lois put the letter aside as she rose from the living-room couch and walked to the small table where her Bible rested. She opened it and stared at the scrawled promises Bill had written on the page some time ago—promises she had prayed for years would come true. Now they had, only not in the way she had expected. Perhaps that’s why all of these mixed emotions were now swirling inside her.
What is happening to me? she whispered to herself. Why do I feel this way? This is not the kind of person I used to be, certainly not the kind of person I want to be. Why do I always seem so angry and afraid and now jealous and resentful of a man I have never met, a man I don’t even know? I should be glad he was there, as Ebby was, to help my husband and that Bill was there to help him. But I was also there to support Bill, to go to those Oxford Group meetings with him, to be with him whenever he wanted to talk, to question, to share my strength and hope.
As she touched Bill’s handwriting in her Bible, the most fearful thought of all now struck her. Bill was hundreds of miles away, yet he was sober, happy, and filled with self-confidence. This she could tell from his letter. And he did it without her help. What if he doesn’t need me anymore? she suddenly thought. If that’s so, then what is my life all about? What is the meaning of it all? She closed the Bible and stared at it, afraid of what the answer might be. She began to weep.12
Bill knew his drunkenness over the years had seriously eroded his wife’s faith in him. There were days, weeks, even months when they almost seemed like strangers to each other. At the same time, he was aware that she wanted him back in New York, especially after he informed her the proxy battle was all but lost. He was determined now to restore her faith in him even though he understood it would take time. He believed the deep love they still had for each other—tested by the years—would win out in the end. He felt certain of that, provided he didn’t drink again. That was foremost in his mind.
When Bill received the cash from Tompkins, he immediately hired a shrewd local attorney to investigate the possibility of fraud in the stockholders’ vote involving National Rubber’s management group. But as much as he wanted financial success, he was now even more eager to pursue his talks with Dr. Bob and his dream of building a fellowship of drunks. He thought Dr. Bob was equally enthusiastic about the idea until along came another serious setback, another near disaster. Dr. Bob had been sober about ten days when he casually mentioned he planned to attend the annual American Medical Association convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, four days hence. He had never missed one of these important gatherings, he said, and now it was even more essential to reestablish his reputation in the community. Bill saw the worried look on Annie’s face but found it hard to argue the importance of the trip.
The Akron physician was drunk before he reached Atlantic City. He stayed drunk throughout the convention. Several of his colleagues put him back aboard the train for Akron drunk. Bill felt he had failed his good friend when he received a phone call from the Akron station master to pick up Dr. Bob at the depot at four o’clock the morning of June 9. Back at Ardmore Avenue, Bill put him under a cold shower, fed him black coffee throughout the day, and continued to talk to him late into the evening. Dr. Bob went to bed that night humbled by the experience and promising his dedicated friend he would never let him down again.
When he awoke the next morning with a terrible hangover, Bill gave his friend a bottle of beer to calm his shakes. That was June 10, 1935, and that was Robert Holbrook Smith’s last drink. That is also the day the Fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous celebrates as “Founders Day” because both Dr. Bob and Bill Wilson never had another drink for the rest of their lives.
But now they both realized they must take what they discovered to others in order to strengthen their own sobriety. They found their third candidate strapped to a bed in City Hospital, where Dr. Bob had once been on the staff. The man’s name was Bill Dotson, a disbarred attorney who had blackened the eye of a young nurse who was caring for him. Depressed and remorseful, the lawyer listened intently while these two drunks told their stories. He totally identified with them and became the third sober member of this embryonic cluster of alcoholics who now had a much clearer view of their future together.
Bill had been imploring Lois to come to Akron for a visit. She had taken time off from work when he was drinking, he told her on the phone. Why couldn’t she take some time off to spend with him sober?
“But all I did was nag at him to come home,” she later recalled. “I kept saying we lived in Brooklyn, not Akron, Ohio. He said he wanted to show me he could succeed at something. He felt he had always failed at whatever he had undertaken when he was drinking. I thought he was talking only about the proxy fight. But he wasn’t. I could tell there was something else happening so I became more patient with him each time he called. Besides, I hated myself for being a nag.”13
Finally Annie Smith wrote Lois a warm personal letter. She told her what Bill’s efforts meant to her and her family, how they had changed their lives. She said she would be honored if Lois could see her way clear to come for a visit so she could thank her in person. A short while later, Lois boarded a bus for Akron for a week’s vacation. It was early July and she was still fighting her own mixed emotions.14
Bill met her at the bus depot. He kissed and hugged her warmly. She was pleased to see the light in his eyes and the happiness on his face, but wished she had been responsible for making it happen, instead of someone else. If only those mixed emotions could have let her see the truth—that her husband’s sobriety at that very moment was in reality the culmination of all she had given him in their life together. If only he had said something then and there to let her know. But the assault of alcoholism on her own psyche, the fact that spouses and families grow equally sick from the disease, blinded her then to the role she had played and all she had done just to keep him alive, to keep him sane. One day she would be able to see through the pale and understand.
With the Smiths, however, it was a different story. The trepidation and resentment Lois had carried with her on the bus all but vanished as Annie and Bob greeted her on the front porch of their modest home.15
“I loved Annie and Bob from the moment I saw them,” Lois remembered. “They were so warm, so gracious, so good. Bob was a tall, lanky Vermonter like Bill and, like him, yearned to be of use to others. In other respects they were very different.”16
Lois said that “Bob and Bill were very busy at the time [I arrived]. They had just gotten Bill D. into the program. So Anne and I spent a lot of time together. Anne was the person I related to as the wife of an alcoholic, even though we didn’t talk too much about our problems.”17
Lois later talked about how she was disappointed not to be spending time with Bill, but she enjoyed her time with Annie. She noted that Annie was as good a listener as she was a talker. The only sad thing was, she was a heavy smoker like Bill.18
Bob Smith, Jr., was sixteen at the time of Lois’s visit. “I remember seeing Lois the day she arrived,” he said. “It was a weekend and she was as cute as Christmas, she was. She had this wonderful warm personality that made you feel right at home with her. Maybe that’s why she and my mother hit it right off. But I think I grumbled the whole week she was there because I had to give up my room for her and Bill and sleep in the attic. Bill had been sleeping on a Murphy bed in the den.”19 Annie, who was more than ten years older than Lois, filled her new friend in on all that had happened—Bill’s call to Reverend Tunks, the gathering at Henrietta Seiberling’s home, even her husband’s relapse and how Bill patiently got him sober again. She said it almost seemed like a miracle after so many years of hardship and degradation. Perhaps that’s why she still carried this sense of doom, something she couldn’t quite overcome. And when Annie remarked that she still walked on eggshells when Bob was around and kept all her toes and fingers crossed, Lois smiled and nodded in agreement. She fully understood and began to share her own experiences.
Though affable and outgoing, Lois had always been a private person when it came to her feelings and especially with regard to her husband’s drinking and all the shame and humiliation involved. But here she talked openly and freely about these things to a woman she had only just met, yet a woman she felt she had known forever since they had so much in common. In that one short week, Lois Wilson and Annie Smith developed a strong, close bond that would grow and last for more than a decade, right up to Annie’s passing. It would help each of them through difficult times and produce the kind of self-discovery that would also help others who followed in their footsteps. But for now, their warm and loving friendship was enough.
Annie knew Lois wanted her husband to return to New York as soon as his proxy battle was over, which seemed only a matter of weeks at the most. At the same time, she admitted she was being selfish for wanting him to stay in Akron. She feared what could happen once he left. Lois remembered Annie telling her, “Having Bill here has been a godsend. Bob’s practice has picked up. The bills are getting paid. There’s peace in the house once again. I have a semblance of hope back in my life and I owe all that to your husband . . . and to God answering my prayers.”20
While Lois was happy and a bit proud that her husband had done so much for this wonderful family, Annie’s words actually prompted another twinge of jealousy, followed by that now familiar feeling of resentment. Here was a woman who, like herself, had put up with a terrible alcoholic, but now she was beginning to get some good things back in her life again—the kinds of things Lois herself yearned for. If Bill could help strangers in Akron find them again, why couldn’t he bring them back into our own lives? she thought. Annie would have understood, but Lois kept these feelings to herself, at least for now.21
By the time Lois returned to Brooklyn, she had a very strong sense that her husband’s main priority was working with alcoholics. She had seen him applying very little effort to the proxy battle even though it was currently putting bread on the table and its outcome was important to their future, or so she thought. She still had no idea where his work with drunks would lead even though she knew how important that was for all of them—her and Bill, Dr. Bob and Annie. But Dr. Bob had his practice. He had a growing income now. How did Bill plan to earn a living? What about the dream he came here with—to build a financial empire? He had no answers whenever she asked. He would only say it depended upon the outcome of the proxy fight . . . “and other things.”
Lois rode the bus back to New York still filled with anxiety about the future and carrying all the mixed emotions she had brought with her to Akron.22 Bill and Dr. Bob continued to go almost daily to City Hospital to talk with drunks. Afterward, they worked to formulate a program that would keep their new candidates sober, a program based essentially on the Oxford Group principles in which they both still believed. Soon they added a fourth sober member to their clan, and then a fifth. Bill was beginning to think that few men of forty could find a vocation more fascinating, more challenging, more absorbing of their energies than trying to sober up complicated, denying, angry, self-pitying, hopeless alcoholics. Just where it would all lead to he had no idea. But it was what he felt compelled to do—absolutely.
By the middle of August, the shrewd lawyer he hired had actually convinced a federal judge that National Rubber’s management group had solicited fraudulent proxies in an attempt to gain control of the company. The judge ordered a revote. It was very close. Bill’s group lost by a mere 2 percent.
The battle was over. Bill’s business venture in Akron had failed. All he had to show for his four months there was the work he had done with Dr. Bob and the small group of now-sober alcoholics following in their footsteps. So on August 25, 1935, he caught the train back to New York leaving behind his dreams of building a financial empire—but having his dream of creating a fellowship of sober alcoholics ahead of him.
Lois met her husband at Pennsylvania Station. She was grateful he was still sober but worried about what their life together would be like from this moment on.