12
HE NEARLY BOWLED OVER SEVERAL LADY CUSTOMERS THAT afternoon as he rushed excitedly into Loeser’s department store to tell Lois the great news. For Bill, it was the answer to all their problems. Lois would no longer have to work. He could pay off all their creditors. And the Clinton Street gang would have a large and comfortable facility in which to meet, one that would accommodate their growing needs.
Heading straight for the home furnishings department, Bill could still hear the startling words of Charlie Towns, the owner of Towns Hospital, asking him to be his partner.1 It all happened less than two hours ago, and he was still shaking his head in disbelief. He could hardly wait to see the joy and delight on his wife’s face when he told her.
Just yesterday Charlie had called Bill at the house and asked him to drop by, that he had an interesting business proposition to discuss with him. When they met this morning, the flamboyant owner didn’t have to explain the history of his well-known establishment nor its lucrative past, when famous celebrities such as John Barrymore and W.C. Fields poured thousands of dollars into Charlie’s coffers for a few discreet weeks of drying out. Bill had heard those stories over and over again during his own turbulent visits there. But what he didn’t know until Mr. Towns opened his books and disclosed his recent financial statements was just how seriously the business had declined in recent years. The nationwide Depression had taken its toll on jobs and expendable income.
Then Charlie laid out his proposal. He said that both he and Dr. Silkworth had developed enormous respect for Bill as they watched the “cures” he wrought on helpless drunks, many of whom were now rebuilding their lives at Clinton Street while others were already back out in society, sober and prospering. He and Dr. Silkworth, he added, were convinced their former patient’s program was not only a proven success, but—and now Charlie was speaking strictly for himself—it could become a real “cash cow,” if handled properly. The owner then patted Bill on the back and proposed that he move his entire operation into the hospital and make Towns his headquarters. He was prepared to give him an office, a very decent drawing account, and a generous share of the profits engendered by all the paying patients he was bound to attract. In no time, Charlie remarked, he expected Bill to become the most respected and successful lay therapist in New York with the opportunity to launch similar facilities around the country.
The washed-up Wall Street genius who only moments before was convinced he had little or no hope of rebuilding his business reputation did not have to ponder Charlie’s proposition for very long to realize its tremendous upside potential. It even surpassed the dreams he had in Akron before the proxy battle turned against him. It appealed to all those egocentric instincts he thought had run their course—his drive for money, power, and prestige. They were all back now in force. He told his smiling suitor he’d have an answer for him in twenty-four hours, adding that he saw no major obstacles.2
Lois was with a customer when he finally arrived at her department. She was surprised to see him and waved that she’d be finished shortly. He paced impatiently back and forth, casting urgent glances in her direction. Fearing something might be amiss, Lois excused herself and led her husband off to the side. There he exploded his news on her.
The look of sheer joy and delight he expected to see on her face didn’t appear. Instead, she reacted calmly, mulling over what she had just heard as though she hadn’t fully understood. So Bill repeated himself. She smiled politely, gave his comments some further thought, then looked up at him and asked:
“Have you talked to Bob about it? . . . What does everyone else think?”3
Bill frowned down at her. Why should she be asking about Dr. Bob? he wondered. Surely his Akron colleague would see the obvious benefits to such a move. And besides, who launched this ship in the first place? And “everyone else”? If Lois was referring to his recovering alcoholics at Clinton Street, what doubt was there that they’d go along with whatever he suggested? They always did. Well, maybe not always, but certainly most of the time.
The real enigma for him was his wife’s attitude. Bill simply could not understand why Lois was not overjoyed at the prospect of his success and the financial rewards it would bring. Then he thought, perhaps it’s because she’d heard all of this before, at other times and in other forms. And once booze had taken over his life, it had never panned out—his grandiose schemes, his promises of laying the moon and stars at her feet. So why should she believe him this time?
But as he stared into his wife’s eyes, he sensed it was more than that. She seemed preoccupied, distant, not the woman who would always throw her arms around him anyway and root him on no matter what. He suddenly began to realize how much about her he had taken for granted all these years. When he left the department store that afternoon, not only was the bloom slightly off his rose, but he had a strange feeling in the pit of his stomach, a worrisome overall sense that his wife’s feelings toward him were changing.
If the offer from Charlie Towns had been a surprise to Bill, and Lois’s reaction to the news a deep disappointment, that was nothing compared to the stunning, cold silence he received from the group that evening when he tried with as much enthusiasm as he could muster to depict the benefits he saw in this proposal for all concerned. But halfway through his pitch, he regretted not securing Dr. Bob’s endorsement first. It would have reinforced his stance.
Lois stood in the back of the living room listening. The new man with the Irish brogue was sitting nearby. The place was packed. Another woman was also in the room that night, Marty Mann, the first female alcoholic to join the Fellowship. After several “slips,” Marty had become a firm believer, a sober member, a good friend of Lois, and a very successful businesswoman who, twelve years later, went on to found the National Council on Alcoholism—an educational organization still working in the recovery field today. Recalling her initial reaction to Bill’s news, a skepticism that the group members were now about to share, Lois once told a close friend: “As much as I realized Bill needed to earn some money to pay our bills and get us out of debt, I felt like the others that night. This didn’t seem to be the way.”
After a while Bill found himself addressing a roomful of impassive faces all frowning up at him. Long before he finished his presentation, Lois noticed her husband’s voice wavering. He was stumbling over his words. When Bill finally finished, Fitz slowly rose to his feet and began shifting nervously. He admitted that everyone at Clinton Street and all those who came from the outside to the meetings were sympathetic to Bill’s financial needs and had been for some time. But, he added, while he couldn’t speak for the others, he felt what was being suggested didn’t seem like the best answer and could possibly lead to complications of all sorts in the future. Fitz wasn’t challenging Bill. He was simply expressing his anxiety.
“Bill, you can’t do this to us,” he said. “Don’t you see that for you, our leader, to take money for passing on our magnificent message, while the rest of us try to do the same thing without pay, would soon discourage us all? . . . Why should we do for nothing what you’d be getting paid for? We’d all be drunk in no time.”4
Chris then stuttered from his chair that Charlie Towns was not an alcoholic and therefore couldn’t possibly know what makes their Fellowship work. Why was it that he himself could get sober among the drunks at Clinton Street when he was never able to stay dry anywhere else? Because of their trust and support, that’s why. Chris wanted to say more until Bill’s challenging stare sat him back in his seat.
Everyone began whispering to each other when suddenly a short, squat fellow with a graying beard slowly rose from the other side of the room. His name was Buddy Hackler, and he was a former derelict who hadn’t had a drink now for almost five months. Bill knew that Buddy’s sobriety meant everything in the world to him. He had great respect for this middle-aged man whose words whistled through three broken teeth as he apologized for not being a very good speaker. That night, however, he held the entire room in rapt attention, trying to explain in simple terms why the proposal at hand could never work.
Everyone around him had this “thing” that bound them together, one to the other, the short, nervous newcomer said. He couldn’t find the right words to describe it, Buddy went on, with all heads nodding at him in support, but it was something that could not be bought and paid for. No doctor or nurse or therapist ever got him sober. He doubted if they ever could, because drunks were not “cases.” Drunks were people with an addiction to booze that few understood except here at Clinton Street and on Ardmore Avenue in Akron. What Bill and Dr. Bob discovered, Buddy summed up in a voice now filled with confidence, what this “thing” was based on, was one poor drunk bastard coming eyeball to eyeball with another drunk bastard and telling it like it was. With no BS, they could trust each other, bare their souls, and stay sober—and that was something you couldn’t put a price tag on, he concluded.
Before sitting back down, the relative newcomer reminded Bill of something he was always telling others—that the good was often the enemy of the best. Drunks, Buddy said, needed the best and they had it in spades at Clinton Street.5
It was after midnight when Bill finally came into the bedroom. He stood at the window looking out at the full moon. Lois was still awake. She watched him for a moment, then climbed out of bed, walked over, and stood next to him. He told her he had phoned Dr. Bob after the lengthy meeting broke up and everyone had left, some offering their apologies for speaking out against the Towns proposal. He said Bob reminded him of something they had discussed very early on in Akron when laying out their ideas for the Fellowship. They had agreed that the only authority would be the group itself. Bill admitted he had forgotten that in his desire to solve his economic problems and probably also to satisfy his own big ego.
Lois squeezed his hand to let him know she understood. She told him it was probably all for the best, and they’d find their way out of their financial maze somehow or other.6 Bill wanted to reach out and take his wife into his arms and ask her why he felt they were growing apart. Where was the warmth she had always exuded toward him even in the worst of times? Yes, he was constantly busy with his drunks and now his book, but she always said she understood. Was he simply taking her for granted again? Was it his imagination, or was her seeming preoccupation the result of her being the breadwinner, the one who was truly keeping things together? So he hesitated. He simply stood there holding her hand and sensing this was not the right moment, especially since the evening’s events—whether he agreed with the outcome or not—made him feel like a huge failure.
The next morning Bill phoned Charlie Towns to thank him and to say rather reluctantly that he couldn’t accept his generous offer.
Lois could also sense the distance that was opening between her and her husband and wondered just when it began. Yes, she was often hurt when he paid more attention to his drunks than he did to her, but by now she was used to that. Yes, he needed her, but was it more for her cooking and cleaning and financial help than for her emotional support? It sometimes seemed that way. But somewhere deep inside she sensed her feelings toward Bill really began to change the day the tall, handsome newcomer from Bellevue Hospital showed up at Clinton Street.7
His name was Russell, and she remembered how, as the days went by and he became more sober, his delightful gift of gab returned and she found him great fun. They were drawn to each other so quickly that she never gave it a second thought. However, the more she saw of him, the more she began to question her every thought, her every action, her every feeling, especially the guilt that suddenly came over her each time she was with Bill.
A County Cork man from a well-to-do Irish family, Russ decided America offered a more challenging and exciting life. So after college in Dublin, he came to the states and settled in New York City. He became an apprentice at Time-Life. He moved up the ladder quickly, and soon he was a correspondent for Life magazine, writing about everyone from Al Capone to J. Edgar Hoover. But the bright, good-looking Irishman loved the night life and the ladies. Soon he was known in every speakeasy from Manhattan to the south side of Chicago. Then one day a wealthy uncle died back home and left Russ a considerable sum. He decided to quit his job and play—and for him, playing meant drinking up a storm.
Before long, instead of being well known in the most popular saloons, he was becoming well known in drunk tanks, drying-out hospitals, nut wards, and finally among the lowest of the low at the Bowery Mission. By the time his money was almost gone, he had become a frequent guest at Bellevue Hospital. That’s where Bill found him, believed he sincerely wanted to stop drinking, and brought him home to Clinton Street.
“He was not only quite handsome,” Lois once shared with a close friend, “but he was also very intelligent. He could do a crossword puzzle in no time. He was perhaps one of the brightest men I ever met.
“After getting sober, he was so happy he had another chance at life that he seemed to be laughing all the time. He was so much fun to be with. He once told me he played the piano in a college band, a dance band. He asked me if we could go out dancing some time. Just the thought of it brought back so many wonderful memories. The dances we would go to in Vermont. The hayrides. But he knew by the look on my face that I couldn’t go so he just laughed again and pretended he was just joking all along.”8
Russell often dropped by Loeser’s department store unexpectedly. He waited for Lois if she was busy, and then they would sit and have lunch in a nearby park. Afterward they walked along the street window-shopping until it was time for her to go back to work. One day as they were walking, Lois recalled, he took her hand. She felt awkward and nervous. After a few moments, she eased her hand away, turning a soft shade of pink in the process. Russell simply grinned and began chatting about something or other to quietly dismiss the unease of the moment.
Here was a warm, charming, caring man who wanted to be with her, to be near her, to spend time with her, who needed her trust and confidence so that he could share his innermost feelings. And here was a fragile, vulnerable, unhappy lady who needed someone to care about her, to pay attention to her, to let her know she was lovable, attractive, and sensuous still. That she was a woman.
“I was so terribly unhappy at the time,” Lois admitted later. “I tried so hard to hide it from myself but deep inside I was terribly unhappy. And now this emotional feeling I suddenly had for this man began to frighten me because it went against the ideal I knew I should be living up to, the ideal I was raised with.”9 One belief that Lois still clung to was that advances from men were most often caused by the woman’s attitude, so now she questioned her own attitudes. Was she encouraging Russell’s affection by her willingness to spend so much time with him? Was she less concerned about her husband’s needs now that she had another man to look after? Or was she unconsciously playing a game, hoping Bill would notice, get jealous, and finally give her the love and consideration she craved? One of the most important traits Lois inherited from her mother was self-honesty. She might be able to fool herself for a little while but not for very long, not with that gnawing feeling in the pit of her stomach. And so it was this time. She was forced to admit to herself that the answer to all these questions was yes. The only question that remained was, what should she do about it?
“Looking back,” she once said, “I must admit that for a woman of my age then, I was still very naive. I smugly thought I knew so much about life and the world, love and relationships and how it should all be. But when it came right down to it, I knew very little.
“I soon became convinced that Bill suspected something the way he would look at Russell and then at me. So to get rid of this guilty feeling and that gnawing inside of me, I decided the best thing to do was to tell him all about it without mentioning anyone’s name, although I felt sure he knew.
“I told Bill I was very upset with myself for becoming so interested in another man regardless of the reasons. I said instead of it making me happy, the guilt I felt was making me even more miserable. I told him I didn’t plan to spend any more time with this man ever again.”10
Looking back at this whole affair some years later, Lois said she could see more clearly that, while she had come to care for Russell rather deeply, she was mainly screaming out for her husband’s attentions. She might as well have been shouting, “Bill! Pay attention to me. I’m your wife and I have a problem. I want you to think about me for a moment instead of yourself, your drunks, your Fellowship, and your damn book! This is me, Lois, and I have something going on here that could get out of control. You better pay attention to me. I need you to pay attention to me!”11
As she suspected, Bill had been paying attention. But perhaps his own guilt, the recognition of his own failures, and his seeming lack of concern about their relationship prevented him from saying anything right away—from asking questions and getting answers he didn’t want to hear—or quite possibly being afraid of how he might react. As it turned out, he was right, for when Lois finally told him what had been going on, even she was shocked by his sudden and bewildering reaction. Lois had no idea she was reminding him of his past, those times when people had left him, walked out of his life—his father, his mother, Bertha Banford—and he had felt “unlovable” all over again.
“We were in the bedroom,” she recalled. “I had just gotten home from work and said I needed to speak with him. I had been thinking all day about how I should put it. As I began to tell him, he turned away and faced the wall. When I finished, he yanked open the door, shouted that he might as well be drunk and ran down the stairs. I was desperately afraid that he meant it—that he was going out to get drunk. All I could do was cry.”12 After more than two years of not drinking, after leading dozens of helpless alcoholics along the path to sobriety, after creating so much hope in the lives of so many, Bill Wilson was about to follow in the footsteps of his sponsor, Ebby Thacher. He was about to let those character defects of anger, jealousy, and resentment get him drunk. As he would later share with Lois and a few members of the Fellowship, he ran through the streets of Brooklyn Heights until he found a bar. He went in and stood looking into the barroom mirror. As he stared at the rage filling his face, he saw out of the corner of his eye a man flopped over a corner table in a drunken stupor. In an instant, the sight brought back his every binge, every hangover, every catastrophe in the company of John Barleycorn. Then, as the bartender approached, he turned and rushed out the door.
Bill wound up that evening at the Hotel St. George, where Charley the plumber had restarted his business and now roomed with another Clinton Street graduate. They all talked late into the night. Bill left grateful to his friends for reminding him of his own words to them—that alcohol was only the symptom of their disease and that unless one works on his character defects and shortcomings, he would always be in danger of drinking again.
Lois was so worried and regretful for having opened Pandora’s box that she couldn’t sleep. It was very late when Bill walked into their bedroom. His eyes were red, but she could tell immediately that he hadn’t been drinking. As she started to beg for his forgiveness, he took her gently into his arms and said he was the one who needed to be forgiven. He was the one who had to make amends for his selfish, insensitive behavior, for not showing his love and gratitude often enough for all she had given to him. They hugged and they kissed. Then they got undressed, turned out the lights, and went to bed. They made love again for the first time in many, many months.13
Russell heard the buzzing going on around Clinton Street that evening, talk that Bill had stormed out of the house red-faced and angry and no one seemed to know why or where he went. Later, when he saw Lois going upstairs crying and avoiding his glances, Russell sensed that whatever might have happened had something to do with him. After all, he was a very bright man who by now had seen the jealousy in Bill’s eyes whenever they passed each other. So the charming Irishman went upstairs himself that night, but not to see Lois. He went to pack his suitcase. He was gone before Bill returned from the Hotel St. George.
A few weeks later, after everything had settled down, Lois wrote a poem for her husband, a tongue-in-cheek ditty to let him know that she not only still loved him, she was very proud of what he was accomplishing.
Once there was a funny man
Who lived at 182.
He had so many drunks around
Who didn’t know what to do.
He nursed some, he razzed some,
He taxied some to Bellevue.
But the funniest thing about him was,
He really “fixed” a few.14
Bill remained quite attentive for a while despite his heavy workload. He put his book project aside for a short time to take on several small stock analysis jobs for an old Wall Street buddy, which produced a few thousand dollars of income. One involved Loft’s Candy Company and the other Pepsi-Cola. He later told Hank and Fitz that if he had some money to spare at the time, he could have made a killing. Loft’s stock quadrupled.
At the same time, Bill began encouraging his wife to “go out on your own as an interior decorator.”15 He said everybody raved about her work and “that damn department store is taking advantage of you.”16 He said with all her talent, she could probably build a nice business for herself and enjoy the satisfaction of doing it.
Lois finally acquiesced to her husband’s wishes. She had been anxious to see how well she could do on her own. And now with Bill bringing in a few more dollars, the time seemed right. She quickly found two customers. One was a rather wealthy lady who was redecorating her entire house. The other, a speech teacher.
While Lois felt no compunction about billing the Loeser customer, she did have qualms for some reason about sending her bill to the teacher with whom she had now become quite friendly. So she made an agreement instead to take speech lessons from her as payment, but then never took the lessons.17
Even when Lois redecorated the offices of her brother-in-law, Dr. Leonard Strong, she sent him a very small bill, greatly underestimating the value of her services. Knowing this, Leonard gave her a large gratuity, which embarrassed her to no end.
Perhaps it was Lois’s upbringing that stood in the way of her turning her interior decorating skills into a profitable enterprise. Her parents had always insisted that she and her siblings were to help people without seeking payment in return—that being of assistance and the good feelings that come from it were reward enough. As a result, Lois started bringing less money into the household than she did before leaving Loeser’s.18 By the autumn of 1937, Bill had become quite dispirited by having painted himself into a very tight corner. He had a wife who deserved far more than he was giving her. He had a house full of drunks who demanded more of his time. And he needed to find a way to earn considerably more than he was from his infrequent Wall Street assignments. He felt he had to talk with someone, to get some fresh ideas, some new suggestions. So he went to see Leonard Strong to seek his advice. They were now even closer friends, and Bill always had great respect for Dr. Strong’s counsel.
“The very first thing Leonard did was offer Bill some money,” Lois remembered her husband telling her. “Trying not to show his embarrassment, Bill said he joked and told Leonard he was no longer hustling family and friends since getting sober. He also told Leonard he already owed him more than he could possibly repay for all the help and support he gave both of us while he was drinking. He turned the money down.”19
Dr. Strong, like his good friend Dr. Silkworth, had become very impressed with what Bill had been accomplishing with his drunks and was convinced his work must go on. So he volunteered to call a man he had met several years earlier, a Mr. Willard Richardson, who headed the board at the Rockefeller philanthropies. He thought Bill might approach him about some sort of grant to support his growing group of alcoholics. After all, everyone knew that John D. Rockefeller, Jr., had been one of the major forces behind the passage of the Volstead Act, which gave the country Prohibition. He might possibly be sympathetic to Bill’s cause.20 Within a matter of weeks, Leonard and his nervous brother-in-law were seated in John D.’s private boardroom at a huge, beautifully carved mahogany table, directly across from Mr. Richardson. As Bill described the program he and Dr. Bob had created to help alcoholics, both he and Leonard could tell the philanthropic foundation’s chief executive was moved by what he heard, so moved in fact that he promised to have his committee look into this “evangelical society,” as he called it, just as soon as possible. And, he added, if they approved of the movement and its monetary requirements, Mr. Rockefeller would probably give it his financial support.
Lois remembered her husband coming home that night “riding on a pink cloud.”21 She said he called everyone in the house together and urged them to be on their best behavior when Mr. Richardson and his committee came to call the following week. Lois said Bill then phoned Dr. Bob in Akron and explained all that had happened. He told him it was important that he come to New York to be on hand to meet the Rockefeller people.
Dr. Bob would later remark that his good friend and partner was “higher than a kite” when he spoke to him that evening, even though he was stone-cold sober. Dr. Bob was concerned, however, when he heard Bill say, “The cat’s in the bag.” While he promised to be there for the meeting, he warned Bill not to count his chickens too soon.
As usual, Dr. Bob’s advice was right on target. The philanthropic group came to Clinton Street, where they greatly admired the work being done. Some of them remarked it was comparable to “first century Christianity.” One committee member, a gentleman by the name of Albert Scott, chairman of the trustees for Riverside Church in New York, even went so far as to ask, “Won’t money spoil this thing?” His remark disturbed Bill and momentarily blurred the vision of sugarplums dancing in his head. However, he started smiling again when the others decided they wanted a closer look to better understand what this growing Fellowship was all about and the extent of its future success.22
Christmas came and went. Bill’s spirits were up one day and down the next as the committee’s investigation dragged on. The new year of 1938 was now already underway. Then, in the middle of January, Willard Richardson phoned and asked Bill to meet him in his office. Lois admitted she was on pins and needles waiting for the news.
Committee member Frank Amos, a well-known New York City advertising executive who had taken a shine to Bill and his work, was with Richardson when he arrived. Amos said he was recommending that the Fellowship be given an initial grant of fifty thousand dollars, adding that the committee was in general agreement. It only awaited Mr. Rockefeller’s final approval. While it was nowhere near the hundreds of thousands of dollars Bill had dreamed about, it was an enormous sum and a fantastic solution to the immediate and pressing problems both at Clinton Street and in Akron, where Dr. Bob was now having some health problems.
By the time Bill arrived back in Brooklyn that night, he was floating on air. He phoned Akron to give his friend the good news and was unpleasantly surprised by his response. Bob was still warning Bill not to count his chickens too soon. Lois recalled they almost had their first knock-down, drag-out fight on the telephone that evening when Bill accused Bob of always being “too damn negative.”
A few days later, however, those chickens Dr. Bob had been talking about finally came home to roost. Albert Scott, the committee member who from the beginning felt that alcoholics who helped other alcoholics were like the early Christians, had convinced John D. Rockefeller, Jr., that indeed “too much money could spoil their work”—and that fifty thousand dollars was too much money. The wealthy philanthropist agreed. He and the committee finally decided to place five thousand dollars in the treasury at Riverside Church for Bill and Bob to draw upon as needed. But that would be all. The letter from Mr. Richardson informing them of the decision said the committee came to believe in the end that the alcoholic movement should become self-supporting in order to achieve and maintain its magnificent goals.
Despite such flattering comments, Bill was devastated at first. As usual, he had projected a momentous outcome only to be crestfallen when it failed to come to pass. In time he would learn another great lesson from all of this, but for now he had to fight his way out of another depression. While the five thousand dollars would help temporarily, he saw it as a mere drop in the bucket. That’s how deep an emotional pit he found himself in.
Lois recalled what a bitter disappointment this was to her husband, mainly because he was torn between not having the time to earn money and continuing to direct and grow his struggling fellowship of alcoholics. But Lois also remembered how Bill felt sometime later when he came to recognize that a great influx of money at that point would have finished Alcoholics Anonymous just as it was getting started. It was then that Hank Parkhurst tried to ride to the rescue.23
The second man to sober up at Clinton Street, Hank had since moved out, reconciled with his wife, Kathleen, and was living in New Jersey, although still attending all the meetings in Brooklyn Heights. Now feeling his oats after more than a year and a half without a drink, he had started an entrepreneurial venture in the Garden State, where he had worked for many years in the oil business. Through his former connections, Hank was organizing gasoline service station owners into a cooperative buying syndicate that he called “Honor Dealers.” He had set up an office in Newark, hired a lady named Ruth Hock to run the place, and now invited Bill to join him in what he was convinced would quickly become a lucrative enterprise. He thought it would solve Bill’s financial problems.
Miss Hock, a dedicated, hardworking German lady in her early thirties, didn’t know what she had gotten herself into at first. Almost from the start she was shocked to see rather shabbily dressed men stagger into Hank and Bill’s office in the rear of the building and not come out until the day was over. One afternoon she entered the office without knocking only to find Bill and some others on their knees praying, while Hank was at his desk pretending nothing was going on. She hurried back out blushing, then Bill took her aside and explained what they were doing and why—that it was a practice left over from his Oxford Group days. Before long, the office at 17 William Street in Newark became Clinton Street West, with Hank and Bill spending more time trying to sober up New Jersey’s alcoholics than trying to help its service station owners. A native of Newark, Ruth would soon become Bill’s trusted secretary, working with him on his “Big Book” project. She would also become a close friend and confidante of Lois.
“I remember Ruth telling me once,” Lois recalled, “that the business could have been very successful had they given as much energy, thought, and enthusiasm to it as they did to helping drunks. She said she soon came to realize that the Honor Dealers business was really only a means to an end, that end being expanding the Fellowship of drunks. I could have told her that the very first day she started work.”24
Soon Hank and Bill were finding it difficult to pay Ruth her twenty-five-dollar-a-week salary and the rent on the office at the same time. Ruth so admired what they were doing to help others that she often went without pay for a while. The landlord, however, was not as generous. In fact, he eventually forced them to leave. They set up shop in a smaller office in Newark, and that’s where, with the aid of Ruth’s typing skills, Bill went to work on his book in earnest. It was now May of 1938. He started gathering success stories from the men who had stayed sober thus far and discussed with Dr. Bob how to formulate the “steps” the first one hundred sober alcoholics had taken to achieve this goal.
While the financial pinch became evident in Newark as the buying syndicate failed to produce the profits Hank had hoped for, funds became even tighter at Clinton Street. The more time Bill spent outlining and gathering material for his book, as well as working with his drunks in Brooklyn and New Jersey, the fewer hours he had to dredge up income. And with Lois now earning less as an independent interior decorator, the financial cupboard was rapidly running bare. On top of all this, President Roosevelt’s “mortgage moratorium” had now run out, and the bank that held the loan on Clinton Street was demanding a larger payment each month.
One evening Lois came home tired and discouraged, a mood she thoroughly disliked because it seemed to have become too frequent lately. While she and Bill had been getting along much better, Lois saw no end in sight to their economic malaise, no light at the end of the tunnel. She trudged up the steps of the brownstone only to find another letter in the mailbox from the bank, probably reminding her again how far behind they were slipping on their mortgage payments. She shook her head and slowly entered the house.
When she climbed the hall stairs and reached their bedroom, she found Bill dressing for his meeting. He didn’t rush to her and take her into his arms, as she would have liked. He didn’t ask her how she felt or how her day went. He didn’t even ask her about the new interior decorating project she had started at a business office in downtown Brooklyn. He simply smiled, kissed her on the cheek, and finished buttoning his shirt.
Lois slipped off her coat, hung it in the closet, then sank down on the bed and opened the letter. It was exactly what she had expected. She glanced over at her husband. He was now knotting his tie in the dresser mirror. She wanted to talk to him about the problems with the bank, and some other troubles, but as she started to speak, he turned her off rather abruptly. He said he was running late and that they could talk after the meeting. Immediately she began to feel that now familiar anger rising.
No, she heard the voice in her head shout. She said it out loud. No! They had to talk now! He was always putting things off, putting his needs, his desires ahead of hers. It had been different for a while but now he was sliding back into his same old ways. At least that’s what her anger and self-pity were telling her at the moment. So she said it again, this time more forcefully. They had to talk now!
Bill frowned and looked over at the clock. Then he turned toward his wife as he slipped into his jacket. There simply wasn’t enough time right now, he pleaded. He’d be late for the sharing meeting at Calvary Church.
Lois had a shoe in her hand. She remembered her rage suddenly erupting like a volcano. Before she knew what had happened, she flung the shoe at her husband, shouting: “Damn your old meetings!”25
“This unexpected display of anger surprised me even more than it did him,” Lois later wrote in her memoirs. “I might have had an excuse for losing my temper during his drinking years. But why now, when everything was fine, had I reacted so violently to his very natural remark?”26 Bill was at a loss for words. He picked up her shoe and handed it back to her. She turned her head away. She couldn’t explain her actions and she didn’t want him to see her crying again. The tears were coming too often of late. Bill quietly left the room and went to his meeting.
Lois couldn’t remember how much time passed after she heard the door close. Finally she slipped her shoe back on, turned around, and caught her image in the dresser mirror. Who is this I’m looking at? she asked herself, watching the tears roll down her cheeks. What kind of person have I become? Why am I always so angry, so negative, so unhappy about my life when it’s the life I chose?
Suddenly the room felt very stuffy. She opened the window, but there was hardly a breeze. She decided to take a walk, to get some fresh air, to think about what had just taken place, and to try to find some answers that made sense. That sudden outburst of anger just would not leave her mind.
The following night, Bill was holding one of his regular gatherings of drunks in the parlor at Clinton Street. Still thinking about her outburst the night before, Lois walked out onto the front porch trying to relax, to put her mind at ease. That’s when she glanced toward the street and noticed a long line of cars parked along the curb. Only the wealthier people still living in Brooklyn Heights had automobiles in those days, and most had garages for them. The regular folks in the neighborhood rode the subways and the buses. But on Fellowship meeting nights at Clinton Street, people would drive their cars in from the suburbs. For some reason, this was the first time Lois had really taken note of them, perhaps because in most of the vehicles she saw ladies sitting uneasily in the passenger seats, all appearing stoic or sad.
Recalling that important evening in her life, Lois said she had no idea what possessed her to approach those ladies except that she suddenly realized their husbands were probably attending Bill’s meeting. They were simply sitting there all alone, waiting for it to be over. She walked down the steps and knocked gently on the window of the first car. The lady inside rolled down the window. She happened to be Anne Bingham, an attractive, auburn-haired lady in her early forties, who would become one of Lois’s closest and dearest friends. She would eventually help Lois organize the fellowship of the Al-Anon Family Groups. But on this particular night, Anne Bingham was in the same kind of mood Lois had brought home with her only a short time ago—tired, discouraged, and frustrated. She had driven again with her husband, Devoe, all the way from their home in Westchester County for him to attend this AA meeting. He had tried everything, and this gathering of alcoholics was the only thing that seemed to work. It was keeping him sober.
It wasn’t as though Lois had never befriended the spouses of alcoholics before. She had always welcomed them into her home just as Annie Smith had done and was continuing to do in Akron. It was simply that her work schedule and her household chores gave her little time to spend with them to develop close and meaningful relationships. Then again, perhaps she didn’t really want to. Perhaps she preferred to isolate and enjoy the sickly warmth of her self-imposed martyrdom and self-sacrifice. But this night was different. This night she needed someone to talk to, someone who could understand and possibly even help her find some of the answers she was looking for. This night Lois was to find once again that God does work in very strange ways indeed.27
After introducing herself, Lois invited Anne Bingham to join her for some tea or lemonade in the kitchen. The offer was gladly accepted. Then Lois glanced toward the other cars. Almost without hesitation, she and Anne invited the other eight ladies in waiting to join them. While a few were shy and a bit reluctant at first, a short time later they were all seated around Lois’s kitchen table asking themselves what brought them there in the first place.
“If I didn’t drive him here and wait outside, he probably would never come to these meetings,”28 Lois recalled one dour-looking woman commenting as several others nodded in agreement. Most continued to fidget uncomfortably, not knowing what to do or say until Lois quietly remarked, “I threw a shoe at my husband last night. I’m still trying to understand why I did it, why I’m still so angry when he’s been sober now for over three years. I guess I thought that once he stopped drinking, everything would go back to what it was like before, happy and loving. But it hasn’t and I’m not sure whose fault it really is.”
That’s when Anne Bingham turned to her and said: “It’s because of all the things they did, that’s why. You can’t forget so easily. At least I can’t.”
“I think it’s more than that,” Lois replied, admitting at the same time she couldn’t put her finger on exactly what it was.29
As the moments passed and the initial discomfort of being among strangers started to ease, these ten ladies from all walks of life—some with children; some living in nice homes, others in hovels; some filled with shame, others with rage; some attractive, others pale and sickly—began to share their anger, their fear, and their frustrations. Lois listened, and as she did, she slowly came to realize how much they all had in common. She felt as she had when she first met Annie Smith. Lois also came to realize that night that, like these other ladies, she had the same addiction—only hers went by the name of Bill Wilson.
“Even though I had known it deep down inside,” Lois would later share, “it struck me so clearly that night that I was as addicted to Bill as he was to alcohol. But I also now saw that I wasn’t alone in how it had affected me. That every spouse of every alcoholic I have ever known also becomes terribly affected by this disease.”30
At one point during this kitchen gathering, the ladies heard the roar of laughter coming from the Fellowship meeting in the parlor. Lois remembered one very thin and peevish lady remarking with a deep frown: “Listen to them in there having a good time while all of us sit out here stewing from all their garbage!”31
Lois remembered looking at her and replying: “No. I think they’re all in there getting well while we sit out here sick and getting sicker.”32
While her retort didn’t go over well with some of the ladies, it didn’t stop any of them from joining Lois and Anne around the kitchen table at Clinton Street again a few nights later. The women were more open this time. One talked about being sick and tired of lying to cover up for her husband when he missed work or disappointed the children. Another said her children were too embarrassed to bring their friends into the house anymore because their father was either drunk on the couch or staggering around in his bathrobe.
Some expressed their fear of financial insecurity. A very pale and nervous lady remarked that her husband was into his third job in the last six months, and she was worried he might soon lose that one too. And another woman’s husband had such a violent temper when he drank that one night he kicked in the bathroom door because their son was taking too long in the shower.
A rather stout lady with very sad eyes seemed to sum it all up when she confessed she would get so depressed over her husband’s drinking and its effects on her family that she kept the window shades down all day. She said sunlight was only for happy people.
Lois could only reply that since throwing her shoe at Bill, she had started taking a closer look at herself. It seemed she had always depended upon her husband for her happiness, her contentment, her reason for being. Maybe she had better consider more seriously what her mother had told her as she lay dying in the hospital. “Lois,” she said, “you have a life of your own to live, and you must live it. You must find out what can truly fulfill you, otherwise one day you will wake up and be consumed by anger and resentment for being cheated out of that life.”
Soon this gathering in Lois’s kitchen became a regular affair. It planted the seeds from which Al-Anon would eventually blossom. However, at the start, it began to bother some of the newly sober alcoholics coming to the house. In fact, one evening as the ladies were straggling down the hall toward the kitchen, a newcomer asked Bill if he thought it was a good idea for Lois to be meeting with members’ wives. Some of the “boys,” he said, thought the women might be comparing notes.
Bill laughed, put his arm around the newcomer, and replied, “What can they find out that they don’t already know or suspect? Besides, I don’t think they’re spending their time chewing us over. So relax.”33
Lois came to realize increasingly, as these kitchen meetings continued, just what a toll the disease of alcoholism had taken on her life, how it had changed the very ideals and virtues she had grown up with, and how it had turned her into the kind of person she never wanted to be. Looking back at that extraordinary evening when she invited those ladies into her kitchen, Lois recognized that it marked one of the most important turning points in her life.
When she began to share her innermost thoughts and feelings with others, she came to understand how much she had really believed she could control her husband’s life from the very beginning of their relationship, when he first started his heavy drinking. She was totally convinced that her love and inspiration was all that was required to fulfill his every need, that her own willpower and steadfast guidance was all that was needed to quench Bill’s thirst for alcohol.
But as her husband’s drinking grew worse and their lives spiraled into chaos, she then turned to prayer and her relationship with God, believing that this would cure Bill of his affliction. She never thought about what God’s will might be. She only thought about her own will—what Lois wanted and what Lois’s sheer determination should be able to achieve.
Then came the crushing blow: Bill finally found sobriety through the help of Ebby Thacher, Dr. Robert Holbrook Smith, the Oxford Group, and now his small but budding band of fellow alcoholics. She felt she played no role in the most important goal of her life—getting her husband sober—and now was playing no role in helping him stay sober. Her own inner needs had always been fed by being her husband’s nurse, his mother, the breadwinner, and the decision maker. Now she was on the outside looking in.
Since throwing her shoe in anger and now meeting and sharing with her “kitchen group,” Lois was discovering how resentful and jealous she had become of her husband’s newfound friends, and how filled with anger and self-pity she was. But most of all she had come face to face with a woman who was smug and self-righteous, a lady who thought she had all the answers for Bill and the rest of the world but now saw she didn’t even have many answers for herself. She was now determined to find them.
So Lois set out with her own newfound friends to take an honest and searching look at herself in order to change—to rid herself of those painful traits and defects she was now uncovering. At the same time, Lois was recognizing that often her will and God’s will were in conflict and that true peace and comfort only comes when these two meet and she accepted God’s plan for her life.
In a wonderfully strange way, as Lois began to walk down this new path, she came to realize more and more that she and Bill were walking along similar paths and that hopefully those paths would converge one day at a juncture where she and Bill would find an even deeper and more loving relationship. She hoped it would be soon.34
As Lois Wilson met with her fledgling kitchen group, she slowly but surely began to find some of the answers she was looking for. And it was important that she did, for soon her mettle would be tested even more. The next letter she would receive from the bank would warn that unless the payments were brought up to date soon, the bank would have no choice but to foreclose on the mortgage and have her and Bill dispossessed. This time her husband listened to her plea and sat with her as they both tried to figure out what to do next.