13
SINCE HIS INAUGURATION IN 1933, PRESIDENT FRANKLIN D. Roosevelt had subordinated any and all problems abroad to his enormous battle to pull America from its deepening economic crisis and restore its people to the life of abundance and security they once enjoyed. To help achieve this end, the president and his Congress had initiated and passed the most stringent neutrality legislation in the nation’s history.
As a result, throughout the 1930s, the entire nation practically wore blinders when it came to distinguishing between “aggressor” and “non-aggressor” belligerents overseas. America focused inward instead, on the needs of its own people. Fathers had to have jobs, not guns. Mothers cried out for food, not tanks. And families yearned for homes, not battleships. So when Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany, threatened his European neighbors, joined forces with Italy and Japan, and pointed his storm troopers in the direction of Austria and Poland, the United States was ill-prepared to meet the pending crisis. The ensuing result was an increasingly frightened and unsettled world.
On the home front, however, President Roosevelt’s tactics, both tough and ingenious, were beginning to win the war against the Great Depression. His often-controversial New Deal program was pumping new life into an almost moribund economy. First he cut federal salaries and government overhead generally. Then he signed into law the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which through price increases and loan guarantees relieved farmers of a mortgage indebtedness of more than eight billion dollars, a burden that could have threatened the nation’s food supply.
FDR then forced passage of his most contentious measure, the National Industrial Recovery Act, which created minimum wages, fixed maximum hours, abolished sweatshops and child labor, and required business owners to open their books to government inspectors. In addition, the government began building new roads, bridges, and tunnels and financing the construction of huge public works projects such as the Grand Coulee and the Bonneville irrigation plants. Soon the country’s wage earners were finding more jobs and steadier employment and bringing home bigger paychecks.
President Roosevelt won a second term in 1937 by a landslide and swept Democratic majorities into office with him. He now had an even freer hand. He continued to create more “alphabetical” government relief programs to subsidize the unemployed and provide lower interest rates and a greater money supply to business and industry. This helped stabilize companies and allowed them to begin growing once again. Now there were the FER, the RFC, the TVA, the HRA, and the NRA. Despite the enormous public debt piling up—almost four billion dollars more than the World War I debt at its peak—by the end of the 1930s the country was finally beginning to sense that the worst was over.
However, while the nation’s economy was slowly starting to awake from its painful doldrums, such was not the case at 182 Clinton Street in the heart of Brooklyn Heights, New York. If the country had been wearing blinders so as not to see the growing menace overseas, the increasing difficulties in the Wilson household were so obvious they simply couldn’t be hidden from view. This became even more evident when John D. Rockefeller, Jr., declined Bill Wilson’s request for a major infusion of capital for his struggling band of alcoholics.
As Lois once shared with a close friend: “The small grant Bill received from Mr. Rockefeller was really a godsend. Even though it didn’t solve our problems, it did help us a bit during a very difficult and trying period. Bill had hoped, however, that the five thousand dollars would somehow last until he finished writing his book. Hank was certain the book would be a best seller. They were both wrong. The money slowly ran out and the book didn’t sell, at least not right away.”1
But one important thing did emerge from the Rockefeller episode. Bill had made a number of important contacts with some very generous and very high-powered men who were now sold on his budding movement. Hank, who by now had become Bill’s right-hand man, was the first to see the opportunity in such elite connections. He was convinced that most wealthy people only liked to donate to organizations or foundations they could brag about to their friends and associates—medical, charitable, scientific, the arts, and such—not a disorganized bunch of “raggedy-assed, low-bottom drunks.” And he told Bill so. What they needed, Hank said, was to somehow find a way to directly involve these nonalcoholic movers and shakers in their Fellowship, perhaps as “advisory members.” Bill cottoned to the idea at first until his friend suggested such prominent figures would make “great window-dressing.”
Lois remembered the reluctance her husband initially expressed about the whole idea following Hank’s remark. “Bill told me he didn’t like the thought of ‘using’ people simply to gain your own selfish ends,” she once shared. “He said he did that too many times when he was drinking and he wasn’t going to do it now that he was sober. And he didn’t.”2
Besides, Lois went on to say, Bill was mainly interested in the objective counsel and experienced guidance such men could provide to help him build the Fellowship into a strong and lasting organization. Certainly he was open to whatever suggestions and support they could lend to raising much-needed income, but he had now come to believe that Mr. Rockefeller was right—that too much money in the hands of recovering alcoholics could, at this juncture, prove to be an absolute disaster.
After cooling Hank’s “promotional instincts,” Bill phoned Dr. Bob to discuss the concept of engaging outside advisors. His partner agreed that a small group of nonalcoholic men of good will and good repute could lend great objectivity to their efforts. He also agreed that “putting the arm on them” must not be the primary motive for their involvement.
Then Bill went to see his brother-in-law Dr. Strong once again for his trusted opinion. Leonard offered him similar advice. As a result, the Alcoholic Foundation, a tax-free charitable trust, was formed a short time later, and Leonard Strong was the very first person Bill asked to serve on its board of directors. He accepted. Then Bill went to Willard Richardson and Frank Amos, and they, too, graciously offered their services.3
When the new foundation held its first formal meeting in Richardson’s office, Hank still hadn’t changed his stripes. He insisted the first item on the agenda must be a plan to solve the movement’s serious financial crisis. That there was no way to help and support any more alcoholics without additional resources. He urged the board members to show Bill and himself how they could approach other philanthropists and wealthy donors for financial grants—and possibly lend their influence.
Once again Bill had to politely chastise his friend for trying to move too fast. He told the board he had high hopes for solving the money problems himself by finishing his book about the Fellowship. He said many in the group strongly believed there was a vast nationwide audience of suffering alcoholics and their families just waiting for a treatise that could offer them an answer to their dilemma—an answer that almost one hundred alcoholics had already found in Brooklyn, New York, and Akron, Ohio.
When Frank Amos, the advertising executive, heard Bill’s description of the proposed book, he excitedly agreed with his comments. He thought its potential to create the much-needed funding was significant and offered to help by contacting his good friend Gene Exman, the editor of religious books at Harper Brothers Publishing Company. Frank said once Bill had completed a few chapters, he would show them to Exman. If the editor liked what he saw and thought the book had good marketing possibilities, he might offer an advance against royalties, even though Bill was a first-time author. The other board members readily agreed with Amos that the book project was where the foundation’s emphasis should be placed at the moment. It could lead to what each director firmly believed—that the Fellowship of alcoholics must eventually become self-supporting and not dependent upon outside financial support that could unduly subject it to external influence and dickering.
While Lois was pleased on one hand that her husband was now envisioning some daylight ahead, she was unhappy on the other hand that she would be seeing him far less as he dedicated himself to producing what would become the “Bible” of AA’s teachings. He began spending much of his time in Newark dictating his prose to Ruth Hock, editing the personal success stories of his sober alcoholics, and getting comments back from Dr. Bob and others on the pages he had completed.
Lois often said her saving graces during this period, from the spring of 1938 to the end of January 1939, when the book was finally finished, were her meetings with her “kitchen group” and her frequent conversations with her dear friend Annie Smith in Akron.
Bob Smith, Jr., Annie’s son, remembers traveling with his parents to visit Bill and Lois at Clinton Street around this time. He was seventeen then and excited about his first trip to New York City.
“My father came to spend a few days with Bill to go over the pages he was writing for AA’s Big Book,” he recalled. “Lois seemed to perk right up as soon as she saw my mom. They had developed a very close bond with each other. In fact, as I recall, they spent most of the time together while we were there and also went to meet with other ladies whose husbands were in the Fellowship. And with Dad off somewhere with Bill, I was basically on my own. Once I discovered New York’s subway system, however, I had a ball. There was no graffiti back then. The trains were neat and clean and I rode all over New York seeing everything I could.”4
Young Smitty said Lois appeared to be doing the same thing in Brooklyn that his mother was doing back in Akron—gathering spouses together to talk about living with an alcoholic, coping with the problems that result, and trying to find ways to improve their own lives in spite of it all.
“My mother was a Wellesley graduate,” Bob liked to recall. “She was not only very intelligent but had great insight into people and could readily understand their problems and their situations. She was still a member of the Oxford Group at the time and would share those principles with the wives of other alcoholics as well as try to live by them herself. I know my mother and Lois would frequently talk about this and how they needed to change their old ways of thinking and acting or perhaps reacting.
“As the AA movement continued to grow,” he said, “Bill and Lois would visit our home in Akron when they could and we would visit them at Clinton Street in Brooklyn. They became devoted friends. Dad told me that, although he and Bill often saw things from different angles, they never had a real serious argument and their minds seemed to mesh in developing an intelligent program which they could present to an alcoholic. I think my mom and Lois were on the very same path before my mother died in 1949.”5
The day the Smiths were leaving for Pennsylvania Station to return to Akron, Lois remembers Dr. Bob took her aside and said to her with great warmth:
“Lois, I want to thank you for staying with Bill. You know what it’s meant to me. For some reason, we alcoholics seem to have the gift of picking out the world’s finest women. Why they should be subjected to the tortures we inflict upon them, and stay, I cannot explain.”
Then he hugged her and left. Lois later commented about the incident, “Bob was not a flatterer. He was generally quiet and reserved. So I know he spoke those words from his heart. I was deeply touched.”6
While Bill worked intensely on his book, he was always back at Clinton Street for group meetings, which were gradually attracting more and more people.
Lois came to recognize what a privilege it was seeing people change right in front of her eyes, witnessing the miracle of those crawling out of abject despair into the light of hope and leaving the anchor of alcoholism behind.7
But many of their wives continued to have a much more difficult time, it seemed. “Like myself,” Lois would share, “they thought once their husbands stopped drinking, everything would be hunky-dory, that life would be beautiful. When it didn’t happen, we only became more angry and resentful, always blaming our husbands for all of our problems.”8
So Lois continued to meet with her “kitchen group,” not only at Clinton Street but now at the homes of other ladies as well, some of whom couldn’t always afford babysitters or couldn’t travel for various reasons. Slowly but surely she was beginning to find some answers—mainly the calm and patience that come when you take your mind off your own problems for a while and try to help someone else, she would say. Without realizing it at the time, Lois was actually starting to walk in Bill’s shoes, to discover the same principles, to find the same empathy for those suffering from the same disease of alcoholism. But again like her husband, it would be two steps forward and one step back before the real solution would become crystal clear.
Bill arrived at his small office in Newark each morning with a batch of crinkled yellow pads under his arm, all filled with scribbled notes. He propped his lanky legs up on a beat-up desk and slowly began dictating his thoughts to Ruth Hock. He spoke simply, honestly, and unashamedly about his own experiences with alcohol and the tools he and Dr. Bob had discovered that were keeping them and many others sober. With no hesitation he described his surrender at Towns Hospital and his miraculous communion with Dr. Bob at Henrietta Seiberling’s gatehouse. He didn’t worry about style. It was plain, homespun prose, the kind of straight talk one would hear sitting around a potbelly stove in an old Vermont general store.
In no time, Bill had completed the first two chapters—the first his own personal story and the second entitled, “There Is a Solution.” Ruth typed them up and sent copies around for comment. There were many questions, a number of suggestions, and a few proposed changes, but overall there was general acceptance of the way Bill had begun his treatise. Frank Amos gave a copy to Gene Exman at Harper Brothers as he had promised. The editor liked what he read. After being convinced that Bill could write the entire book in the same simple, direct style, Exman said he was prepared to offer him fifteen hundred dollars as an advance against future royalties on book sales.
Bill was ecstatic. So was Lois. In the light of this sudden and delightfully shocking turn of events, they both celebrated two things: that the cash advance would help pay some bills, and that a major publishing enterprise was willing to print, promote, and sell the book worldwide. What could be greater than that? the board members said, admittedly surprised at how well and how quickly things were turning in the foundation’s favor.
That night, however, Bill couldn’t sleep. Lois recalled how he paced the bedroom floor, asking himself questions that suddenly occurred to him as the initial exuberance wore off.
“Bill began thinking about all the difficulties that might arise if the book were to be successful,” Lois recalled. “If a commercial publisher owned the book, who at that company could answer the flood of inquiries that would undoubtedly pour in. Whereas if the Fellowship itself printed the book and handled its distribution, it would have the know-how to respond to questions and could control the number of books printed and distributed in order to control the number of inquiries. It all made sense to me.”9
Besides, she remembered her husband saying, if this book was to be their basic text, and if the Fellowship were to grow as everyone had hoped, then it didn’t seem right that its main asset should be owned by outsiders. It should be owned by the Alcoholic Foundation and provide the means of self-support the board had recommended.
All three trustees, however, argued against turning down Harper’s offer, mainly on the grounds that they knew of no author who had ever successfully published his own works. Troubled by their stance, Bill went back to Gene Exman, thanked him for his offer and then told him about the controversy he found himself in. The editor immediately saw that the group would benefit in many ways by controlling its own published materials and generously advised Bill about having the book printed on his own. The foundation trustees quickly dropped their objections and turned instead to helping raise the four thousand dollars that would be needed to initially publish and distribute five thousand books.
Lois had hoped that with the publishing controversy now settled, there would be clear sailing ahead. Bill would finish writing the book, it would become the great best seller everyone seemed to anticipate, and the money would start flowing in to meet the bills and the mortgage payments so they wouldn’t lose their home. But those old butterflies that had never left her stomach were now whispering loud and clear that if the past was any barometer, things would not be that simple, that easy, or that successful. And the butterflies were right, as usual.
All hell broke loose, particularly at Clinton Street, just as soon as Bill finished chapter five, which he called “How It Works.” It began, “Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path.”10 The path Bill was referring to consisted of both the practical and the spiritual principles he and Dr. Bob had formulated and tried to practice daily in order to stay mentally, physically, and spiritually sober. These principles, which Bill developed into AA’s Twelve Steps to recovery for millions of alcoholics around the world, essentially incorporated and expanded upon the Oxford Group’s “Four Absolutes” of honesty, purity, unselfishness, and love. Bill’s first draft of the Twelve Steps read as follows:
1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that God could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our wills and our lives over to the care and direction of God.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely willing that God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly on our knees asked Him to remove these shortcomings—holding nothing back.
8. Made a complete list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our contact with God, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual experience as the result of this course of action, we tried to carry this message to others, especially alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.11
Lois vividly recalled the night she heard Bill read these steps to the Clinton Street boys. She always seemed to turn up at opportune moments with fresh pots of coffee to overhear her husband discussing with the group the chapters he had just completed. She said there was always a lively debate but none compared to what ensued after the reading of chapter five, “How It Works.”12
“Bill had told me he was quite pleased with what he had written,” Lois recalled. “He said Dr. Bob had agreed with almost every word he had put down. So he was in no way prepared for the violent reaction when he read the steps to the group that night. I never will forget what happened.”13
While a few men smiled with delight and bought the steps exactly as Bill had written them, most members squirmed uncomfortably. And much to Bill’s dismay, a faction led by his friend Hank shouted that there was too much God talk and it would scare drunks away.14
“It wasn’t any God that got me sober,” Hank argued. “It was you guys. Being around all you guys and knowing what can happen if we drink again.”15
While Bill and Hank had often disagreed about “this God thing,” it was particularly disturbing that the one leading the anti-God stampede was his right-hand man. Then others joined in. If Bill wanted to talk about the spiritual, okay, they said, but religion? Never! The missions at Calvary Church and on the Bowery did the God thing, and everyone knew they always failed with alcoholics.
Bill argued back at first for he knew, as few men did, that his Higher Power made everything else work, had brought him together with Dr. Bob, and had given him this insatiable desire to help other alcoholics. But the more he defied the group, the more the battle raged on. So he decided to sit back and hear them out, to keep an open mind. And as the hours passed, he began to understand their anxieties, their fears, and their prejudices as he never had before. A compromise began to form in his mind, a compromise that soon everyone would come to accept, including the recovering drunks in Akron and elsewhere. And it was a compromise that would enable the Fellowship to attract believers and nonbelievers alike, the willful and the beaten-down, the citizens of all nations and the sons and daughters of all “Gods.”
First, they would label the steps as “A Suggested Program of Recovery.” Everyone agreed that night that no drunk would rebel at a mere “suggestion.” It was the “musts” that bothered them and Bill removed all “musts” from the steps.
And second—and this proved providential—whenever the word God was to be used in the steps or anywhere else in the book now and into the future, it would be followed by the phrase “as we understood Him.” Once again there was a meeting of the minds, including Hank, that this would open the gates wide enough for all drunks to pass through, regardless of their belief or lack of belief. This settled the group controversy once and for all.16
But then came another bump in the road, only this one had nothing to do with the group. It concerned a hurtful misunderstanding between Lois and her husband. From the beginning of his book project, Bill had always felt it necessary to address the wives and families of alcoholics, to share with them the knowledge and insight he and Dr. Bob and the Fellowship in general had gleaned from their painful experiences and to offer whatever sage advice they could to those still living with this terrible disease. And Lois had always felt that Bill would involve her in this process. That, she felt, was only natural since she herself had lived through those harrowing times and had come to learn much from her own experiences. That’s why Lois was certain her husband would want her to write the chapter in the book, “To The Wives” and even the following one, “The Family Afterward.” When he didn’t, she was devastated.
They had often talked about spouses not being as happy as should be expected after an alcoholic was sober for a while. They wondered together why the initial exuberance that comes with sobriety couldn’t be sustained. What was it that impeded these relationships and what could be done to solve this disappointing problem . . . not just for the spouse of the alcoholic but for the entire family as well?
With Lois now embarked on her own journey of self-discovery and learning much from others similarly involved, who else could have greater insight and a more experienced perspective? So when Bill came up with the flimsy excuse that the book had to be written in the same style, Lois didn’t buy it. Not only didn’t she accept his rationale, but the hurt from his dismaying decision stayed with her for years.17
Lois simply buried the hurt inside where she had buried many other things in the past. Later in life, as she looked back at that incident, she shared with a close friend: “While the disappointment still remains, I finally came to see, when reading what Bill wrote in those chapters, that he did understand and appreciate all that I had gone through as the wife of an alcoholic, and all the pain and suffering the malady of alcoholism had brought into my life. That at least salved the hurt somewhat.”18
By the middle of January 1939, Bill had finished the book. That’s when the final controversy arose—what should its title be? Everyone in the Fellowship, both in New York and Ohio, seemed to have a suggestion. Lois once said that more than a hundred names were considered including Hank’s tongue-in-cheek offering—“The Bill W. Movement.” She noted with a smile that while her husband may have enjoyed the momentary flattery, he killed that notion very quickly. “He still had a big ego,” Lois once shared, “but not that big.”
In the end, six suggested titles led the pack. They were, One Hundred Men, The Empty Glass, The Dry Way, The Dry Life, Dry Frontiers, and The Way Out. The last one, The Way Out, seemed to be the favorite of most until Bill asked his friend Fitz to find out how many other books carried the same title. Fitz had a former business partner in Washington, D.C., who knew someone at the Library of Congress. When it was discovered there were at least twenty-five books called The Way Out, that name dropped to the bottom of the heap.
That’s when one of the members at Clinton Street—nobody could ever recall exactly who—pointed out that they had been calling themselves “anonymous alcoholics” for some time. So he suggested that moniker as a book title. When Bill turned the words around to “Alcoholics Anonymous,” the name was not only chosen unanimously as the title for the book, but soon became the name for the entire Fellowship—“The Fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous.”19
By March 1939, book pages were rolling off the presses at the Cornwall Printing plant in Cornwall, New York, an excellent company recommended by Gene Exman of Harper Brothers. Supersalesman Hank had talked Bill, Dr. Bob, and the foundation board into pricing the treatise at three dollars and fifty cents a copy, rather steep back in 1939. So to convince the buyers they would be getting their money’s worth, Hank told the printer to use the thickest paper they had in the plant.
“The original volume proved to be so bulky,” Lois would often share when talking about that historical event, “that it soon became known as the ‘Big Book.’ That’s where the name came from and why it’s still called that today even though it’s not nearly so bulky.”20
Hank’s plan to sell books was publicity, publicity, and more publicity. He thought he had Reader’s Digest talked into doing an article about the Fellowship, but that fell through at the last moment. So did everything else in his promotion plan. As a result, five thousand copies of the Big Book lay idle in Cornwall Printing’s warehouse for months after their publication. It seemed they weren’t worth the paper they were printed on. And as the books remained piled up in Cornwall, the bills continued to pile up at Clinton Street.
“I had difficulty sleeping at times,” Lois once shared with a close friend. “I would walk through the house late at night wondering what I would do if I ever lost the only real home I ever knew. It was frightful to think about. Bill kept assuring me that things would work out. That soon the book would begin to sell. That it just had to.”21
Then suddenly came more excitement—another hopeful light at the end of an ever-lengthening tunnel. A newcomer by the name of Morgan Rogers, who had only recently sobered up at Clinton Street, told Hank and Bill that he knew Gabriel Heatter very well and had worked with him in the past. Gabriel Heatter was an immensely popular radio broadcaster in the 1930s and 1940s whose nationwide program We the People focused on heartrending human-interest stories. Morgan, who had once been in the publishing business himself and was a very good speaker, offered to tell his own heartrending story on Heatter’s radio show, talk about the Fellowship, and plug Bill’s book.
Once Hank confirmed Morgan’s appearance on the national radio program, he put together an elaborate promotion scheme to take advantage of the exposure. More than twenty thousand postcards were mailed out to doctors and related medical practitioners east of the Mississippi announcing Heatter’s broadcast and urging them to send for a copy of Alcoholics Anonymous while it was still available. Then he and Bill and the group sat back and waited for the anticipated avalanche of replies to pour in.
They waited anxiously for three whole days before going to the post office, carrying with them a large suitcase to collect the deluge of reply cards they had anticipated. They found twelve cards, two made out so illegibly they were probably from medics in their cups. Just two more replies dribbled in a few days later. The scheme turned out to be a total failure, and the rest of the five thousand books continued to gather dust in the Cornwall warehouse.
On Wednesday, April 26, 1939, the day following the We the People broadcast, Lois and Bill Wilson received an eviction notice from the bank, telling them they must vacate the house that had been the Burnham family home for half a century.
Lois’s worst nightmare had now become a reality. She cried for days. Bill couldn’t console her. In fact, his presence at times only made things worse, for as hard as she tried not to blame him, the words were always at the tip of her tongue. Finally she had to face the facts, and the facts were they had to move. But where? What could they afford? What could they take with them and what did they have to leave behind?
Then one day Annie Smith showed up on her doorstep. Though not in the best of health, she had come all the way from Akron to help Lois, to calm her, to convince her that God had a very special plan for her life, that everything she was going through at the moment had a purpose, a meaning, and that some day she would understand why. Annie then took her out on the town to shake her from her blues. They went to a movie, ate dinner at a nice restaurant, and had a banana split at Schrafft’s. Annie picked up the bill. She said it was her way of repaying her dear friend for all she had given her.22 The next day, Annie joined Lois’s “kitchen group” for one last meeting at Clinton Street. While the ladies were thrilled to meet Dr. Bob’s wife, they were sad about Lois’s dire situation. Many offered to share their own homes and apartments with her and Bill for as long as necessary. By the time Annie left for Akron, Lois’s spirits were buoyed a bit, and she was prepared to face the difficult tasks ahead.
The house was still filled with possessions her parents had accumulated since 1888, Lois said. She also had her own things to pack. It took her months to sort everything out, distribute some to friends and relatives, and pack up what they wanted to put in storage. They donated carloads of things to the Salvation Army and Goodwill Industries.
Lois labeled every single item in the house she planned to keep, whether it was stuck away in some bureau draw or sitting idly on a shelf. And her organizational skills had her put each item on a list—from silverware to blankets to books—so she could find them at the storage warehouse if need be.23
She said it was heartbreaking to leave Clinton Street. “Having no money for even a small apartment, we had no idea when or where we would ever again have a home of our own. But our AA friends, the sober alcoholics in the Fellowship and their wives, helped us out. Many invited us to stay with them until we were able to afford a place of our own. I soon began to feel like a vagabond, living off the kindness and generosity of others. If I wasn’t familiar with humility before, I certainly was now.”24 Had it not been for the fact that Lois had already “lived around,” having traveled across the country on a motorcycle with Bill, knowing how to pack frugally, camping out in all kinds of weather, accepting the graciousness of strangers to share their abodes in North Carolina, Florida, and New England, perhaps she could not have handled what she was about to face over the next two years—two years in which she and Bill were to move fifty-one times and often live in conditions that were both uncomfortable and humiliating.
What must Lois Burnham Wilson have felt that chilly, gray spring morning as she stood on the sidewalk outside of 182 Clinton Street and watched her possessions being carried out and packed into a van? What shame this proud woman must have felt when she and her husband found themselves almost penniless, without even enough money to pay the movers. If it hadn’t been for their friends in the AA group setting up the “Bill and Lois Improvement Fund,”25 which barely collected enough money to pay the storage company’s bill for a single month, all their furnishings would have been left in the street.
As she stared at the stately brownstone one last time, she must have been thinking back to those wonderful childhood days when her mother dressed her so prettily for kindergarten, and their housekeeper, Maggie Fay, led her to the front door and watched her bound down the steps and into the horse-drawn black brougham filled with her noisy classmates.
She must have thought about those disturbing nights when her little sister Barbara, still recovering from her terrible burns, awakened in their bedroom and sobbed in her arms from the fright and the pain. And about those wonderful parties and formal dinners when she squelched her giggles over the guests who squirmed and blushed holding hands with strangers as the family said grace.
She must have been remembering all the time she spent in the den, talking and studying with her best friend, Elise Valentine. Just the thought of their many years of friendship and their bitter parting must have added to her heartache that day.
And of course she had to be thinking of her and Bill’s wedding in that lovely, ornate parlor filled with guests, he in his army uniform and she a blushing bride, and their hopes and joys as they looked forward to their exciting future. Yes, there was a war in Europe, and they both knew that Bill would be leaving shortly to help conquer the enemy. But then he would return home and conquer the world, to achieve the greatness she knew he had within him.
That’s when Bill took her hand and slowly led her away from 182 Clinton Street in the heart of Brooklyn Heights, New York. They both were carrying their own suitcases.
The Clinton Street boys also had to find new abodes. Some buddied up in small, inexpensive apartments. Some moved into rooming houses. Others, particularly the newest arrivals, returned to places like the Salvation Army and the Calvary Mission, where at least they could get “two hots and a cot.”
Since Bill and Hank were working on another book promotion deal with Morgan Rogers, for the first week Bill and Lois stayed in Morgan’s small apartment on Fifty-first Street in Manhattan. A bachelor, Morgan slept on the couch while Lois and Bill snuggled in a twin bed. Lois remembered the place well, having bumped her knee painfully on a dresser while hauling her suitcase into the tiny bedroom.
But their second stop was much more pleasant for two reasons. First, Lois had decided to make the best of things for a while, turning her life over to her Higher Power and trying not to feel sorry for herself. Somehow, some way, everything would work out just as Annie Smith had told her. And second, she and Bill were back out in the country, the environment she loved. It seemed that Chris, the wire-rope salesman, had a small bungalow on Green Pond in northern New Jersey that he inherited from his parents. So he lent it to Lois and Bill until the end of June when others in his family would be using it. At least the “vagabonds” could now breathe freely for two months while deciding where to go next.
When she shared those times with friends later on, Lois would recall how much she enjoyed being out in the country again, even though it was just for a short while. She said honking geese would wake her and Bill in the morning. They would run outside the bungalow to see them flying north to nest, sailing across the pale blue sky in their usually orderly triangle.
Then she and Bill would hear a loud noise behind them like someone starting up an old motor. They’d turn to see a flight of ducks beating their wings as they rose from a nearby pond. Lois would then inhale the morning dew, smile at the new spring flowers, kiss her husband warmly, and saunter back inside to make him breakfast.26
Since they had no car, they had to walk four miles to the small town of Newfoundland for provisions. The grant from the Rockefeller philanthropies hadn’t completely run out, so they were still receiving thirty dollars a week from the Riverside Church fund and twenty dollars every now and then from the “Bill and Lois Improvement Fund.” It was enough for food and travel but little else.
Bill was still meeting with members of the Alcoholic Foundation, keeping in touch with Dr. Silkworth, gathering with his sober alcoholics at various homes around town, and working with Hank and Morgan and others on ideas to get the Big Book off the ground. So he frequently took the train into New York and sometimes spent a day or two there with some friends.
Lois became so enamored by the lovely place on Green Pond that the time just flew by. Soon their solitude and the fun things they did together came to an abrupt end. It was June and Chris’s family was due to arrive. That’s when Lois and Bill began another sojourn, one that would find them changing abodes fifty-one times during the years of 1939 and 1940.27 Over the course of this “living around” period, Lois and Anne Bingham—the first woman she had met that night from the cars parked along Clinton Street—became very close friends as she and Bill spent several weeks at her Westchester home from time to time. Anne would invite the “kitchen group” ladies over for a meeting, or she and Lois would travel to one of their homes. By now the group had expanded and splintered into other groups. And the women were beginning to focus more on their own lives and their own problems and less on their husbands. Lois once said of those days that she could sense the principles of AA were starting to “rub off on them.”
It was late January of 1940. Lois and Bill were staying with Marty Mann, the first recovered woman alcoholic, at her home in snowy Greenwich, Connecticut, when they received the news. Willard Richardson, who now chaired the Alcoholic Foundation board, said his boss, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., wanted to give a dinner for the AA Fellowship. He had been quietly following the movement’s progress over the past three years and now wanted some of his wealthy friends to hear the marvelous story of how it was continuing to cure hopeless drunks.
Lois remembered her husband’s initial reaction to Richardson’s remarks. “He assumed that Mr. Rockefeller had changed his mind and had decided to give AA money and to ask his friends to do the same,” Lois told a close friend. “He had just gotten used to the idea that the Fellowship shouldn’t have a lot of money so now he had all sorts of mixed feelings about what was happening.”28 This was especially true when he learned the invitation list for the dinner was “a veritable constellation of New York’s prominent and wealthy. Anybody could see that their total financial worth might easily be a billion dollars.”29
Dr. Bob came to New York a few days before the dinner to discuss the prospects with Bill and the foundation trustees. They shared ideas on what the Fellowship might do were millions to be donated. That perhaps there could be AA hospitals for the sickest of drunks and halfway houses to help them get back on their feet. Perhaps there could be AA-financed clubhouses where alcoholics could gather for meetings as well as social events. It all sounded wonderful—that money properly spent could help thousands of recovering alcoholics in many meaningful ways. The foundation could also have its own office, it could have a staff to help manage the growing movement, and Bill could finally draw a salary that he and Lois could live on comfortably. After all, didn’t they deserve it by now?
While the trustees all seemed to agree, Bill could tell that Bob had serious reservations. He told Bill as they left the meeting that he never met a drunk who could handle a whole lot of money very well—and besides, they were all once again counting their chickens before they hatched.
The Rockefeller dinner was held on February 8, 1940, at Manhattan’s exclusive Union Club. It was an all-male black-tie affair. Of the four hundred prominent and influential people invited, seventy-five accepted. Using his characteristic promotional instincts, Hank placed one “very sober” AA member at each table, having rehearsed with them the story of their miraculous path to sobriety for their guests to hear. John D., Jr., had taken ill a few days earlier, so his son, Nelson Rockefeller, who was thirty-one at the time, chaired the proceedings.
As Bill and Dr. Bob told their stories that evening, supported by the testimony of Dr. Silkworth and others, it became obvious that the audience of millionaires was both sympathetic and impressed. Bill’s hopes and expectations soared. At one point, Dr. Bob leaned over and whispered: “Keep both feet on the ground.” Bill simply frowned.30
Did it occur to either one of them that this was déjà vu all over again, that they had been through all of this once before, only without the squab on toast that was served at dinner? Neither one ever said. But as it turned out, they had been.
When the guests had finished asking questions and offering flattering comments, Nelson Rockefeller returned to the podium. A hush came over the room. Bill could hear his heart thumping—then almost stop as he listened to the rich young man summarize the evening. He thanked his guests for attending and for witnessing with him what his family believed was the birth of an important movement. Then he underscored his father’s faith in AA, and his belief that its power lay in the fact that the message was always carried from one man to the next without any thought of financial reward. For this reason, he concluded, he agreed with his father that AA must always be self-supporting as it was with the early Christians. That all they needed from the public and from the men gathered there that evening was their confidence and goodwill.
Then the guests rose and gave Bill and Bob and the AA Fellowship a thunderous round of applause. After hearty handshakes and pats on the back, Bill watched in disbelief as millions of dollars walked slowly out of the room. He slumped back into his chair and tried to figure out what this evening, what this elaborate dinner was all about. But for the moment, he couldn’t come up with an answer. He would later understand, however, that the confidence and goodwill of such people contributed enormously to lessening the stigma of alcoholism. He would also realize once more, after thinking it through, that a whole lot of money really and truly would have unraveled the Fellowship sooner or later because, as his friend Buddy the derelict had said a few years earlier, “sobriety was something that could not be bought or paid for.”
The Fellowship did receive a little money as the result of the dinner. Nelson Rockefeller purchased five hundred Big Books, which he sent to those on his original guest list and to some libraries around the state where he thought they might be of some help to families. And the Alcoholic Foundation received an additional two thousand dollars in anonymous contributions for a total of about four thousand dollars. But all this did was cover some foundation expenses and help provide Lois and Bill with the bare necessities as they pondered what to do next about their future—which certainly looked far bleaker than it had before February 8.
Then, just before the first crocus of spring fought its way into the sunlight, Bill was hit with still another deep disappointment that made him feel he was back in the dead of winter. His right-hand man, Hank, got drunk.
“First there was Ebby and now Hank,” Lois said, recalling the incident. “Here were two of his closest friends he was sure would stay sober forever. He began to question himself all over again until he came to realize what made them start drinking again in the first place.”31
She said Bill saw they were no longer helping newcomers, had drifted away from the group, and harbored resentments against certain people, which they refused to discuss. Lois also knew that Hank and his wife, Kathleen, weren’t getting along in their second try at marriage. She had pleaded with Kathleen to attend some of her “kitchen group” meetings, but to no avail. Kathleen insisted that drinking was her husband’s problem, not hers, and that she had been very patient in letting him attend all his AA meetings even though he wasn’t paying enough attention to his business or to her.
On that score, the confused and upset woman was correct, especially about the business. The Honor Dealers buying syndicate had continued to evaporate as Hank spent more time on AA affairs than on his own. But, according to Lois, two other reasons may have led to his slip.
First, Bill had been sharing Hank’s Newark business office to write his book and conduct some of the Alcoholic Foundation’s work at the same time, contributing to the rent whenever he could. Now Bill was talking about finding a small office in New York for the foundation’s headquarters when all along his friend felt it would remain in Newark. This misunderstanding created resentment between these two good friends.
Second, and probably the more important reason, Hank had become smitten with Ruth Hock. In fact, as his own marriage was crumbling once again, he proposed wedded bliss to Ruth. While she respected her boss for his dedication to helping the less fortunate, she was not in love with him and therefore not interested in his proposal. She turned him down.
Filled with anger at his wife, resenting Bill, hurt by Ruth’s rejection, and with no God in his life, Hank had little or no defense against alcohol. He went out and got drunk, and he stayed drunk for many months. He tried to come back to the Fellowship on several occasions, but his false pride, anger, and other character defects always stood in his way. His drinking finally grew much worse and, in a few years, it ended in his death.
Hank’s slip shook Bill to his very core. It forced him to take a good look at his own life once again and the utter failure he saw when measured against the world’s standards for success. He recognized that the struggle he was waging to build a sanctum for suffering alcoholics only heaped more hardship on his loving wife and caused him great guilt. He decided AA could get along without him. That he had brought it along far enough and now it could survive on its own. He needed to put his own house in order and get a job, any sort of a job. He needed money and he needed it fast.
Bill thought about his young friend Chris who had lent him his bungalow on Green Pond. Chris was now making a good living selling wire rope for Paulson and Weber, a large industrial products distributor, and had always kidded Bill about being the best damn salesman he had ever met. The former stockbroker decided to put that to a test with Chris’s help.
Although he knew nothing about wire-rope customers and had even less interest in the product itself, Bill spent that summer doing his best under very pressing and distracting circumstances. It barely put a few dollars in his pocket.
Lois also tried to find a way to bring in some money. With life being too hectic and disorganized to hold down a regular job, she tried her hand at writing. She had once sold an article about veneers to House and Garden magazine. However, when she submitted some tales to the magazine Romantic Stories, she received pink slips rather than greenbacks.32
In June of 1940, a group of New York AA’s, concerned about Bill pulling back from his activities for the Fellowship, met with him to say that the movement needed his continued guidance and direction. Otherwise it would fall apart. Too many recovered alcoholics were already going in different directions, setting their own rules. They said they also needed a central place to meet as they once had at Clinton Street. So these concerned members came up with a proposition. Two of their number who had a few extra bucks were willing to guarantee the rent on a quaint little building at 344 1/2 West Twenty-fourth Street in Manhattan. The building, which could be supported by passing the basket, would actually become an AA clubhouse and serve multiple purposes. It would be used for AA meetings, contain an office for Bill, and be a gathering place for members to pass their time and talk about their disease and their recovery. They said Bill and Lois could live rent free in the rooms on the second floor, which were neat and clean. They convinced him that in time, as the Fellowship continued to grow, the Big Book would sell and his royalties would be enough for him to live on.
Bill sat with his wife that night and talked things over. They had come this far together, Lois said; why turn back now? If God had wanted him to be a successful wire-rope salesman, He would have at least had him enroll in the navy, not the army, in order to get the right experience and contacts. They both laughed, something that they hadn’t done for a while.
So they moved into what soon became known as the Twenty-fourth Street Clubhouse, and Bill dedicated himself once again to the task of saving drunks. He set up a temporary office there until the Fellowship could afford a larger central office some time later. Lois described the clubhouse in her memoirs. “It used to be a stable,” she wrote, “so is set back from the street and entered through a covered passage with a doorway on the street. It used to be the Illustrators Club so is very attractive. One large room, with fireplace and paneled in knotty pine, and kitchen are downstairs. Upstairs there is a large room with skylights, and two small bedrooms and two toilets.”33
Lois went ahead and fixed up the place. The ten feet square room, once used by the Illustrators Club of New York, had little privacy and few conveniences. Still, Lois tried her best to at least make it bright and comfortable. She and Bill painted the walls and found two fruit boxes that they used as lamp stands and bureaus. They screwed hooks into the wall to hang their clothes, which they had to get at by climbing across a bed without a footboard. And they ventilated the room by opening the door to the fire escape.34
After she and Bill moved in, Lois described how the clubhouse quickly became a beehive of AA activity.
“It was Clinton Street 1935,” she wrote, “only more so. There were always visitors, people driving in from Westchester or Connecticut, winos shuffling in from the Salvation Army down the street, or out-of-towners far from the safety of their group, who needed the security of this crazy, solid oasis in the city. These were men from every rung of the social ladder, who never conceivably would have drunk together, never would have gone to the same bars, yet here they were in one room, helping each other to keep sober. Whatever hour Bill wandered in, there was a feeling of a meeting. In a sense they were all members of an exclusive club and only they understood what they had to pay to get there.”35
These notes from her memoirs showed how much Lois had come to understand what AA was really all about and how much every alcoholic had in common. And she was coming to understand the same thing about the wives and the families of alcoholics.
Lois didn’t write in her memoirs about the “accidental” break-ins in the upstairs rooms at the clubhouse, but she did tell a close friend. It seemed the upstairs bedroom was sometimes mistaken for one of the bathrooms since the doors looked alike. There were times when newcomers unfamiliar with the place mistook her bedroom door for the entrance to the toilet and barged in on her when she forgot to lock her door. It was embarrassing, to say the least.
Even after Bill made sure the toilets were clearly marked, there was yet another incident. A newcomer still in his cups and in a hurry to get to the men’s room grabbed the handle of Lois’s bedroom door instead. He jiggled and pulled and began banging on the door until Lois finally had to open it and scream at him to leave. The man slunk away red-faced, leaving her weeping over her unseemly circumstances. That was when Lois knew she couldn’t go on like this much longer.36
Shortly after that incident, she and her husband were invited to spend a weekend with some AA friends, Ruth and Wilbur Slocum, in Chappaqua, New York, a small, upscale town in the heart of Westchester County.
“We were lugging our suitcases through Grand Central Station, hurrying to catch the train,” Lois shared in her later years, “when suddenly I felt overwhelmed by the way we were living. I can’t explain why it suddenly happened like that. I sat down on the cold marble stairs and burst out at Bill: ‘I can’t go on like this anymore! Will we never have a home of our own?’ I wept oceans right there in public.
“Bill finally consoled me. He understood perfectly what I was going through. He wanted a place for us too. He asked me to put up with it for just a little while longer. He had said that before only this time for some reason I believed him.”37
By now the AA Fellowship was more than five years old and had been spreading its wings far beyond New York and Ohio. Sober alcoholics traveling on business and finding themselves alone in a strange hotel in a strange city, as Bill once had at the Mayflower Hotel, sought out other drunks to help themselves stay sober. That’s how the Fellowship arrived in Philadelphia, began to grow, and came to the attention of Judge Curtis Bok, the owner and publisher of the Saturday Evening Post, at that time one of the largest and most influential magazines in the country.
Curious to learn the truth behind the wild rumors he was hearing about “miraculous cures” of hopeless drunks, Judge Bok hired a well-known, hard-nosed reporter by the name of Jack Alexander to look into the movement. He wanted Alexander to investigate “this AA thing” as thoroughly as he had recently probed the New Jersey crime rackets, and then write an in-depth article about whatever he uncovered.
The truth was, the reporter was extremely skeptical when he began his assignment in November of 1940 and expected to write a critical and derisive piece. “When did you ever meet a drunk who told you the truth?” Alexander cynically thought he’d never met a drunk who told the truth until he met Bill Wilson and Dr. Robert Smith. He was frankly impressed by their candor and stunned by what they were doing.38 Lois remembered that both Bill and Dr. Bob were leery when the reporter first called to tell them of the Post’s interest in the Fellowship. The idea of a “full and complete investigation” sounded rather ominous. But then, they had nothing to hide, and a story about AA in a major publication like the Post could get their message out to thousands. So they decided to meet with the reporter.
Once Alexander agreed to protect the anonymity of his interviewees by using fictitious names, Bill took him in tow for almost a month. He brought him to Akron and Cleveland, to Brooklyn and Westchester County. He sat him down with Dr. Bob, walked him through the new alcoholic ward at St. Thomas Hospital in Akron, introduced him to Dr. Silkworth at Towns, and had him meet and chat with the nonalcoholic trustees of the Alcoholic Foundation in Manhattan. Every question Alexander asked was answered forthrightly and without reservation. He was treated almost like a member of the Fellowship in terms of openness and trust.
When his story was finished, it was not only approved but applauded by the editors of the Post and scheduled for the March 1, 1941, issue. It was a cover story of about seventy-five hundred words, headlined “Alcoholics Anonymous: Freed Slaves of Drink, Now They Free Others.”39 It detailed exactly how the program of AA worked, supported by the stories of some of the men it helped get sober, mainly Bill and Bob. And finally it highlighted AA’s acceptance by many medical, legal, and social service professionals.
The effect of its publication on the still relatively small band of sober drunks was explosive. It stretched Bill and Dr. Bob and their fellow members almost beyond their capacity to meet the demand for help. Overnight, attendance at meetings rose dramatically. Older members were running wild trying to make “Twelfth Step Calls”—the term AA uses to describe sober alcoholics carrying the message to wet ones.
In the beginning of March, 1941, there were about two hundred members attending meetings at the clubhouse. Before the end of March, the membership more than doubled. Lois wrote in her memoirs, “It was the same everywhere. Groups outgrew their meeting places and had to be divided. Older members worked frantically with newcomers. These newcomers in turn, after a month or so of sobriety, were sent on Twelfth Step calls to help still newer-comers. It is estimated that 6,000 AAs owe the start of their sobriety to the Post article, and nobody knows how many more thousands were sparked by them.”40
It can be said that Alcoholics Anonymous was firmly established in 1941 as a great American achievement.
And as new members poured into the Fellowship, they needed the program’s “Bible” to learn from. So the piles of dusty Big Books sitting in the Cornwall warehouse were rapidly depleted and more books had to be printed. The royalties began to slowly accumulate. Bill could finally see the prospect of earning a decent income after his long struggle and dedication to helping his fellow alcoholics. And perhaps he could somehow make it up to his loving wife, who never left his side.
Lois remembered how her husband turned to her one afternoon as they were returning to the clubhouse to face another desk full of mail and pleas for help and smiled: “Maybe it’s about time we started looking for a place of our own.”41
She hesitated. She was waiting to feel those butterflies in her stomach again or hear them whispering in her ear. But they weren’t there. Could it possibly be they had gone, had flown off somewhere to haunt some other doubting Thomas? She didn’t know, and, for the moment at least, she didn’t care. For Bill’s words had just made her deliriously happy.