5
BILL CHOSE THE MOST ELEGANT AND EXPENSIVE RESTAURANT IN midtown Manhattan for the occasion. The salad was crisp, the steak tender, the service excellent, and the baked Alaska a delightful treat. While the evening was to celebrate their expectant parenthood, Lois knew her husband was trying at the same time to make up for his boorish behavior over the past several days.
He had told her all about his disastrous meeting with Frank Shaw, his resultant anger and depression, and his deep disappointment over royally screwing up a great opportunity. He feared he had lost a strong Wall Street ally and perhaps even Frank Shaw’s friendship. Lois squeezed his hand and assured him that couldn’t be the case, not with Frank. He wasn’t like that.
Still, as her humbled husband confessed, even this disaster was no reason to come home drunk three nights in a row, spoil the whole weekend for Lois, and rain on the parade of her exciting news. He promised it would never happen again.
They kissed and toasted with their water glasses. “The third time’s a charm,” he kept saying. “You’ll see, Lo. The third time’s a charm.”
They made love again that night and Bill fell asleep in her arms. She stroked his hair and touched his cheek, hoping and praying that he was right—that the third time nature, as the doctor had said, would reward them beyond measure. Two nights later, Bill came home unusually late from school. He tiptoed into the bedroom trying not to wake her. When he crawled under the covers, she pretended to be asleep. Her heart sank when she smelled the liquor on his breath.
A little over a month into her pregnancy, Lois’s doctor strongly suggested she request a leave of absence from her job in order to take every precaution possible. Her father agreed and came by regularly to check on her. The leave may have been good for her physically but perhaps not so good emotionally. Every twinge, every sensation would raise her anxiety. Lois simply had too much time on her hands to sit around and think—not only about the baby but also about what Bill might be doing at the moment.1
Why was he continuing to drink? she would ask herself. He still loved his job. He told her so whenever she asked. And he was still attending law school although now he was missing some classes, saying he was stuck at the office or at a late business meeting. Bill was a terrible liar. Even he realized Lois knew he was at some speakeasy with Ebby or with another bunch of hard-drinking friends.
What was happening to him? What was happening to them? Lois would sit by the window and recall the promises they made when they were courting back in Vermont. They would never lose their love of nature, their love of the outdoors, they swore to each other. Those weekends before she became pregnant again, when they hiked in the Palisades or rented a boat and sailed along the Hudson River, filled them with such peace, joy, and contentment. It was so puzzling to her that on those treks, Bill never seemed to think about alcohol.
Perhaps the combination of the fresh air and strenuous exercise created some special inner potion that took away the need for booze. Because when he returned to the city, trudging those dim chasms of Wall Street, that potion seemed to disappear and he was looking for a drink. And it was no longer just one drink, or even a couple. A couple always led to a couple more. If only they could both be back in the countryside right now, she would sigh.
Maybe, just maybe, she would then say to herself, hoping and praying she was right, this time they would have a strong, healthy baby, and the excitement of fatherhood would prove to be the most effective potion of all to quench Bill’s desire for alcohol.2
Little did Lois realize that her husband was struggling himself with the same questions at the very same time—mainly, why couldn’t he simply stop drinking so much? He always started with such good intentions. He would only have a few. This time he meant it, he’d insist. But those few always seemed to turn into a few more and then one too many—and he was off to the races. Even that hurt look on Lois’s face when he staggered in past midnight couldn’t seem to slow him down.
He had to shake off this Frank Shaw mess, he kept telling himself. He’d sit down and put together a new and more positive spin on his company research idea. That’s what he’d do. Then he would present it to some other heavy hitters on the Street. Once they backed him and things got rolling, those damn speakeasies could take all their damn booze and flush it down the damn toilet because he wouldn’t need it anymore. He’d be on top of the world. But in the meantime, maybe he’d have just one more for the road.
It was now May of 1924. As the weeks passed, Lois grew tired of sitting around reading books or talking on the telephone. One afternoon she decided she had to stop this moping business. She was feeling a lot better, she told herself, and there hadn’t been any twinges or strange sensations in quite a while. Standing in the parlor, she ran her finger across the nearby lamp table. It was covered with dust. So were the lamp shade, the coffee table, and the old rocking chair she inherited from Aunt Emma. Before long she was dusting and cleaning and feeling useful again.
The pains didn’t start until she reached for some towels in a closet above the kitchen sink. Lois grabbed her side and sank into a chair at the kitchen table. Then she felt another pain, sharp and stabbing like the first. She tried to take a deep breath and couldn’t. Beads of perspiration broke out on her forehead. When the next pain hit, she decided to call Bill. The phone was on the cabinet next to her.
Bill wasn’t in his office. She was told he was out at a meeting. She called Ebby. He was gone for the day. She glanced at the clock above the stove. It was almost four thirty. She tried to stand. There was a slight twinge, and then nothing. She moved to the sink and filled a glass with water. It cooled her insides going down. The pains seemed to be subsiding.
Lois decided to wait until after six, when Bill was due at Brooklyn Law School. She switched on the radio, but even the music and occasional news report didn’t help pass the time. It simply dragged on.
By six fifteen the pains had grown more intense. She called the school but Bill was not in class. As she hung up the phone, she suddenly realized she was bleeding. Trying to control her emotions, Lois immediately called her father. He had just arrived home.
A half hour later, Lois was in an ambulance on her way to Skene Sanitarium, a women’s hospital in Brooklyn where Dr. Burnham was on the staff. The specialist he brought in quickly discovered that a second ectopic pregnancy had burst a fallopian tube. Lois was rushed into surgery. The surgical team also found an ovarian cyst and was forced to remove her ovaries and both fallopian tubes. While they left her uterus intact to help maintain Lois’s normal sexual feelings and desires, her worst fears of never having children were now a reality.3
Bill staggered into their apartment well past midnight. He was confused when he discovered Lois wasn’t home. Perhaps she had gone to see her mother, was the first thought that entered his clouded mind. But she’d never stay out so late, not in her condition. He put on some coffee and waited. He finally concluded something must be wrong. Despite the late hour, he called Clinton Street. Katherine gave him the news.
Dr. Burnham was still at Skene Sanitarium when his somewhat- disheveled son-in-law arrived, still slightly inebriated even after several cups of black coffee. Being a direct man, and now a very weary and worried one, Clark Burnham tore into Bill with all the anger and frustration a caring father can generate under such circumstances. He told him his wife could have bled to death waiting for the likes of him to come home from one of his damn speakeasies. He castigated him for his carousing and his total irresponsibility with regard to Lois, who deserved far better than she was getting.
Finally, when the good doctor gained control of himself, he explained frankly and fully the medical procedures that were required and then stormed out of the hospital leaving Bill to contemplate what to do next.
As he watched his father-in-law exit the dim, quiet lobby, the trembling young Wall Street want-to-be was shocked by the very next thought that jumped into his head. While he knew this was certainly neither the time nor the place, what he wanted right now more than anything was another drink. He fought off the insane impulse and went looking instead for a nurse.4
Upstairs, Lois was beginning to wake and was about to face her cruel reality. When asked later in life how she felt while lying in that hospital bed trying to accept such tragic news, Lois sadly replied, “When I was told about the surgery and that I could never have a baby, I cried for a long, long time. I didn’t want to see Bill at first. Naturally he thought I was angry because he wasn’t there when I needed him. But it wasn’t that at all. My feelings were all mixed up and I didn’t know what to say to him. I knew how disappointed he would be.”5
Bill sat in the waiting room for hours, smoking and drinking glasses of cold water. Sometimes he paced up and down, filled with guilt over what he had done. But mostly he was torn by his love and concern for his beloved Lois, who didn’t deserve all this pain and anguish. When he shared these feelings with her later, it helped lift her spirits. But now all Bill wanted to know was when he could see his wife. He was told she was still recovering from the ether; perhaps he should go home and come back later. He refused. He would wait. He would be here when she was able to see him.
It was around dawn when the nurse on duty, a motherly woman in her fifties, entered Lois’s room, saw she was awake, and asked if she needed anything. Lois needed to talk.
“This kind and lovely nurse helped me to realize what I already knew in my heart,” Lois recalled. “I had done nothing wrong to prevent our having children. She said I had to accept this burden as God’s will even if I couldn’t understand it or agree with it, and that none of this was my fault. Still, somehow I could not help feeling guilty. I came to realize later this was one reason why I didn’t blame Bill so much when he continued to drink more and more.”6 Shortly afterward, Bill walked nervously into her room, his head down, tears welling in his eyes. They didn’t speak about what had happened right away. He just sat there at her bedside holding her hand. After all, what words could adequately express what they both felt at that moment? A moment that seemed like the end of something for Lois and posed a bleak, bewildering fog for Bill. How could they pick up the pieces, find a new direction, and move on?
It was several months before Lois regained her strength. It was really her emotional lassitude, which she later described as “self-pity,” that prevented her from recovering more quickly. Bill took two weeks off from work and they traveled to Vermont hoping, perhaps, to find something there that would rekindle their life, spark the kind of hope and joy they always found in the mountains and at the lake. Grandpa Griffith passed away while they were in East Dorset, which only added to their sadness.
The next six or seven months dragged by. Lois went back to work at the Brooklyn Naval Hospital, and Bill continued his sporadic drinking, somehow managing to hold on to his job at the bank. The evening he took his final exams at Brooklyn Law School he was so intoxicated he couldn’t read most of the questions. He justified his failure by telling himself he never wanted to be a lawyer anyway.
One night in early March of 1925, Bill came home so drunk he fell asleep on the parlor couch with all his clothes on. Lois couldn’t get him up and into bed so she simply threw a blanket over him and put a water bucket next to the couch just in case. Once too often he had thrown up on the floor and the furniture before he could reach the bathroom.
As Lois got up at about seven the next morning, she heard Bill in the kitchen making coffee. When she entered, he was at the window, smoking a cigarette and staring out into the street. He looked terrible—red-eyed, pale, and hungover. As she later recalled, he reached out his hand to her and, almost pleading, whispered in a hoarse voice, “Lo, let’s get out of this. I’ve been thinking. This idea I have . . . it can change everything, I know it can. Nobody’s ready to back me yet because they don’t understand. They can’t see it. But . . . would you take the chance with me, Lo? I finally realized . . . I just can’t go on like this anymore.”7
They sat at the kitchen table and, over coffee, Bill outlined his plan. He wanted to travel the country with her. He would visit companies, get on the inside, find out what was really going on, and write reports for Wall Street investors who could then put their money into sure winners, not crapshoots.
He felt certain that once some Wall Street big shots saw he could deliver cold, hard facts about a company’s growth and earnings potential, they’d pay handsomely for such information. Even Frank Shaw would then understand what Bill had been trying to tell him all along.
First, Bill would buy a few shares of stock in the companies he wanted to investigate, just enough to give him an entrée as a stockholder. This way he would have access to top management. He would also go in the back door and talk to the workers who knew all about the quality of the things they were producing. Then he’d check on the firm’s reputation in the community and within its industry. By the time he was finished, his investigative skills would have gleaned all the in-depth knowledge any investor would need to make an intelligent investment decision.
As he talked on and on, the pallor left his face. His enthusiasm and excitement became infectious. Lois could feel her insides coming back to life, her hope for the future rising, her belief in her man being restored. There was no doubt that Bill absolutely believed everything he was saying. What intrigued Lois the most, and what finally wiped away any hesitation, was that this wild excursion would take them out of the city and away from the speakeasies. They would be together in the country once more where the fresh air and exercise could work its magic, as it had before, and Bill wouldn’t find it necessary to drink. Lois went to work late that morning and gave the hospital her two-week notice.
Next, the soon-to-be cross-country explorers sat down and added up their assets. They had a little less than a thousand dollars. That would get them started and, if need be, they could pick up odd jobs along the way to supplement the kitty. But first they would require transportation, something reliable but inexpensive.
That weekend found Lois and Bill at the army surplus depot in Fort Hamilton, Brooklyn. They spotted a used but sturdy Harley-Davidson motorcycle with a large sidecar attached. Bill laughed and guessed that by the size of the sidecar it probably served a general or at least a bird colonel. Anyway, he was sure he could whip the motorcycle into shape in no time. They also purchased two canteens, a kerosene stove, and a passel of army blankets. The tents were all too small or in disrepair, so that important piece of equipment was left up to Lois’s ingenuity, as were many other things. Their preparations for the trip and her eagerness for the outdoor life were things she loved to talk about later on in life.
Lois purchased a tent from Sears Roebuck. It had a canvas floor and a net over the entrance to keep out mosquitoes, and it stood seven feet high and seven feet wide. She stitched in a window with netting for ventilation.
For sleeping, Lois’s mother helped her sew together seven army blankets, which gave the couple a variety of “warmth” layers for whenever the weather turned cold or hot. They rolled the blankets together with a light kapok mattress into a small bundle for easy storage on the Harley.
When it came to packing food, toiletries, pajamas, towels, and other miscellaneous items, Lois’s ingenuity paid off again. She made storage containers out of black oilcloth and lined them with rubber and tape to make them waterproof. She even made watertight coveralls for her and Bill and oil-silk liners to protect everything they took with them.
Then Lois added with a sparkle in her eye, “We felt well-prepared for anything. Crazy or not, it was fun to anticipate the open road and unknown adventures ahead.”8
Bill managed to squeeze in four huge Moody’s manuals on industrial companies. They contained general information about the firms he planned to investigate. For starters, he selected the General Electric plant in Schenectady, New York, and Giant Portland Cement in Egypt, Pennsylvania. He bought several shares in each company before leaving.
A week prior to their departure, Bill drove the motorcycle out to Prospect Park, Brooklyn, where there was still a great deal of open space. His partner was in the bumpy sidecar next to him. Did Lois remember that this was the neighborhood where a young doctor named Clark Burnham began his medical career some forty-one years earlier? She never said. The goal this day was to teach her how to handle the Harley-Davidson since traveling so many miles with only one experienced driver would be quite a chore. Lois had already driven an automobile, but the thought of sitting directly on top of the hot, noisy engine of a motorcycle gave her pause. But not for long.
Bill coaxed her into the driver’s seat and, snuggling behind her, he carefully explained all the controls—the gas, the brake, the gear shift, and the speedometer. Then he revved it up and drove very slowly in wide circles, gradually letting her take control of the steering. When it was her turn to solo, those old Clark Burnham genes took over. Once Lois felt certain the engine below wouldn’t burn her pants off, she was off and running. Her husband watched with pride and, of course, with that silly grin on his face, as Lois drove in wider and wider circles and at faster and faster speeds.9
On April 16, 1925, Lois and Bill Wilson headed for America’s heartland, bound and determined to put all the pieces back together, find the joy and contentment they had lost, and finally realize the great dreams Lois always knew her Bill was capable of achieving. And as they left that day, Lois Wilson was in the driver’s seat.
Roaring away from the crowded streets of Brooklyn into the open country before them, these bold “pioneers” could feel deep in their souls the great and exciting adventure that lay ahead.
It was the era of Bonnie and Clyde and Rudolph Valentino, a period that would see talking motion pictures and the phonograph record. They would find a vibrant land exploding with new energy and new industry, one that would produce vast cement highways and awesome power-producing dams.
Lois and Bill Wilson were entering a new world, part of a new generation. They could smell it in the air and sense its grand potential throughout every tingling nerve in their bodies.
That momentous day as Lois climbed into the driver’s seat, pulled down her goggles, and revved up the engine, she felt the world belonged to her and Bill alone and that whatever lay ahead could only be magnificent.10
Riding a motorcycle without a windshield in early April in upstate New York can be very invigorating, if not bone-chilling. Perhaps that’s why, when the trunk rack came loose less than fifty miles from home, neither of these “explorers” was too unhappy about stopping to fix it. They were somewhere outside of Poughkeepsie at the time, so they decided to camp for the night. Bill set up the tent, then belted the trunk rack to a post under the front seat. Meanwhile, Lois cooked them a nice supper. After a cup of coffee, they crawled under the army blankets and made love for the first time in months. They both had a very sound sleep.
Since Bill’s first target was the General Electric Company, they headed straight for Schenectady the next day, arriving early in the afternoon. A dairy farmer by the name of Jake Morowski gave them permission to camp in his pasture. While Bill pitched the tent under a large oak tree, Lois found some old boards next to the barn and asked Morowski if she could have them. No problem, he said. She and Bill used them to build a small table and bench to cook and eat on. Lois said later she could have spent a lifetime living in that beautiful open field under that gorgeous oak tree. But soon Bill was about his business.
The very next day he put on his best suit (actually the only one he brought along), reviewed Moody’s comments about GE, and then headed due east for the plant. His primary interest in the company, one of the early producers of electric generation equipment, was the new line of “futuristic” products rumored to be under development.
Identifying himself as a “significant investor,” he was cordially received by a staffer in the personnel department. However, when Bill asked for a tour of the production facilities and research laboratory, he was given a company brochure and a stiff good-bye handshake.
Bill arrived back at the Morowski farm quite discouraged. Lois could tell. She tried to cheer him up with the fresh apple pie she helped Mrs. Morowski bake that day. She told him about all the fun she had watching the cows being milked and chasing some strays away from their tent—beautiful little calves she’d love to take home as pets. Her husband sensed she might enjoy the life of a dairy farmer but he knew instinctively this type of rugged existence was not for him. Lois continued her chatter over dinner, telling Bill about her meeting that afternoon with a Mr. Goldfoot who owned the dairy farm right next to the Morowskis. It just so happened that Mr. Goldfoot’s two sons worked for General Electric since, with wives and families, they were not able to sustain them all with the farm. The detail about “working for General Electric” raised Bill’s eyebrows.
The next morning, the young investigator paid a call on Mr. Goldfoot. It was about a week later when he was invited to join the farmer and his boys at Dawson’s Cafe, which happened to be one of the two speakeasies in Schenectady. Bill told Lois they’d be having a bite to eat so she needn’t bother cooking him supper. He didn’t want to worry her unnecessarily—about the speakeasy, that is.
That night turned into the kind of colossal event Bill Wilson would never forget. First he bought a few rounds of beers, having one himself, naturally. Then, after convincing the Goldfoots he once worked for Thomas Edison, he said he still was not permitted to reveal the fantastic inventions on the old man’s drawing board. Feeling challenged, the farm boys drove Bill out to the GE research laboratory where they worked and showed him the “fantastic things” they were involved in.
Bill couldn’t believe his eyes. There, stretched out before him was a display of equipment and prototype devices only hinted at in science magazines—experiments in sound motion pictures, console sets, electric phonographs, magnets, and all sorts of shortwave communications. In less than an hour, he had the inside track on what General Electric was soon to become.
It was after one in the morning when Bill returned to the campsite. His Harley backfired as he approached, startling Lois, who was still awake and very tense from hearing strange noises all night. Her husband was so excited that he accidentally stumbled into the tent. He could hardly begin to tell Lois all he had just seen. As he came close, she smelled the beer on his breath. She remembered shouting:
“You’re drunk! After all your promises, you’re drunk again!”
Bill was taken aback. He knew he wasn’t. He tried hard to convince her that all he had was a few beers—that he wasn’t staggering or slurring his words. He was just excited, that’s all.
“Honest, Lo,” he kept saying. “It was just to prime the pump. Just business. I bought the Goldfoots some drinks so they would take me into the plant. Sure I had a few myself but I know now that if it’s just for business, I can handle it. Look at me.”11
As she calmed down, she could see he really wasn’t intoxicated by the booze, only by the excitement of what he had just discovered. After a few moments, she became excited along with him. Maybe he’s right, she thought to herself. If he can control his drinking like this, then maybe everything will be okay. She had met other men on Wall Street who drank with business associates and then went home to their families. Her own father drank occasionally on weekends. Perhaps Bill had finally found a way to control it himself. Yet those nagging butterflies still remained in the pit of her stomach, spurred on by a few more “slips” he would have along the way.
The following day Bill sent a brief note to Frank Shaw about his look inside GE’s research laboratory. Lois helped him with the letter. He requested a meeting to present a detailed report. Then he broke the news to Lois that they would be moving on, the next stop being Egypt, Pennsylvania, just outside Allentown. She was a bit disappointed. But they said their farewells to the Morowskis and Goldfoots, packed up, and went noisily on their way with Lois again at the wheel and Bill attempting to study his Moody’s manual in the bumpy sidecar.
They were about twenty miles from Egypt when ominous black clouds began building in the skies ahead. They decided to stop and camp in a nearby field next to a running stream. Late that evening, the thunderstorms crashed and crackled overhead. It rained those proverbial cats and dogs for the next three days. Lois described the “Noah’s Ark” event in her memoirs.
This was the first real test of their new tent, especially its guaranteed canvas floor, and it was a dandy test. When camping in Vermont, they had always dug a ditch around their army pup tent for drainage, but naively they imagined this to be unnecessary with their miraculous new one—that they could even pitch it in a puddle and remain dry. They soon learned the truth, however.
Feeling the dampness seeping through the floor, Lois awakened Bill. Donning their waterproof zippered coveralls, they bravely launched forth into the pouring rain and discovered that the tent was standing in a small lake, three inches deep, in a claylike hollow. But the canvas floor hadn’t done too badly after all . . . that is, if they didn’t mind sleeping in a little water.
Sponging up the puddles and pushing a mass of ferns underneath to raise the floor off the ground, they then dug a drainage ditch around the outside despite all that muddy clay and deep water. Inside finally, a bunch of old newspapers kept them fairly dry the rest of the night and the ensuing nights.
In spite of all the problems, Lois was delighted that the homemade window she had cut and sewn into the tent had not leaked one single drop during the entire storm.12
With the country’s economy starting to boom and the automobile industry pouring out affordable cars, Bill knew what a great demand there would be for concrete roads, bridges, and other such infrastructure. He had studied every cement manufacturer listed in his manuals before finally zeroing in on Giant Portland Cement Company, which was listed on the small Philadelphia Stock Exchange. He felt its shares were exceedingly cheap when compared to its growth potential.
By now, Lois and Bill’s assets were running low with all the initial expenses for the Harley-Davidson, the camping equipment, the special clothing, and the shares Bill had purchased in his targeted companies. They needed to replenish their kitty.
This fit right in with Bill’s latest scheme. What better way to get inside information than by actually being on the inside? So they pitched their tent less than a mile from the cement company—this time on top of a lovely hill where the rain wasn’t likely to gather—and Bill rode over to the plant and was hired on the spot.
“From our campsite,” Lois recalled, “we could see in all four directions. This part of Pennsylvania has fascinating steep hills like green chocolate drops and little toy villages hidden in narrow valleys where pretty brooks run all the way down into green pastures. I must admit, however, that I did have a little difficulty with some of those long Dutch names painted on the signboards in town.”13 While Bill snooped around the plant during his work breaks, Lois found a job with a couple named Baer who had a large vegetable farm nearby. Mostly Lois cared for Mrs. Baer’s three little girls, which she enjoyed immensely.
Working at Giant Portland, the undercover investigator was gathering a great deal of vital information: how much coal they were burning to produce a barrel of cement, what quantities they were shipping each day, and how the installation of some brand-new expensive equipment was about to greatly increase production, reducing the cost to less than a dollar per barrel. This would give the company a tremendous competitive edge.
Then one day, Bill Wilson showed up at the front entrance to Giant Portland as a “significant investor” dressed in his best and only suit instead of driving up as usual to the employees’ gate in his coveralls and cap. He confronted a stunned management trio with the facts he had uncovered and, before he was ushered out, he could tell by their faces and their off-the-cuff comments that his findings were absolutely correct. After visiting a few more companies in Pennsylvania, he and Lois headed back to New York.
A month later, Bill was at J.K. Rice & Company, standing in the boardroom before Frank Shaw and the firm’s major partners. He made a brilliant presentation. Lois had helped him polish it. He talked about what he had discovered at General Electric and at Giant Portland. On the basis of his reports, the firm purchased five thousand shares each of GE and Portland for starters, and bought thousands more after that. They also purchased several hundred shares for Bill, put him on the payroll, and authorized him to draw additional funds to buy more shares as they rose in value.
Bill left the Rice & Company boardroom that afternoon with Frank Shaw’s arm around his shoulder. He was suddenly a rising star on Wall Street. And before the year was over, the Giant Portland stock that had been purchased for $20 per share had risen to over $75 per share. General Electric did equally as well.
There were other companies the firm now wanted Bill to investigate—American Cyanamid and the Aluminum Company of America, for instance, as well as certain steel and coal mining interests. But first Lois and Bill had some important family matters to attend to, along with getting the shakes and rattles out of their mile-weary Harley-Davidson by putting on a new set of tires and getting it completely overhauled for the next leg of their excursion.
Lois’s mother Matilda hadn’t been feeling very well, and Matilda didn’t want to write her for fear of cutting their journey short. Her daughter spent almost a month with her at Emerald Lake that summer, and by the time she left, Matilda convinced her she was feeling much better. If Dr. Burnham seemed pleased when he heard all about Bill’s success, it was mainly because Lois convinced him that his son-in-law wasn’t drinking nearly as much. In fact, Bill was still managing to control his alcohol intake at that time.
Dorothy Strong, Bill’s sister, also hadn’t been well since the birth of her last child. While Lois was at the lake, Bill spent ten days with his sister and his brother-in-law, Leonard, at their home in Tarrytown. He and Dr. Strong had formed a close friendship, one that would be a great help to Bill during his heavy drinking days.
Also, Bill’s mother’s husband, Dr. John Strobel, had called and asked for his assistance with a pending legal matter in New York, where he had once worked at Sloan-Kettering Cancer Hospital. Bill was quite flattered by the request. Even though he never graduated from Brooklyn Law School, the knowledge he gained there was enough to help settle Dr. Strobel’s legal troubles and please his mother greatly.
By now it was late September of 1925, Lois’s favorite time of year, the fall. Bill’s career was apparently set so they decided to combine their next business junket with a long overdue vacation. With Frank Shaw’s blessing, they planned a slow “investigative tour” of the southern states to check out their “business investment potential.” Besides, Bill’s next prime target was American Cyanamid in Brewster, Florida, so they could plan to arrive there during Lois’s least favorite time of year—the dead of winter.
The warm autumn air scented with wildflowers and southern pines stirred the sexual juices of these motorcycle companions as they crossed the Mason-Dixon line. They frolicked in mountain streams, bathed and swam naked at sunset in tree-shrouded lakes, and made love under the stars as they listened to the crackling of their campfire and the hooting of owls in the forest’s giant oaks. It was beyond Lois’s fondest wishes, this fulfillment of her intense love for her husband and his love for her. She prayed it would never end, but those butterflies kept telling her one day it would.
Bill, with his long, lanky legs dangling out over the sidecar, often directed her to stop at small, unheard-of companies along the way. While he spent time chatting with the owners, she visited the town square to absorb the history of the place and its people, and also to replenish their food supply. After a few days, sometimes staying at a small hotel or country inn, they’d be off again, although never in a hurry.
Just before Christmas, they found themselves caught high in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina while investigating several sizable logging companies near a small town called Pelham. Ensconced in their tent covered by a heavy snowfall from the night before, the young explorers were prepared to spend Christmas alone, warmed only by old newspapers, heated stones, and their faithful hot water bottle. Suddenly they heard a hoot and a holler outside. It was the voice of old Ed Brown, a logger Bill had met very briefly. He lived in a log cabin nearby with his wife and his son, daughter-in-law, and their six children. He was inviting Lois and Bill to spend Christmas with his family.
“Such generosity. Such warm hospitality,” Lois wrote years after the trip. “In spite of being terribly hard up, there was not an ounce of self-pity in any of them. For Christmas dinner, we had salt pork, turnip greens, corn pone, sweet potato custard and for dessert, sweet potato pie.”14 After dinner, Bill happened to notice there were no presents around the sparsely decorated Christmas tree. He grabbed each of the children, sat the younger ones on his knee, and gave them all several dollars, saying Santa Claus had left the money for them in his tent. Mr. Brown and his son seemed embarrassed and tried to dissuade him but Bill would have none of it.
Lois recalled that Christmas night in Pelham, North Carolina, with mixed emotions.
“I must admit some of that old guilt came back as I watched Bill playing so happily with those children,” she said. “But then some of the old fears came back too when Mr. Brown brought out a jug of white lightning—I think that’s what he called it—and Bill got terribly drunk. We had to sleep on the cabin floor that night because we couldn’t get Bill back to our campsite.”15
The very next day they packed up and made a mad dash for the warm, sunny clime of Brewster, Florida, and Bill’s primary target, American Cyanamid. They never once talked about that drinking incident.
Just before they reached Jacksonville, the front tire blew out. Lois almost swerved off the road. Bill patched the inner tube in fifteen minutes and they were on their way. But after a few more miles, the tire blew again. Lois was tired and now a bit nervous, so she let Bill take over the driving. Another patch, a few more miles, and it happened for a third time.
Bill had been relatively calm for most of the trip, but now he really lost his temper, cursing and kicking the side of the Harley. That’s when he noticed that a broken spoke had been piercing the tube and causing the flats. He ate humble pie, patched the tire one more time, and drove slowly and carefully into Jacksonville, where they had the wheel repaired.
Back then the American Cyanamid Company owned and ran the town of Brewster in the north central part of Florida. Lois and Bill expected to find a ramshackle mining village. Instead, with a population of two thousand, it was laid out like a subdivision with vine-covered cottages for married couples, a central park, a golf course, tennis courts, a swimming pool, and separate dormitory housing for bachelor men and women.
For his report to Frank Shaw, Bill was mainly interested in the productivity of the company’s phosphate mines and screening plant. He noted in his comments to Shaw, however, that the powerhouse that generated all the electricity for the mine, the plant, and the whole town contained nothing but General Electric equipment. He thought Frank would be pleased at that.
Lois recalled that they spent about a week there. She said that the town manager, a Mr. Curry, told her the area was once an anthropologist’s paradise. There were still bone fragments scattered everywhere, mostly dug up by the mining excavations. Mr. Curry said the bones of the extinct three-toed horse and three-toed rhinoceros had been found there some years before.16
They traveled across the Florida Panhandle and then up into Montgomery, Alabama, where Bill checked out the Tennessee Coal and Iron Works owned by the United States Steel Company. This plant’s major product was steel rails and, with the nation’s railroads needing to upgrade to meet increased freight transportation, its growth potential appeared significant to Bill.
Lois was intrigued when they stopped outside of Birmingham, Alabama, so that Bill could investigate a large coal mine that supplied coke to the surrounding steel mills.
Camping that evening not far from the mine, Lois watched with great interest as the miners exited the pit wearing flickering lights on their helmets. Even though she found it a bit eerie, she had the urge to go down into the mine herself and explore the underground shafts. Bill and the foreman, however, put a quick end to her urge.17
By now Lois and Bill had received word that Lois’s youngest sister, Katherine, had finalized her wedding date. It was scheduled for the middle of June. It was now nearing the end of April, 1926. They had been on the road for close to a year. They decided to head for home in order to have plenty of time to prepare for the grand occasion.
Lois said she could hardly wait to get there. Perhaps that’s why she was a little careless driving through Tennessee. She said her head was back in Brooklyn, thinking about what she would wear, who she would see, and what a wonderful time she would have bragging about all of Bill’s marvelous accomplishments.18
It happened as they were leaving the outskirts of Dayton, Tennessee, the town famous for the Scopes Evolution Trial the year before. Lois was driving the Harley over a sandy road that appeared to run straight ahead when suddenly, hidden by a large barn, a curve to the right appeared. The sand on the road ahead was quite deep. When Lois tried to jerk the wheel around the tight curve, the motorcycle spun out of control. Bill went flying out of the sidecar, breaking his collarbone as he landed. Lois cut her face and twisted her knee while their equipment scattered in every direction. Fortunately, a Good Samaritan happened along and took them to a doctor in town. Since there was no hospital, the doctor put them into a hotel room conveniently located above his office.19
They rested for a week. The man who rescued them collected their belongings from the road and brought them to the hotel. Not a single article was missing, which testified to the honesty of the people of Dayton and to the country in general back then. He also stored the damaged Harley in his barn.
Before they were ready to leave, Lois and Bill made arrangements to have the motorcycle and most of the gear shipped back to Brooklyn. As soon as the doctor said they could travel, they took the train home.
“Although we were in plenty of time for the wedding,” Lois recounted later, “I made a sorry looking matron of honor when, with red gashes on my face, I limped up the aisle.”20
She couldn’t help but notice at the reception afterward how many people seem to treat a now spiffily dressed Bill Wilson differently than they had at their own wedding some seven years earlier. What a little money and a little prestige can do, she thought.
There was one person at the reception, however, who felt exactly the same way about Bill as he did seven years ago. That was Clark Burnham, as he watched his son-in-law once again guzzle down a full glass of his finest Scotch.