9
LOIS WILSON WASN’T THE ONLY ONE WHO WAS FORCED TO SELL some of her treasured things during those dark days of the Great Depression, but like many others, she did so with great sorrow and reluctance. Perhaps it was the embarrassment of standing in long lines at sleazy pawnshops or being stared at in used furniture stores that finally convinced her to look for another job, regardless of the consequences. Besides, with all the bills piling up, she had little choice, especially with her husband still unemployable.
Fortunately, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who succeeded one-term President Herbert Hoover, had declared a “mortgage moratorium” in the summer of 1933 so that millions of citizens impoverished by the Depression wouldn’t lose their homes. As a result, the mortgage payments on Clinton Street, which Lois had insisted on paying when her father married and moved out, had now been reduced to simply a small amount of interest for the next several years. It was something she could afford even if she earned only a pittance of a salary.1 So, early in the fall of 1934, she found a new job as a salesclerk on the furniture floor of Frederick Loeser’s department store in downtown Brooklyn, not far from the house. This led a few months later to the position of hostess in the company’s interior decorating department, where she advised customers on the design and decoration of their homes and offices. While her salary was only nineteen dollars a week plus a 4 percent commission on everything she sold, having such a responsible position in a career she loved boosted her spirits enormously during a time when she needed it the most.
For at Clinton Street, it was once again the calm before the storm. After leaving Towns Hospital for the third time, Bill appeared so terror-stricken by Dr. Silkworth’s admonitions—the same ones he had given to Lois—that he took every precaution for a while to avoid anyone, anything, or any place that could possibly tempt him to drink. He feared greatly being locked away in some dingy mental ward.
In fact, on their subway ride home from the hospital, Bill confided to his wife his memory of driving with his grandfather past the state insane asylum in Brattleboro, Vermont, a large, ominous-looking red brick building down by the river. Grandpa Griffith pulled to the side of the road so they could watch the mental patients through the heavy metal fence. For the young boy, it was an eerie and very scary sight.
Bill said he recalled seeing the inmates stumbling around and around in circles, bumping into each other and hollering so loudly that the guards had to pull them apart. Others were seated on rotting park benches mumbling to themselves or staring across the thick grassy lawn with dark, blank eyes. He said he saw several who kept pulling their gray bathrobes up over their heads as if to hide from the world or block out the hot sun beating down on them. After a few minutes, he couldn’t bear to watch them any longer and asked his grandfather to drive away.2
Lois remembered urging her husband to hold on to those memories each time he thought about drinking and perhaps it would help dissuade him. As upsetting as that sounded, Bill agreed he had to do everything possible this time to stay sober.
For the first few weeks at home, Bill rose early and made breakfast for his wife, who had to leave for work by eight. They chatted about her job, the places she was decorating, and about how well he was looking and that soon he’d be back on his feet and working again himself. But then came the mornings when Lois would be up and dressed and ready to leave and he’d still be in bed. She’d smile at him lovingly and say, “Why don’t you just go back to sleep for a little while?” The implication was, at least in his mixed-up head, “You don’t have to get up for anything, you poor, hopeless thing.”3
So Bill began to sleep later and later. His brooding soon turned to anger and resentment. The maniac in his brain told him his wife was putting him down, losing what little respect she had left for him. Soon he was twisting and turning in bed, trying to forget all he had lost and all he would probably never have again. Then he would think about the bottles of booze still hidden around the house in places Lois never thought of looking. Just knowing they were there would take the edge off, help him to breathe a little easier. But as soon as he felt the urge to get up and find one of those bottles and swung his legs onto the floor, the pictures of those faces at the insane asylum in Brattleboro would suddenly flash before him. He would break into a cold sweat and slowly ease back into bed, pull the covers over his head, and try to go back to sleep.
Armistice Day rolled around, November 11, 1934, and he was still sober. He was also feeling much better physically. In fact, Lois had been getting him out of the house for walks around the neighborhood. He did so a bit reluctantly, always feeling uncomfortable trying to avoid the stares of those who had all too often seen him hunched over on park benches or in doorways drinking from a bottle in a brown paper bag. Lois felt the same discomfort, but getting her husband healthy again was far more important to her than the humiliation swirling inside.
Lois had to work that holiday so Bill thought he might drop in on some old Wall Street connections “just to check the lay of the land.” When she reminded him the stock market was closed for Armistice Day, he became pensive. Then, suddenly, the thought of playing golf occurred to him. He hadn’t played since his stint in Montreal, but he remembered Rogers had an old set of clubs up in the attic.
Though apprehensive to see him going out alone to be with men who might hoist a few, Lois hid her fears and agreed the fresh air and exercise could be just what the doctor ordered. The family purse was rather slim, but there was an inexpensive public course he had heard about on Staten Island. All he needed was fare for the ferry and bus and a few dollars for greens fees.
They left the house together that clear, crisp November morning, their spirits high and hopeful. As they kissed good-bye, Lois suggested they celebrate the holiday by having dinner that evening at their favorite Italian restaurant near the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge. Bill agreed.4
After the ferry ride to St. George, Staten Island, Bill boarded a bus to take him to the public links. The man seated next to him was also an army veteran headed for the same golf course, so they struck up a pleasant conversation. Halfway across the island, the bus broke down. They joined a number of other passengers in a nearby pub to await repairs. Here in this bar filled with World War I vets celebrating the holiday, the booze was flowing like water since Prohibition had finally been repealed earlier that year.
Prohibition, which had also been called the Volstead Act after the U.S. Congressman who had spearheaded passage of the legislation, had finally fallen of its own weight for two reasons. First, people began finding out they could be arrested for violating the act by simply having one drink. In other words, when the police arrested them for public intoxication and the courts sentenced them to the drunk tank or thirty days in jail, the offense was merely in the eye of the beholder—the authorities—because the rules and regulations were so confusing and there were no Breathalyzers back then. In fact, even a Catholic priest saying mass with sacramental wine or a druggist preparing a prescription that contained alcohol could be in jeopardy under the strict interpretation of the Volstead Act.
So soon a growing majority of the public, even those who initially thought Prohibition might be a good idea, was against the law. However, it wasn’t until people began dying from rotgut booze, and mobsters battling for a stranglehold on the illegal whiskey business spilled blood into the streets, that ordinary citizens finally began to fear for their own safety. Then came a loud hue and cry for repeal—but it took fourteen long years for it to happen.
Now it had, and Bill’s new friend from the bus bellied up to the bar and ordered a rye whiskey. He cast a strange glance at his companion when he ordered a ginger ale. Feeling a bit embarrassed and in need of explaining himself, Bill offered a brief history of his long ordeal with alcohol: his thwarted career, his trips to Towns, and even Dr. Silkworth’s theory of allergy and obsession. It was when he dramatically commented that the next drink could put him in a padded cell that his new friend told him if he had it that bad, he sure as hell wouldn’t drink either.5
Shortly after noon, a substitute bus arrived and took them to the golf course. The clubhouse restaurant was also teeming with the congenial holiday crowd. Across the way, a group of men surrounding a piano player were singing war songs, such as “Mademoiselle from Armentieres,” “Over There,” and “Oh Give Me Something to Remember You By,” that spurred Bill’s patriotic feelings. As he and his friend approached the bar, a red-faced bartender with a thick Irish brogue placed two glasses of Scotch in front of them and smiled: “It’s on the house, me lads. It’s Armistice Day. Drink up.”6
It was almost a reflex action. Bill reached for the Scotch and put it to his lips. His companion stood there stunned, a deep frown on his face. “My God, is it possible that you could take a drink after what you just told me? You must be crazy.” Bill simply replied, “Yes, I am,” and then downed the whiskey.7 When he turned around, his newfound friend was gone. He had disappeared into the crowd, perhaps fearful of being in the company of a potential lunatic. Bill swung back to the bar and nodded to the Irish bartender, who refilled his glass. He quickly forgot about golf and joined the drinking chorus at the piano. Before long he was back in France, back at the Front saving the world from the invading horde. He was in a small bistro in Paris, being idolized for his heroics by lovely French demoiselles. He was with his platoon on the transport ship home, all lined up at attention as a general pinned a medal on his chest for exceptional gallantry. Soon the singing began to fade as one by one the veteran choristers headed for the links or left for home.
Now he was back at the clubhouse bar, spilling down another Scotch in an almost empty room and being urged by the ruddy-faced bartender to go home—that he’d had enough.
But what is “enough” to an alcoholic when he can still stand, when he can still walk, when he can still dream those wild, racy, outsized dreams? It’s when those dreams turn into memories and those memories turn into reality that the fear, anger, and self-revulsion set in. It’s when he stares at himself in the mirror as Bill was doing now and the real enemy, the real provocateur, stares back.
That’s when the panic hits. That’s when Bill smashed his glass on the floor, stumbled off the barstool, staggered out into the cold, windy street and tried to find his way back home—back from the far reaches of Staten Island to the familiar streets of Brooklyn Heights.
It was very late that night when he finally arrived at 182 Clinton Street. Unable to climb the steps, he staggered and fell into the basement area below, cracking his head open on the iron gate. Lois found him there at five o’clock the next morning after a premonition had awakened her from a fitful night’s sleep. Bill’s scalp was still bleeding from the fall as she half-dragged him into the basement and plopped him down onto the mattress she had put there some time ago, fearing he might fall or jump from an upstairs window. She washed and bandaged his head, then sat next to him in a chair wondering who to call this time—Leonard Strong, Dr. Silkworth, or the Elmwood Sanitarium, one of the mental institutions she had been told about during her husband’s last stay at Towns Hospital.
She sat next to him for several hours, dozing off and on. Finally she went upstairs and called Frederick Loeser’s department store to inform them she needed the day off—telling another lie that only added to her own self-loathing. She made some tea and paced the kitchen floor, trying to pull her thoughts together.
How do you put a man you love but now also pity into an insane asylum? Must you do it to save his mind, to save his life? Should you get someone else to do it for you, like your father, for instance, or Leonard Strong or even Dr. Silkworth, whose opinion on the matter she already knew? Would the commitment to the asylum be for a month, a year, or possibly forever? How could she live with herself when she still believed deep inside that her own inability to have children was one of the reasons he still drank—and now she had completely failed to help this wonderful man who still had such great potential if only this curse were lifted from him? Would it be the courageous thing for her to do or simply the cowardly way out? What would he think of her for doing it, and if he were ever cured, would he forgive her? Could they ever have a life together again? Would he still love her?8
These were the kinds of anguishing questions that haunted Lois over the next several weeks as Bill hid away in the basement, sneaking out only when she was at work to beg, borrow, or steal more booze and then hide bottles around the house. She now guarded her purse and locked away what was left of her precious things. Where he got the money for his alcohol she never knew. When she came home, she’d search the house as usual to find whatever bottles she could and pour them down the drain, but it was a useless exercise. There was always that one bottle she could never find. He ate very little, and what he did eat she had to force into him. His clothes began to hang off his lanky frame as he lost more and more weight and more and more coherence each day that went by.
“I was at my wit’s end,” she recalled. “I think I was close to calling Leonard Strong again since he and Dorothy were always so kind and understanding and they knew things were only getting worse. Then something almost miraculous happened.
“I came home from work early one evening to find Ebby Thacher seated at our kitchen table talking with Bill. It had been more than a year or two since they had last seen each other, and I had heard several times that Ebby was also in terrible straights. But now here he was completely sober and I soon learned had been so for some time.
“For a brief moment my spirits rose, hoping that somehow he might share with Bill whatever he had found that was helping and then Bill would get sober too. To be honest, though, I really didn’t hold out much hope for that, especially when I saw a half empty pitcher of pineapple juice on the table and Bill trying to hide the bottle of gin he had spiked it with. I was certain that before the night was over, both of them would be terribly drunk.”9
But this time Lois was wrong. Little did she know until Ebby spoke with her on the front porch of Clinton Street later that night that this man she had known since her childhood in Vermont was actually here on a mission. He had come to help her husband find a way out of his alcoholic morass just as he had done himself, four months earlier, with the aid of two men from a religious movement called the Oxford Group. Lois had heard of the movement but knew little about it or its philosophy.
The Oxford Group was actually a nondenominational movement founded in 1921 by a Lutheran minister, Dr. Frank Buchman. Among his early followers was Dr. Sam Shoemaker, who was pastor of New York’s Calvary Episcopal Church and also ran its affiliated Calvary Mission in lower Manhattan. Dr. Shoemaker, was to play a significant role in Bill Wilson’s spiritual development and his writing of Alcoholics Anonymous, which became known as “The Big Book.”
The religious movement focused on the need for people to change—that everyone must undergo a spiritual conversion in order to improve their lives. There was strong emphasis on personal housecleaning, that people confess their sins one to another, that they make restitution and amends in order to repair and restore personal relationships. Emphasis on prayer and meditation for at least one hour each day was also an integral part of the philosophy. The Oxford Group believed that if its followers, coming from any religious denomination, would adhere to such high moral standards, then God could and would enter and direct their lives. The movement’s goal was to set up a worldwide chain reaction—one person carrying the good news of hope and recovery to the next.
Many people with serious problems and broken lives, such as alcoholics who had “hit bottom,” were attracted to this stringent way of life almost as “a last hope.” Many, such as Ebby Thacher, found help there, although admittedly most of them for only a short period of time. It has been said that the tremendous pain and despair from lost jobs, lost homes, and lost lives wrought by the crash of 1929 and the Great Depression was actually a boon to the Oxford Group, attracting to it society’s poor and downtrodden, its alcoholics and Bowery bums. The movement hit its peak of popularity in 1936, and then its magnetism began to fade. In 1938, it changed its name to Moral Re-Armament and gradually lost the impact and influence it once had.
Still, when Ebby phoned Bill at Clinton Street two weeks after his harrowing Armistice Day experience and asked if he could drop by, he was bringing with him this dramatic message of change and conversion. Fortunately, his boyhood pal didn’t know this at the time. Otherwise, as Bill said later with a big grin: “I would have told him to go peddle his papers somewhere else.”
Instead, even though suffering his usual morning whiskey jitters, Bill was overjoyed to hear from his longtime drinking buddy who, as far as he knew, had dropped completely off the face of the earth. But now, almost as if he had risen from the dead, the marvelous, the fearless, the one and only Ebby Thacher would be joining him that very afternoon to toast the long-overdue reunion of two of nature’s true survivors.
Despite washing up, combing his hair, and stumbling out of his pajamas and into a wrinkled pair of pants and a shirt for this special occasion, Bill still saw a pathetic-looking, red-eyed drunk staring back at him when he glanced into the bathroom mirror. But a few swigs from the bottle of gin he had stashed in the water tank above the toilet soon took care of those feelings. A few more swigs put him into just the right kind of affable mood to receive his long-awaited guest.
His mind began racing with anticipation. He started to reminisce about all those wonderful times he and Ebby had had together over the years—those practical jokes on their classmates at school; the exciting hayrides and barn dances in Vermont; those early drinking days when they were in the army together before shipping out; the many drunken blasts they shared after the war in speakeasies all over Manhattan. Even the trouble they got into back then—such as their infamous drunken airplane flight from Albany to Manchester five years earlier—seemed like fun now as the memories paraded through his sodden brain.
Bill wobbled downstairs and into the kitchen. After a brief search, he found what he was looking for—another untapped bottle of gin, wrapped in a towel and stashed amid the cobwebs under the stove. It was after two o’clock now and should Lois come home early, he didn’t want her to see a naked bottle of booze on the kitchen table. That’s when the thought struck him—a pineapple punch. It was one of Ebby’s favorite “morning-after fixes.” So what if it was already afternoon. He’d get a kick out of it, provided it contained more gin than juice.
The punch was now ready. The glasses were on the table. He had another quick swig, then lit a cigarette. His hands were trembling but not nearly as badly as they were an hour ago.
Then the doorbell rang.
No matter how many years went by, Lois could always clearly remember how her husband described the events that took place that afternoon when a man she once didn’t particularly care for brought a message to her home that would save her husband’s life.
“Bill always said he was absolutely stunned when he opened the door and saw the look on Ebby’s face that day,” she recalled. “He said there was something very different about him from the last time they had been together—in fact, from the many years they had been drinking together. It took Bill several moments to comprehend exactly what it was. Then he realized that Ebby was sober, not merely dried out, but completely sober. I can only imagine what went through Bill’s mind at that point.”10
One of those thoughts, which he later shared with his wife, was that he felt awkward and uncomfortable for a moment. He said he felt almost as he did when the police pulled him out of a doorway, drunk and covered with puke, and looked at him as if he were something less than human. That’s the way Ebby seemed to be staring at Bill’s red eyes and trembling hands as he stood at the front door. But Bill’s uncomfortable feelings were only temporary, for somewhere in his head that ever-present maniac kept saying he could even the score by bringing Ebby into the kitchen and pouring him a few glasses of that punch.
There was something else different about his friend that afternoon. When Ebby smiled, it was a warm, serious kind of a smile, sort of an “I’m here on a mission” smile. And when he shook hands, it was a firm and clasping kind of handshake, not the slap-on-the-back type these two drinking buddies always used to exchange. It wasn’t until Bill led him into the kitchen, offered him a seat, and poured him a glass of punch that he began to comprehend what was behind all these changes in his now-sober friend. Ebby pushed the glass away and said quietly but with great confidence, “No, thanks, Bill. I don’t need this stuff anymore.”
Bill laughed out loud, thinking at first Ebby was joking with him. But there was no laughter in return. So he poured himself a drink, chugged it down, and then asked, with a deep frown on his forehead, “Ebby, what on earth has got into you? What is this all about?”11
So Ebby told him. He told him that after his family’s cast-iron stove business finally went belly-up, he drank so much that he spent more time in Albany’s drunk tanks than he did in his own house. The local authorities, thanks to his straight-laced older brother, suggested he get some help for his problem, so he moved into the old Battenkill Inn in Manchester, Vermont, to dry out. The elderly owner had been a good friend of the Thacher family for years, so he helped by warning his employees not to serve his special guest any alcohol or they’d be fired on the spot.
Ebby managed to stay dry for almost six months. Then the owner of the inn suddenly died. Ebby had to mourn his passing. This led to another long drinking binge and total depletion of whatever family assets he had left. He went from one job to another, even working as a housepainter to get money for booze. After many more failed attempts to stay sober, he wound up in a vacant cabin in the Green Mountains, where he nearly drank himself to death.
Officials of the local lumber company that owned the cabin were about to ship him off to the insane asylum in Brattleboro when word reached two of Ebby’s old friends in Manchester, men he used to drink with and who were now sober members of the Oxford Group. The two men brought him home with them, cleaned him up, and shared the newfound philosophy that was keeping them sober. Having hit bottom, Ebby began absorbing the movement’s principles like a sponge, especially the four basic principles of absolute honesty, absolute purity, absolute unselfishness, and absolute love. He soon found sobriety, a new kind of sobriety he called “a sobriety of the soul.” And now, just four months later, here he was trying to share what he found with his drunk and disbelieving boyhood chum.
“You mean . . . you got religion?”12 Bill half-snarled, staring across the table at the man he suddenly decided had become a ludicrous convert and, even worse, seemed about to break one of the oldest laws in the book of scams: try to con a con artist. What Bill couldn’t see was that Ebby was on a mission and wasn’t about to give up that quickly, especially when he stared back across the table and saw a man he always loved and admired now desperately in need of help.
“It was really more of a spiritual than it was a religious movement,” Ebby tried to explain. “It was what I had been taught as a child and what I inwardly believed but had laid aside.”13
Because of their long history together and Ebby’s obvious sincerity, Bill listened to his story for another hour or so while he himself continued to drink and smoke. Without his realizing it, something was penetrating, something was getting through, something was lighting a small flame that would eventually burst into a gigantic spiritual fire. But for the moment, the gin-laced punch was etching it all in his subconscious.
Finally, as Ebby rose from the kitchen table, he urged his friend one more time to seek the help of Dr. Sam Shoemaker at the Calvary Mission where he himself was staying while in New York. Bill promised to give it serious consideration while thinking to himself that he had heard enough about God and religion for one day and, with the pitcher of punch depleted, he needed to find another bottle hidden somewhere in the house to get him through the night.
On his way out, Ebby noticed Lois seated in the parlor, ostensibly sewing, although her mind had been focused on the happenings in the kitchen. He entered to say good-bye.
“I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw that Ebby was still completely sober,” Lois recalled. “I wanted desperately to ask him how he was managing to do it and what he had said to Bill. So I walked with him to the front door and out onto the front porch.
“He told me briefly about the Oxford Group and where I could go myself to get more information. But then my heart sank once again when he said Bill didn’t appear too receptive to the idea. When I asked why, he explained that as far as he knew, Bill had always wanted to stop drinking mainly to please me. Now the shame and guilt for not being able to do so only increased his need to keep on drinking, to drown out those feelings.
“Ebby also told me that night that Bill was never really concerned about hurting himself but that it tore him up inside each time he realized how much he was hurting me. Then, after the disaster on Wall Street when we lost everything and he really wanted to stop drinking for himself in order to turn his life around, he couldn’t. By that time he was totally addicted mentally and physically just like Ebby had been until he found a spiritual solution in the Oxford Group.
“Then Ebby hugged me and said all we could do for Bill now was to pray for him. I thought to myself as I watched him walk down the steps, what good would more prayers do when they hadn’t worked all these years. I didn’t know at the time I had a soul-sickness too.”14
When Lois walked back into the kitchen, Bill was still seated at the table, smoking. He appeared deep in thought.
“Without my even asking,” she remembered, “he willingly related to me the story of Ebby’s introduction to the Oxford Group. He admitted he was quite impressed that Ebby was sober and said he just might look into the things he told him about.”15
Lois wanted to reply. She wanted to urge her husband to do just that . . . to do exactly what Ebby had suggested. But she was afraid of what his response might be, especially since she could tell he had been drinking rather heavily. So, not wanting to raise any more false hopes, she made herself a cup of tea, kissed him on the cheek, and then went upstairs to read herself to sleep.
Though inebriated, Bill could still recognize that all-too-familiar look in his wife’s eyes, the look that said what’s the use of trying anymore, of even attempting to share her painful thoughts and feelings with the very man who caused them in the first place. And now, Bill pictured her thinking, along comes their longtime friend from Vermont, sober and filled with hope and optimism. She has to be wondering why it can’t be him, why this spineless, weak-willed excuse of a husband couldn’t have found what Ebby found—and isn’t willing to accept it even now.
He lit another cigarette, took a deep drag, and waited until he felt Lois was settled in her bedroom upstairs. Then he rose and quietly sneaked down into the basement. After another brief search, he found a half-empty bottle of booze hidden in an old storage bin. He sat down on the now-familiar mattress near the coal furnace, leaned back against the cold cement wall, and proceeded to ponder Ebby’s visit as he poured the burning liquid directly from the bottle down his throat.
Sure, Ebby believed all that stuff he was spouting—but then his old drinking buddy often played it fast and loose with the truth. On the other hand, he, Bill Wilson, used to be a terrific professional investigator. He still could be if only some lame-brained idiot on the Street would give him half a chance. Anyway, maybe he ought to check out this Oxford Group himself, he thought. Go right to the source, the head man, this Dr. Shoemaker fellow over at this Calvary Mission place. As he continued to drink, his mind conjured up the deep theological and philosophical questions he would stump Dr. Shoemaker with. Soon the bottle was empty, and he passed out in the chilly cellar.16
Before leaving for work the next morning, Lois came down and covered her husband with a warm blanket. Then she briefly searched for more hidden bottles. She couldn’t find any. As she stood there staring down at this man she once thought would conquer the world or at least achieve some kind of greatness, her head kept telling her she must soon decide about committing him to a sanitarium. If Dr. Silkworth couldn’t help and now his closest friend couldn’t get through to him, what hope was there left?
She remembered Ebby’s last words to her. “All we can do for Bill now is to pray for him.” But she had pleaded to God so many times she felt as if she had worn out her welcome. Nevertheless, she lowered her head and murmured the words she had said so often in the past: “God help me to help him, my husband, my boy.”17
Then she wiped her eyes, tucked the cover up closer around his neck, and left for work. Lois was soon to learn that the God she had put her faith in often works in very strange ways—even in ways she might not agree with. But the prayer she had just uttered and the many prayers she had whispered, shouted, and cried out all these years were about to be answered . . . in a very strange and very powerful way.
It was around noon when Bill awoke, shaking and desperately in need of a drink. He could find nothing in the basement. He staggered upstairs and, despite his weakened condition, almost tore the kitchen apart looking for a bottle he knew he had hidden in one of the cabinets—unless Lois had found it. He wracked his brain but couldn’t remember where he had stashed it. Then an idea struck him. Perhaps this was a sign, some kind of an omen, he thought. Maybe as a result of Ebby’s visit, something was trying to tell him he didn’t have to drink today. And if he turned himself over to that Oxford Group bunch, maybe he wouldn’t have to drink at all, just like his old pal.
But then he remembered the kicker, the real stumbling block—this God thing. Sure, he believed there was something out there, some kind of unexplainable intelligence or power that ran the universe. But a personal God? One who watched over his life? He had given up on that idea a long time ago. Still, Ebby was sober. There was no denying that. So on that score alone it was something worth looking into, with a keen investigator’s eye.18
He quickly washed up, threw on some clothes, and took off. He remembered Ebby saying Calvary Church was on Twenty-third Street, somewhere near Fourth Avenue in Manhattan. Back then, Twenty-third Street was a drunkard’s paradise, with bars lining both sides of the busy thoroughfare. Bill managed to make it halfway down the block before some strange magnetic force emanating from an Irish pub pulled him inside. He was loaded by the time he staggered into the mission a few hours later, arm in arm with another drunk he met at the bar.
The mission was filled with men in every stage of decay, most bearded, filthy, and tipsy, seated on rows of wooden benches slopping down beans and bread from dented tin plates.
“I never will forget,” Lois once said, “Bill telling me about his first impression of the old Calvary Mission. Even though he was quite drunk himself, he said all he could see was a roomful of victims and losers. Bill always had a great deal of pride. He never considered himself a victim since he was honest enough to admit he brought most things on himself. And while he might have been a loser at that time, he always believed he would one day turn things around and become a winner again.”19
Dr. Shoemaker wasn’t there that night, but Ebby was. He cornered his friend and forced some beans and black coffee down his throat and then began introducing him to a few fairly well-dressed men he kept referring to as “part of God’s army.”20 This turned Bill off—this and the smell of society’s rejects and discards, the bedraggled waste of a country in despair seated all around him . . . men who, his investigator’s nose said, were as phony about their intention to stay sober as he was. He knew they came for the grub.
But Bill stayed anyway just to please his old friend. He even rose up and staggered to the front of the hall when “confession” time came. Standing among a crowd of sweating, stinking, but seemingly eager penitents, he shouted above the group for all to hear—that if Ebby Thacher could stay sober, so could he.
Lois was surprised when she came home that night to find Bill seated in the living room staring off into space. He was deep in thought. Ebby had brought him home from the mission, and they had talked for several hours over coffee until he left. Bill told his wife he might give the Oxford Group a try, even though there was much about the movement he didn’t like or agree with. He said he had to do something because he couldn’t stand the hurt look in her eyes every time he got drunk.
“I remember how I hugged him and cried in his arms,” she wrote. “As hard as I tried not to, I began to hope again. He didn’t drink for the next several days even though he was shaking so badly I thought I would have to call Leonard Strong for help. But Bill got angry every time I mentioned it. He grew more and more restless and found it hard to sleep. Then I came home from work early one evening and he wasn’t there. I didn’t want to believe he was drinking again until I went upstairs and saw that he had gone though my bureau apparently looking for some of my jewelry to sell. I was devastated.”21
Lois thought it was around nine or ten that night when she heard the front door slam and footsteps coming down the hall. She was in the den off the dining room sewing, trying to keep herself busy so she wouldn’t have to think. She rose and started for the hall when Bill was suddenly there in the doorway. He was very drunk, angry, and incoherent.
“I don’t know what you and Ebby have been cooking up,” he ranted, “but nobody’s shoving religion down my throat. Nobody! Not even you!”22
Then he began babbling about “God’s army” chasing after him . . . that he wasn’t like all those “bums and losers” at the Calvary mission . . . that she was among those religious fanatics who brainwashed Ebby but weren’t going to brainwash him. He demanded she tell him where she had hidden all his booze and said he was sick and tired of living with someone who didn’t respect him and always treated him like a helpless child.
Lois had witnessed many of her husband’s hallucinations in the past, but nothing like this. It frightened her and crushed whatever hope she may have had left. But then suddenly something snapped inside her. Those emotions she had always tried to keep in check now loosened her bitter tongue.
All those years of loving and caring. All those years of living her life for him. All those years of people asking her why . . . why did she suffer this almost sick devotion to a man who showed her a thousand times that he didn’t care to help himself so long as she was always there to comfort him and nurse him back to health? She had become not only his wife but his mother, his nurse, his excuse-maker, his caretaker, and his financial support as well. As he stood in the doorway raving at her, all those seething emotions rose to the surface and poured out in the most hurtful, vindictive words she could find.
“You are nothing but a drunken sot just like those other bums you keep talking about,” she recalled screaming at him. “But I don’t have to live like this anymore. I should have put you in a sanitarium a long time ago, when my father told me to do it and then Dr. Silkworth. That’s where you belong—in an insane asylum—because you’re crazy. You hear me! You’re crazy!”23
Bill’s eyes widened and his face filled with even greater rage. He glanced around the room, then charged toward the sewing machine. He picked it up and threw it against the wall. Lois had never seen him lose control like this before. She was petrified. She shrank into a corner and began crying hysterically. Her husband glared at her, then suddenly turned, ran down the hall, out the front door, and into the night shouting, “I’m not crazy! I’m not crazy!”24
Lois couldn’t remember how long she sat curled up in the corner, weeping.
Bill rode the city’s subways in a stupor that night and into the early hours of the morning. Then he panhandled enough from the rush-hour crowd to buy a pint of gin. That got him back to Clinton Street. Lois was gone when he entered the house. He had emerged from his blackout by now, and as he wobbled down the hall and past the den, vague glimpses of last night’s harrowing episode began flashing through his troubled brain. He poked his head into the den. The cracked wall and broken sewing machine left little doubt about his irrational outburst.
He sank into a chair. Tears streamed down his face. Even in his half-drunken state, he realized there was nothing left for him anymore but madness or death. This was either the end of the road or the jumping-off place to a new start. No, not a start built on self-deception, but one like his pal Ebby had found . . . seemingly solid and sure. But he couldn’t do it here, not in this house filled with so many ghosts, so many guilty memories, so many hidden bottles of booze. He knew in his heart there was only one place to go, that is, if Dr. Silkworth would allow him back. He must go to Towns Hospital at once to dry out—and then give the Oxford Group another try. Then maybe . . . just maybe . . .
He shuffled into the kitchen, found a pencil and piece of paper, sat at the kitchen table, and with his trembling hands wrote Lois a brief note. He admitted there was no way he could possibly apologize for his insane behavior but that perhaps this was what it had to come to for him to understand that she was right—that her father and Dr. Silkworth were right—that he truly was insane and getting worse each time he drank. He told her he was going back to Towns, where he hoped Dr. Silkworth would give him one more chance. He left the note on the table and hurried out the door.25
Bill’s tremors were almost uncontrollable by the time he reached the train station. He needed a drink badly. He dug into his pockets but only found a nickel, the cost of the subway fare. Then he remembered a small grocery store down the block where Lois still had some credit. He talked the poor young clerk, who was stunned by Bill’s appearance, into giving him four bottles of beer on account. He drank one of them on the street outside and then made it to the subway. He tripped and fell halfway down the steps. His head was cut and bruised but not one bottle of beer was broken. A drunk protects his booze with his very life.
Dr. Silkworth saw Bill approaching the hospital from his office window. He greeted him in the entrance hall. As the doctor later said, there was something in Bill’s eyes that afternoon that spoke of desperation, that pleaded for one more chance at life. So the kind physician admitted him and allowed him to finish the beer before ushering him into the detox ward.
Despite the nightmarish incident with the sewing machine, Lois went to work the next morning to get it out of her mind. She loved her interior decorating job, and her involvement with customers helped her to relax and forget about her home life even if only for a few hours.
“I found Bill’s note when I returned home from work that evening,” she recalled. “I had planned to call Dr. Silkworth that day but kept putting it off. Once I told him all that had happened, I knew what his answer would be. When I read that Bill had gone to Towns Hospital, I was relieved for a few moments but then just as quickly my mood turned into one of deep despair.
“I thought, what good would it do anyway? He would only get drunk again the moment he left the hospital. And who was going to pay the bill this time? The money I earned was barely enough to keep us going. I had to ask my brothers to help pay the previous hospital bills. There wasn’t much left in the house to sell or pawn. All I could think about over and over again was what possible permanent good could it do for Bill to go back to Towns again. I had so little faith left in the good Lord just when He was about to show me His miraculous power.”26
Sweating and shaking to pieces in the detox ward, Bill received the usual Towns treatment to taper off—barbiturates to sedate him and paraldehyde to ward off the DT’s. Two days later he was moved to a small private room and there fell into the deepest, darkest depression he had ever known. He was afraid to leave the room for fear of running out to find another drink. He was afraid to look out the window, at the cars and people struggling through the cold wintry night. He knew that out there he had only three choices left. He could stop drinking, something he deeply feared he could not do. He could go completely insane, a state he felt was very close at hand. Or he would die. For an alcoholic in the final stages of his disease, there are no other choices.
Alone, lost, and terrified, he lay back on his small steel-railed bed, reached his arms upward, and mumbled through his tears, “If there be a God, let Him show Himself!”27
What happened next was something few have experienced, a spiritual event of remarkable consequence. Bill Wilson would later try to explain it in his own words:
Suddenly, my room blazed with an indescribable white light. I was seized with an ecstasy beyond description. Every joy I had known was pale by comparison. The light, the ecstasy—I was conscious of nothing else for a time.
Then, seen in the mind’s eye, there was a mountain. I stood upon its summit, where a great wind blew. A wind, not of air, but of spirit. In great, clean strength, it blew right through me. Then came the blazing thought, “You are a free man.” I know not at all how long I remained in this state, but finally the light and the ecstasy subsided. I again saw the wall of my room. As I became more quiet, a great peace stole over me, and this was accompanied by a sensation difficult to describe. I became acutely conscious of a Presence which seemed like a veritable sea of living spirit. I lay on the shores of a new world. “This,” I thought, “must be the great reality. The God of the preachers.”
Savoring my new world, I remained in this state for a long time. I seemed to be possessed by the absolute, and the curious conviction deepened that no matter how wrong things seemed to be, there could be no question of the ultimate rightness of God’s universe. For the first time, I felt that I really belonged. I knew that I was loved and could love in return. I thanked my God, who had given me a glimpse of His absolute self. Even though a pilgrim upon an uncertain highway, I need be concerned no more for I had glimpsed the great beyond.28
It was December 11, 1934. Bill had just turned thirty-nine. He would never again doubt the reality of God. He now had a whole new life ahead of him but, as it would turn out, not the life of money and privilege he had once envisioned.
And as for Lois, she recalled, “I knew something overwhelming had happened. His eyes were filled with light. His whole being expressed hope and joy. From that moment on, I shared Bill’s confidence in the future.”29
“He told me he first thought he might have had another hallucination but that Dr. Silkworth assured him it wasn’t so. He told Bill he had experienced some great psychic occurrence, some kind of conversion experience he had only read about and that he should hang on to it for it was a great gift, a great blessing. I had no idea which way our lives would go but I now had a strong reason to hope he was finally freed from his addiction. It never occurred to me that I was still trapped in mine.”30
When Lois brought her husband home from the hospital on December 18, he was filled with an insatiable desire to help other alcoholics like himself. He could not stop talking about it. He kept saying that since a miracle had happened to him and to Ebby, why couldn’t it happen to others as well, to all the drunks in the world perhaps? He could help make it happen by spreading the message. And because her husband was finally back home, not just in body but in mind and spirit as well, Lois went right along with his idea enthusiastically, even accompanying him to Oxford Group meetings at the Calvary Episcopal Church. As usual, she wanted to help and support him all she could.
Lois was content enough attending Oxford Group meetings to support her husband, but she never even considered applying the spiritual principles to her own life. She felt Bill’s drinking and the troubles that ensured were her only real problems and now after his spiritual experience at Towns Hospital coupled with the Oxford Group program, those problems were taken care of. After all, she had been raised to love God and her fellow man, and now that her prayers for her husband’s recovery had been answered, she didn’t require any further spiritual guidance.31
“My sheer arrogance told me I was fine and didn’t need to change in any way,” Lois later recalled. “Was I due for a serious comeuppance.”32
Indeed, only after that serious comeuppance would Lois change her attitude toward the Oxford Group and realize the need to apply its principles to her own life. She eventually became a great admirer of both Dr. Shoemaker and Dr. Frank Buchman, who founded the movement, and of their belief that by changing each individual person, the whole world could be changed for the better. In fact, she and Bill would later use the essence of the principles that Dr. Shoemaker and Dr. Buchman preached in the development of the Twelve Step recovery programs used today in both Alcoholics Anonymous and Al-Anon.
Later in life, Lois Wilson would often profess the great aspirations of these men in her own words as they applied to the worldwide programs she and her husband cofounded: “If everyone could somehow learn to live by the principles incorporated in the Twelve Steps to Recovery,” she would say, “then some day there could truly be peace and joy in the entire world.”33
In the meantime, Bill began learning much about the physical side of his disease—the mental obsession coupled with a physical allergy—each time he visited his mentor, Dr. Silkworth. The doctor always allowed Bill to share his God-experience with some patients, hoping somehow it might help. And Bill began learning about the mental and spiritual part of his alcoholic malady from Dr. Shoemaker, who had now befriended the former Wall Street analyst. Dr. Shoemaker encouraged Bill to spread the message of change and spiritual recovery to others like himself.
Bill took the preacher at his word. With Lois’s full support, he was soon walking through the gutters of the Bowery, into the nut ward at Bellevue Hospital, down the slimy corridors of fleabag hotels, and into the detox unit at Towns with a Bible under his arm. He was promising sobriety to every drunk he could corner if they, like he, would only turn their lives over to God.
“He was even bringing some of these poor souls home with him,” Lois explained. “He thought a good home-cooked meal plus plenty of inspirational talks about the Oxford Group’s principles of honesty, purity, unselfishness, and love would get them sober. Ebby had also moved in with us by then but between the two of them, it was obvious to me that all their preaching was only turning off our rather inebriated guests.”34
After a while, the whole experience slowly began having a negative impact on Lois’s life and her life together with Bill. The simple fact was they had no life together. Yes, Bill was sober, but it wasn’t what she had envisioned. She thought that if she went along with his religious revival for a while, he would soon come back down to earth and things would return to normal—at least normal by other people’s standards. But the revival continued, the drunks were constantly dragged in and out of Clinton Street, and there was no end in sight. Gradually she became deeply frustrated and less affable about hosting a household full of itinerants. Bill sensed her feelings.
Every now and then she overheard her husband talking with Ebby about his dream of building a movement separate and apart from the Oxford Group, one focused solely on saving alcoholics. He saw so many drunks in the Oxford Group fall by the wayside while few nonalcoholic members seemed to care. But during the first five months of 1935, he encountered his own frustrations on the “preaching circuit.” None of his prospective converts were staying sober.35
Early that May an old friend of Bill’s, Howard Tompkins of Beers & Company, a Wall Street stock brokerage firm, called and invited him to lunch. He wanted to discuss a prospective project. Tompkins had bumped into Bill from time to time and was impressed with his recovery and newfound zest for life. Over lunch he explained that one of his clients planned to launch a proxy fight for control of the National Rubber Mold Machinery Company in Akron, Ohio. He thought this former financial hotshot would be the right one to organize and lead the battle. So Tompkins offered him the project, a modest fee, and a handsome bonus if he could pull it off. Under growing pressure at home, both financially and emotionally, Bill reluctantly accepted the offer over Ebby’s strong warnings and objections. Ebby was concerned about his friend’s sobriety, alone in a strange town and among heavy-drinking stock promoters.
Lois was also concerned when Bill first told her the news. The thought of being so many miles apart, absent if he needed her, caught her off guard. She had always been the mainstay in her husband’s alcoholic existence, and now suddenly she was about to find herself an almost unnecessary part of his sober new life. It took the wind out of her sails and gave rise to a sudden feeling of resentment she could not quite understand. But as the day of his departure for Akron drew near, she began to satisfy herself with the thought that perhaps this was God’s way of returning her husband to normalcy, getting his foot back into the door on Wall Street, and restoring some balance she so desperately yearned for in their lives.
It was the day before Bill was due to leave. Lois was packing his suitcase, and he was huffing and puffing about having only one decent suit to wear, that the collar on his favorite dress shirt was frayed, that his black shoes needed new heels. Suddenly he burst out in anger that his whole damn life was a mess, that he’d never amount to a hill of beans, and that it was a sheer waste of time going to Akron to handle some lousy proxy battle he’d probably only lose anyway.
Lois was taken aback by her husband’s attitude and remarks. Here was the man who had seen the face of God, now angry, bitter, and filled with self-pity again—when he had ruined his own life by drinking. She couldn’t understand his outburst and told him so.
All those men he had brought home to sober up, she reminded him, were back out in the streets drunk, yet here he was sober for more than five months and with an opportunity to earn some decent income by doing something he was good at. What was wrong with that?
“Sober!” he shouted back at her. “You call this sober? I’m still a drunk who hasn’t had a drink yet!”36
Then he stormed out of the bedroom leaving his wife bewildered and fearful that he would be back on the bottle again before ever reaching Akron.
The truth was, Lois’s remarks and his angry response stuck in Bill’s craw on his train ride west—the fact that he was still a drunk who hadn’t had a drink yet. He would soon come to realize that booze was merely the symptom of his disease. That alcoholism runs much deeper than its obvious physical signs. That it’s made up of all the low self-esteem, self-pity, anger, resentment, greed, jealousy, and other character defects and shortcomings that drive the alcoholic to find comfort and relief from such feelings in another drink. And Bill was soon to understand something else from his New York “preaching” experiences . . . that by trying to help other drunks, he was focusing less on himself and his own problems and thus had no thought or desire for a drink himself. He was bringing this newfound knowledge and understanding with him to Akron where he would desperately need it, for his five months of sobriety were about to be severely tested.
Lois admittedly felt lost as she watched her husband’s train pull out of Pennsylvania Station. It wasn’t that she would miss the frenzy and bewilderment that alcoholism brings into the household. It was simply the vacuum she now faced in her life and the wonder of where it would all end.
All she ever wanted was a peaceful life with a sober man she had always deeply loved. Now all she had was concern and confusion. Yes, he was sober and maybe he would stay that way in Akron. God only knew. And yes, he had recovered from his addiction, at least for now. But was that recovery only for himself, for his own desires, his own happiness, his own ambitions? Where did she fit in? After all she had given, all that she had sacrificed for their marriage, what was to be her reward?
“I thought I’d be glad once he stopped drinking,” Lois would often share later in her life. “I thought we’d be happy and close and loving like we once were earlier in our marriage. Now I just sat and wondered and waited for his letters to arrive from Akron. I waited and I waited.”37