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Source: Lois W – Al-Anon at Stepping Stones (1966) – Date Unknown.mp3 File: lois-w-al-anon-at-stepping-stones-1966-date-unknown.mp3 Duration: 00:25:59
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I have a peculiar privilege for me, I used the wrong word, a wonderful, wonderful privilege for me, and I spoke about Holly before, and I think I can illustrate what our life was before AA and Al-Anon by another short little story. Two people like ourselves were married. We got along quite well for quite a number of years. Things went pretty well, and the drinking increased, and things got difficult at home.
It got worse and worse as time went on until finally it got to the point where the wife stayed in her room with the door locked until the old boy got out in the morning, and she was either locked in the room or out of the house when he came home at night. Finally, one day, she met a friend on the street. The friend had been in the same circumstances, but lo and behold, now she looked lovely. She was well-dressed and quite calm.
She asked her how this had come about, and she said, well, she said, you know, John had a lot of trouble with drink, and she said, I found an organization that helped me, and John found an organization that helped him, and now we have a wonderful life together. So, of course, she wanted to find out all about this, and her friend said, all right. She said, you come with me to an Al-Anon meeting tonight, and you'll learn all about it.
So they went together that night, and as soon as the gal realized what it was all about, she began to tell the assembled there about this drunken bum she had married, and of course, they shut her right up and said that they didn't talk about their alcoholic there, that if she wanted any help, some of them would talk with her privately after the meeting. And at the end of the meeting, when she showed that she was quite upset, they stopped her with, well, are you the kind of wife that you were when you married John?
And after a little honest self-evaluation, she had to agree that she wasn't. So they got her to agree that for one day, she would go home and be the wife that she had been back in their early married days. So she went home, and the next morning, she got up bright and early, and she primped and powdered, and she put on her best bib and tucker, and got down in the kitchen to wait for the Lord and Master.
And a little while later, John came down, and he was still a little green around the gills, and the sweat hadn't hardly dried. He heard the commotion in the kitchen, and he looked around the corner, and for a minute, he thought he was in the wrong kitchen. And then, no, he said, that's her, and he walked out, and he greeted her very pleasantly, what the hell are you doing up? And she said, why, dear, I thought I'd get up and make you some breakfast before you go to work.
And he said, I don't need any breakfast, you know that. And she said, well, you should, you really need it. And of course, after a little of this exchange, he figured it's the easiest way out, so he said, all right, fix me some breakfast. Well, she'd about had it, but then she realized, no, I promised to do this for one day, so she said, what would you like for breakfast, dear? And he said, fix me a couple of eggs.
She said, how would you like the eggs, dear? He said, oh, he said, fry one and boil one. Well, of course, by this time, she was pretty peeved, but she decided, I'll go on with it anyway, so she fried an egg, and she boiled an egg. She put them very daintily on a plate, brought them over to John. John took one look, oh, for God's sakes, and he took them over and threw them in the garbage. She said, what's the matter now, dear?
He said, you fried the wrong egg. Well, this was Hollies in my life. Then I found A.A. Eight months later, she found Al-Anon, and ever since then, we've scrambled our eggs. We have no problems. But it is my extreme pleasure and privilege to introduce the First Lady of Al-Anon, and I can stand here and say, God bless her, and God bless Al-Anon Lois. Thank you, Frank. Please sit down. Thank you, Frank, and everybody.
I thought before I told you a little bit about the early days of A.A., I'd take this opportunity to introduce some of Al-Anon's World Service Office folks that are here tonight. There's Mary S. right in front of me. Mary, will you stand up? Mary is the Chairman of our Board of Trustees, and her husband Cliff S. has just gone out for a drink.
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And then Henrietta S. is our General Secretary at our office. And over on this side is Sue L., who's the Chairman of our Conference Committee. And then I wish Holly would stand. She's Frank's wife and our Conference Secretary. You know, in the early days of A.A., it was really quite different from the way it is now. For five years, there was no book. And the only way to communicate with other people was to go and tell them by word of mouth.
There was no literature. So that's what we did do, the few groups in those five years that were around at that time. Of course, all the meetings were held in people's homes, the homes of those who were lucky enough to have a home. And anybody that did have a home, it was wide open to anybody that the boys brought in. And our houses, those in the S. in Akron, and ours in Brooklyn, and the people that have V. over in Jersey, and everybody in the early days that had a home, had them just filled with drunks of one sort or another, either drinking or stopped temporarily or well on the way to real sobriety.
It was quite a different thing in those days, as I said before, for many reasons. One was that there were no people in AA that, except those that had gone to the very bottom, those were the only people who would even listen to the story that one drunk was telling another. They had to be worked with oh so hard, and everybody, families and everybody, did what they could to help. Mike's mentioning the syrup made me think of something that happened at our house.
Bill, as you know, came from Vermont, and somebody had sent him some maple syrup, and they'd sent it in a whiskey bottle, and the whiskey bottle was in the kitchen, and one of the boys saw this good-looking bottle in the kitchen, and he was so drunk at the time that he drank the whole bottle of syrup, thinking he was drinking whiskey. Of course, there were many, many sad things that happened, and many very humorous things that happened, and very many inspirational things.
Some of the boys, not some of the boys, but all the boys, we had a rule that nobody could come in the house when he was drinking. So one of the boys couldn't get in, we wouldn't let him in, so he opened the cold chute and got into the cellar. He was quite fat, and I'm surprised that he could get down the cold chute, but some way he did, he slid down the cold chute into the cellar and got in that way.
And the same fat man got stuck one night in the wash tubs, you know, in the old city houses there used to be stationary tubs,
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and he lived down in the basement, that was his apartment, and he thought he'd take a bath in the wash tub. But once he got in, he couldn't get out. So one of us, and I think it was me, pulled him out. And there were many, many things, a man committed suicide in our house after having pawned our clothes, our best clothes. This was not too long after the, before the Depression, before the crash, when we were used to dress up once in a while, and Bill had evening clothes, dress suit, and I had an evening cape.
And we never had one since, that went the way of, way of all crash. And of course it was always the most thrilling thing, the whole, the families were included in all the meetings, the wives and husbands, there weren't too many alcoholic women then, so there were mostly wives, but the children came too. And the children were so vitally interested in everything that went on. They'd inquire about all the people and want to know how they were, and they'd learn the 12 steps and they were really trying to live themselves by them.
I don't think youngsters, even now that we may have allotops, can be too young to be thrilled by the AA program and be helped by it. The first girl, woman, that came in, we, was a wife of a friend of Bill's, who had been in Bellevue, and she came from Bellevue to our house, and she stayed sober quite a while. And at that time there was a wonderful man by the name of Fitz M., I guess he was the fourth or the fifth AA, and he was trying to start a group in Washington, D.C., and she went down to help him.
And she stayed sober for really quite a long time. Then she married a man that they were trying to get in AA, he didn't really go along with the idea at all himself. And this man used to say to her every once in a while, he really didn't understand alcoholics or himself or anybody, but he would say to her every once in a while, Florence, you look so thirsty. And so she would have to do something about that.
And Florence disappeared, and we all, everybody looked for her everywhere, and they couldn't find her, but after about a couple of weeks, they found her in the morgue in Washington. Everybody used to visit every other group. The New York group would go to Jersey or go to Greenwich or Philadelphia or Washington or even Cleveland or Akron. And Chicago, those were the groups, I think, that were in existence in the first five years.
And if anybody had a car, a bunch would all pile in and we'd go to where we knew a meeting was going to be. So the families were really just as much a part then of AA as the alcoholics. We really felt very much a part. But after a while, the AAs thought that they should have a meeting They should have a meeting or two, at least one every week, they thought they should have,
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of just alcoholics only, so that they could really get down to business. And when this occurred, the wives thought they'd meet together at the same time. So, we used to have little gatherings of wives, they want, at first, they didn't have any particular characteristics, sometimes we'd play bridge, sometimes we'd gossip about our husbands, we'd do a lot of, a variety of things. But then, a few of us began to see that we really needed the A.A. program just as much as the alcoholics did. The famous case of my throwing a shoe at Bill, started me wondering about myself, and realizing that I needed to live by the Twelve Steps just as much as Bill did.
He was striding way, way ahead of me. I'd always thought of myself as being the moral mentor in the house. But Bill never was a mentor, but he was certainly growing spiritually where I was standing still, or perhaps, I don't think there is any standing still. If I wasn't going ahead, I was going backwards. So, I decided that I better live by the Twelve Steps, too. And Annie S. and a number of other people had come to the same conclusion. So, when any time we visited a group, we would tell the other wives and families, we'd tell them about how we had found that we needed to live by the Twelve Steps of A.A.
So, little groups of wives and families all over the country began to feel the same need. That they needed to have something for themselves where they could help themselves to be, stop being the frustrated people they were, and be real integrated human beings. So, that's really the way Al-Anon started. And we followed A.A. in every possible way that we really could do. So, I want to thank A.A.s so very much for showing us the way.
Without your leading us, we would still be the floundering, frustrated folks that we were. In our meetings, we tell our own experiences just as A.A.s do. We tell how we came to find that we needed Al-Anon and what Al-Anon has done for us. And we sought to help other families that were in, that have had the same sort of an experience. Then in 1950, Bill traveled all over the country in Canada and the United States to try and see how people, how A.A.s reacted to the idea of a general conference for Alcoholics Anonymous.
And in doing so, he discovered quite a few of these groups of the families of alcoholics.
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And he thought that they should have a central office here in New York or someplace, just the way A.A. did, so that they could have the same benefits that the A.A.s did, that they could be unified, that they could have a set of principles that everybody would know what they were. That where inquiries could be sent, where publicity or knowledge of Al-Anon could go forth, so that the public might learn, not only the public, but those in need might learn about where they could turn to help.
So a friend of mine and I started a little office up in Bedford Hills. And soon, oh, A.A. had had, by the way, they had had inquiries from 87, I believe it was, 87 wives or groups wanting to know if they could register with A.A. Well, A.A. wasn't equipped to help the families of alcoholics, so they handed over this list of 87 and we wrote to them. And we got 50 groups, 50 people started. And now today, there are over 3,000.
And this was in 51, so that's 15 years. And the potentialities of Al-Anon are really lots greater than they are of A.A. Because there are all the friends and there are all the relatives, the children and the parents. And the alcoholic, I think some estimates, some people estimate, I think that there are five people affected for every one alcoholic. So that the potential for growth is simply terrific.
And I think we've only just barely started to scratch the surface. So, that's the story of Al-Anon in the early days. You know, one thing more about A.A. When A.A. first started, it was, before there was a book, it was more anonymous than any one A.A. Because it was a fellowship without a name. They didn't have a name until the book was written. They were just a bunch of drunks trying to help each other.
A bunch of nameless drunks trying to help each other. So again, I want to thank you, UAAs, for all that you've done for so many. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Lois. Very quickly, I think, if I have your permission, I'd like to just tell two instances in my own life that are humorous now. But I think illustrate pretty well some of the things that families go through. And these things happen to me almost daily for many, many years.
But two stand out in my mind. One, I can recall Holly and her mother. The children were pretty small then. And my father-in-law. But Holly and her mother particularly would sit in the kitchen window on a Saturday. And I would bring a car in the yard with all the intentions of working on it. And they never knew until after I came into this fellowship how I could go under the car at 8 o'clock in the morning, cold sober, and come out at 11 o'clock so drunk I couldn't walk.
I used to take the floorboards out of the car, put a couple of pints of whiskey in the glove compartment, and I could reach up through and lay under the car and drink very beautifully in the shade.
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And then I recall going through one of those stages that I think most alcoholics go through with the pets. And I brought tropical fish. And I used to stand and watch the tropical fish swim by the hour, half drunk. And I used to wonder whether male fish drank, and whether female fish could talk. And then I put guppies in the tank, and I realized after a few weeks that this had been a mistake. I had more guppies than tropical fish.
So I started to sort them out one night, and I had glasses of guppies and tropical fish, and whiskey all over the kitchen table. And I picked up a whole glass of guppies and drank them down, and swore the next day when they told me this that they were insane. So as I've heard Bill say, and it's always struck home with me, they went through sober, but we went through with an anesthetic.