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Source: Lois W – Al-Anon Family Groups Archive – Part 1 – Date Unknown.mp3 File: lois-w-al-anon-family-groups-archive-part-1-date-unknown.mp3 Duration: 00:34:02
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Good evening, everybody. Hi. This is one of the most thrilling meetings I've ever been at. I don't know whether I'll be able to even say a few words because it's so very moving to see so many of you. In the beginning of AA, it was a family affair. Parents, mates, and children accompanied the AAs to meetings, which often were held in homes. Anyone lucky enough to still have a home shared it with those without one, who were most of the people. Our house buzzed like a beehive. Such terrific excitement and enthusiasm existed about this wonderful program, but no one considered carrying on any outside activities.
When not twelve-stepping or attending meetings, AA was the enthralling topic of conversation morning, night, and noon. Any new prospect was treated like the find of a raw diamond, and all were anxious to help polish him and to see that he got the program. It wasn't too long, however, before some AAs felt that they needed meetings for alcoholics only. When the families were thus left to themselves, they sometimes met together too, and eventually our line grew out of this.
The mutuality of the old days seemed wonderful, but we mates now have something much deeper and more useful. Then we floated gratitude over the dramatic recovery of our dear ones, but we never thought about changing ourselves. Consequently, when the pink cloud faded, we woke up to find our alcoholics way ahead, often leaving behind in us hurt feelings, resentment, and self-pity. Along with our line coming into maturity, and its members practicing the AA principles in all their affairs, home lives can be based solidly on real understanding and true partnership.
We thank you, dear AAs, for showing us the way. Thank you all. How could we possibly be sitting at home feeling miserable if one person had not had an inspiring idea? It was our dear Lois's idea that started Al-Anon for friends and families of alcoholics, the idea that we can help ourselves. That was a break for the alcoholic, wasn't it? She realized that we need not live our lives totally dependent upon that of the alcoholic, whether drunk or sober. We can live a full, happy life, filled with purpose.
She is an example and an inspiration to all of us in her loving generosity, her youthfulness, openness and flexibility of mind, her forthright and deep spiritual strength.
[00:05:01]
Her life of dedication is a perfect example of the saying, it is better to serve than to be served. I am privileged to introduce to you the founder of Al-Anon, our dear Lois. Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Lois and I'm an Al-Anon, but I think I'm also an AA. Because I was around at the very early days and that was my first love. But I want to first thank you all for this wonderful luncheon we are having here together, for all your kindness to me and your gratitude.
And for this very happy gathering, to see all your smiling faces is a great joy. And there really never, I think in this world, is anything like the getting together of AAs and Al-Anons. There's something here in a meeting together that we never can get any other way, I think. Something special when we all gather together and enjoy each other and share our love and gratitude. And I want to thank the committee for all their graciousness to me and the beautiful flowers and all their kindness. And I also want to contradict Penny in saying that all so many wonderful things started with me.
That isn't true at all. And as I tell my story, which I will do, I think you'll see that it wasn't really anything to do with me except that I happened to be the first link in a chain. Every other member in a chain is just as important as the first member. It just happened to be me that was in that position. When Bill and I were engaged, I was very, very proud of him because he never touched alcohol. I hadn't any particular fear of alcohol because there was nobody in my family that drank too much.
We always had wine or liqueurs on the table on Sunday, but nobody ever seemed to take too much. But I knew Bill was afraid of it, and he had been warned by his family that he must not touch a drop of liquor. Because if he did, he might get in the same kind of trouble that his father and his grandfather before him did. So for some reason he believed them, and he stayed away from alcohol in all his boyhood until he was married.
Getting married must have been what broke him over. He'd go to the bars and saloons with the boys, and he'd take ginger ale or sarsaparilla or something, fruit beer, while they took beer. And I thought he was so very strong-willed. But then after we married and lived in New Bedford, Massachusetts, we went to several parties. There was quite a little bit of money and social life there in New Bedford, Massachusetts.
That was where Bill was stationed, at Fort Rodman. This was during the First World War, World War I. First World War is what I'm trying to say.
[00:10:18]
The socialites in the town used to invite the young army officers on the post to parties. As a bride, I didn't see Bill around, and some of the other officers that I'd met came to me and said, we've just taken Bill home, and we've put him to bed. And they took me home, and there was Bill in bed with a bucket at his head. And I was really terribly shocked and surprised, but I didn't think it was going to be anything very serious.
And Bill didn't drink, really, too much, except when we had a party. But he always got drunk. He never took a few drinks. He always drank until he was laid out stiff. But I thought that I'd be able to change him. I thought living with me would be so inspirational that he wouldn't need any artificial stimulant. But things got worse, and worse, and worse. And as time went on, and we had no children, my one purpose in life was to help Bill become sober.
And as you all know, my one purpose didn't succeed. Years and years went by when Bill got worse and worse, and he had episode after episode, until one day, 17 years after we'd been married, and after I had tried with everything within me to help him, he finally did get sober. But it was not through me. It was not my inspiration that sobered Bill up. A friend came to him, bright-eyed and cherry-faced, who had usually been half-squished with liquor when he came to New York.
And this friend he'd known for many years, and they'd had many drunken episodes together, but now he was clear-eyed, as I said. And he said he'd found a release from alcohol. And he told Bill about it, and Bill was very much interested. We had tried everything together, Bill and I. Towards the end of Bill's drinking, he had been so hopeless about himself that he'd asked me to help him, and we'd tried to do everything together that we could think of to stop his drinking.
But nothing had worked. But this friend said that he was not on the wagon, he was not fighting alcohol. The problem had been taken from him. He was released from the problem. And as I say, Bill was terribly struck by this. Terribly struck by this because he had wanted with his own very soul to stop drinking, but
[00:15:05]
he hadn't been able to. So he went to the hospital to try to get his thinking clear, clear up his thinking so that he could understand, try to understand a little what had happened to this friend. And when he had, when he was at the hospital, he had this wonderful experience that you've probably read about in the Big Book. And he, too, was released from alcohol. At first, when he went to the hospital, he, I was upset about it.
He'd left me a note. He hadn't consulted with me. I had become the chief cook and bottle washer in the family because Bill was drunk and so he wasn't able to make any decisions or to earn any money to speak of. And I'd had to be nurse and mother and caretaker and breadwinner. So I thought I should be asked about making any decision about going to a hospital that required money especially. But when I did go to see him, I knew something terrific had happened.
He was a different man. The light in his eyes was most revealing. And since that moment, I never really had any doubt about his having found what he was looking for. So after he got out of the hospital, he was so excited about this wonderful thing that had happened to him that he thought, well, this could happen to other people. Why not sober up all the drunks of the world? Bill never did anything by haves.
So he set out and began bringing them all to Clinton Street where we lived. And I think he must have gotten at least half of them to the house because we had them living on all floors of the house that belonged to my father where we were living. And they were in all stages of sobriety. Well, I was really terribly moved and excited about this wonderful thing. But after a while, I didn't seem to be quite as happy as I thought I ought to be.
And one day, Bill said to me, Lois, let's hurry up and go to the meetings. We were going to Oxford Group meetings then. Ebi, the friend that had come to Bill and told him about his release, belonged to the Oxford Group. And we'd gone to those meetings together. And I'd gone along with Bill because that's what a good wife does, goes along with her husband. But I had gone for my own benefit. The Oxford Group was a spiritual program and they were trying to help by changing individual lives.
And I didn't think I needed to be changed. I just, I knew Bill needed to keep up going to these meetings, but I didn't need to.
[00:20:00]
I'd had a good bringing up, I'd had a lovely, loving family, and a good religious training as a child. And I didn't see any need that I needed any changing. I loved Bill and I thought that that was all that was necessary. So when Bill said, hurry up, let's get ready and go to the meeting, I had a shoe in my hand and I took that shoe and I threw it just as hard as I could and I said, dog, you're on your own meetings.
This surprised me even more than it did Bill. And I started wondering about myself for the first time. I started trying to think of my relationship to Bill and to my fellow man and to my God. I'd taken myself for granted before. And now I began, as I say, to think and wonder, why had I lost my temper over such a simple thing? There must be something wrong somewhere, and what was it? And by degrees, I saw that I was terribly, deeply hurt that somebody else had come along and talked with Bill for just a few minutes and Bill's whole life was changed, whereas I had tried our whole 17 years together and had not succeeded.
Also, Bill and I had been very compatible. Because he was an alcoholic, we had stayed away from all our friends and our families. We'd been thrown at each other entirely. We relied completely on each other for everything. And now I had no companionship with him. He was off in the highways and byways collecting drunks. And I wasn't needed anymore. Before that, I had been terribly needed. I was the staff of the family, but now I didn't know just where I stood or what I was supposed to be doing.
I knew I was working, I had a job, and I had a house full of drunks to look after. Bill was just as loving and devoted as ever, but he didn't need me the way he had before. And I guess we all want to be needed. So after the long years of thinking about this, I really have seen that I had a lot of resentment against all these drunks that were coming in, although I liked them all. You can't help but liking them, because we didn't have them very often.
Once in a while we had them when they were drunk, but mostly they were just in the kind of sad sap stage afterwards. So as I said, it has taken me many, many years to really understand myself and to see how much I rationalized. And after a while, Bill's group of drunks began to grow, and he went out to Akron and met Bob Smith, Dr. Bob, and the groups began out there to grow, because there were groups
[00:25:04]
out there, really, before there were groups in New York. We just had a few odd drunks around, but the groups began to start out there, and then they began growing all over the country, really very, very fast. It was, I think, in 1950, which was quite a number of years after this, it was 34 that Bill sobered up, and AA had developed and grown, and in 1950, he had thought that a conference of delegates was a very necessary thing for AA, and he went around the country trying to get the opinion of the groups and of the AAs everywhere in the United States and Canada to see what their feeling about the matter was.
And to his surprise, he found that there were quite a number of groups of the families of alcoholics. You see, in the very beginning, when there was no literature, AA literature, you had to travel, you had to talk face-to-face with a new prospect, there was no literature to send through the mail to start a group, it had to be all done by word of mouth, so there was a lot of traveling, and when we had traveled around, Bill had talked with the alcoholics and I had talked with the families, and I told them about my experience, how I had found that I, too, needed to live by the same 12 steps as Bill did.
So what with that start and the feeling, the same spontaneous feeling that I had had that I needed to start, other people and other groups had that same feeling, too. So these groups of families of alcoholics had been going on for quite some time, and some of them were for just hanging up curtains in the clubhouse or putting on coffee at a meeting, and quite a few of them were for their own spiritual development.
And when he came back from his trip around the country, he told me about it, and he said that he thought they should have a central office, a service office, that could unite them and be a place where people could write for information, just as the alcoholics had a service office. Well, that seemed like a good idea, but at first I was so interested in having a hole of my own, which we hadn't had for many years during the early periods of AA, that I didn't think I wanted to do it at first.
And then I began to think about it and think about the really great need for such a thing. And then, of course, I became more and more enthusiastic every minute. I got a friend of mine who lived in the neighborhood and begged him to help me, and we started upstairs and we wrote to the AA office and asked them if they had any inquiries from the families of alcoholics. And to our surprise, they had 87 names of people that had written in to the AA office and wanted to register there.
Office, and wanted to register there, but of course AA was for alcoholics only and had
[00:30:01]
nothing special to give the families of alcoholics, so they had just wrote them a pleasant responding letter and kept their names, and they handed us over those 87 names, and Ann and I wrote to them. They were mostly groups, but one or two were just lone members, and to our surprise we got 49 answers, which was very good. The 49 groups said that they would like to form a fellowship, they would like to have a service office of their own, and that they would like to name our non-family groups. There was one that didn't, just one out of the 49 that didn't want to join us. So we started with 48 groups, and Ann and I were so busy after a while, by then seven or eight local groups in the metropolitan area, the New York area, we went around asking for volunteers, and AA has always been very, very cooperative and very helpful to Al-Anon. They let us have the upstairs room in the New York clubhouse for a very low rent, and they've always been very considerate and helpful. So we began to get volunteers for our new service office down in New York on West 24th Street. And Al-Anon, from that beginning, has grown to, in a remarkable way, to really tremendous size. At least it seems that way to one who saw it in the very early days. And now there are, I believe, 1,300, 1,300, 13,000, I beg your pardon, groups of Al-Anon in 70 countries. And Al-Anon has been translated, I mean our Al-Anon literature, we have six hardcover books, and our books have been translated into eight different languages. So that's the story of the growth of Al-Anon, at least my side of it, part of it. And you look around and see all the people here and all the happiness, and it just is the most inspiring and thrilling thing for me to be here with you. And I thank you all so much.