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Anonymous Ally A. A. WORLD SERVICES INC, The more money he made in the 1920s bull market, the more Wall Street Analvst William Griffith Wilson hit the bottle. “Men of genius,” he assured his worried wife, “conceive their best projects when drunk.” Itre was right, though hardly in the sense he meant. When Wilson died last week at 75, he left one of the finest projects that a drunk has ever conceived. He was the famous “Bill W.,” who sobered up and in 1935 cofounded Alcoholics AnonYmous. A gawky Vermonter, Wilson grew up with a crushing sense of inferiority. Alcoholism ran in his familY; he was physically weak and a target for bullies. By sheer persistence, he became captain o[ his school baseball team, played the violin well, and led the school orchestra. But his feelings of inadequacy remained until as a World War I artillery officer, he gulped his first drink. lnspirotionol Teochings. As Wilson used to relate, “Down went that strange barrier that had always stood between me and the people around me. Here was that missing link.” After the 1929 A.A. FOUNDER WITSON crash, Wilson tried to forget his losses ldenlificotion leods fo power. with numbing doses of bathtub gin and bootleg whisky. His wife went to work must not merely control their consumpto support him. and, as Wilson recalled. tion but curb it entirely, A.A. members his mintal disintegration “proceeded listened to each other’s stories and helped rapidly and implacably.” Injured after one another resist the temptation to an Armistice Day bender in 1934, he drink. But they never forgot that the tried to heed the inspirational teachings major effort to abstain must be made of the First Century Christian Fellow- by the drinker himself. “The only reship (precursor of Moral Re-Armament), quirement for A.A. membership,” acbuf soon went on a three-daY drunk cording to an organization tradition, “is that left him shattered. a sincere desire to stop drinking.” At a Manhattan hospital, Wilson grim- Wilson was A.A.’s most active memly prayed for help. “Suddenly,” he re- ber. Even after his retirement in 1962 lated, “the room lit up with a great he remained in touch, addressing the orwhite light. I was caught up into an ec- ganization’s banquet each fall and, destasy which there are no words to de- spite illness, struggling from a wheelchair scribe.” After leaving the hospital, Wil- to speak to its convention in Miami son tried to help other drunks achieve last July. He took immense pride in his similar religious experiences, but found accomplishment, and with good reason. that he also needed medical facts to A.A. now has 475,000 members in crack their tough egos. In 1935 he got 16,000 groups in the U.S. as well as the help he needed when he met “Dr. 90 foreign countries. A.A. strategy has Bob,” Akron Surgeon Robert H. Smith, been copied by organizations like Syna fellow Vermonter who had vainlY anon and others working on group thertried to control his own compulsive apy for all kinds of troubled people, drinking. Together they founded Al- including ex-convicts. It obviously coholics AnonYmous. works. Today 60Vo of A.A. members For a time, Wils6n had grandiose vi- get on the wagon and stay on it. sions: “Chains of A.A. hospitals and tons of free literature for suffering alkies.” But when he sought millions from John D. Rockefeller Jr., the philanthropist astutely replied: “I think money -spoil will this.” As a result, A.A. was financed by its own members. In dealing with each other or the public,.they used only, their flrst names and initials. “Identifiiation leads to power drives,” Wilson explained. “The thought of power is one ieason we were drunks in the first place.” A.A. shunned moralizing in favor of viewine alcoholism as an emotional crutch combined with a physical allersv to liquor. Thus A.A.’s methods teanea more heavily on psychology than physiology. Recognizing that alcoholics