BILL’S WIFE REMEMBERS WHEN HE AND SHE AND THE FIRST A.A.s WERE VERY YOUNG Christmas Issue, 1944, A.A. Grapevine

As the wife of an early A.A., some of our experiences and my reactions to my husband’s changed life may be interesting to other wives. Bill was an alcoholic, I believe, from the first drink he ever took, just a few months before our marriage. From then on, for seventeen years, I did everything I could think of to keep him away from liquor. I will tell a little of our life before A.A. to help explain some of my later emotions. Bill and I had no children, so I soon felt that my job in life was to help Bill straighten himself out. As time went on, he earnestly tried to stop drinking. He was always very remorseful and perplexed the mornings-after. We would then resolve to lick this liquor situation together, launching off on some new tack. As his drinking got worse, all decision and responsibility had to be taken by me. It was lucky that we were companionable, for gradually as our social contacts were broken we were thrust back on each other for company. In order to get away from alcohol over the week ends, I used to engineer some sort of outing, as we both loved the outdoors. If our pocketbook was flat, we might take the subway to the Dyckman Street ferry and hike along the Palisades to some scenic spot where we would nibble our sandwiches and gaze at the view. Or we might ferry to Staten Island and walk there; perhaps broiling a steak over a campfire. We have hired a rowboat at Yonkers and, using a bathtowel as a sail, floated up the Hudson, to a spit of land near Nyack, were we camped and tried to sleep. We once went so far to get away from alcohol that we both gave up our jobs and took a whole year off. This we spent motorcycling and camping over half the United States. Theses trips, although good for Bill’s health, did nothing towards his permanent sobriety. In fact, his alcoholism grew steadily more serious. He lost job after job until I became entirely hopeless about him. And then suddenly and finally Bill straightened out through the help of an old friend. At once I was convinced of his complete change and was of course extremely happy. Bill began to go to religious meetings and to work feverishly with alcoholics. I would go to meetings too and would try to share his newfound enthusiasms. He always had some drunk in tow and would work all night or get up in the middle of the night to go to the suburbs if one called him. We had drunks all over the house; sometimes as many as five lived there at one time. One drunk committed suicide in the house after having sold about 700 dollars worth of our clothes and luggage. Another slid down the coal chute from the street to the cellar when we refused him the front door. Two others took to fighting, and one chased the other all around the house with a carving knife. The intended victim was saved by a third drunk, who delivered the knife-minding one a knockout blow. An alcoholic who was living in the basement was invited up for a pancake breakfast. After eating his share, he suddenly put on his hat and started out the door remarking that he was going to Childs for PLENTY of pancakes. Bill had found himself a job about this time; and it used to take him away from home a great deal and I was left with one or more alcoholics to look after. Once one of these boys lay in the vestibule all night and screamed invectives at me because I would not let him in. He was so loud the passers-by all stopped, looked and listened. Another time it was 4 a.m. before I succeeded in towing a drunk home. He was anxious to be at his job the next morning and we had gone out around midnight to look for a doctor, having been unable to get one to come to the house at that hour. I helped his shaky steps up and down stoops, lit his cigarettes for him and finally, when we could not rouse a doctor, held a drink to his lips in a bar. When I asked him how he then felt he said, “Well, a bird can’t fly on one wing.” After a few more drinks I managed to get him home, but he did not get to his job the next morning. I was once suddenly taken sick, and when my sister arrived to nurse me she found five men milling around in the living room, one of them muttering, “One woman can look after five drunks but five drunks cannot look after one woman.” Now to describe my reactions to it all. When Bill first sobered up I was terribly happy but soon, without my realizing it, I began to resent the fact that Bill and I never spent any time together any more. I stayed at home while he went off somewhere scouting up new drunks or working with old ones. My life’s job of sobering up Bill with all its former responsibilities was suddenly taken away from me. I had not yet found anything to fill the void. And then there was the feeling of being on the outside of a very tight little clique of alcoholics into which no mere wife could possibly enter. I did not understand what was going on within myself until one Sunday, Bill asked me to go with him to a meeting. To my own surprise as well as his I burst forth with, “Damn all your meeting,” and threw my shoe at him as hard as I could. This bad display of temper woke me up. I realized that I had been wallowing in self pity; that Bill’s change was simply miraculous; that his feverish activity with alcoholics was absolutely necessary to his sobriety; and that if I did not want to be left way behind I had better jump on the bandwagon, too!

Bill’s wife, Lois Wilson

…it might have been the time… “I too needed spiritual development” By Lois February 1950 AA Grapevine

It is hard to say just when Alcoholics Anonymous began. It may have been at the time a friend came to see my husband, Bill. Or it may have been at the moment of Bill’s spiritual experience. Most AAs feel it is the time six months later when he met Dr. Bob in Akron and, together, they started to help other alcoholics who wanted to be rid of their addiction. But for me it was the day I first saw the released expression on my husband’s face. We had been married 17 years, and were compatible and companionable. Our interests were similar and we both deeply desired and strove for the other’s welfare. The only, but considerable block to our happiness was Bill’s uncontrolled drinking. In early years he said that he could stop when he wanted and I thought I’d soon be able to make life so complete for him that he would wish to quit drinking entirely. Much later when he really did want to stop, he was absolutely unable to do so, and we both then became terribly confused and frustrated. Oddly enough he had been in other matters a person of strong will power, but his will seemed to melt away where alcohol was concerned. In his remorse and disappointment he was a tragic and heart breaking figure. I too felt myself a failure, for despite every endeavor, I had not been able to help him in time, nor could I aid him in the least in his final struggle for freedom. Today I can talk and write about these intimate details of our life together. While Bill was drinking, I dared not even speak to my family about it and tried to hide the fact of his alcoholism in every way possible. Now that I have learned that Bill was actually a very sick man, that awful feeling of disgrace has left me. I have also learned how much help the telling of such experiences can be to those who are going through similar ones. After fifteen years in AA the old trying times are so far away and foreign to Bill’s and my present way of life that it seems like the experience of someone else. After Bill left the hospital for the last time, he began to think of the thousands of alcoholics who wanted to be rid of their malady. If they could be made to feel desperate enough, they might have a releasing experience just like his. He would hold before them the medical verdict that alcoholism was hopeless. So tirelessly, day and night, we worked. Our home was filled with alcoholics in various stages of sobriety. As many as five of them lived with us at one time. But none of them stayed sober for long. Then started a long process of trial and error, certain ideas were retained, but many discarded. It was in June 1935 that Bill went to Akron, Ohio on a business trip. The venture failed. He finally contacted Dr. Bob, an Akron surgeon soon to become cofounder of Alcoholics Anonymous. Bob too wanted above all to stop drinking. He and his wife, Anne, had done everything they could. Something passed between these two men. There was real mutuality this time. By example they showed how it worked. Thus AA spread like a chain letter. Bill had learned a great deal. At first he had tried to put every alcoholic he met in the way of a spiritual experience just like his own. As AA grew, he realized that what had come to him in a few dramatic minutes usually dawns on others in months or years. Sometimes the alcoholic himself does not even realize his own development, though his words and actions soon speak for him, for he is doing now what, of himself, he was unable to do before. He is staying sober and helping other people as never before. He is gaining a serenity, a joy in living. Watching Bill and the other men at the meetings, I noticed many of them had begun to grow by leaps and bounds. This made me look at myself. I had been given a sound religious upbringing and felt I had done for Bill all a good wife could do, although this was strangely mixed with a sense of failure. At first it never occurred to me that I too needed spiritual development. I did not realize that by living such an abnormal life I might have become twisted, losing a sense of true values. After awhile I saw that unless I jumped on the bandwagon too, I would be left way behind. The AA Program I found could be most helpful to the non-alcoholic as well, a fact thousands of alcoholics’ relatives and friends now apply to their own lives. Those Clinton Street days are full of memories. Some of them are humorous, some tragic. But most of them bring back a warm glow of hope and courage, of friendship and rebirth. For the fellowship in AA is unique. Ties are made overnight that it would take years to develop elsewhere. No one needs a false front. All barriers are down. Some who have felt outcasts all their lives, now know they really belong. From feeling as if they were dragging anchor through life, they suddenly sail free before the wind. For now they can be of tremendous and peculiar use to others having a dire need like their own.

Family Circle As non-alcoholic mates and families see the AA program… August 1953 AA Grapevine How One AA Wife Lives the 12 Steps

Lois W., AA’s “first lady” as the non-alcoholic wife of Bill, the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, tells the story of her own adventure in growth applying AA principles to her own life.

We have often heard it said that the Twelve Steps of AA are a way of life for anyone, if you substitute for the word “alcohol” any particular problem of life. For a close relative of an AA, a wife or husband, even the word alcohol does not need to be changed in the First Step; simply leave out “alcoholic” in the last, thus: “carry the message to others, etc.” We wives and husbands of AA in our Family Group try to live by the Twelve Steps, and the following is how one wife applies the Twelve Steps to herself: Step 1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol…that our lives had become unmanageable. I was just as powerless over my husband’s alcoholism as he. I tried in every way I knew to control his drinking. My own life was indeed unmanageable. I was forced into doing and being that which I did not want to do or be. And I tried to manage Bill’s life as well as my own. I wanted to get inside his brain and turn the screws in what I thought was the right direction. But I finally saw how mistaken I was. I, too, was powerless over alcohol. Step 2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. My thinking was distorted, my nerves over-wrought. I held fears and attitudes that certainly were not sane. I finally realized that I had to be restored to sanity also and that only by having faith in God, in AA, in my husband and myself, could this come about. Step 3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him. Self-sufficiency and the habit of acting as mother, nurse, caretaker, and breadwinner, added to the fact of always being considered on the credit side of the ledger with my husband on the debit side, caused me to have a smug feeling of rightness. At the same time, illogically, I felt a failure at my life’s job. All this made me blind for a long time to the fact that I needed to turn my will and my life over to the care of God. Smugness is the very worst sin of all, I do believe. No shaft of light can pierce the armour of self-righteousness. Step 4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. Here is where, when I tried to be really honest, I received a tremendous shock. Many of the things that I thought I did unselfishly were, when I tracked them down, pure rationalizations – rationalizations to get my own way about something. This disclosure doubled my need to live by the 12 Steps as completely as I could Step 5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs. I found this was just as necessary for me to do as it was for an alcoholic, even more so perhaps, because of my former “mother-and-bad-boy” attitude toward Bill. Admitting my wrongs helped so much to balance our relationship, to bring it closer to the ideal of partnership in marriage. Step 6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character. I came to realize there were selfish thoughts, feelings and actions that I had felt justified in keeping because of what Bill or someone else had done to me. I had to try very hard to want God to remove these. There was, for instance, my self-pity at losing Bill’s companionship, now that the house was full of drunks, and we saw each other alone so seldom. At that time I didn’t realize the importance of his working with other alcoholics. In order to banish his alcoholic obsession he needed to be equally obsessed by AA. In the early days there was also my deep and unconscious resentment because someone else had done in a few minutes what I had tried my whole married life to do. Now I realize that a wife can rarely if ever do this job. The sick alcoholic feels his wife’s account has been written on the credit page of life’s ledger. But he knows his own has been on the debit side; therefore she cannot possibly understand. Another alcoholic, with similar debit entry, immediately identifies himself as a non-alcoholic really cannot. This important fact took me a long time to recognize. I could find no peace of mind until I did so. Step 7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings. “Humbly” was a word I never fully understood. Today it means “in proportion,” an honest relationship between myself and my fellow man, and myself and God. While striving for humility myself, it was encouraging to see my husband’s growth in humility. While he was drinking he was the most inferiority-ridden person in the world. After AA, from a doormat he bounced way up to superiority over everyone else, including me. This was pretty hard to take “after all the good I done him.” Of course few wives at first can see how natural it is for the alcoholic to feel that the most wonderful people in the world are AAs living the only true principles. Since I, too, was trying to live the AA program, this was the very point where I had to look to my own humility, regardless of my husband’s progress or lack of it. Step 8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all. At first I couldn’t think of anyone I had harmed. But when I broke through my own smugness even a little, I saw many relatives and friends whom I had resented; I had given short, irritated answers and had even imperiled long standing friendships. In fact, I remember one friend that I threw a book at when, after a nerve-racking day, he annoyed me. (Throwing seems to have been my pet temper outlet.) I try to keep this list up to date. And I also try to shorten it. Step 9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others. This is just as important for me as for the alcoholic. To have serenity and joy in living and doing, to be able to withstand the hard knocks that come along, and to help others do the same, I found I had to make specific amends for each harm done. I couldn’t help others while emotionally sick myself. Step 10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it. It is astounding how each time I take an inventory I find some new rationalization, some new way I have been fooling myself that I hadn’t recognized before. It is so easy to fool oneself about motives. And admitting it is so hard, but so beneficial. Step 11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out. I am just beginning to understand how to pray. Bargaining with God is not real prayer and asking him for what I want, even good things, I’ve had to learn is not the highest form of prayer. I used to think I knew what was good for me and I, the captain, would give my instructions to my Lieutenant, God, to carry out. That is very different from praying only for the knowledge of God’s will and the power for me to carry it out. Time for meditation is hard to find, I imagine, for most of us. Today’s living is so involved. But I’ve set aside a few minutes night and morning. I am filled with gratitude to God these days. It is one of my principal subjects for meditation; gratitude for all the love and beauty and friends around me; gratitude even for the hard days of long ago that taught me so much. At least I’ve made a start and have improved to some small degree my conscious contact with God. Step 12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to others, and to practice these principles in all our affairs. I am like many AAs who do not realize when their spiritual awakening occurred. Mine was a slow developing experience. Even following a sudden spiritual awakening, no one can stand still. One either moves forward, or slips backward. In retrospect I can see a change for the better between my old and new self, and I hope that tomorrow, next month, next year I shall continue to see a better new self. And nothing has done more to move me forward than carrying the AA message to those non-alcoholics who do not yet comprehend and are still in need of the understanding and help of those who have gone before.

The Al-Anon Family Groups now number about 400. Queries and comments are welcomed at the Family Group Clearinghouse, whose mailing address is: P.O. Box 1475, Grand Central Annex, New York 17, N.Y.

Convention News FAMILIES OF ALCOHOLICS AT THE AA CONVENTION IN ST. LOUIS

Many families from all over the country are making plans for going to the big AA Convention in St. Louis, starting July 1, to celebrate AA’s Twentieth Anniversary. It will be an outstanding event, not only for AAs but for their close relatives, too. The Al-Anon Family Groups, to which many of these wives, husbands, parents, and children belong, have planned an extensive program to interest and inspire these relatives, whether or not they belong to Al-Anon. During the daytime on Friday and Saturday, while AA is holding sessions primarily for alcoholics, Al-Anon will hold similar meetings. There will be open and panel discussions on such subjects as:

What to do about the children of alcoholics How to apply the Twelve Steps to ourselves The adjustments necessary between husbands and wives, after AA How the Family Groups can help you and the alcoholic alike Explanation of what the Al-Anon Headquarters is, and what it does Reports from Al-Anon groups all over the country

Four members from Al-Anon Headquarters will be on hand to help you in any way they can. Panels will be selected from Al-Anon members of groups all over this country and Canada. And one member from Sydney, Australia, who is accompanying her husband to the Convention, has been asked to lead a meeting. A Reception Committee will try to make sure that everyone becomes well-acquainted, will know where and when the meetings take place, where coffee can be obtained at any time of the day or night, and where small gatherings are meeting for luncheon get-togethers. Of course everyone at the Convention – AAs and relatives alike – will all want to attend the big open AA meetings on Friday and Saturday evenings and on Sunday morning. It is hoped that Bill’s mother will be well enough to attend the Convention. One of the outstanding events will be a reception for her, if she is able to be there. Sight-seeing trips and a program have also been arranged for the wives of Conference Delegates who will accompany their husbands to St. Louis for the Fifth Annual General Service Conference of AA, the week of June 26th, immediately preceding the Twentieth Anniversary Convention. Irma, our Program Chairman, and I will be on hand all week to do what we can to make the pre-Convention stay of the wives of delegates both interesting and profitable. All who attend the Convention – families as well as AAs – must register in advance. If you are coming with your AA member, be sure he or she has registered for you. If you are coming unaccompanied by an AA be sure that you yourself register. Send in your $5.00 registration fee and make your hotel reservations well in advance direct to: Hotels Convention Reservation Bureau for AA, 911 Locust St., St. Louis 1, Missouri. If you have any suggestions for subjects you would like discussed at the Al-Anon meetings, write them to: Irma Flynn, Program Chairman, Box 1475, Grand Central Annex, New York 17, N.Y. This Twentieth Anniversary should be an experience which will never be forgotten by anyone who attends. See you in St. Louis!

Lois W. May 1955, AA Grapevine

IMPORTANT NOTICE To be certain of getting the accommodations you desire, please note that all hotel room reservations in St. Louis for the convention period are made through the Hotels Convention Reservation Bureau, 911 Locust St., St. Louis 1. Do not write direct to a particular hotel, since all its available rooms have been “sold out” to the Reservation Bureau. To assure completely fair treatment to all convention-goers, General Service Headquarters has assigned full responsibility for hotel reservations to the Reservation Bureau in St. Louis. Applications for rooms should be made on the special Convention application forms sent to all groups in November. Additional application forms may be obtained by writing to P.O. Box 459, Grand Central Annex, New York 17, N.Y.

In AA’s First Five Years

Lois Wilson, wife of AA’s co-founder, Bill Wilson, recalls the time in AA when there were few members and no Big Book. From the January 1967 AA Grapevine.

In the early days of AA things were really different. For five years there was no Big Book. The only way to communicate with other people was to go and tell them, so that’s what we did. Of course, all of the meetings were held in people’s homes, the homes of those who were lucky enough to have them. Anybody who had one made it wide open to whomever the boys brought in. Our houses, Dr. Bob’s in Akron and ours in Brooklyn, were just filled with drunks, either drinking, or stopped temporarily, or well on the way to real sobriety.

Yes, AA was quite different in those days for many reasons. One was that there were no people in AA except those who had gone to the very bottom. Only these would listen to the story that one drunk was telling another. When AA first started, before there was a book, it was more anonymous than it is now, because even the Fellowship was without a name. AA didn’t have a name until the book was written. Before that it was just a bunch of drunks trying to help each other, a bunch of nameless drunks. They had to be worked with over and over; families and everybody did what they could to help.

There were many, many sad things that happened, many very humorous things, and inspirational things, too.

Several are coming to mind right now. Bill, as you know, came from Vermont and someone sent him some maple syrup from there. It came in a whiskey bottle. One of the boys saw this attractive container in the kitchen and he was so drunk at the time that he gulped the whole bottle of syrup, thinking it was whiskey.

We had a rule that no one could come into the house when he was drinking. One night one of the boys came home drunk. We wouldn’t let him in so he pried open the coal chute and slid into the cellar. Since he was very fat it was surprising that he could slide down it, yet somehow he made it. But this same fat man did get stuck one night in the washtubs. He lived in the basement apartment. Old city houses used to have stationary tubs in the kitchen. He thought he’d try to take a bath in one. But after getting in he couldn’t get out so one of us (and I think it was I) had to pull him out.

There were many other things…a man committed suicide in our house after having pawned our dress clothes, left over from more prosperous days. These included Bill’s dress suit and my precious evening cape. We have never owned such articles again.

AA was always thrilling. The families were included in all of the meetings; wives and parents (there weren’t many alcoholic women then), and the children came too. The children were vitally interested in everything that went on. They would inquire about all the members and want to know how they were. They’d learn the Twelve Steps and really try to live by them. I don’t think youngsters can be too young to be thrilled by the AA program and be helped by it.

One of the first women who came in was the ex-wife of a friend of Bill’s. She had been in Bellevue and had come from there to our house. At that time there was a wonderful man – I think he was the fourth or fifth AA – who was trying to start a group in Washington, D.C. This woman went down to help him and she stayed sober for quite a long time. Then she married a man they were trying to bring onto the program. He really didn’t go along with the idea himself and used to say to her every once in a while, “Florence, you look so thirsty.” And so she did something about that, Florence disappeared. Everybody looked for her everywhere and couldn’t find her. After a couple of weeks they found her in the morgue.

At that time each group used to visit every other group. New York members would go to New Jersey or Greenwich, Philadelphia or Washington or even Cleveland or Akron. Those were the groups I recall were in existence in the first five years.

If anybody had a car a bunch of us would pile in and we’d go wherever we knew there was a meeting. Families were just as much a part of AA as the alcoholics and we did feel we belonged.

But after a while the AA’s thought that they should have an occasional meeting – at least one every week – of just alcoholics so that they could really get down to business. When this occurred the wives thought they’d meet together, too, at the same time. At first these little gatherings of wives didn’t have any particular purpose. Sometimes we’d play bridge and sometimes we’d gossip about our husbands.

Then a few of us began to see that we really needed the AA program just as much as the alcoholics. 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 he did. He was getting way ahead of me. I always thought of myself as being the moral mentor in the house, but Bill, who never was a mentor, was certainly growing spiritually while I was standing still. Or perhaps there is no standing still – if I wasn’t going ahead, I must be going backwards.

I decided I’d better live by the Twelve Steps. Annie S. and a number of other people had come to the same conclusion. So, whenever we visited another group, we would tell the wives and families how we found that we, too, needed to live by the Twelve Steps of AA. Little groups of wives and families all over the country began to feel the same need for something to help overcome their frustrations and help them become integrated human beings again.

That’s the way Al-Anon started. We followed the AA program in every principle. I want to thank AA’s so very much for showing us the way. Without your leading us we would still be the unhappy folks we were.

In our meetings we tell our own experiences just as AA’s do. We tell how we came to find that we needed Al-Anon and what Al-Anon has done for us. And we seek to help other families that were, or are, having the same sort of experience.

In 1950 Bill traveled all over Canada and the United States to see how AA’s would react to the idea of a general conference for Alcoholics Anonymous, and in doing so he discovered quite a few types of groups of the family of alcoholics. He thought that they should have a Central Office here in New York, just as AA did, so that they could be unified in their use of the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions – a place where inquiries could be received, literature prepared and the public informed so that those in need would know where to turn.

A good friend and I started a small office in Bedford Hills. By then AA had had eighty-seven inquiries from wives or groups who wished to register. As AA was not equipped to handle the families of alcoholics it handed over this list to us and we wrote to them. Fifty groups responded and were registered with us. That was in ’51. Today (1967) there are over 3,000 Al-Anon groups.

The numerical potential of Al-Anon is greater than AA’s because it is composed not only of mates of alcoholics, but children, parents and other relatives and friends. It is estimated that five people are seriously affected by one alcoholic.

Though we have barely scratched the surface, the future is bright, thanks to you AA’s for your wonderful example and inspiration.