Drunks

by Christopher Finan

  Like all freshmen, Bob reveled in the freedom of being on his own. He devoted himself to doing “what I wanted to do, without regard for the rights, wishes or privileges of others.” Mostly what he wanted to do was have fun. He became a skilled billiards player and began to develop into a cardsharp. Drinking was what he enjoyed most, and he quickly outstripped the upperclassmen. He amazed his friends by demonstrating the ability to drink a bottle of beer without swallowing. Unlike his friends, he never got sick or suffered a hangover. “Never once in my life have I had a headache,” Bob said many years later. The first sign of trouble occurred only after he graduated. He was working as a salesman and drinking heavily on the weekends, when he discovered that he was shaking on some mornings. The “jitters” would only stop after he had a drink. Bob’s jitters increased after he enrolled in the University of Michigan Medical School. Many days he turned around on his way to class for fear of disgracing himself if he was called on for an answer. His drinking and his shakes continued to worsen until, in the spring of his second year, he withdrew from medical school and moved to a large farm owned by a friend to recuperate.31

  After a month of drying out, Bob realized he had made a mistake in quitting school. Although he was given a second chance at Rush University in Chicago, his drinking was out of control. During one of his exams, he submitted three blank examination books because his hands were shaking so badly he couldn’t write. However, some alcoholics are capable of functioning without alcohol for long periods before they start drinking again. Unlike Bill Wilson, who could not stop drinking, Bob, under threat of expulsion, remained abstinent for a year, during which he earned grades good enough to help him secure a prestigious internship at City Hospital in Akron.

  Bob was able to stay sober for five of the next eight years. He welcomed the long days during his two-year internship because it made it easier not to drink. Soon after he had opened his own office, however, he began drinking again to ease stomach pain. On at least a dozen occasions, he was forced to put himself into private rest homes to dry out. When he collapsed again, his father sent a doctor to bring him back to Vermont. During another period of sobriety, he finally married his longtime sweetheart, Anne. Three sober years followed. But, in 1918, he picked up another drink and kept drinking for seventeen years.

  Bob suffered from two major fears. “One was the fear of not sleeping; the other was the fear of running out of liquor,” he said. “Not being a man of means, I knew that if I did not stay sober enough to earn money, I would run out of liquor.” Since he could not drink in the morning, he started using large doses of sedatives to keep him steady. Anne searched his clothes for bottles when he came home from work. But he had dozens of hiding places. Every morning, Bob would appear at the lunch counter in his office building and order Bromo-Seltzer, tomato juice, and aspirin. A waitress noticed Bob because of his shakes. “Does he have palsy?” she asked the owner. “No, he has a perpetual hangover,” the man replied.32

  Despite Bob’s strenuous efforts to keep his alcoholism a secret, it was becoming increasingly apparent to his friends and colleagues. He remained well liked. He struck strangers as gruff and abrupt, but his friends knew that he actually cared deeply about people. Unlike many doctors, he wasn’t arrogant or abusive to the staff. Smith naturally sympathized with the underdog and was even willing to accept responsibility for mistakes made by nurses to spare them punishment. He was also popular with his patients. As the nation sank into the Depression, most of his patients became charity cases. “I remember how he’d say, ‘Well, I’ve got three operations this morning—two for the Lord and one for R. H. [Robert Holbrook (Smith)],’” his son remembered. “Not only that but people would come into his office in desperate straits, and he would literally give them his last cent. He might have only 50 cents, but he’d give it to them.”33

  Bill Wilson knew that he had found an alcoholic the moment Bob extended his trembling hand. At fifty-five, the doctor was sixteen years older than Wilson. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man with hands that seemed unusually large for a surgeon. Bob was obviously in bad shape. Bill joked that it looked like he could use a drink. The remark embarrassed the doctor, but Bill thought he seemed to brighten a little. Henrietta took the two men to her small library and left them alone.

  As Bill started talking, he was determined to follow Silkworth’s advice by steering clear of any discussion of the role that God had played in his recovery. Instead, he spoke about what alcohol had done to him until he was sure that Bob had accepted him as an alcoholic. Then Bill sought to convince Bob of the hopelessness of his condition. He explained Silkworth’s theory that alcoholism was an incurable disease.

  “What really did hit him hard was the medical business, the verdict of inevitable annihilation . . .,” Bill recalled many years later. “[I]t was not any spiritual teaching of mine, rather it was those twin ogres of madness and death . . . that triggered him into a new life.” Bill later saw this as the moment when he found the approach that would guide him in the years ahead.34

  Bob Smith remembered the encounter differently. He wasn’t particularly impressed by the scientific theory that Bill advanced. “It must be remembered that I had read a great deal and talked to everyone who knew, or thought they knew anything about the subject of alcoholism,” he wrote. What was new was Bill. Bob explained,

  [H]e was the first living human with whom I had ever talked, who knew what he was talking about in regard to alcoholism from actual experience. In other words, he talked my language. He knew all the answers, and certainly not because he had picked them up in his reading.

  Bob had always pictured alcoholics as Bowery bums. Bill was no bum. It didn’t really matter whether alcoholism was a disease. Bob discovered that he wasn’t alone. The two men talked for hours. Back home, for the first time in years, Bob did not drink himself to sleep.35

  Over the next two weeks, Bill Wilson and the Smiths got better acquainted. Anne invited Bill to move into the Smiths’ modest home on Ardmore Avenue. “There I might keep an eye on Dr. Bob and he on me,” he explained.

  It took the Smiths some time to adjust to their guest. Bill had only been sober for five months, and he was “jittery as hell,” he admitted. When he woke early and could not go back to sleep, he would go downstairs to make coffee, sometimes waking the family with a start at 6 a.m. The Smiths would find him in the kitchen, sitting in his bathrobe, “draped around this drip coffeepot.”36

  Bill also insisted that there be liquor in the house. Believing that alcoholics would have to learn to live among people who drank, he bought two large bottles of liquor and placed them on the Smiths’ sideboard. “That drove Anne about wild for a while,” he said. She was also upset when Bill supported Bob’s desire to attend the American Medical Association convention in Atlantic City during the first week of June. The AMA convention had always been an opportunity for a binge, and Anne feared that the temptation would overpower Bob, who had only been sober for two weeks.37

  They didn’t hear from Bob for five days. He had started drinking the moment he got on the train, and he had checked out of his hotel two days later to avoid disgracing himself. He couldn’t remember much about the next three days. He had managed to get back on the train and to call his office nurse when he arrived in Akron. She and her husband picked him up and took him to their home, where he finally began to emerge from his blackout.

  Now there was another problem. Bob was scheduled to perform surgery three days later, and there was a good chance that he would not be fit to hold a scalpel. Bill took charge. He and Anne drove over to the nurse’s home, where Bill gave Bob enough scotch to prevent a rapid withdrawal that could trigger delirium tremens. On their arrival back at Ardmore Avenue, Bob was put to bed. For the next three days, they fed him nothing but tomato juice, sauerkraut, and Karo corn syrup, which Bill believed would give Bob energy and vitamins. Anne and Bill took turns nursing Bob around the clock, sleeping in the second bed in the room.

  At 4 a.m.
on the day of the operation, Bill noticed that Bob was wide awake. He was still shaking. “I am going through with it,” Bob said. “I’m going to do what it takes to get sober and stay that way.”38

  At 9 a.m. Anne and Bill helped Bob dress. As they drove to the hospital where he would perform rectal surgery, Bob kept raising his hand to see if his jitters had subsided. Just before they arrived, Bill gave him a bottle of beer and “one goofball”—a sedative. Terrified that Bob might make a mistake, Anne and Bill returned home to await his call. Several hours later, Bob telephoned to say the operation had gone well, but he did not immediately return home.

  As the hours passed, Anne and Bill began to worry again. Bob was sober when he walked in the door. He had been apologizing to his creditors and promising restitution. The Smiths would remain in debt for years to come, but Bob made good on the one promise that mattered most. The beer that Bill gave him to get him through the operation was his last drink. Alcoholics Anonymous, the organization that the two men were about to launch, dates its origin from that day, June 10, 1935.

  Bill Wilson and Bob Smith had started searching for another alcoholic to help, even before Bob took his final drink. Wilson had left Towns Hospital following his spiritual experience determined to save alcoholics everywhere. The Oxford Group was also committed to evangelism, although its goal was to convert the world. But Smith had never embraced the Oxford Group’s idea of converting others until he met Bill. In their first meeting, Smith had felt the power of one drunk talking to another. He also recognized the truth of Wilson’s view that carrying the message of sobriety to alcoholics was essential for the sober drunks, especially for those like him who continued to suffer from strong cravings for alcohol. Wilson and Smith were making little progress in their search to find someone to help when a nurse in the receiving ward at Akron City Hospital told them about a drunk who had been strapped to his bed after assaulting two nurses. It was his eighth admission to the hospital in the last six months.

  Smith arranged a meeting with the man’s wife, Henrietta D., who was desperately searching for help for her husband. “You aren’t reaching him,” she had told her pastor. “I’m going to find someone who can if I have to see everyone in Akron.” In her first conversation with Smith, Henrietta sensed the compassion behind his rough exterior. “What kind of bird is this egg when he is sober?” he asked. She decided to give him a chance and agreed to move her husband, Bill D., to a private room so that he could confer with Smith and Wilson. She was waiting for him when he was wheeled into his new room. Bill D. was expecting her to say that she was getting a divorce. “You are going to quit,” she announced.39

  Bill D. was relieved that he was still married but skeptical about the rest. After each of his recent hospitalizations, he had emerged with the conviction that he would not get drunk again for at least six months. He had lost hope, and he was not pleased to learn that Henrietta had been talking to Smith and Wilson. He felt better when she said these men were drunks themselves who were staying sober by talking to other drunks. “All the other people that had talked to me wanted to help me, and my pride prevented me from listening to them . . .,” Bill D. said. “[B]ut I felt as if I would be a real stinker if I did not listen to a couple of fellows for a short time, if that would cure them.”40

  A short time later, Bill D. met Wilson and Smith. “I looked up and there were two great big fellows over six foot tall, very likeable looking,” Bill D. said. They gained his confidence by talking about their own drinking and then came to the point. Wilson turned to Smith. “Well, I believe he’s worth saving and working on,” Wilson said. “Do you want to quit drinking?” he asked Bill D.

  It’s none of our business about your drinking. We’re not up here trying to take any of your rights or privileges away from you, but we have a program whereby we think we can stay sober. . . . Now if you don’t want it, we’ll not take up your time, and we’ll be going and looking for someone else.

  “Bill didn’t seem too impressed,” Wilson recalled. He did agree to see them again.41

  Over the next five days, Bill D. ate sauerkraut and tomatoes at every meal and met frequently with Wilson and Smith. They told him they were looking for men who recognized that they could not control their drinking and needed God’s help to stay sober. The idea of “surrender,” or turning one’s life over to God’s will, was to become enormously important in developing a program of recovery. Wilson would later describe the life of an alcoholic as “self-will run riot.” The goal of surrendering to God’s will was to reduce the drunk’s inflated ego, making it possible for him to recognize that drinking was the cause of his problems and that he needed help to control it.

  Wilson had surrendered at Towns Hospital the night he begged for divine intervention. He had discovered that God could do for him what he could not do for himself, and all he had to do was ask for help. Smith, who had been seeking spiritual answers in the Oxford Group for more than two years, had less difficulty accepting this concept. But how would they explain the importance of surrender to others?

  Once again, Wilson started with the facts about the incurable disease of alcoholism. If Bill D. accepted the fact that he could not stop on his own, did he believe in a higher power that he could ask for help? “I had no problem there because I had never actually ceased to believe in God, and had tried lots of times to get help but hadn’t succeeded,” Bill D. said.42

  One night after Wilson and Smith had left, Bill D. reviewed his life and saw for the first time the damage that alcohol had done. “I finally came to the conclusion that if I didn’t want to quit, I certainly ought to want to, and that I was willing to do anything in the world to stop drinking,” Bill D. said. The next day, Bill D. announced his decision. “Yes, Doc, I would like to quit, at least for five, six, or eight months,” Bill D. said.43

  Wilson and Smith started laughing. “They said, ‘We’ve got some bad news for you. . . . Whether you quit six days, months, or years, if you go out and take a drink or two you’ll end up in this hospital tied down, just like you have been in these past six months.’” But they offered him hope. “‘You can quit 24 hours can’t you?’” I said, ‘Sure, yes, anybody can do that, for 24 hours.’ They said, ‘That’s what we’re talking about just 24 hours at a time.’”44

  They asked Bill D. to kneel by his bed and ask God for help and joined him in prayer. When they finished, Bill D. was ready to leave. “Henrietta, fetch me my clothes. I’m going to get up and get out of here,” he said. The partnership of Wilson and Smith had become a group.45

  Meanwhile, Lois Wilson was growing impatient for her husband to return to Brooklyn. He had been in Akron for over six weeks, and there were no signs that he intended to come home anytime soon. In letters and brief telephone calls, Bill had given Lois status reports on the proxy fight that had carried him to Akron in the first place. He had also explained how he had come to live with the Smiths. Lois pressed for his return. “I was nagging him,” she said.46

  Then Anne wrote Lois, telling her how grateful the Smiths were to Bill and inviting her to visit. In early July, Lois took a vacation from her job at the department store and traveled to Akron. Bill met her at the bus depot. She wouldn’t see much of him over the next week. He and Bob were making daily visits to the drunks at City Hospital. Although Lois was disappointed, she took an instant liking to the Smiths. “[Bob] definitely wanted to help people in trouble. And he was so excited and enthusiastic about this new thing he and Bill had,” she said.47

  Lois spent most of her time with Anne, and although they spoke little about their problems or what was going on, she got a good look at how sobriety had transformed the Smiths. “Mother was a lot less anxious about Dad, and I think he was a lot more satisfied with himself,” the Smiths’ daughter, Sue, said. “The whole family had good laughs, and it was really a happy time.” The change in Bob was particularly important for his teenage son, Smitty. “I never had a chance to know him well during the time he was drinking, but he livened
up so much and had such a wonderful time after,” he said.48

  By the time Lois got on the bus back to New York, she had a new worry. If being together was so important for Bill and Bob, what would happen when it was finally time for Bill to go home? Could the men stay sober when they were separated?

  In the meantime, the trio of sober alcoholics became a quartet when Ernie G. got sober. A fifth man stopped drinking in the late summer, and the new recruits soon began visiting the alcoholics in City Hospital. Following the example of Bill and Bob, they didn’t tell the patients to stop drinking. “They just told me stories for seven days about how they drank,” one of the hospitalized drunks remembered.49

  Once a man announced that he wanted to quit drinking, he was told that he would have to surrender his will to God. If this didn’t happen in the hospital, it occurred when he attended his first Wednesday night meeting at the home of T. Henry and Clarace Williams. This was an Oxford Group meeting that Henrietta Seiberling had started to help Smith, and both the drunks and their wives attended. While it included nonalcoholics, the attendees referred to themselves as the “alcoholic squad,” and during each meeting, the sober drunks took the newcomers upstairs where they made their surrender. “After about half an hour or so, down would come the new man, shaking, white, serious and grim.”50