The Lois Wilson Story

by William G Borchert

  In June of 1940, a group of New York AA’s, concerned about Bill pulling back from his activities for the Fellowship, met with him to say that the movement needed his continued guidance and direction. Otherwise it would fall apart. Too many recovered alcoholics were already going in different directions, setting their own rules. They said they also needed a central place to meet as they once had at Clinton Street. So these concerned members came up with a proposition. Two of their number who had a few extra bucks were willing to guarantee the rent on a quaint little building at 344 1/2 West Twenty-fourth Street in Manhattan. The building, which could be supported by passing the basket, would actually become an AA clubhouse and serve multiple purposes. It would be used for AA meetings, contain an office for Bill, and be a gathering place for members to pass their time and talk about their disease and their recovery. They said Bill and Lois could live rent free in the rooms on the second floor, which were neat and clean. They convinced him that in time, as the Fellowship continued to grow, the Big Book would sell and his royalties would be enough for him to live on.

  Bill sat with his wife that night and talked things over. They had come this far together, Lois said; why turn back now? If God had wanted him to be a successful wire-rope salesman, He would have at least had him enroll in the navy, not the army, in order to get the right experience and contacts. They both laughed, something that they hadn’t done for a while.

  So they moved into what soon became known as the Twenty-fourth Street Clubhouse, and Bill dedicated himself once again to the task of saving drunks. He set up a temporary office there until the Fellowship could afford a larger central office some time later. Lois described the clubhouse in her memoirs. “It used to be a stable,” she wrote, “so is set back from the street and entered through a covered passage with a doorway on the street. It used to be the Illustrators Club so is very attractive. One large room, with fireplace and paneled in knotty pine, and kitchen are downstairs. Upstairs there is a large room with skylights, and two small bedrooms and two toilets.”33

  Lois went ahead and fixed up the place. The ten feet square room, once used by the Illustrators Club of New York, had little privacy and few conveniences. Still, Lois tried her best to at least make it bright and comfortable. She and Bill painted the walls and found two fruit boxes that they used as lamp stands and bureaus. They screwed hooks into the wall to hang their clothes, which they had to get at by climbing across a bed without a footboard. And they ventilated the room by opening the door to the fire escape.34

  After she and Bill moved in, Lois described how the clubhouse quickly became a beehive of AA activity.

  “It was Clinton Street 1935,” she wrote, “only more so. There were always visitors, people driving in from Westchester or Connecticut, winos shuffling in from the Salvation Army down the street, or out-of-towners far from the safety of their group, who needed the security of this crazy, solid oasis in the city. These were men from every rung of the social ladder, who never conceivably would have drunk together, never would have gone to the same bars, yet here they were in one room, helping each other to keep sober. Whatever hour Bill wandered in, there was a feeling of a meeting. In a sense they were all members of an exclusive club and only they understood what they had to pay to get there.”35

  These notes from her memoirs showed how much Lois had come to understand what AA was really all about and how much every alcoholic had in common. And she was coming to understand the same thing about the wives and the families of alcoholics.

  Lois didn’t write in her memoirs about the “accidental” break-ins in the upstairs rooms at the clubhouse, but she did tell a close friend. It seemed the upstairs bedroom was sometimes mistaken for one of the bathrooms since the doors looked alike. There were times when newcomers unfamiliar with the place mistook her bedroom door for the entrance to the toilet and barged in on her when she forgot to lock her door. It was embarrassing, to say the least.

  Even after Bill made sure the toilets were clearly marked, there was yet another incident. A newcomer still in his cups and in a hurry to get to the men’s room grabbed the handle of Lois’s bedroom door instead. He jiggled and pulled and began banging on the door until Lois finally had to open it and scream at him to leave. The man slunk away red-faced, leaving her weeping over her unseemly circumstances. That was when Lois knew she couldn’t go on like this much longer.36

  Shortly after that incident, she and her husband were invited to spend a weekend with some AA friends, Ruth and Wilbur Slocum, in Chappaqua, New York, a small, upscale town in the heart of Westchester County.

  “We were lugging our suitcases through Grand Central Station, hurrying to catch the train,” Lois shared in her later years, “when suddenly I felt overwhelmed by the way we were living. I can’t explain why it suddenly happened like that. I sat down on the cold marble stairs and burst out at Bill: ‘I can’t go on like this anymore! Will we never have a home of our own?’ I wept oceans right there in public.

  “Bill finally consoled me. He understood perfectly what I was going through. He wanted a place for us too. He asked me to put up with it for just a little while longer. He had said that before only this time for some reason I believed him.”37

  By now the AA Fellowship was more than five years old and had been spreading its wings far beyond New York and Ohio. Sober alcoholics traveling on business and finding themselves alone in a strange hotel in a strange city, as Bill once had at the Mayflower Hotel, sought out other drunks to help themselves stay sober. That’s how the Fellowship arrived in Philadelphia, began to grow, and came to the attention of Judge Curtis Bok, the owner and publisher of the Saturday Evening Post, at that time one of the largest and most influential magazines in the country.

  Curious to learn the truth behind the wild rumors he was hearing about “miraculous cures” of hopeless drunks, Judge Bok hired a well-known, hard-nosed reporter by the name of Jack Alexander to look into the movement. He wanted Alexander to investigate “this AA thing” as thoroughly as he had recently probed the New Jersey crime rackets, and then write an in-depth article about whatever he uncovered.

  The truth was, the reporter was extremely skeptical when he began his assignment in November of 1940 and expected to write a critical and derisive piece. “When did you ever meet a drunk who told you the truth?” Alexander cynically thought he’d never met a drunk who told the truth until he met Bill Wilson and Dr. Robert Smith. He was frankly impressed by their candor and stunned by what they were doing.38 Lois remembered that both Bill and Dr. Bob were leery when the reporter first called to tell them of the Post’s interest in the Fellowship. The idea of a “full and complete investigation” sounded rather ominous. But then, they had nothing to hide, and a story about AA in a major publication like the Post could get their message out to thousands. So they decided to meet with the reporter.

  Once Alexander agreed to protect the anonymity of his interviewees by using fictitious names, Bill took him in tow for almost a month. He brought him to Akron and Cleveland, to Brooklyn and Westchester County. He sat him down with Dr. Bob, walked him through the new alcoholic ward at St. Thomas Hospital in Akron, introduced him to Dr. Silkworth at Towns, and had him meet and chat with the nonalcoholic trustees of the Alcoholic Foundation in Manhattan. Every question Alexander asked was answered forthrightly and without reservation. He was treated almost like a member of the Fellowship in terms of openness and trust.

  When his story was finished, it was not only approved but applauded by the editors of the Post and scheduled for the March 1, 1941, issue. It was a cover story of about seventy-five hundred words, headlined “Alcoholics Anonymous: Freed Slaves of Drink, Now They Free Others.”39 It detailed exactly how the program of AA worked, supported by the stories of some of the men it helped get sober, mainly Bill and Bob. And finally it highlighted AA’s acceptance by many medical, legal, and social service professionals.

  The effect of its
publication on the still relatively small band of sober drunks was explosive. It stretched Bill and Dr. Bob and their fellow members almost beyond their capacity to meet the demand for help. Overnight, attendance at meetings rose dramatically. Older members were running wild trying to make “Twelfth Step Calls”—the term AA uses to describe sober alcoholics carrying the message to wet ones.

  In the beginning of March, 1941, there were about two hundred members attending meetings at the clubhouse. Before the end of March, the membership more than doubled. Lois wrote in her memoirs, “It was the same everywhere. Groups outgrew their meeting places and had to be divided. Older members worked frantically with newcomers. These newcomers in turn, after a month or so of sobriety, were sent on Twelfth Step calls to help still newer-comers. It is estimated that 6,000 AAs owe the start of their sobriety to the Post article, and nobody knows how many more thousands were sparked by them.”40

  It can be said that Alcoholics Anonymous was firmly established in 1941 as a great American achievement.

  And as new members poured into the Fellowship, they needed the program’s “Bible” to learn from. So the piles of dusty Big Books sitting in the Cornwall warehouse were rapidly depleted and more books had to be printed. The royalties began to slowly accumulate. Bill could finally see the prospect of earning a decent income after his long struggle and dedication to helping his fellow alcoholics. And perhaps he could somehow make it up to his loving wife, who never left his side.

  Lois remembered how her husband turned to her one afternoon as they were returning to the clubhouse to face another desk full of mail and pleas for help and smiled: “Maybe it’s about time we started looking for a place of our own.”41

  She hesitated. She was waiting to feel those butterflies in her stomach again or hear them whispering in her ear. But they weren’t there. Could it possibly be they had gone, had flown off somewhere to haunt some other doubting Thomas? She didn’t know, and, for the moment at least, she didn’t care. For Bill’s words had just made her deliriously happy.

  14

  The Evolution of Al-Anon

  THE TRAIN RIDE ALONG THE HUDSON RIVER FROM URBAN NEW York City into the picturesque countryside of Westchester County was something Lois always enjoyed. She would sit back and watch the scenery change from crowded Bronx apartment houses to sprawling landscapes dotted with suburban homes; from black-tarred city streets to winding country roads; from stark cement sidewalks to tree-lined paths. It was still only March, but she could tell by the yawning shrubbery and small patches of greening grass that spring was right around the corner.

  Ruth and Wilbur, their dear AA friends in Chappaqua, had invited her and Bill up to their home for another relaxing weekend. As Lois stared out of the train window, her mind began racing again, excited about soon leaving their cramped and often too-public quarters at the Twenty-fourth Street Clubhouse.

  Should they rent a small apartment back in Brooklyn Heights, she wondered, or one in the heart of Manhattan, since Bill would be spending much of his time there on AA business?

  Certainly they had to have at least two bedrooms so that when Annie and Bob came to town or when other AA friends visited, they would have room for them. Of course, she would like a large living room for entertaining, maybe one with a skylight, and a nice kitchen and, oh yes, a big old fireplace like the one they had at Clinton Street. Then again, that might be overdoing it, at least for now. They could start small, and as Bill’s royalty income continued to grow, they could find something larger. But no matter what, whatever it was, it would be all their own.1

  Ruth and Wilbur met them at the train station in their used Buick and, after hugs and kisses, loaded the bags into the trunk and headed off. They talked at first about Jack Alexander’s article and its far-reaching impact on the Fellowship, even here in Westchester County. Then the conversation turned to the war in Europe, the fall of France, and Winston Churchill and the Brits’ heroic stand against Hitler’s blitzkrieg of London. Would the United States enter the fray or not? Wilbur was also a veteran of World War I, so he and Bill were both convinced that President Roosevelt, like President Woodrow Wilson before him, would soon be forced to abandon his neutrality policy and come to the aid of the nation’s European friends.

  The ladies also remembered the war that was supposed to end all wars. Lois and Ruth both hoped that somehow there could be a peaceful resolution to the growing crisis. It was 1941 and the entire country seemed to be holding its breath.

  It was Bill who first noticed they had passed Chappaqua and were approaching the quaint little village of Bedford Hills. That’s when Ruth smiled coyly and told her guests they had a surprise for them. She and her husband wanted to show their friends a charming house that was perfectly suited to their needs. Not only that, the house was owned by a widow who absolutely revered the program of Alcoholics Anonymous because of how much it helped someone near and dear to her.

  A house! Lois looked at Bill. He simply shrugged. Lois had often heard Wilbur talk to Bill about someday moving to Westchester, only a forty-five-minute train ride to the city. But buying a house there was out of the question. In fact, buying a house anywhere was a prospect so remote they never even gave it a thought. After all, they were only now beginning to see their way clear to rent an apartment. Then again, “what harm was there in looking?” Bill whispered to his wife as Wilbur turned off a small road and headed up a long dirt driveway. There, sitting atop the hill on a two-acre estate, was a charming country house.

  Secluded among the thatch of trees on a lovely knoll overlooking a valley, the brown cedar-shingled house seemed to enchant them into taking a closer look. Bill discovered an unlocked window around back, climbed in and hoisted Lois in after him. They found themselves gazing into a marvelous fieldstone fireplace that ruled a large, wood-paneled living room. Lois had always fancied a little white cottage so the place immediately struck her as too large and solemn. She later admitted that perhaps she didn’t want to like the house at first because she knew they couldn’t afford it.2

  But as Lois walked around the house that day, she came to realize it wasn’t all that big and formal. There were seven rooms: a living room, three bedrooms, and a kitchen downstairs, and a long, bookshelved library and one bedroom upstairs. When she stood in front of the fireplace, she felt warmth, friendship, and hominess. And when she stepped outside and saw the gardens and the surrounding woods, as much as she didn’t want to, she fell in love with this enchanting place.

  Lois had never really believed in coincidences, not since she was a child. She believed that everything happened for a reason—not by accident. She remembered her mother used to tell her that “happenstance was God’s way of doing something nice for you in His own quiet and surprising way.”3 And at AA meetings she often heard some very spiritual members call coincidences “God shots.” So why should she be surprised, then, to learn that the owner of this wonderful house and grounds had been to some AA meetings, not for herself but to accompany and support a very close friend? And why should she be taken aback when her friends Ruth and Wilbur told her this lady had often expressed great interest in meeting her and Bill?

  It was all true. That Sunday they drove back to Bedford Hills, up the long dirt driveway, and there at the top of the hill standing next to her house was a warm and generous middle-aged lady by the name of Mrs. Helen Griffith—no relation to any of Bill’s kin. When her husband had died several years earlier, Mrs. Griffith moved back into the city, leaving her country home locked and shuttered until just the right buyers came along. And now here they were.

  The tall, stately woman knew that Lois and Bill were living at the Twenty-fourth Street Clubhouse and said she was frankly “appalled at the notion.”4 She insisted they have her home and proposed a plan they could hardly refuse. She would let this stunned couple have it for sixty-five hundred dollars, a significant decrease from her original asking price. Ther
e would be no money down, and they could pay her forty dollars a month against the mortgage with no interest at least for the first year. Bill quickly calculated they’d be saving twenty dollars a month by taking their furniture and possessions out of storage, so all they would need was another twenty each month. He felt certain the book royalties would more than cover that.

  All Lois could do was cry, she was so overcome. Mrs. Griffith embraced her and said that for all she and Bill had done for others, the least they deserved was a comfortable home for themselves. Before parting, Mrs. Griffith said she felt very grateful they had accepted her offer. Lois and Bill moved into their new home on April 16, 1941.

  Their “vagabond” days were over. They finally had their own place, a home where they could once again be together to enjoy the normal pleasures Lois yearned for such as music, reading, gardening, and other activities Bill also loved. And they could now plan their future together as Bill continued to guide and grow Alcoholics Anonymous.

  However, since one of Bill’s favorite sayings was “first things first,” he recognized that the house was in need of significant repairs and improvements. For example, there was no furnace. One day he spotted an old coal-burning furnace stashed beside a bar in the town of Bedford Hills. The owner was changing his heating system over to oil. Bill paid the man ten dollars and had several of his AA friends help him install the old furnace in the house. It lasted until they could change over to oil themselves.5

  Having moved out of the clubhouse and also out of his digs in Newark, Bill established a central office for AA activities at 30 Vesey Street in lower Manhattan. This gave the Fellowship, for the first time, a headquarters of its own. It was also where the trustees of the Alcoholic Foundation now gathered to share their thoughts on the objectives and direction of the movement. The office was actually one large room that Bill had partitioned off to hold meetings with some privacy. The total staff at the time consisted of himself, Ruth Hock, and Ruth’s new assistant, Lorraine Greim, also a nonalcoholic.