The Lois Wilson Story

by William G Borchert

  Lois couldn’t remember how long she sat curled up in the corner, weeping.

  Bill rode the city’s subways in a stupor that night and into the early hours of the morning. Then he panhandled enough from the rush-hour crowd to buy a pint of gin. That got him back to Clinton Street. Lois was gone when he entered the house. He had emerged from his blackout by now, and as he wobbled down the hall and past the den, vague glimpses of last night’s harrowing episode began flashing through his troubled brain. He poked his head into the den. The cracked wall and broken sewing machine left little doubt about his irrational outburst.

  He sank into a chair. Tears streamed down his face. Even in his half-drunken state, he realized there was nothing left for him anymore but madness or death. This was either the end of the road or the jumping-off place to a new start. No, not a start built on self-deception, but one like his pal Ebby had found . . . seemingly solid and sure. But he couldn’t do it here, not in this house filled with so many ghosts, so many guilty memories, so many hidden bottles of booze. He knew in his heart there was only one place to go, that is, if Dr. Silkworth would allow him back. He must go to Towns Hospital at once to dry out—and then give the Oxford Group another try. Then maybe . . . just maybe . . .

  He shuffled into the kitchen, found a pencil and piece of paper, sat at the kitchen table, and with his trembling hands wrote Lois a brief note. He admitted there was no way he could possibly apologize for his insane behavior but that perhaps this was what it had to come to for him to understand that she was right—that her father and Dr. Silkworth were right—that he truly was insane and getting worse each time he drank. He told her he was going back to Towns, where he hoped Dr. Silkworth would give him one more chance. He left the note on the table and hurried out the door.25

  Bill’s tremors were almost uncontrollable by the time he reached the train station. He needed a drink badly. He dug into his pockets but only found a nickel, the cost of the subway fare. Then he remembered a small grocery store down the block where Lois still had some credit. He talked the poor young clerk, who was stunned by Bill’s appearance, into giving him four bottles of beer on account. He drank one of them on the street outside and then made it to the subway. He tripped and fell halfway down the steps. His head was cut and bruised but not one bottle of beer was broken. A drunk protects his booze with his very life.

  Dr. Silkworth saw Bill approaching the hospital from his office window. He greeted him in the entrance hall. As the doctor later said, there was something in Bill’s eyes that afternoon that spoke of desperation, that pleaded for one more chance at life. So the kind physician admitted him and allowed him to finish the beer before ushering him into the detox ward.

  Despite the nightmarish incident with the sewing machine, Lois went to work the next morning to get it out of her mind. She loved her interior decorating job, and her involvement with customers helped her to relax and forget about her home life even if only for a few hours.

  “I found Bill’s note when I returned home from work that evening,” she recalled. “I had planned to call Dr. Silkworth that day but kept putting it off. Once I told him all that had happened, I knew what his answer would be. When I read that Bill had gone to Towns Hospital, I was relieved for a few moments but then just as quickly my mood turned into one of deep despair.

  “I thought, what good would it do anyway? He would only get drunk again the moment he left the hospital. And who was going to pay the bill this time? The money I earned was barely enough to keep us going. I had to ask my brothers to help pay the previous hospital bills. There wasn’t much left in the house to sell or pawn. All I could think about over and over again was what possible permanent good could it do for Bill to go back to Towns again. I had so little faith left in the good Lord just when He was about to show me His miraculous power.”26

  Sweating and shaking to pieces in the detox ward, Bill received the usual Towns treatment to taper off—barbiturates to sedate him and paraldehyde to ward off the DT’s. Two days later he was moved to a small private room and there fell into the deepest, darkest depression he had ever known. He was afraid to leave the room for fear of running out to find another drink. He was afraid to look out the window, at the cars and people struggling through the cold wintry night. He knew that out there he had only three choices left. He could stop drinking, something he deeply feared he could not do. He could go completely insane, a state he felt was very close at hand. Or he would die. For an alcoholic in the final stages of his disease, there are no other choices.

  Alone, lost, and terrified, he lay back on his small steel-railed bed, reached his arms upward, and mumbled through his tears, “If there be a God, let Him show Himself!”27

  What happened next was something few have experienced, a spiritual event of remarkable consequence. Bill Wilson would later try to explain it in his own words:

  Suddenly, my room blazed with an indescribable white light. I was seized with an ecstasy beyond description. Every joy I had known was pale by comparison. The light, the ecstasy—I was conscious of nothing else for a time.

  Then, seen in the mind’s eye, there was a mountain. I stood upon its summit, where a great wind blew. A wind, not of air, but of spirit. In great, clean strength, it blew right through me. Then came the blazing thought, “You are a free man.” I know not at all how long I remained in this state, but finally the light and the ecstasy subsided. I again saw the wall of my room. As I became more quiet, a great peace stole over me, and this was accompanied by a sensation difficult to describe. I became acutely conscious of a Presence which seemed like a veritable sea of living spirit. I lay on the shores of a new world. “This,” I thought, “must be the great reality. The God of the preachers.”

  Savoring my new world, I remained in this state for a long time. I seemed to be possessed by the absolute, and the curious conviction deepened that no matter how wrong things seemed to be, there could be no question of the ultimate rightness of God’s universe. For the first time, I felt that I really belonged. I knew that I was loved and could love in return. I thanked my God, who had given me a glimpse of His absolute self. Even though a pilgrim upon an uncertain highway, I need be concerned no more for I had glimpsed the great beyond.28

  It was December 11, 1934. Bill had just turned thirty-nine. He would never again doubt the reality of God. He now had a whole new life ahead of him but, as it would turn out, not the life of money and privilege he had once envisioned.

  And as for Lois, she recalled, “I knew something overwhelming had happened. His eyes were filled with light. His whole being expressed hope and joy. From that moment on, I shared Bill’s confidence in the future.”29

  “He told me he first thought he might have had another hallucination but that Dr. Silkworth assured him it wasn’t so. He told Bill he had experienced some great psychic occurrence, some kind of conversion experience he had only read about and that he should hang on to it for it was a great gift, a great blessing. I had no idea which way our lives would go but I now had a strong reason to hope he was finally freed from his addiction. It never occurred to me that I was still trapped in mine.”30

  When Lois brought her husband home from the hospital on December 18, he was filled with an insatiable desire to help other alcoholics like himself. He could not stop talking about it. He kept saying that since a miracle had happened to him and to Ebby, why couldn’t it happen to others as well, to all the drunks in the world perhaps? He could help make it happen by spreading the message. And because her husband was finally back home, not just in body but in mind and spirit as well, Lois went right along with his idea enthusiastically, even accompanying him to Oxford Group meetings at the Calvary Episcopal Church. As usual, she wanted to help and support him all she could.

  Lois was content enough attending Oxford Group meetings to support her husband, but she never even considered applying the spiritual principles to her own life. She felt Bil
l’s drinking and the troubles that ensured were her only real problems and now after his spiritual experience at Towns Hospital coupled with the Oxford Group program, those problems were taken care of. After all, she had been raised to love God and her fellow man, and now that her prayers for her husband’s recovery had been answered, she didn’t require any further spiritual guidance.31

  “My sheer arrogance told me I was fine and didn’t need to change in any way,” Lois later recalled. “Was I due for a serious comeuppance.”32

  Indeed, only after that serious comeuppance would Lois change her attitude toward the Oxford Group and realize the need to apply its principles to her own life. She eventually became a great admirer of both Dr. Shoemaker and Dr. Frank Buchman, who founded the movement, and of their belief that by changing each individual person, the whole world could be changed for the better. In fact, she and Bill would later use the essence of the principles that Dr. Shoemaker and Dr. Buchman preached in the development of the Twelve Step recovery programs used today in both Alcoholics Anonymous and Al-Anon.

  Later in life, Lois Wilson would often profess the great aspirations of these men in her own words as they applied to the worldwide programs she and her husband cofounded: “If everyone could somehow learn to live by the principles incorporated in the Twelve Steps to Recovery,” she would say, “then some day there could truly be peace and joy in the entire world.”33

  In the meantime, Bill began learning much about the physical side of his disease—the mental obsession coupled with a physical allergy—each time he visited his mentor, Dr. Silkworth. The doctor always allowed Bill to share his God-experience with some patients, hoping somehow it might help. And Bill began learning about the mental and spiritual part of his alcoholic malady from Dr. Shoemaker, who had now befriended the former Wall Street analyst. Dr. Shoemaker encouraged Bill to spread the message of change and spiritual recovery to others like himself.

  Bill took the preacher at his word. With Lois’s full support, he was soon walking through the gutters of the Bowery, into the nut ward at Bellevue Hospital, down the slimy corridors of fleabag hotels, and into the detox unit at Towns with a Bible under his arm. He was promising sobriety to every drunk he could corner if they, like he, would only turn their lives over to God.

  “He was even bringing some of these poor souls home with him,” Lois explained. “He thought a good home-cooked meal plus plenty of inspirational talks about the Oxford Group’s principles of honesty, purity, unselfishness, and love would get them sober. Ebby had also moved in with us by then but between the two of them, it was obvious to me that all their preaching was only turning off our rather inebriated guests.”34

  After a while, the whole experience slowly began having a negative impact on Lois’s life and her life together with Bill. The simple fact was they had no life together. Yes, Bill was sober, but it wasn’t what she had envisioned. She thought that if she went along with his religious revival for a while, he would soon come back down to earth and things would return to normal—at least normal by other people’s standards. But the revival continued, the drunks were constantly dragged in and out of Clinton Street, and there was no end in sight. Gradually she became deeply frustrated and less affable about hosting a household full of itinerants. Bill sensed her feelings.

  Every now and then she overheard her husband talking with Ebby about his dream of building a movement separate and apart from the Oxford Group, one focused solely on saving alcoholics. He saw so many drunks in the Oxford Group fall by the wayside while few nonalcoholic members seemed to care. But during the first five months of 1935, he encountered his own frustrations on the “preaching circuit.” None of his prospective converts were staying sober.35

  Early that May an old friend of Bill’s, Howard Tompkins of Beers & Company, a Wall Street stock brokerage firm, called and invited him to lunch. He wanted to discuss a prospective project. Tompkins had bumped into Bill from time to time and was impressed with his recovery and newfound zest for life. Over lunch he explained that one of his clients planned to launch a proxy fight for control of the National Rubber Mold Machinery Company in Akron, Ohio. He thought this former financial hotshot would be the right one to organize and lead the battle. So Tompkins offered him the project, a modest fee, and a handsome bonus if he could pull it off. Under growing pressure at home, both financially and emotionally, Bill reluctantly accepted the offer over Ebby’s strong warnings and objections. Ebby was concerned about his friend’s sobriety, alone in a strange town and among heavy-drinking stock promoters.

  Lois was also concerned when Bill first told her the news. The thought of being so many miles apart, absent if he needed her, caught her off guard. She had always been the mainstay in her husband’s alcoholic existence, and now suddenly she was about to find herself an almost unnecessary part of his sober new life. It took the wind out of her sails and gave rise to a sudden feeling of resentment she could not quite understand. But as the day of his departure for Akron drew near, she began to satisfy herself with the thought that perhaps this was God’s way of returning her husband to normalcy, getting his foot back into the door on Wall Street, and restoring some balance she so desperately yearned for in their lives.

  It was the day before Bill was due to leave. Lois was packing his suitcase, and he was huffing and puffing about having only one decent suit to wear, that the collar on his favorite dress shirt was frayed, that his black shoes needed new heels. Suddenly he burst out in anger that his whole damn life was a mess, that he’d never amount to a hill of beans, and that it was a sheer waste of time going to Akron to handle some lousy proxy battle he’d probably only lose anyway.

  Lois was taken aback by her husband’s attitude and remarks. Here was the man who had seen the face of God, now angry, bitter, and filled with self-pity again—when he had ruined his own life by drinking. She couldn’t understand his outburst and told him so.

  All those men he had brought home to sober up, she reminded him, were back out in the streets drunk, yet here he was sober for more than five months and with an opportunity to earn some decent income by doing something he was good at. What was wrong with that?

  “Sober!” he shouted back at her. “You call this sober? I’m still a drunk who hasn’t had a drink yet!”36

  Then he stormed out of the bedroom leaving his wife bewildered and fearful that he would be back on the bottle again before ever reaching Akron.

  The truth was, Lois’s remarks and his angry response stuck in Bill’s craw on his train ride west—the fact that he was still a drunk who hadn’t had a drink yet. He would soon come to realize that booze was merely the symptom of his disease. That alcoholism runs much deeper than its obvious physical signs. That it’s made up of all the low self-esteem, self-pity, anger, resentment, greed, jealousy, and other character defects and shortcomings that drive the alcoholic to find comfort and relief from such feelings in another drink. And Bill was soon to understand something else from his New York “preaching” experiences . . . that by trying to help other drunks, he was focusing less on himself and his own problems and thus had no thought or desire for a drink himself. He was bringing this newfound knowledge and understanding with him to Akron where he would desperately need it, for his five months of sobriety were about to be severely tested.

  Lois admittedly felt lost as she watched her husband’s train pull out of Pennsylvania Station. It wasn’t that she would miss the frenzy and bewilderment that alcoholism brings into the household. It was simply the vacuum she now faced in her life and the wonder of where it would all end.

  All she ever wanted was a peaceful life with a sober man she had always deeply loved. Now all she had was concern and confusion. Yes, he was sober and maybe he would stay that way in Akron. God only knew. And yes, he had recovered from his addiction, at least for now. But was that recovery only for himself, for his own desires, his own happiness, his own ambitions? Where did she fit i
n? After all she had given, all that she had sacrificed for their marriage, what was to be her reward?

  “I thought I’d be glad once he stopped drinking,” Lois would often share later in her life. “I thought we’d be happy and close and loving like we once were earlier in our marriage. Now I just sat and wondered and waited for his letters to arrive from Akron. I waited and I waited.”37

  10

  Great Dreams in Akron

  FIVE LONG DAYS WENT BY AND LOIS DIDN’T HEAR A SINGLE WORD from Bill. She would rush home from the department store and hurry up the front steps of Clinton Street to check the mailbox. All she found were a handful of payment notices and, one day, a note from her sister-in-law Dorothy inviting her to dinner. Her thoughts were always the same as she stepped into the vestibule and hung up her coat and hat. She imagined he was off on another binge and nowhere to be found. But by the time she entered the kitchen and put the kettle on for tea, she would be angry at herself for having so little faith in her husband and especially in her God.

  After all, she asked herself, why would the Almighty raise him up to such a high spiritual place if only to let him tumble back down again? That is not the work of a loving and merciful God.

  Even Ebby Thacher kept calling and asking if she had heard anything from Bill. Ebby had moved from Clinton Street back to the Calvary Mission to work with Dr. Shoemaker once his friend had gone to Akron. He told Lois not to worry, that “God’s army” was praying for their boy.

  Still, before the end of the week, Lois had left four messages for Bill at the Mayflower Hotel, where he was staying. Yes, he had told her he would be spending considerable time lining up brokers to solicit proxies from company shareholders, probably working late into the night at their respective firms. However, she thought, just a call or a brief note was in order to let her know he was all right.