The call came Saturday morning. It was brief, but Bill sounded excited and upbeat. His whole demeanor seemed different. All was going well; he had written a letter that she should be receiving shortly. Then he had to run off to a weekend-long meeting with his financial team.1
The letter arrived on Monday. Bill said that in barely a week, his group already had put together more support among the shareholders of National Rubber than either management or another faction had done. He said he was already beginning to feel the rising excitement of prospective victory:
It is by far the greatest opportunity to do a fine piece of work that I have ever had, and I don’t see how anything can be too much to sacrifice temporarily. Think of it, darling—the opportunity to be president of this company and have some real income to pay bills with, a new life, new people, new scenes. No more Loeser’s—a chance to travel, to be somebody; to have you rested at last after your long wait for me to get somewhere. All these things are at stake. Is it not worth the worry, dear heart? I have never tried to do my best before, but I have this time, and I shall not have any regrets if I lose.2
Lois could tell from the bold confidence behind her husband’s words that he had no intention of losing. In fact, he not only intended to lead the takeover of this rubber machinery firm but to use it as a stepping stone to much greater things. As Lois penned in her memoirs, “After years of defeat and failure, Bill finally saw the door to victory and success opening wide for him. He wrote me from Akron that the take-over of the National Rubber Mold Machinery Company would only be his start. He said he might yet build that illustrious career he had envisioned years earlier, controlling vast enterprises and reaping great rewards. He was dreaming great dreams again and without realizing it, I became swept up in those dreams too. I would go to bed thinking all about his exciting work in Akron and wake up smiling and happy, feeling better than I had felt in years. And yet I wondered why I still had those old butterflies back in my stomach.”3
Proxy battles can often turn into mean-spirited, dirty campaigns with adversaries digging up the past and hitting below the belt—“All’s fair in love and war.” And Bill, together with his primary financial backer at Beers & Company in New York, had underestimated their competition.
Those allied with the company’s management group turned out to be no “hicks from the sticks,” as some of Bill’s proxy solicitors liked to describe them. They began spreading stories about Bill’s drinking history and his power drive and probable ambition to be president of the company. They warned shareholders not to place their trust in a drunk who had been fired from several large, respected financial institutions and was washed up on Wall Street. Lois learned that the climate in Akron was worsening when she received another letter from her husband about ten days later: “There is an enormous load of internal dissension, hate, fear, envy, etc. And it is a question of adjusting personal relationships and restoring confidence. In this case in particular, confidence is the key to the whole matter. This thing has been a racket for so many years that the townspeople haven’t a spark of confidence in it, and I am staying here so long as I am able to sell them on our good intentions as to them and to National Rubber.”4
Reading between the lines, Lois could tell that the big deal Bill had hoped to pull off, the victory that would rocket him to success, was in trouble and likely not to happen. For Lois herself, it was one more punch in the stomach, one more balloon bursting, one more slide from the mountaintop of hope into the valley of despair.
But her main concern, as always, was Bill himself. If things didn’t work out, how would he face still another terrible disappointment after building his aspirations up so high? His other painful failures had always led to another bottom with the bottle. She prayed that this time it would be different.
As hard as he tried, Bill was not able to allay the assault on his reputation. Soon the momentum shifted and things began heading south. Shareholders started changing their allegiances, Bill’s proxy solicitors packed it in, Beers & Company pulled out, and Bill found himself pacing the lobby of the Mayflower Hotel one rainy Saturday afternoon on the eleventh of May, 1935, alone, defeated, angry, and depressed. He had a ten-dollar bill left in his pocket, and the entrance to the Mayflower bar with its sleek art deco facade was less than one hundred feet from where he stood.
There was a festive air in the lobby of Akron’s finest hotel that particular Saturday afternoon as a crowd gathered for the annual May Ball given by the St. Thomas Hospital Guild. People were also arriving to dine at the Mayflower and then see a movie at the Rialto down the block where Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire were starring in Roberta or at the Clover Theater around the corner where James Cagney was featured in G-Men. But Bill Wilson was totally oblivious to the festive air and the crowds around him. His eyes were fixated on the door to the barroom. He wanted to ease the pain, remove the fear and anger.
He watched a young couple enter the cozy saloon and heard the familiar sounds of tinkling glasses and laughter echoing back at him. That maniac in his head that had been dozing for six months was suddenly awake and whispering in his ear: What harm would one little drink do? You know how to handle it now. Why not? Who would know? Besides, you’re miles from home and you could use a pick-me-up. Lois would never be the wiser.
It all made sense to a man who admitted to his wife he was still a drunk who hadn’t had a drink yet. Then he noticed his hands were trembling slightly. He felt weak in the knees and beads of cold sweat began running down his arms. In his mind’s eye he was back at Towns Hospital pleading for his life. He saw the faces of all the losers and victims at the Calvary Mission, the Bowery derelicts he had preached to, the itinerants he had dragged home to Clinton Street. Suddenly a thought struck him. They were the ones who had kept him sober all those months. He must find one to talk to now. Right now.
He glanced around and spotted, near a bank of phone booths, a glass-encased hotel directory that listed all the major churches and their ministers in the Akron area. Yes, preachers minister to drunks, he thought. Surely if he called, one of them should be able to help him.
One of them did—a Reverend Walter F. Tunks of the First Episcopal Church, who just happened to be familiar with the Oxford Group movement when Bill mentioned it and knew some of its members in town. After phoning several with no response, Bill found himself speaking with Mrs. Henrietta Seiberling, the daughter-in-law of Frank Seiberling, who had built the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company in Akron. When he explained he was a drunk from New York who needed to talk to another drunk in order to stay sober, Henrietta was taken aback at first. But her attendance at local Oxford Group meetings had brought her in contact with a number of inebriates, one in particular whose wife had become her good friend—one Dr. Robert Holbrook Smith. He, like Bill, had given up everything for another drink and was now surviving, with his wife, Annie, and their two children, on bare necessities and a history of broken promises.
As it turned out, these two drunks had several other things in common. They were both natives of Vermont, Dr. Bob Smith having been born in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, on August 8, 1879, only seventy-five miles from Bill Wilson’s East Dorset home. They had both attended meetings of the Oxford Group movement. And they had both hit their alcoholic bottoms in late 1934, although Dr. Bob was still struggling to find his way out.
Henrietta Seiberling, a religious woman who relied heavily on God’s guidance, invited Bill to her home that day. It was a modest but warmly decorated house at the entrance to the Seiberling estate and had once been used by a gatekeeper and his family. That is why it was often called the “gatehouse.” Her invitation to an odd-sounding stranger was quite remarkable in itself since she had three teenage children in the house.
Upon meeting Bill and after a brief discussion, she called her friend Annie Smith and insisted she bring her husband over to meet this charming man who described himself as “a rum hound from New York.”5
Like Lois Wilson, Annie Smith, also a very religious woman, was willing to do almost anything to help her husband. She told Henrietta that Bob had passed out on the couch but that they would come the next day around five o’clock.
That was Mother’s Day, May 12, 1935. Lois remembered going to church in Brooklyn Heights that day as she did almost every Sunday, only this time she had to listen to the minister extol the wonderful work mothers do, raising their children, caring for their husbands, and holding their families together. She left feeling blue. Even after all these years, she still had pangs of guilt for not being able to have a family of her own.
Recalling that day later, Lois thought she might have phoned Bill again that afternoon, leaving him another message. It had been several days since his last call and his most recent letter had been rather brief and not very optimistic. She was worried. She felt alone and helpless. If only she were there with him, to comfort him, to help see him through this depressing affair. For a while she thought about visiting her sister Barbara or perhaps Katherine, whom she hadn’t seen in weeks. Instead she simply sat in the living room sewing and waiting for Bill to return her call. Lois had no idea or intuition that as she sat there in the quiet waning light at Clinton Street, her husband was about to embark on a momentous, world-changing journey that would begin that very afternoon hundreds of miles away in the gatehouse of Henrietta Seiberling in Akron, Ohio.6
Bob Smith woke that Sunday morning with a pounding headache, tremors, and an upset stomach. He drove with his wife to the Seiberling estate that evening mainly to please her. After all, it was Mother’s Day, and he had already spoiled most of it for her by sleeping late and missing church. But Annie was used to that by now. She was with him on the pretext of owing Henrietta a visit, but in truth it was to make sure her husband got there. Bob also felt somewhat shamefully indebted to Mrs. Seiberling for her quiet generosity to his family and her personal kindness and concern toward him. However, on the drive over, he told his wife he wasn’t feeling very well and could only give this “mug from New York” fifteen minutes of his time. As it turned out, he and Bill talked for almost seven hours.
Dr. Smith was fifty-five, more than fifteen years older than the man he was about to meet. A surgeon by training, he almost drank his way out of medical school as a young man. Thanks to his father, who was a stern probate judge, and to a college professor he greatly respected, young Bob stopped imbibing altogether until after he graduated, completed his internship at City Hospital in Akron, Ohio, and set up his medical practice in the Second National Bank Building there in 1912. He remained in the very same office until he retired in 1948.
A tall, broad-shouldered, somewhat reserved man, Bob Smith married a lady he had met seventeen years earlier, Anne Robinson Ripley of Oak Park, Illinois, and brought her to Akron in January of 1915. She was a small, quiet woman whose charm, cheerfulness, and calm ways would stay with her all her life.
Reared in a family of railroad people, Anne found there was never enough money for the finer things in life. But she abhorred ostentation and pretense anyway. When she was admitted to Wellesley College, it was on a scholarship, not on the family fame and fortune that ushered many students into this elite institution.
Anne had been spending a holiday break with a college friend in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, when she met Bob Smith, a medical student at the time. They had gone to a local dance. He was quite shy until he had a few drinks, and then she couldn’t get him off the dance floor. He and his drinking crowd made an impression on her. The way they acted reminded her of some heavy drinkers in her own family.
Nevertheless, while they fell in love right from the start, their romance was hardly a whirlwind courtship. It would culminate in marriage only after many years of school, hard work, and Bob’s medical internship. But they corresponded frequently and dated whenever they could during this period, while Anne taught school.
Perhaps another reason for their long courtship was her healthy fear of walking down the aisle with a man she felt drank too excessively too often. She even learned about his almost being tossed out of medical school because of his drinking habit. So she waited until he finally graduated, completed his internship, set up his practice, and gave solid evidence of being sober for quite some time before agreeing to marry him.
They bought a two-story clapboard house at 855 Ardmore Avenue in Akron and proceeded to raise two wonderful children—a biological son, Robert, Jr., and an adopted daughter, Sue. Now hardworking and very professional, Dr. Robert Holbrook Smith had a flourishing practice and soon became a trusted and admired member of the community. Life was good.
In the spring of 1918, the young doctor attended a state medical convention with his wife, who was expecting their first child. He and the others at their table toasted her with a glass of wine. Annie never even thought about her husband’s past drinking problem. That was when he was young and sowing his wild oats, she had told herself. Now he was sober and successful, so she paid little heed to the incident. Besides, she thought, a small glass of wine is not really “drinking.”
That very same year Congress passed the Eighteenth Amendment—Prohibition—and Smitty, as his close friends now called him, thought it was his insurance policy to imbibe with impunity. After all, he told himself, how could anyone buy enough liquor to get into any real trouble now that the whole country had gone dry? He would soon discover how easy it was for an alcoholic to deceive himself.
He started drinking very moderately. Annie hardly noticed at first. In fact, it was almost a year before she learned her local druggist was also her husband’s local bootlegger. But within a relatively short time, the respected physician’s intake was drifting out of control. Only his past experience with booze and two “conflicting phobias” kept things in check for some time. He was afraid of running out of liquor, which he now needed in order to sleep, and was also afraid that if he didn’t stay sober enough to earn a living, he couldn’t buy the alcohol he needed to sleep. For the next seventeen years he led this squirrel-cage type of existence, which gradually eroded his abilities as a doctor, his medical practice, his reputation in the community, his spiritual beliefs and actions, and his financial and emotional responsibilities to his wife and children.
His son, Robert, Jr., was a teenager then. Before passing away on April 22, 2004, the younger Smitty recalled how bad things were by the time Mother’s Day, 1935, rolled around. “My father had almost no practice left to speak of,” he said some sixty years later. “When he wasn’t hiding out somewhere, he would be at home, indisposed. My mother would lie to his patients for him. So did Lily, his assistant at his office.
“It seemed every time he came home, my mother always tried to frisk him. She wanted to see if she could possibly keep him in good enough shape to get him into the office the next morning. But my father always had his ways of fooling her. For example, he wore heavy driving mittens during the winter since car heaters didn’t work very well back then. He would put a half pint of medicinal alcohol into one of the gloves and toss it up onto the second-story sun porch of our house.
“After mother had frisked him, he would go upstairs and get his whiskey from the porch. When he came down again, it was obvious to everyone he had been drinking. My poor mother never did figure that one out. If it wasn’t for President Roosevelt’s mortgage moratorium, we would have lost that house.”
Then, remembering how sick his father felt before leaving for Henrietta Seiberling’s home that historic night, the younger Smitty said with a smile, “He probably had his usual big glass of bicarbonate of soda before he left. I was at least twenty-one before I knew there was any other kind of medicine than bicarbonate of soda. My father had it in practically every room in our house. I found out why as I grew older when I saw how his heavy drinking was affecting him physically.”7
The meeting began on an awkward note. It was obvious that Dr. Bob didn’t want to be there as he stuc
k out his trembling hand to this much younger stranger. And Bill was now having second thoughts about imposing himself on these most generous people.
Henrietta had prepared dinner but both men politely declined, Bill apologizing for his lack of appetite, and the red-faced physician explaining his stomach was “on the fritz.” So their hostess led them into her library, sat them before a large brick fireplace, placed a pot of coffee and two cups on the table in front of them, and quietly left the room.
It was a few moments before either of them spoke. Finally Dr. Bob leaned forward, squirmed a bit, and then said firmly that he could only spare fifteen minutes. He suggested Bill get right to the point. Why was he there? What did he want, exactly? And what did he possibly think he could do for him? He made it clear his drinking was a personal matter and besides, he had been worked over by the best—several well-meaning ministers, a so-called spiritual healer, and even a prominent psychiatrist a doctor friend had recommended to him some time ago. So what new cure was this interloper from New York offering?
At that juncture, Bill leaned forward. He nervously apologized if he seemed to be intruding into the doctor’s private affairs. That was not his intention. He frankly admitted he wasn’t there to help him, as his new acquaintance most likely assumed. Instead, staring deeply into Dr. Bob’s eyes, he said with the utmost sincerity that he had come because he, Bill Wilson, was the one who needed help. They looked at each other for a long moment. Dr. Bob frowned, then eased back into his chair and began to listen.
Bill told his own story, playing down his spiritual experience, as Dr. Silkworth had always suggested, and describing in every painful detail the horror of his obsession with alcohol and the physical addiction that condemned him to the out-of-control drinking and irrational behavior that had destroyed his life. He even quoted some of what Dr. Silkworth had told him about the progress of the illness and its eventual prognosis—insanity or death. Being a doctor himself inflicted with the same malady, Dr. Bob found it all made sense.
The Lois Wilson Story Page 22
