The Lois Wilson Story

by William G Borchert

  Lois was in the kitchen making another large pot of coffee when she heard the doorbell. Drying her hands on her apron, she pushed her hair back from her forehead and headed down the hall to the front door. She was taken aback to see her father standing there. Dr. Burnham was also taken aback to see his daughter in a stained apron, her hair awry, and perspiration covering her weary face. He hadn’t seen his oldest and dearest daughter looking this way since the time her husband returned drunk and broke from his failed excursion to Montreal. So Dr. Burnham stood with his mouth hanging open until Lois collected herself, grabbed him by the hand, and ushered him inside.

  The good doctor couldn’t believe his eyes as he glanced around at what he would later describe as “the alcoholic ward at Bellevue Hospital.” He spotted two drunks shaking it off in the living room, two other fairly sober gents playing checkers in the dining room, and another staggering slowly down the front hall stairs. Ebby Thacher was chatting with another half-sober individual over a cup of coffee in the kitchen.

  As Lois recalled, her stunned father leaned close and whispered quite loudly: “Tell me . . . what in God’s name is going on here?”2

  Knowing they couldn’t have a private conversation in the kitchen, she led him out into the small yard behind the house. But before she could begin explaining, her father demanded to know why she was apparently nursing a house full of inebriates. Hadn’t she gone through enough with her own husband? Had she, too, lost her mind? He had warned her what could happen if she stayed with Bill.

  Lois waited until her father ran out of breath and was now only huffing and puffing. She had tried to remain calm as she fidgeted in the cool autumn air.

  “I still love him very much, Father,” she remembered saying.3 Then she took his hand again and tried to briefly detail what had happened to Bill during his trip to Akron, how he finally found a way to stay sober and help others at the same time. That while he wanted to get back on Wall Street if he could, his life was now mainly about working with alcoholics to help them find permanent sobriety. She decided to stay with her husband, she confessed, because, well, he finally seemed to need her help once again—and she needed to be needed. That’s all there was to it.

  “But you deserve better than this,” she recalled him saying as he stared at her in a very strange way.4 She could tell he felt there was something definitely wrong with this need of hers to be needed, but he never said it. He was too kind and loving for that. Instead he remarked that if her husband was really cured of his drinking problem, he should be providing a much better life than this for his long-suffering wife.

  Before her father left that day, Lois assured him she was doing exactly what she wanted to do at the moment and would continue down that path until she felt she couldn’t go any further. While Dr. Burnham departed still worried about his daughter, Lois was even more concerned about him as she watched this once robust man, now eighty, shuffle feebly down the steps of his beloved Clinton Street brownstone.

  Lois wanted to explain all that had happened—and happened so quickly—since Bill’s return from Akron only three months earlier. But she sensed her father didn’t have the patience to listen and probably wouldn’t have understood anyway. After all, she herself was only beginning to comprehend the importance of the work her husband was doing. She even felt a growing pride in it. However, while living in the same house, his zealous dedication to his drunks was keeping them apart. He simply had no time for her, and this she found hard to accept.5

  Almost immediately upon returning from Ohio, Bill had gone to Towns Hospital to fill Dr. Silkworth in on what he and Bob Smith had discovered together. Dr. Silkworth gave his prized patient the opportunity to try it out on some men in his hospital as he did once before, reminding Bill as he had in the past to “go easy on the God stuff. It turns a lot of drunks off.”

  By now, Bill understood this completely from his own experiences both in New York and Akron, although he never wavered from the belief that spirituality or a connection with a “Higher Power” was the real key to long-lasting sobriety. But he also understood that it took time, pain, and change for most alcoholics to accept this. This is the reason Bill used the term Higher Power when writing AA’s Twelve Step program, since it was acceptable to those who had difficulty with the word God.

  So, with Dr. Silkworth’s help and Lois’s reluctant consent, he began bringing a few willing candidates home to Clinton Street as he had before, only this time he had confidence that he could show them how to stay sober and that they, in turn, could show each other. As he and Dr. Bob now knew, it had to be one drunk helping another.

  Lois remembered the first alcoholic her husband dragged in from Towns. He was Hank Parkhurst, a once high-powered promoter who lost his top management position with a major oil company because of his boozing. From the moment he heard about Bill’s plan to build a large fellowship of drunks, he wanted to go right out, raise a lot of money, sell the idea to the whole world, and make Bill a fortune. But the air quickly came out of Hank’s balloon when his mentor informed him the movement would be based on the Oxford Group principles, which called for everyone turning their lives over to God. Hank didn’t believe in God—at least not then.

  John Henry Fitzhugh Mayo from Cumberstone, Maryland, was the second candidate from Towns. The son of a minister, Fitz, as everyone soon came to call him, said he always felt inferior, incompetent, and unworthy until he got smashed. Then he felt he was the greatest at everything. Lois soon dubbed him “the impractical, lovable dreamer.”6

  More came. More went. There was Freddie the chemistry professor, Herb the golf pro, Alec the accountant, Charley the plumber, Wes the obese advertising executive, and Chris the rugged wire-rope salesman. While many others tried Bill’s wares for short periods of time, these men, along with Hank, Fitz, and Ebby, all of whom were living at the house, were the mainstay of the early developing Fellowship.7

  Bill and Dr. Bob remained in very close contact and were basically taking the same approach—carrying their message to alcoholics in hospitals, nut wards, and drunk tanks while opening their homes as halfway houses or hostels to homeless men or men temporarily estranged from their wives and families. Since Clinton Street was much larger than the Smith’s Ardmore Avenue residence, it could accommodate more “guests.” Lois and Bill occupied the second floor, and the rest of the house—the first and third floors and the basement—were made available to “recovering” alcoholics.

  As Lois would often share with friends later on, this was a period in her life where she felt very much alone and shut out of Bill’s companionship. He was so busy trying to earn some money doing investigative work while also trying to care for his alcoholics that he had little or no time for his wife or those weekend trips to Vermont she so yearned for. Still, Lois tried as hard as she could to convince herself that she was not really that unhappy and that things would soon change for the better.8

  For a while, her work with the drunks helped Lois ignore all those mixed emotions she still had inside.

  Charley Baker, one of the early “Clinton Street boys,”9 as Lois nicknamed her guests, whose drinking had cost him a very profitable plumbing business, reportedly told some friends back then, “All of us were living rent-free, food-free, everything-free in Clinton Street, and Lois doing all the work. She was working in a department store during the day and cooking for us and providing all the money the whole house had.”10

  While Lois may have enjoyed all the praise heaped on her by her “boys” for her perceived heroics, she was also well aware that some people, including her own family and her neighbors, looked upon the situation at Clinton Street as a nightmare and Lois’s work as a seeming charwoman foolish and insane. Noting this in her later years, she commented, “I certainly thought I knew what I was doing and why I was doing it. I wanted to help Bill because I loved him and wanted to be with him. But I also received tremendous joy and satisfaction
from helping the other men who were staying with us and watching some of them get sober and rebuild their lives. Of course, it didn’t happen to everyone, I’m sorry to say.”11

  Most of the time their guests caused little trouble, but there were occasions when, with no warning, the house was overrun with six or seven men in various stages of recovery. One might get the urge and find a bottle he had stashed away for “emergencies.” Then he and several buddies would proceed to get royally soused. Sometimes a fight broke out over the last few swigs. Bill, Ebby, and some other sober men would drag these “slippers” off to Towns or Bellevue or wherever they could get them admitted.

  “The rule in the house was always no drinking or you would be evicted,” Lois explained of that challenging time. “And Bill made sure it was strictly enforced because he was often gone, visiting needy alcoholics around town or in New Jersey or Connecticut and I would have to cope with the boys on my own. One could see in those instances another sort of trouble might have seemed likely, but I encountered it only once.

  “My theory that advances from men were often caused by the woman’s attitude held water through all my experiences with alcoholics—with just one exception. The exception was a man Bill and I had come to love and trust a great deal. This man must have misinterpreted my expressions of gratitude for his sobriety.

  “One night while Bill was away, the man, much to my dismay, came into my bedroom. However, he did not make too much fuss at being rebuffed as he knew there were others nearby who could have been alerted. Perhaps knowing I would tell Bill, the man left quietly the next morning. We never saw him after that.”12

  Bill had now started holding meetings or, as some called them, “sharing sessions” at Clinton Street both for those at the house as well as for other alcoholics he had met at the Calvary Mission and elsewhere who decided to try his approach to staying sober. Here they openly discussed the serious problems drinking had caused in their lives and their current strategies for staying sober, such as trying to be more honest and caring, making amends for the past, and looking for ways to help their fellow drunks. While Bill and Lois also brought their guests to the regular Oxford Group sessions at Calvary Church, many felt looked down upon there by the nonalcoholic members of the movement. They much preferred their own gatherings aimed solely at the alcoholic and his particular requisites.13

  “Bill and Dr. Sam Shoemaker, one of the leaders of the Oxford Group movement, had become very good friends by this time,” Lois once explained. “But one of Dr. Shoemaker’s assistants did not approve of Bill working only with alcoholics. He particularly did not like my husband holding meetings in our home away from the church’s influence.

  “That assistant gave a talk one Sunday at an Oxford Group gathering and said certain special meetings being held surreptitiously were not good for the overall movement. He was referring of course to Bill. The atmosphere of the Group toward us from then on became slightly chilly.”14 On the one hand, some of the Oxford Group’s nonalcoholic members simply could not understand why Bill’s followers had special needs and required special attention since they believed faith in God could cure anyone or anything. On the other hand, the more snobbish members felt that drunks lowered the overall image of the movement. After all, they said, wasn’t one of the Oxford Group’s main goals to attract the more powerful of society, the political and business leaders who could have a great impact for change in the world? Instead, here were rooms filled with inebriates, some of whom, like Hank Parkhurst, even questioned the very existence of God.

  But the underlying concern was Bill Wilson creating his own “faction” by having his own meetings separate and apart from the Oxford Group. By the middle of 1936, the alcoholics who came to the Calvary Mission were instructed not to attend any more meetings at Clinton Street. Bill soon realized that such growing dissension could only have a negative effect on his goals. So quietly and without fanfare, he severed his relationship with the movement but continued to foster and incorporate many of its principles into the program he and Dr. Bob were developing for their fledgling Fellowship.

  Even Dr. Shoemaker eventually became disenchanted with the backbiting and small-mindedness within the Oxford Group. He later resigned himself and ultimately became a great admirer of Bill’s work. He even spoke in strong support of that work before thousands at two International Conventions of Alcoholics Anonymous, in 1955 and again in 1960.15

  And so the work at Clinton Street continued, often at the pace of one step forward, two steps back. But it continued, and as it did, it produced many memorable episodes in the ever-changing lives of the men involved—some comical, some tragic, some inspirational. And Lois was involved in many, which she often recounted in her later years.

  Lois loved to recall several humorous incidents involving Wes Wiley, the roly-poly advertising man who struggled as hard as anyone she ever knew to stay sober. But even after he took up residence in the basement at Clinton Street, he kept slipping and sliding. She still had great empathy for him and always tried to help wherever and whenever she could.

  “Wes knew the rule that anyone who was drinking was not allowed into the house,” she related. “So one night half-drunk Wes, nearly as wide as he was tall, decided to get in by sliding down the coal chute. Why his great bulk didn’t get stuck in the chute, I’ll never know. But then he decided to take a bath to get the coal dust off and believe it or not got stuck in our old-fashioned, soapstone washtub in the kitchen.

  “He began yelling and screaming so loud he woke up the entire house. When I dashed down to see what was the matter, there was Wes folded up like an accordion, with his chin on his knees, yelling for me to get him out. I brought him a large towel to cover himself and with the help of a few other men we managed to get his arms out from under the faucets and finally pull him free. The incident chastened him for a while.”16

  But only for a while. Less than a week later, a friend set him up with a job interview at a large advertising agency in Manhattan. Still very shaky from his last binge, he asked Lois if she would call a doctor to give him something to settle his nerves. He wanted to be in good shape for his appointment the next morning.

  “It was already late in the evening when he asked and I couldn’t get anyone on the phone,” Lois recalled. “There were many doctors in Brooklyn Heights at the time so we set out on foot to find one. I helped this rather rotund gentleman up and down front steps, held his arm steady as he lit cigarette after cigarette and rang a dozen doorbells, all with no success. One doctor in a nightshirt yelled from his window that he’d call the police if we didn’t get off his front porch immediately.”

  After several more futile attempts, Lois found a policeman who, apparently impressed by her Florence Nightingale grit, suggested she try the physician who resided at the nearby Hotel St. George. When she called the doctor on the house phone and explained the situation, he told her there was nothing he could do to help.

  “Wes was becoming shakier and shakier,” she remembered. “When he said he needed a drink, I was afraid he might go into the DT’s. So I took him to the Childs Bar & Grill where he had a whiskey. Then when I tried to coax him back to Clinton Street, he grinned and said a bird can’t fly on one wing. He ordered another whiskey. That’s when I had it. I left him sitting on the stool in Childs and went home. Of course, Wes never went for the job interview the next day and it was several more days before we saw him again.”17

  Then there was Joe Brawley, who perhaps had the briefest stint at Clinton Street. He had been sent over by Dr. Silkworth, spent the night, and was found terribly ill in the kitchen by Lois the next morning.

  Lois laughed every time she told the story of how the man thought he discovered a bottle of booze in her kitchen simply because the bottle was filled with a brown liquid and was wrapped in Christmas paper. She said it was actually homemade Vermont maple syrup. How the man was able to swallow so much of the sweet stuf
f Lois never understood. Anyway, the man got terribly sick to his stomach and fled Clinton Street as soon as he was well enough to travel.18

  Bill Corbett was one of the tragedies at Clinton Street. A brilliant Canadian-born lawyer, he was arrogant when he first arrived from Towns Hospital at Dr. Silkworth’s urging. He agreed to stay for one night—but then stayed for almost a year trying to find some peace and contentment in his shattered life.

  After sobering up, he soon found a job with a law firm in the city and began doing quite well. But he worked all day and gambled at bridge most nights—for a substantial amount of money—so he didn’t make many meetings at the house with his fellow alcoholics.

  Lois remembered how aloof the man was, even around her and Bill. She also recalled how those in the house would talk about his great obsession with gambling and how he always walked around with a deck of cards in his hands.19

  She remembered when she and Bill had finally gotten away for a weekend together. Bill had borrowed a car to visit an old friend of his in Delaware to discuss a business proposition, hoping to generate some income. Lois was disappointed they hadn’t run off to Vermont and camped out in the mountains as she had wished. But she was grateful she at least had this brief respite alone with her husband. That Saturday night they made love for the first time in many, many months. Returning home the next evening, they both smelled gas immediately upon opening the front door. The men inside were rushing around trying to discover where it was coming from, checking the basement, the kitchen stove, the gas jets used for lighting. Bill calmed everyone down, then sensed the odor could be coming from upstairs.