The Lois Wilson Story

by William G Borchert

  Once there was a funny man

  Who lived at 182.

  He had so many drunks around

  Who didn’t know what to do.

  He nursed some, he razzed some,

  He taxied some to Bellevue.

  But the funniest thing about him was,

  He really “fixed” a few.14

  Bill remained quite attentive for a while despite his heavy workload. He put his book project aside for a short time to take on several small stock analysis jobs for an old Wall Street buddy, which produced a few thousand dollars of income. One involved Loft’s Candy Company and the other Pepsi-Cola. He later told Hank and Fitz that if he had some money to spare at the time, he could have made a killing. Loft’s stock quadrupled.

  At the same time, Bill began encouraging his wife to “go out on your own as an interior decorator.”15 He said everybody raved about her work and “that damn department store is taking advantage of you.”16 He said with all her talent, she could probably build a nice business for herself and enjoy the satisfaction of doing it.

  Lois finally acquiesced to her husband’s wishes. She had been anxious to see how well she could do on her own. And now with Bill bringing in a few more dollars, the time seemed right. She quickly found two customers. One was a rather wealthy lady who was redecorating her entire house. The other, a speech teacher.

  While Lois felt no compunction about billing the Loeser customer, she did have qualms for some reason about sending her bill to the teacher with whom she had now become quite friendly. So she made an agreement instead to take speech lessons from her as payment, but then never took the lessons.17

  Even when Lois redecorated the offices of her brother-in-law, Dr. Leonard Strong, she sent him a very small bill, greatly underestimating the value of her services. Knowing this, Leonard gave her a large gratuity, which embarrassed her to no end.

  Perhaps it was Lois’s upbringing that stood in the way of her turning her interior decorating skills into a profitable enterprise. Her parents had always insisted that she and her siblings were to help people without seeking payment in return—that being of assistance and the good feelings that come from it were reward enough. As a result, Lois started bringing less money into the household than she did before leaving Loeser’s.18 By the autumn of 1937, Bill had become quite dispirited by having painted himself into a very tight corner. He had a wife who deserved far more than he was giving her. He had a house full of drunks who demanded more of his time. And he needed to find a way to earn considerably more than he was from his infrequent Wall Street assignments. He felt he had to talk with someone, to get some fresh ideas, some new suggestions. So he went to see Leonard Strong to seek his advice. They were now even closer friends, and Bill always had great respect for Dr. Strong’s counsel.

  “The very first thing Leonard did was offer Bill some money,” Lois remembered her husband telling her. “Trying not to show his embarrassment, Bill said he joked and told Leonard he was no longer hustling family and friends since getting sober. He also told Leonard he already owed him more than he could possibly repay for all the help and support he gave both of us while he was drinking. He turned the money down.”19

  Dr. Strong, like his good friend Dr. Silkworth, had become very impressed with what Bill had been accomplishing with his drunks and was convinced his work must go on. So he volunteered to call a man he had met several years earlier, a Mr. Willard Richardson, who headed the board at the Rockefeller philanthropies. He thought Bill might approach him about some sort of grant to support his growing group of alcoholics. After all, everyone knew that John D. Rockefeller, Jr., had been one of the major forces behind the passage of the Volstead Act, which gave the country Prohibition. He might possibly be sympathetic to Bill’s cause.20 Within a matter of weeks, Leonard and his nervous brother-in-law were seated in John D.’s private boardroom at a huge, beautifully carved mahogany table, directly across from Mr. Richardson. As Bill described the program he and Dr. Bob had created to help alcoholics, both he and Leonard could tell the philanthropic foundation’s chief executive was moved by what he heard, so moved in fact that he promised to have his committee look into this “evangelical society,” as he called it, just as soon as possible. And, he added, if they approved of the movement and its monetary requirements, Mr. Rockefeller would probably give it his financial support.

  Lois remembered her husband coming home that night “riding on a pink cloud.”21 She said he called everyone in the house together and urged them to be on their best behavior when Mr. Richardson and his committee came to call the following week. Lois said Bill then phoned Dr. Bob in Akron and explained all that had happened. He told him it was important that he come to New York to be on hand to meet the Rockefeller people.

  Dr. Bob would later remark that his good friend and partner was “higher than a kite” when he spoke to him that evening, even though he was stone-cold sober. Dr. Bob was concerned, however, when he heard Bill say, “The cat’s in the bag.” While he promised to be there for the meeting, he warned Bill not to count his chickens too soon.

  As usual, Dr. Bob’s advice was right on target. The philanthropic group came to Clinton Street, where they greatly admired the work being done. Some of them remarked it was comparable to “first century Christianity.” One committee member, a gentleman by the name of Albert Scott, chairman of the trustees for Riverside Church in New York, even went so far as to ask, “Won’t money spoil this thing?” His remark disturbed Bill and momentarily blurred the vision of sugarplums dancing in his head. However, he started smiling again when the others decided they wanted a closer look to better understand what this growing Fellowship was all about and the extent of its future success.22

  Christmas came and went. Bill’s spirits were up one day and down the next as the committee’s investigation dragged on. The new year of 1938 was now already underway. Then, in the middle of January, Willard Richardson phoned and asked Bill to meet him in his office. Lois admitted she was on pins and needles waiting for the news.

  Committee member Frank Amos, a well-known New York City advertising executive who had taken a shine to Bill and his work, was with Richardson when he arrived. Amos said he was recommending that the Fellowship be given an initial grant of fifty thousand dollars, adding that the committee was in general agreement. It only awaited Mr. Rockefeller’s final approval. While it was nowhere near the hundreds of thousands of dollars Bill had dreamed about, it was an enormous sum and a fantastic solution to the immediate and pressing problems both at Clinton Street and in Akron, where Dr. Bob was now having some health problems.

  By the time Bill arrived back in Brooklyn that night, he was floating on air. He phoned Akron to give his friend the good news and was unpleasantly surprised by his response. Bob was still warning Bill not to count his chickens too soon. Lois recalled they almost had their first knock-down, drag-out fight on the telephone that evening when Bill accused Bob of always being “too damn negative.”

  A few days later, however, those chickens Dr. Bob had been talking about finally came home to roost. Albert Scott, the committee member who from the beginning felt that alcoholics who helped other alcoholics were like the early Christians, had convinced John D. Rockefeller, Jr., that indeed “too much money could spoil their work”—and that fifty thousand dollars was too much money. The wealthy philanthropist agreed. He and the committee finally decided to place five thousand dollars in the treasury at Riverside Church for Bill and Bob to draw upon as needed. But that would be all. The letter from Mr. Richardson informing them of the decision said the committee came to believe in the end that the alcoholic movement should become self-supporting in order to achieve and maintain its magnificent goals.

  Despite such flattering comments, Bill was devastated at first. As usual, he had projected a momentous outcome only to be crestfallen when it failed to come to pass. In time he would learn another gr
eat lesson from all of this, but for now he had to fight his way out of another depression. While the five thousand dollars would help temporarily, he saw it as a mere drop in the bucket. That’s how deep an emotional pit he found himself in.

  Lois recalled what a bitter disappointment this was to her husband, mainly because he was torn between not having the time to earn money and continuing to direct and grow his struggling fellowship of alcoholics. But Lois also remembered how Bill felt sometime later when he came to recognize that a great influx of money at that point would have finished Alcoholics Anonymous just as it was getting started. It was then that Hank Parkhurst tried to ride to the rescue.23

  The second man to sober up at Clinton Street, Hank had since moved out, reconciled with his wife, Kathleen, and was living in New Jersey, although still attending all the meetings in Brooklyn Heights. Now feeling his oats after more than a year and a half without a drink, he had started an entrepreneurial venture in the Garden State, where he had worked for many years in the oil business. Through his former connections, Hank was organizing gasoline service station owners into a cooperative buying syndicate that he called “Honor Dealers.” He had set up an office in Newark, hired a lady named Ruth Hock to run the place, and now invited Bill to join him in what he was convinced would quickly become a lucrative enterprise. He thought it would solve Bill’s financial problems.

  Miss Hock, a dedicated, hardworking German lady in her early thirties, didn’t know what she had gotten herself into at first. Almost from the start she was shocked to see rather shabbily dressed men stagger into Hank and Bill’s office in the rear of the building and not come out until the day was over. One afternoon she entered the office without knocking only to find Bill and some others on their knees praying, while Hank was at his desk pretending nothing was going on. She hurried back out blushing, then Bill took her aside and explained what they were doing and why—that it was a practice left over from his Oxford Group days. Before long, the office at 17 William Street in Newark became Clinton Street West, with Hank and Bill spending more time trying to sober up New Jersey’s alcoholics than trying to help its service station owners. A native of Newark, Ruth would soon become Bill’s trusted secretary, working with him on his “Big Book” project. She would also become a close friend and confidante of Lois.

  “I remember Ruth telling me once,” Lois recalled, “that the business could have been very successful had they given as much energy, thought, and enthusiasm to it as they did to helping drunks. She said she soon came to realize that the Honor Dealers business was really only a means to an end, that end being expanding the Fellowship of drunks. I could have told her that the very first day she started work.”24

  Soon Hank and Bill were finding it difficult to pay Ruth her twenty-five-dollar-a-week salary and the rent on the office at the same time. Ruth so admired what they were doing to help others that she often went without pay for a while. The landlord, however, was not as generous. In fact, he eventually forced them to leave. They set up shop in a smaller office in Newark, and that’s where, with the aid of Ruth’s typing skills, Bill went to work on his book in earnest. It was now May of 1938. He started gathering success stories from the men who had stayed sober thus far and discussed with Dr. Bob how to formulate the “steps” the first one hundred sober alcoholics had taken to achieve this goal.

  While the financial pinch became evident in Newark as the buying syndicate failed to produce the profits Hank had hoped for, funds became even tighter at Clinton Street. The more time Bill spent outlining and gathering material for his book, as well as working with his drunks in Brooklyn and New Jersey, the fewer hours he had to dredge up income. And with Lois now earning less as an independent interior decorator, the financial cupboard was rapidly running bare. On top of all this, President Roosevelt’s “mortgage moratorium” had now run out, and the bank that held the loan on Clinton Street was demanding a larger payment each month.

  One evening Lois came home tired and discouraged, a mood she thoroughly disliked because it seemed to have become too frequent lately. While she and Bill had been getting along much better, Lois saw no end in sight to their economic malaise, no light at the end of the tunnel. She trudged up the steps of the brownstone only to find another letter in the mailbox from the bank, probably reminding her again how far behind they were slipping on their mortgage payments. She shook her head and slowly entered the house.

  When she climbed the hall stairs and reached their bedroom, she found Bill dressing for his meeting. He didn’t rush to her and take her into his arms, as she would have liked. He didn’t ask her how she felt or how her day went. He didn’t even ask her about the new interior decorating project she had started at a business office in downtown Brooklyn. He simply smiled, kissed her on the cheek, and finished buttoning his shirt.

  Lois slipped off her coat, hung it in the closet, then sank down on the bed and opened the letter. It was exactly what she had expected. She glanced over at her husband. He was now knotting his tie in the dresser mirror. She wanted to talk to him about the problems with the bank, and some other troubles, but as she started to speak, he turned her off rather abruptly. He said he was running late and that they could talk after the meeting. Immediately she began to feel that now familiar anger rising.

  No, she heard the voice in her head shout. She said it out loud. No! They had to talk now! He was always putting things off, putting his needs, his desires ahead of hers. It had been different for a while but now he was sliding back into his same old ways. At least that’s what her anger and self-pity were telling her at the moment. So she said it again, this time more forcefully. They had to talk now!

  Bill frowned and looked over at the clock. Then he turned toward his wife as he slipped into his jacket. There simply wasn’t enough time right now, he pleaded. He’d be late for the sharing meeting at Calvary Church.

  Lois had a shoe in her hand. She remembered her rage suddenly erupting like a volcano. Before she knew what had happened, she flung the shoe at her husband, shouting: “Damn your old meetings!”25

  “This unexpected display of anger surprised me even more than it did him,” Lois later wrote in her memoirs. “I might have had an excuse for losing my temper during his drinking years. But why now, when everything was fine, had I reacted so violently to his very natural remark?”26 Bill was at a loss for words. He picked up her shoe and handed it back to her. She turned her head away. She couldn’t explain her actions and she didn’t want him to see her crying again. The tears were coming too often of late. Bill quietly left the room and went to his meeting.

  Lois couldn’t remember how much time passed after she heard the door close. Finally she slipped her shoe back on, turned around, and caught her image in the dresser mirror. Who is this I’m looking at? she asked herself, watching the tears roll down her cheeks. What kind of person have I become? Why am I always so angry, so negative, so unhappy about my life when it’s the life I chose?

  Suddenly the room felt very stuffy. She opened the window, but there was hardly a breeze. She decided to take a walk, to get some fresh air, to think about what had just taken place, and to try to find some answers that made sense. That sudden outburst of anger just would not leave her mind.

  The following night, Bill was holding one of his regular gatherings of drunks in the parlor at Clinton Street. Still thinking about her outburst the night before, Lois walked out onto the front porch trying to relax, to put her mind at ease. That’s when she glanced toward the street and noticed a long line of cars parked along the curb. Only the wealthier people still living in Brooklyn Heights had automobiles in those days, and most had garages for them. The regular folks in the neighborhood rode the subways and the buses. But on Fellowship meeting nights at Clinton Street, people would drive their cars in from the suburbs. For some reason, this was the first time Lois had really taken note of them, perhaps because in most of the vehicles she saw ladies sittin
g uneasily in the passenger seats, all appearing stoic or sad.

  Recalling that important evening in her life, Lois said she had no idea what possessed her to approach those ladies except that she suddenly realized their husbands were probably attending Bill’s meeting. They were simply sitting there all alone, waiting for it to be over. She walked down the steps and knocked gently on the window of the first car. The lady inside rolled down the window. She happened to be Anne Bingham, an attractive, auburn-haired lady in her early forties, who would become one of Lois’s closest and dearest friends. She would eventually help Lois organize the fellowship of the Al-Anon Family Groups. But on this particular night, Anne Bingham was in the same kind of mood Lois had brought home with her only a short time ago—tired, discouraged, and frustrated. She had driven again with her husband, Devoe, all the way from their home in Westchester County for him to attend this AA meeting. He had tried everything, and this gathering of alcoholics was the only thing that seemed to work. It was keeping him sober.

  It wasn’t as though Lois had never befriended the spouses of alcoholics before. She had always welcomed them into her home just as Annie Smith had done and was continuing to do in Akron. It was simply that her work schedule and her household chores gave her little time to spend with them to develop close and meaningful relationships. Then again, perhaps she didn’t really want to. Perhaps she preferred to isolate and enjoy the sickly warmth of her self-imposed martyrdom and self-sacrifice. But this night was different. This night she needed someone to talk to, someone who could understand and possibly even help her find some of the answers she was looking for. This night Lois was to find once again that God does work in very strange ways indeed.27

  After introducing herself, Lois invited Anne Bingham to join her for some tea or lemonade in the kitchen. The offer was gladly accepted. Then Lois glanced toward the other cars. Almost without hesitation, she and Anne invited the other eight ladies in waiting to join them. While a few were shy and a bit reluctant at first, a short time later they were all seated around Lois’s kitchen table asking themselves what brought them there in the first place.