The Lois Wilson Story

by William G Borchert

  “If I didn’t drive him here and wait outside, he probably would never come to these meetings,”28 Lois recalled one dour-looking woman commenting as several others nodded in agreement. Most continued to fidget uncomfortably, not knowing what to do or say until Lois quietly remarked, “I threw a shoe at my husband last night. I’m still trying to understand why I did it, why I’m still so angry when he’s been sober now for over three years. I guess I thought that once he stopped drinking, everything would go back to what it was like before, happy and loving. But it hasn’t and I’m not sure whose fault it really is.”

  That’s when Anne Bingham turned to her and said: “It’s because of all the things they did, that’s why. You can’t forget so easily. At least I can’t.”

  “I think it’s more than that,” Lois replied, admitting at the same time she couldn’t put her finger on exactly what it was.29

  As the moments passed and the initial discomfort of being among strangers started to ease, these ten ladies from all walks of life—some with children; some living in nice homes, others in hovels; some filled with shame, others with rage; some attractive, others pale and sickly—began to share their anger, their fear, and their frustrations. Lois listened, and as she did, she slowly came to realize how much they all had in common. She felt as she had when she first met Annie Smith. Lois also came to realize that night that, like these other ladies, she had the same addiction—only hers went by the name of Bill Wilson.

  “Even though I had known it deep down inside,” Lois would later share, “it struck me so clearly that night that I was as addicted to Bill as he was to alcohol. But I also now saw that I wasn’t alone in how it had affected me. That every spouse of every alcoholic I have ever known also becomes terribly affected by this disease.”30

  At one point during this kitchen gathering, the ladies heard the roar of laughter coming from the Fellowship meeting in the parlor. Lois remembered one very thin and peevish lady remarking with a deep frown: “Listen to them in there having a good time while all of us sit out here stewing from all their garbage!”31

  Lois remembered looking at her and replying: “No. I think they’re all in there getting well while we sit out here sick and getting sicker.”32

  While her retort didn’t go over well with some of the ladies, it didn’t stop any of them from joining Lois and Anne around the kitchen table at Clinton Street again a few nights later. The women were more open this time. One talked about being sick and tired of lying to cover up for her husband when he missed work or disappointed the children. Another said her children were too embarrassed to bring their friends into the house anymore because their father was either drunk on the couch or staggering around in his bathrobe.

  Some expressed their fear of financial insecurity. A very pale and nervous lady remarked that her husband was into his third job in the last six months, and she was worried he might soon lose that one too. And another woman’s husband had such a violent temper when he drank that one night he kicked in the bathroom door because their son was taking too long in the shower.

  A rather stout lady with very sad eyes seemed to sum it all up when she confessed she would get so depressed over her husband’s drinking and its effects on her family that she kept the window shades down all day. She said sunlight was only for happy people.

  Lois could only reply that since throwing her shoe at Bill, she had started taking a closer look at herself. It seemed she had always depended upon her husband for her happiness, her contentment, her reason for being. Maybe she had better consider more seriously what her mother had told her as she lay dying in the hospital. “Lois,” she said, “you have a life of your own to live, and you must live it. You must find out what can truly fulfill you, otherwise one day you will wake up and be consumed by anger and resentment for being cheated out of that life.”

  Soon this gathering in Lois’s kitchen became a regular affair. It planted the seeds from which Al-Anon would eventually blossom. However, at the start, it began to bother some of the newly sober alcoholics coming to the house. In fact, one evening as the ladies were straggling down the hall toward the kitchen, a newcomer asked Bill if he thought it was a good idea for Lois to be meeting with members’ wives. Some of the “boys,” he said, thought the women might be comparing notes.

  Bill laughed, put his arm around the newcomer, and replied, “What can they find out that they don’t already know or suspect? Besides, I don’t think they’re spending their time chewing us over. So relax.”33

  Lois came to realize increasingly, as these kitchen meetings continued, just what a toll the disease of alcoholism had taken on her life, how it had changed the very ideals and virtues she had grown up with, and how it had turned her into the kind of person she never wanted to be. Looking back at that extraordinary evening when she invited those ladies into her kitchen, Lois recognized that it marked one of the most important turning points in her life.

  When she began to share her innermost thoughts and feelings with others, she came to understand how much she had really believed she could control her husband’s life from the very beginning of their relationship, when he first started his heavy drinking. She was totally convinced that her love and inspiration was all that was required to fulfill his every need, that her own willpower and steadfast guidance was all that was needed to quench Bill’s thirst for alcohol.

  But as her husband’s drinking grew worse and their lives spiraled into chaos, she then turned to prayer and her relationship with God, believing that this would cure Bill of his affliction. She never thought about what God’s will might be. She only thought about her own will—what Lois wanted and what Lois’s sheer determination should be able to achieve.

  Then came the crushing blow: Bill finally found sobriety through the help of Ebby Thacher, Dr. Robert Holbrook Smith, the Oxford Group, and now his small but budding band of fellow alcoholics. She felt she played no role in the most important goal of her life—getting her husband sober—and now was playing no role in helping him stay sober. Her own inner needs had always been fed by being her husband’s nurse, his mother, the breadwinner, and the decision maker. Now she was on the outside looking in.

  Since throwing her shoe in anger and now meeting and sharing with her “kitchen group,” Lois was discovering how resentful and jealous she had become of her husband’s newfound friends, and how filled with anger and self-pity she was. But most of all she had come face to face with a woman who was smug and self-righteous, a lady who thought she had all the answers for Bill and the rest of the world but now saw she didn’t even have many answers for herself. She was now determined to find them.

  So Lois set out with her own newfound friends to take an honest and searching look at herself in order to change—to rid herself of those painful traits and defects she was now uncovering. At the same time, Lois was recognizing that often her will and God’s will were in conflict and that true peace and comfort only comes when these two meet and she accepted God’s plan for her life.

  In a wonderfully strange way, as Lois began to walk down this new path, she came to realize more and more that she and Bill were walking along similar paths and that hopefully those paths would converge one day at a juncture where she and Bill would find an even deeper and more loving relationship. She hoped it would be soon.34

  As Lois Wilson met with her fledgling kitchen group, she slowly but surely began to find some of the answers she was looking for. And it was important that she did, for soon her mettle would be tested even more. The next letter she would receive from the bank would warn that unless the payments were brought up to date soon, the bank would have no choice but to foreclose on the mortgage and have her and Bill dispossessed. This time her husband listened to her plea and sat with her as they both tried to figure out what to do next.

  13

  An Unsettled World— An Unsettled Life

  SINCE HIS INA
UGURATION IN 1933, PRESIDENT FRANKLIN D. Roosevelt had subordinated any and all problems abroad to his enormous battle to pull America from its deepening economic crisis and restore its people to the life of abundance and security they once enjoyed. To help achieve this end, the president and his Congress had initiated and passed the most stringent neutrality legislation in the nation’s history.

  As a result, throughout the 1930s, the entire nation practically wore blinders when it came to distinguishing between “aggressor” and “non-aggressor” belligerents overseas. America focused inward instead, on the needs of its own people. Fathers had to have jobs, not guns. Mothers cried out for food, not tanks. And families yearned for homes, not battleships. So when Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany, threatened his European neighbors, joined forces with Italy and Japan, and pointed his storm troopers in the direction of Austria and Poland, the United States was ill-prepared to meet the pending crisis. The ensuing result was an increasingly frightened and unsettled world.

  On the home front, however, President Roosevelt’s tactics, both tough and ingenious, were beginning to win the war against the Great Depression. His often-controversial New Deal program was pumping new life into an almost moribund economy. First he cut federal salaries and government overhead generally. Then he signed into law the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which through price increases and loan guarantees relieved farmers of a mortgage indebtedness of more than eight billion dollars, a burden that could have threatened the nation’s food supply.

  FDR then forced passage of his most contentious measure, the National Industrial Recovery Act, which created minimum wages, fixed maximum hours, abolished sweatshops and child labor, and required business owners to open their books to government inspectors. In addition, the government began building new roads, bridges, and tunnels and financing the construction of huge public works projects such as the Grand Coulee and the Bonneville irrigation plants. Soon the country’s wage earners were finding more jobs and steadier employment and bringing home bigger paychecks.

  President Roosevelt won a second term in 1937 by a landslide and swept Democratic majorities into office with him. He now had an even freer hand. He continued to create more “alphabetical” government relief programs to subsidize the unemployed and provide lower interest rates and a greater money supply to business and industry. This helped stabilize companies and allowed them to begin growing once again. Now there were the FER, the RFC, the TVA, the HRA, and the NRA. Despite the enormous public debt piling up—almost four billion dollars more than the World War I debt at its peak—by the end of the 1930s the country was finally beginning to sense that the worst was over.

  However, while the nation’s economy was slowly starting to awake from its painful doldrums, such was not the case at 182 Clinton Street in the heart of Brooklyn Heights, New York. If the country had been wearing blinders so as not to see the growing menace overseas, the increasing difficulties in the Wilson household were so obvious they simply couldn’t be hidden from view. This became even more evident when John D. Rockefeller, Jr., declined Bill Wilson’s request for a major infusion of capital for his struggling band of alcoholics.

  As Lois once shared with a close friend: “The small grant Bill received from Mr. Rockefeller was really a godsend. Even though it didn’t solve our problems, it did help us a bit during a very difficult and trying period. Bill had hoped, however, that the five thousand dollars would somehow last until he finished writing his book. Hank was certain the book would be a best seller. They were both wrong. The money slowly ran out and the book didn’t sell, at least not right away.”1

  But one important thing did emerge from the Rockefeller episode. Bill had made a number of important contacts with some very generous and very high-powered men who were now sold on his budding movement. Hank, who by now had become Bill’s right-hand man, was the first to see the opportunity in such elite connections. He was convinced that most wealthy people only liked to donate to organizations or foundations they could brag about to their friends and associates—medical, charitable, scientific, the arts, and such—not a disorganized bunch of “raggedy-assed, low-bottom drunks.” And he told Bill so. What they needed, Hank said, was to somehow find a way to directly involve these nonalcoholic movers and shakers in their Fellowship, perhaps as “advisory members.” Bill cottoned to the idea at first until his friend suggested such prominent figures would make “great window-dressing.”

  Lois remembered the reluctance her husband initially expressed about the whole idea following Hank’s remark. “Bill told me he didn’t like the thought of ‘using’ people simply to gain your own selfish ends,” she once shared. “He said he did that too many times when he was drinking and he wasn’t going to do it now that he was sober. And he didn’t.”2

  Besides, Lois went on to say, Bill was mainly interested in the objective counsel and experienced guidance such men could provide to help him build the Fellowship into a strong and lasting organization. Certainly he was open to whatever suggestions and support they could lend to raising much-needed income, but he had now come to believe that Mr. Rockefeller was right—that too much money in the hands of recovering alcoholics could, at this juncture, prove to be an absolute disaster.

  After cooling Hank’s “promotional instincts,” Bill phoned Dr. Bob to discuss the concept of engaging outside advisors. His partner agreed that a small group of nonalcoholic men of good will and good repute could lend great objectivity to their efforts. He also agreed that “putting the arm on them” must not be the primary motive for their involvement.

  Then Bill went to see his brother-in-law Dr. Strong once again for his trusted opinion. Leonard offered him similar advice. As a result, the Alcoholic Foundation, a tax-free charitable trust, was formed a short time later, and Leonard Strong was the very first person Bill asked to serve on its board of directors. He accepted. Then Bill went to Willard Richardson and Frank Amos, and they, too, graciously offered their services.3

  When the new foundation held its first formal meeting in Richardson’s office, Hank still hadn’t changed his stripes. He insisted the first item on the agenda must be a plan to solve the movement’s serious financial crisis. That there was no way to help and support any more alcoholics without additional resources. He urged the board members to show Bill and himself how they could approach other philanthropists and wealthy donors for financial grants—and possibly lend their influence.

  Once again Bill had to politely chastise his friend for trying to move too fast. He told the board he had high hopes for solving the money problems himself by finishing his book about the Fellowship. He said many in the group strongly believed there was a vast nationwide audience of suffering alcoholics and their families just waiting for a treatise that could offer them an answer to their dilemma—an answer that almost one hundred alcoholics had already found in Brooklyn, New York, and Akron, Ohio.

  When Frank Amos, the advertising executive, heard Bill’s description of the proposed book, he excitedly agreed with his comments. He thought its potential to create the much-needed funding was significant and offered to help by contacting his good friend Gene Exman, the editor of religious books at Harper Brothers Publishing Company. Frank said once Bill had completed a few chapters, he would show them to Exman. If the editor liked what he saw and thought the book had good marketing possibilities, he might offer an advance against royalties, even though Bill was a first-time author. The other board members readily agreed with Amos that the book project was where the foundation’s emphasis should be placed at the moment. It could lead to what each director firmly believed—that the Fellowship of alcoholics must eventually become self-supporting and not dependent upon outside financial support that could unduly subject it to external influence and dickering.

  While Lois was pleased on one hand that her husband was now envisioning some daylight ahead, she was unhappy on the other hand that she would be seeing him far less as h
e dedicated himself to producing what would become the “Bible” of AA’s teachings. He began spending much of his time in Newark dictating his prose to Ruth Hock, editing the personal success stories of his sober alcoholics, and getting comments back from Dr. Bob and others on the pages he had completed.

  Lois often said her saving graces during this period, from the spring of 1938 to the end of January 1939, when the book was finally finished, were her meetings with her “kitchen group” and her frequent conversations with her dear friend Annie Smith in Akron.

  Bob Smith, Jr., Annie’s son, remembers traveling with his parents to visit Bill and Lois at Clinton Street around this time. He was seventeen then and excited about his first trip to New York City.

  “My father came to spend a few days with Bill to go over the pages he was writing for AA’s Big Book,” he recalled. “Lois seemed to perk right up as soon as she saw my mom. They had developed a very close bond with each other. In fact, as I recall, they spent most of the time together while we were there and also went to meet with other ladies whose husbands were in the Fellowship. And with Dad off somewhere with Bill, I was basically on my own. Once I discovered New York’s subway system, however, I had a ball. There was no graffiti back then. The trains were neat and clean and I rode all over New York seeing everything I could.”4

  Young Smitty said Lois appeared to be doing the same thing in Brooklyn that his mother was doing back in Akron—gathering spouses together to talk about living with an alcoholic, coping with the problems that result, and trying to find ways to improve their own lives in spite of it all.

  “My mother was a Wellesley graduate,” Bob liked to recall. “She was not only very intelligent but had great insight into people and could readily understand their problems and their situations. She was still a member of the Oxford Group at the time and would share those principles with the wives of other alcoholics as well as try to live by them herself. I know my mother and Lois would frequently talk about this and how they needed to change their old ways of thinking and acting or perhaps reacting.