The Lois Wilson Story

by William G Borchert

  “As the AA movement continued to grow,” he said, “Bill and Lois would visit our home in Akron when they could and we would visit them at Clinton Street in Brooklyn. They became devoted friends. Dad told me that, although he and Bill often saw things from different angles, they never had a real serious argument and their minds seemed to mesh in developing an intelligent program which they could present to an alcoholic. I think my mom and Lois were on the very same path before my mother died in 1949.”5

  The day the Smiths were leaving for Pennsylvania Station to return to Akron, Lois remembers Dr. Bob took her aside and said to her with great warmth:

  “Lois, I want to thank you for staying with Bill. You know what it’s meant to me. For some reason, we alcoholics seem to have the gift of picking out the world’s finest women. Why they should be subjected to the tortures we inflict upon them, and stay, I cannot explain.”

  Then he hugged her and left. Lois later commented about the incident, “Bob was not a flatterer. He was generally quiet and reserved. So I know he spoke those words from his heart. I was deeply touched.”6

  While Bill worked intensely on his book, he was always back at Clinton Street for group meetings, which were gradually attracting more and more people.

  Lois came to recognize what a privilege it was seeing people change right in front of her eyes, witnessing the miracle of those crawling out of abject despair into the light of hope and leaving the anchor of alcoholism behind.7

  But many of their wives continued to have a much more difficult time, it seemed. “Like myself,” Lois would share, “they thought once their husbands stopped drinking, everything would be hunky-dory, that life would be beautiful. When it didn’t happen, we only became more angry and resentful, always blaming our husbands for all of our problems.”8

  So Lois continued to meet with her “kitchen group,” not only at Clinton Street but now at the homes of other ladies as well, some of whom couldn’t always afford babysitters or couldn’t travel for various reasons. Slowly but surely she was beginning to find some answers—mainly the calm and patience that come when you take your mind off your own problems for a while and try to help someone else, she would say. Without realizing it at the time, Lois was actually starting to walk in Bill’s shoes, to discover the same principles, to find the same empathy for those suffering from the same disease of alcoholism. But again like her husband, it would be two steps forward and one step back before the real solution would become crystal clear.

  Bill arrived at his small office in Newark each morning with a batch of crinkled yellow pads under his arm, all filled with scribbled notes. He propped his lanky legs up on a beat-up desk and slowly began dictating his thoughts to Ruth Hock. He spoke simply, honestly, and unashamedly about his own experiences with alcohol and the tools he and Dr. Bob had discovered that were keeping them and many others sober. With no hesitation he described his surrender at Towns Hospital and his miraculous communion with Dr. Bob at Henrietta Seiberling’s gatehouse. He didn’t worry about style. It was plain, homespun prose, the kind of straight talk one would hear sitting around a potbelly stove in an old Vermont general store.

  In no time, Bill had completed the first two chapters—the first his own personal story and the second entitled, “There Is a Solution.” Ruth typed them up and sent copies around for comment. There were many questions, a number of suggestions, and a few proposed changes, but overall there was general acceptance of the way Bill had begun his treatise. Frank Amos gave a copy to Gene Exman at Harper Brothers as he had promised. The editor liked what he read. After being convinced that Bill could write the entire book in the same simple, direct style, Exman said he was prepared to offer him fifteen hundred dollars as an advance against future royalties on book sales.

  Bill was ecstatic. So was Lois. In the light of this sudden and delightfully shocking turn of events, they both celebrated two things: that the cash advance would help pay some bills, and that a major publishing enterprise was willing to print, promote, and sell the book worldwide. What could be greater than that? the board members said, admittedly surprised at how well and how quickly things were turning in the foundation’s favor.

  That night, however, Bill couldn’t sleep. Lois recalled how he paced the bedroom floor, asking himself questions that suddenly occurred to him as the initial exuberance wore off.

  “Bill began thinking about all the difficulties that might arise if the book were to be successful,” Lois recalled. “If a commercial publisher owned the book, who at that company could answer the flood of inquiries that would undoubtedly pour in. Whereas if the Fellowship itself printed the book and handled its distribution, it would have the know-how to respond to questions and could control the number of books printed and distributed in order to control the number of inquiries. It all made sense to me.”9

  Besides, she remembered her husband saying, if this book was to be their basic text, and if the Fellowship were to grow as everyone had hoped, then it didn’t seem right that its main asset should be owned by outsiders. It should be owned by the Alcoholic Foundation and provide the means of self-support the board had recommended.

  All three trustees, however, argued against turning down Harper’s offer, mainly on the grounds that they knew of no author who had ever successfully published his own works. Troubled by their stance, Bill went back to Gene Exman, thanked him for his offer and then told him about the controversy he found himself in. The editor immediately saw that the group would benefit in many ways by controlling its own published materials and generously advised Bill about having the book printed on his own. The foundation trustees quickly dropped their objections and turned instead to helping raise the four thousand dollars that would be needed to initially publish and distribute five thousand books.

  Lois had hoped that with the publishing controversy now settled, there would be clear sailing ahead. Bill would finish writing the book, it would become the great best seller everyone seemed to anticipate, and the money would start flowing in to meet the bills and the mortgage payments so they wouldn’t lose their home. But those old butterflies that had never left her stomach were now whispering loud and clear that if the past was any barometer, things would not be that simple, that easy, or that successful. And the butterflies were right, as usual.

  All hell broke loose, particularly at Clinton Street, just as soon as Bill finished chapter five, which he called “How It Works.” It began, “Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path.”10 The path Bill was referring to consisted of both the practical and the spiritual principles he and Dr. Bob had formulated and tried to practice daily in order to stay mentally, physically, and spiritually sober. These principles, which Bill developed into AA’s Twelve Steps to recovery for millions of alcoholics around the world, essentially incorporated and expanded upon the Oxford Group’s “Four Absolutes” of honesty, purity, unselfishness, and love. Bill’s first draft of the Twelve Steps read as follows:

  1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.

  2. Came to believe that God could restore us to sanity.

  3. Made a decision to turn our wills and our lives over to the care and direction of God.

  4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

  5. Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

  6. Were entirely willing that God remove all these defects of character.

  7. Humbly on our knees asked Him to remove these shortcomings—holding nothing back.

  8. Made a complete list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

  9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

  10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.

 
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our contact with God, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.

  12. Having had a spiritual experience as the result of this course of action, we tried to carry this message to others, especially alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.11

  Lois vividly recalled the night she heard Bill read these steps to the Clinton Street boys. She always seemed to turn up at opportune moments with fresh pots of coffee to overhear her husband discussing with the group the chapters he had just completed. She said there was always a lively debate but none compared to what ensued after the reading of chapter five, “How It Works.”12

  “Bill had told me he was quite pleased with what he had written,” Lois recalled. “He said Dr. Bob had agreed with almost every word he had put down. So he was in no way prepared for the violent reaction when he read the steps to the group that night. I never will forget what happened.”13

  While a few men smiled with delight and bought the steps exactly as Bill had written them, most members squirmed uncomfortably. And much to Bill’s dismay, a faction led by his friend Hank shouted that there was too much God talk and it would scare drunks away.14

  “It wasn’t any God that got me sober,” Hank argued. “It was you guys. Being around all you guys and knowing what can happen if we drink again.”15

  While Bill and Hank had often disagreed about “this God thing,” it was particularly disturbing that the one leading the anti-God stampede was his right-hand man. Then others joined in. If Bill wanted to talk about the spiritual, okay, they said, but religion? Never! The missions at Calvary Church and on the Bowery did the God thing, and everyone knew they always failed with alcoholics.

  Bill argued back at first for he knew, as few men did, that his Higher Power made everything else work, had brought him together with Dr. Bob, and had given him this insatiable desire to help other alcoholics. But the more he defied the group, the more the battle raged on. So he decided to sit back and hear them out, to keep an open mind. And as the hours passed, he began to understand their anxieties, their fears, and their prejudices as he never had before. A compromise began to form in his mind, a compromise that soon everyone would come to accept, including the recovering drunks in Akron and elsewhere. And it was a compromise that would enable the Fellowship to attract believers and nonbelievers alike, the willful and the beaten-down, the citizens of all nations and the sons and daughters of all “Gods.”

  First, they would label the steps as “A Suggested Program of Recovery.” Everyone agreed that night that no drunk would rebel at a mere “suggestion.” It was the “musts” that bothered them and Bill removed all “musts” from the steps.

  And second—and this proved providential—whenever the word God was to be used in the steps or anywhere else in the book now and into the future, it would be followed by the phrase “as we understood Him.” Once again there was a meeting of the minds, including Hank, that this would open the gates wide enough for all drunks to pass through, regardless of their belief or lack of belief. This settled the group controversy once and for all.16

  But then came another bump in the road, only this one had nothing to do with the group. It concerned a hurtful misunderstanding between Lois and her husband. From the beginning of his book project, Bill had always felt it necessary to address the wives and families of alcoholics, to share with them the knowledge and insight he and Dr. Bob and the Fellowship in general had gleaned from their painful experiences and to offer whatever sage advice they could to those still living with this terrible disease. And Lois had always felt that Bill would involve her in this process. That, she felt, was only natural since she herself had lived through those harrowing times and had come to learn much from her own experiences. That’s why Lois was certain her husband would want her to write the chapter in the book, “To The Wives” and even the following one, “The Family Afterward.” When he didn’t, she was devastated.

  They had often talked about spouses not being as happy as should be expected after an alcoholic was sober for a while. They wondered together why the initial exuberance that comes with sobriety couldn’t be sustained. What was it that impeded these relationships and what could be done to solve this disappointing problem . . . not just for the spouse of the alcoholic but for the entire family as well?

  With Lois now embarked on her own journey of self-discovery and learning much from others similarly involved, who else could have greater insight and a more experienced perspective? So when Bill came up with the flimsy excuse that the book had to be written in the same style, Lois didn’t buy it. Not only didn’t she accept his rationale, but the hurt from his dismaying decision stayed with her for years.17

  Lois simply buried the hurt inside where she had buried many other things in the past. Later in life, as she looked back at that incident, she shared with a close friend: “While the disappointment still remains, I finally came to see, when reading what Bill wrote in those chapters, that he did understand and appreciate all that I had gone through as the wife of an alcoholic, and all the pain and suffering the malady of alcoholism had brought into my life. That at least salved the hurt somewhat.”18

  By the middle of January 1939, Bill had finished the book. That’s when the final controversy arose—what should its title be? Everyone in the Fellowship, both in New York and Ohio, seemed to have a suggestion. Lois once said that more than a hundred names were considered including Hank’s tongue-in-cheek offering—“The Bill W. Movement.” She noted with a smile that while her husband may have enjoyed the momentary flattery, he killed that notion very quickly. “He still had a big ego,” Lois once shared, “but not that big.”

  In the end, six suggested titles led the pack. They were, One Hundred Men, The Empty Glass, The Dry Way, The Dry Life, Dry Frontiers, and The Way Out. The last one, The Way Out, seemed to be the favorite of most until Bill asked his friend Fitz to find out how many other books carried the same title. Fitz had a former business partner in Washington, D.C., who knew someone at the Library of Congress. When it was discovered there were at least twenty-five books called The Way Out, that name dropped to the bottom of the heap.

  That’s when one of the members at Clinton Street—nobody could ever recall exactly who—pointed out that they had been calling themselves “anonymous alcoholics” for some time. So he suggested that moniker as a book title. When Bill turned the words around to “Alcoholics Anonymous,” the name was not only chosen unanimously as the title for the book, but soon became the name for the entire Fellowship—“The Fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous.”19

  By March 1939, book pages were rolling off the presses at the Cornwall Printing plant in Cornwall, New York, an excellent company recommended by Gene Exman of Harper Brothers. Supersalesman Hank had talked Bill, Dr. Bob, and the foundation board into pricing the treatise at three dollars and fifty cents a copy, rather steep back in 1939. So to convince the buyers they would be getting their money’s worth, Hank told the printer to use the thickest paper they had in the plant.

  “The original volume proved to be so bulky,” Lois would often share when talking about that historical event, “that it soon became known as the ‘Big Book.’ That’s where the name came from and why it’s still called that today even though it’s not nearly so bulky.”20

  Hank’s plan to sell books was publicity, publicity, and more publicity. He thought he had Reader’s Digest talked into doing an article about the Fellowship, but that fell through at the last moment. So did everything else in his promotion plan. As a result, five thousand copies of the Big Book lay idle in Cornwall Printing’s warehouse for months after their publication. It seemed they weren’t worth the paper they were printed on. And as the books remained piled up in Cornwall, the bills continued to pile up at Clinton Street.

  “I had difficulty sleeping at times,” Lois once shared with a close f
riend. “I would walk through the house late at night wondering what I would do if I ever lost the only real home I ever knew. It was frightful to think about. Bill kept assuring me that things would work out. That soon the book would begin to sell. That it just had to.”21

  Then suddenly came more excitement—another hopeful light at the end of an ever-lengthening tunnel. A newcomer by the name of Morgan Rogers, who had only recently sobered up at Clinton Street, told Hank and Bill that he knew Gabriel Heatter very well and had worked with him in the past. Gabriel Heatter was an immensely popular radio broadcaster in the 1930s and 1940s whose nationwide program We the People focused on heartrending human-interest stories. Morgan, who had once been in the publishing business himself and was a very good speaker, offered to tell his own heartrending story on Heatter’s radio show, talk about the Fellowship, and plug Bill’s book.

  Once Hank confirmed Morgan’s appearance on the national radio program, he put together an elaborate promotion scheme to take advantage of the exposure. More than twenty thousand postcards were mailed out to doctors and related medical practitioners east of the Mississippi announcing Heatter’s broadcast and urging them to send for a copy of Alcoholics Anonymous while it was still available. Then he and Bill and the group sat back and waited for the anticipated avalanche of replies to pour in.

  They waited anxiously for three whole days before going to the post office, carrying with them a large suitcase to collect the deluge of reply cards they had anticipated. They found twelve cards, two made out so illegibly they were probably from medics in their cups. Just two more replies dribbled in a few days later. The scheme turned out to be a total failure, and the rest of the five thousand books continued to gather dust in the Cornwall warehouse.