The Lois Wilson Story

by William G Borchert

  On Wednesday, April 26, 1939, the day following the We the People broadcast, Lois and Bill Wilson received an eviction notice from the bank, telling them they must vacate the house that had been the Burnham family home for half a century.

  Lois’s worst nightmare had now become a reality. She cried for days. Bill couldn’t console her. In fact, his presence at times only made things worse, for as hard as she tried not to blame him, the words were always at the tip of her tongue. Finally she had to face the facts, and the facts were they had to move. But where? What could they afford? What could they take with them and what did they have to leave behind?

  Then one day Annie Smith showed up on her doorstep. Though not in the best of health, she had come all the way from Akron to help Lois, to calm her, to convince her that God had a very special plan for her life, that everything she was going through at the moment had a purpose, a meaning, and that some day she would understand why. Annie then took her out on the town to shake her from her blues. They went to a movie, ate dinner at a nice restaurant, and had a banana split at Schrafft’s. Annie picked up the bill. She said it was her way of repaying her dear friend for all she had given her.22 The next day, Annie joined Lois’s “kitchen group” for one last meeting at Clinton Street. While the ladies were thrilled to meet Dr. Bob’s wife, they were sad about Lois’s dire situation. Many offered to share their own homes and apartments with her and Bill for as long as necessary. By the time Annie left for Akron, Lois’s spirits were buoyed a bit, and she was prepared to face the difficult tasks ahead.

  The house was still filled with possessions her parents had accumulated since 1888, Lois said. She also had her own things to pack. It took her months to sort everything out, distribute some to friends and relatives, and pack up what they wanted to put in storage. They donated carloads of things to the Salvation Army and Goodwill Industries.

  Lois labeled every single item in the house she planned to keep, whether it was stuck away in some bureau draw or sitting idly on a shelf. And her organizational skills had her put each item on a list—from silverware to blankets to books—so she could find them at the storage warehouse if need be.23

  She said it was heartbreaking to leave Clinton Street. “Having no money for even a small apartment, we had no idea when or where we would ever again have a home of our own. But our AA friends, the sober alcoholics in the Fellowship and their wives, helped us out. Many invited us to stay with them until we were able to afford a place of our own. I soon began to feel like a vagabond, living off the kindness and generosity of others. If I wasn’t familiar with humility before, I certainly was now.”24 Had it not been for the fact that Lois had already “lived around,” having traveled across the country on a motorcycle with Bill, knowing how to pack frugally, camping out in all kinds of weather, accepting the graciousness of strangers to share their abodes in North Carolina, Florida, and New England, perhaps she could not have handled what she was about to face over the next two years—two years in which she and Bill were to move fifty-one times and often live in conditions that were both uncomfortable and humiliating.

  What must Lois Burnham Wilson have felt that chilly, gray spring morning as she stood on the sidewalk outside of 182 Clinton Street and watched her possessions being carried out and packed into a van? What shame this proud woman must have felt when she and her husband found themselves almost penniless, without even enough money to pay the movers. If it hadn’t been for their friends in the AA group setting up the “Bill and Lois Improvement Fund,”25 which barely collected enough money to pay the storage company’s bill for a single month, all their furnishings would have been left in the street.

  As she stared at the stately brownstone one last time, she must have been thinking back to those wonderful childhood days when her mother dressed her so prettily for kindergarten, and their housekeeper, Maggie Fay, led her to the front door and watched her bound down the steps and into the horse-drawn black brougham filled with her noisy classmates.

  She must have thought about those disturbing nights when her little sister Barbara, still recovering from her terrible burns, awakened in their bedroom and sobbed in her arms from the fright and the pain. And about those wonderful parties and formal dinners when she squelched her giggles over the guests who squirmed and blushed holding hands with strangers as the family said grace.

  She must have been remembering all the time she spent in the den, talking and studying with her best friend, Elise Valentine. Just the thought of their many years of friendship and their bitter parting must have added to her heartache that day.

  And of course she had to be thinking of her and Bill’s wedding in that lovely, ornate parlor filled with guests, he in his army uniform and she a blushing bride, and their hopes and joys as they looked forward to their exciting future. Yes, there was a war in Europe, and they both knew that Bill would be leaving shortly to help conquer the enemy. But then he would return home and conquer the world, to achieve the greatness she knew he had within him.

  That’s when Bill took her hand and slowly led her away from 182 Clinton Street in the heart of Brooklyn Heights, New York. They both were carrying their own suitcases.

  The Clinton Street boys also had to find new abodes. Some buddied up in small, inexpensive apartments. Some moved into rooming houses. Others, particularly the newest arrivals, returned to places like the Salvation Army and the Calvary Mission, where at least they could get “two hots and a cot.”

  Since Bill and Hank were working on another book promotion deal with Morgan Rogers, for the first week Bill and Lois stayed in Morgan’s small apartment on Fifty-first Street in Manhattan. A bachelor, Morgan slept on the couch while Lois and Bill snuggled in a twin bed. Lois remembered the place well, having bumped her knee painfully on a dresser while hauling her suitcase into the tiny bedroom.

  But their second stop was much more pleasant for two reasons. First, Lois had decided to make the best of things for a while, turning her life over to her Higher Power and trying not to feel sorry for herself. Somehow, some way, everything would work out just as Annie Smith had told her. And second, she and Bill were back out in the country, the environment she loved. It seemed that Chris, the wire-rope salesman, had a small bungalow on Green Pond in northern New Jersey that he inherited from his parents. So he lent it to Lois and Bill until the end of June when others in his family would be using it. At least the “vagabonds” could now breathe freely for two months while deciding where to go next.

  When she shared those times with friends later on, Lois would recall how much she enjoyed being out in the country again, even though it was just for a short while. She said honking geese would wake her and Bill in the morning. They would run outside the bungalow to see them flying north to nest, sailing across the pale blue sky in their usually orderly triangle.

  Then she and Bill would hear a loud noise behind them like someone starting up an old motor. They’d turn to see a flight of ducks beating their wings as they rose from a nearby pond. Lois would then inhale the morning dew, smile at the new spring flowers, kiss her husband warmly, and saunter back inside to make him breakfast.26

  Since they had no car, they had to walk four miles to the small town of Newfoundland for provisions. The grant from the Rockefeller philanthropies hadn’t completely run out, so they were still receiving thirty dollars a week from the Riverside Church fund and twenty dollars every now and then from the “Bill and Lois Improvement Fund.” It was enough for food and travel but little else.

  Bill was still meeting with members of the Alcoholic Foundation, keeping in touch with Dr. Silkworth, gathering with his sober alcoholics at various homes around town, and working with Hank and Morgan and others on ideas to get the Big Book off the ground. So he frequently took the train into New York and sometimes spent a day or two there with some friends.

  Lois became so enamored by the lovely place on Green Pond that the time just flew by.
Soon their solitude and the fun things they did together came to an abrupt end. It was June and Chris’s family was due to arrive. That’s when Lois and Bill began another sojourn, one that would find them changing abodes fifty-one times during the years of 1939 and 1940.27 Over the course of this “living around” period, Lois and Anne Bingham—the first woman she had met that night from the cars parked along Clinton Street—became very close friends as she and Bill spent several weeks at her Westchester home from time to time. Anne would invite the “kitchen group” ladies over for a meeting, or she and Lois would travel to one of their homes. By now the group had expanded and splintered into other groups. And the women were beginning to focus more on their own lives and their own problems and less on their husbands. Lois once said of those days that she could sense the principles of AA were starting to “rub off on them.”

  It was late January of 1940. Lois and Bill were staying with Marty Mann, the first recovered woman alcoholic, at her home in snowy Greenwich, Connecticut, when they received the news. Willard Richardson, who now chaired the Alcoholic Foundation board, said his boss, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., wanted to give a dinner for the AA Fellowship. He had been quietly following the movement’s progress over the past three years and now wanted some of his wealthy friends to hear the marvelous story of how it was continuing to cure hopeless drunks.

  Lois remembered her husband’s initial reaction to Richardson’s remarks. “He assumed that Mr. Rockefeller had changed his mind and had decided to give AA money and to ask his friends to do the same,” Lois told a close friend. “He had just gotten used to the idea that the Fellowship shouldn’t have a lot of money so now he had all sorts of mixed feelings about what was happening.”28 This was especially true when he learned the invitation list for the dinner was “a veritable constellation of New York’s prominent and wealthy. Anybody could see that their total financial worth might easily be a billion dollars.”29

  Dr. Bob came to New York a few days before the dinner to discuss the prospects with Bill and the foundation trustees. They shared ideas on what the Fellowship might do were millions to be donated. That perhaps there could be AA hospitals for the sickest of drunks and halfway houses to help them get back on their feet. Perhaps there could be AA-financed clubhouses where alcoholics could gather for meetings as well as social events. It all sounded wonderful—that money properly spent could help thousands of recovering alcoholics in many meaningful ways. The foundation could also have its own office, it could have a staff to help manage the growing movement, and Bill could finally draw a salary that he and Lois could live on comfortably. After all, didn’t they deserve it by now?

  While the trustees all seemed to agree, Bill could tell that Bob had serious reservations. He told Bill as they left the meeting that he never met a drunk who could handle a whole lot of money very well—and besides, they were all once again counting their chickens before they hatched.

  The Rockefeller dinner was held on February 8, 1940, at Manhattan’s exclusive Union Club. It was an all-male black-tie affair. Of the four hundred prominent and influential people invited, seventy-five accepted. Using his characteristic promotional instincts, Hank placed one “very sober” AA member at each table, having rehearsed with them the story of their miraculous path to sobriety for their guests to hear. John D., Jr., had taken ill a few days earlier, so his son, Nelson Rockefeller, who was thirty-one at the time, chaired the proceedings.

  As Bill and Dr. Bob told their stories that evening, supported by the testimony of Dr. Silkworth and others, it became obvious that the audience of millionaires was both sympathetic and impressed. Bill’s hopes and expectations soared. At one point, Dr. Bob leaned over and whispered: “Keep both feet on the ground.” Bill simply frowned.30

  Did it occur to either one of them that this was déjà vu all over again, that they had been through all of this once before, only without the squab on toast that was served at dinner? Neither one ever said. But as it turned out, they had been.

  When the guests had finished asking questions and offering flattering comments, Nelson Rockefeller returned to the podium. A hush came over the room. Bill could hear his heart thumping—then almost stop as he listened to the rich young man summarize the evening. He thanked his guests for attending and for witnessing with him what his family believed was the birth of an important movement. Then he underscored his father’s faith in AA, and his belief that its power lay in the fact that the message was always carried from one man to the next without any thought of financial reward. For this reason, he concluded, he agreed with his father that AA must always be self-supporting as it was with the early Christians. That all they needed from the public and from the men gathered there that evening was their confidence and goodwill.

  Then the guests rose and gave Bill and Bob and the AA Fellowship a thunderous round of applause. After hearty handshakes and pats on the back, Bill watched in disbelief as millions of dollars walked slowly out of the room. He slumped back into his chair and tried to figure out what this evening, what this elaborate dinner was all about. But for the moment, he couldn’t come up with an answer. He would later understand, however, that the confidence and goodwill of such people contributed enormously to lessening the stigma of alcoholism. He would also realize once more, after thinking it through, that a whole lot of money really and truly would have unraveled the Fellowship sooner or later because, as his friend Buddy the derelict had said a few years earlier, “sobriety was something that could not be bought or paid for.”

  The Fellowship did receive a little money as the result of the dinner. Nelson Rockefeller purchased five hundred Big Books, which he sent to those on his original guest list and to some libraries around the state where he thought they might be of some help to families. And the Alcoholic Foundation received an additional two thousand dollars in anonymous contributions for a total of about four thousand dollars. But all this did was cover some foundation expenses and help provide Lois and Bill with the bare necessities as they pondered what to do next about their future—which certainly looked far bleaker than it had before February 8.

  Then, just before the first crocus of spring fought its way into the sunlight, Bill was hit with still another deep disappointment that made him feel he was back in the dead of winter. His right-hand man, Hank, got drunk.

  “First there was Ebby and now Hank,” Lois said, recalling the incident. “Here were two of his closest friends he was sure would stay sober forever. He began to question himself all over again until he came to realize what made them start drinking again in the first place.”31

  She said Bill saw they were no longer helping newcomers, had drifted away from the group, and harbored resentments against certain people, which they refused to discuss. Lois also knew that Hank and his wife, Kathleen, weren’t getting along in their second try at marriage. She had pleaded with Kathleen to attend some of her “kitchen group” meetings, but to no avail. Kathleen insisted that drinking was her husband’s problem, not hers, and that she had been very patient in letting him attend all his AA meetings even though he wasn’t paying enough attention to his business or to her.

  On that score, the confused and upset woman was correct, especially about the business. The Honor Dealers buying syndicate had continued to evaporate as Hank spent more time on AA affairs than on his own. But, according to Lois, two other reasons may have led to his slip.

  First, Bill had been sharing Hank’s Newark business office to write his book and conduct some of the Alcoholic Foundation’s work at the same time, contributing to the rent whenever he could. Now Bill was talking about finding a small office in New York for the foundation’s headquarters when all along his friend felt it would remain in Newark. This misunderstanding created resentment between these two good friends.

  Second, and probably the more important reason, Hank had become smitten with Ruth Hock. In fact, as his own marriage was crumbling once again, he proposed w
edded bliss to Ruth. While she respected her boss for his dedication to helping the less fortunate, she was not in love with him and therefore not interested in his proposal. She turned him down.

  Filled with anger at his wife, resenting Bill, hurt by Ruth’s rejection, and with no God in his life, Hank had little or no defense against alcohol. He went out and got drunk, and he stayed drunk for many months. He tried to come back to the Fellowship on several occasions, but his false pride, anger, and other character defects always stood in his way. His drinking finally grew much worse and, in a few years, it ended in his death.

  Hank’s slip shook Bill to his very core. It forced him to take a good look at his own life once again and the utter failure he saw when measured against the world’s standards for success. He recognized that the struggle he was waging to build a sanctum for suffering alcoholics only heaped more hardship on his loving wife and caused him great guilt. He decided AA could get along without him. That he had brought it along far enough and now it could survive on its own. He needed to put his own house in order and get a job, any sort of a job. He needed money and he needed it fast.

  Bill thought about his young friend Chris who had lent him his bungalow on Green Pond. Chris was now making a good living selling wire rope for Paulson and Weber, a large industrial products distributor, and had always kidded Bill about being the best damn salesman he had ever met. The former stockbroker decided to put that to a test with Chris’s help.

  Although he knew nothing about wire-rope customers and had even less interest in the product itself, Bill spent that summer doing his best under very pressing and distracting circumstances. It barely put a few dollars in his pocket.

  Lois also tried to find a way to bring in some money. With life being too hectic and disorganized to hold down a regular job, she tried her hand at writing. She had once sold an article about veneers to House and Garden magazine. However, when she submitted some tales to the magazine Romantic Stories, she received pink slips rather than greenbacks.32