At Vesey Street, the ripples from the Saturday Evening Post story turned into gigantic waves of activity—responding to a constant stream of inquiries; contacting members to go on Twelfth Step calls; answering questions from the many new groups sprouting up about how to organize and conduct AA meetings; and continually sending out copies of the Big Book across the country.
Then came that awesome Sunday of December 7, 1941. The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. President Roosevelt responded immediately. The United States was now engulfed in World War II.
Bill tried to reenlist, but at forty-six, he was not accepted. So he and Lois followed the war intently from the home front. Bill charted the battlefronts with pushpins on maps on his office wall. And as AA continued to grow through the war years, Lois recalled that her husband was intent on keeping the program strong for those returning soldiers who, like himself, would develop a problem with alcohol while overseas.
While Bill was running frantic at his new office in the city, Lois was busy with renovations in Bedford Hills. Being a creative person, she had always enjoyed working with her hands. And since there was still no money to hire help, she set about scraping and staining the wooden floors and painting the walls, highlighting the tops of them with the design of fancy drapery swags—something she loved to show off to her guests.
Lois then cut and laid squares of linoleum on the kitchen floor, creating her own pattern. She made valances for the windows, being careful not to obstruct the lovely views of their gardens and nearby hills. Each night she would soak in the tub to soothe her sore knees and aching muscles, yet she felt proud and happy that the house was taking on a life of its own.6
With Bill commuting to the city and busy working on other AA materials when he was home, he didn’t have much free time to help out with the remodeling chores. But there was one big job he had to tackle since it required a bit of muscle: “the waterworks.”
There was a pumphouse down the hill that pushed the water from a spring all the way up to the tank under the porch and then through the pipes in the house. The trouble was, the pump was slow to get the water upstairs, where their bedroom and bathroom were. So Bill purchased a large, open cattle-feeder tank from Sears & Roebuck and put it in the attic, reinforcing the supports in that area to hold the weight. The pump then filled this tank periodically, and gravity supplied the house with water. The problem was, Bill never knew when to turn the pump on and when to turn it off.
However, now sober and filled with creative juices, Bill devised a contraption that would signal when the tank was filled or empty. He connected a bell to a float he placed in the tank. When the tank was filled, the bell would ring and a red light would go on in the kitchen.
The contraption performed even better than Bill had hoped for, that is until one disastrous weekend when some AA friends dropped by unannounced. They all decided to go out for dinner. Bill forgot to turn off his contraption.
While Lois and Bill were enjoying a fine meal with their friends, the tank filled and filled and filled—and then overflowed. Upon their return, they could hear the bell ringing and ringing and ringing. Inside the house they found Niagara Falls. The parlor furniture was soaked, the kitchen linoleum curled up, and the water stains in the upstairs room could be seen for years after regardless of how often the ceiling was painted.7
Once the inside of the house was livable, Lois turned her attention to her first love—the outdoors. It was almost summer now, so she put in flower beds everywhere and manicured the rosebushes and shrubbery that surrounded the house.
Lois also planted a vegetable garden, hoping to grow lettuce, tomatoes, and corn. While she and Bill loved to watch the rabbits, deer, and other animals prance around their property, it became less enjoyable once they began to chew up Lois’s vegetables.
Bill’s creative juices came to the rescue once more. He put a battery-charged wire fence around the garden and the constant static noise from the battery kept most of the animals at bay.8
To get back and forth to the Bedford Hills train station, Bill needed transportation. So he bought an old Stutz from an AA friend in the city who had no more use for it. The car ran well and only cost him thirty bucks. Fortunately, there was a small garage on their property, but it stood at the bottom of a steep hill, reached from the house by a flight of rugged stone steps. Because of the constant climbing up and down, Bill turned to his wife one day and suggested they call their home “Stepping Stones.” Lois smiled and quickly agreed, perhaps because she knew her husband was implying a connection to the Twelve Steps of the Fellowship. So that’s how the home of Lois and Bill Wilson fondly became known to millions around the world as “Stepping Stones.”9
For Lois, the years from 1941 to 1949—aside from some friends losing sons in the war—were filled with many happy events. Their home was constantly overflowing with AA members and their families as the Wilsons continued to share themselves and their good fortune with others. Lois began traveling with Bill to visit AA groups in other cities. She often met with other AA wives, some of whom had started small gatherings just as she and Annie had done. But many others had not. And even when she would attend such meetings, she found many to be simply “gossip sessions” or places for wives to vent their anger and resentment against their alcoholic husbands.
At times when Lois shared about her own “kitchen group,” which was continuing to expand and start new meetings, and how these women like herself discovered they had to change along with their husbands, she often got blank stares or comments such as, “You just don’t understand.” She found such experiences disturbing and kept them in her mind—and in her heart.
Lois, like her dear friend and compatriot Annie Smith, had always felt a part of AA, perhaps because both played such a major role in the lives of the men who launched the movement. In fact, Dr. William Silkworth of Towns Hospital once said in his later years when questioned by an interviewer about the success of AA: “I doubt if there would be a Fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous, no saving grace for thousands of men and women suffering from this malady, without the likes of Lois Wilson and Anne Smith. One should never underestimate the importance of the love and support they gave their husbands that enabled them to eventually come to grips with their disease and find a solution.”10 Maybe it was the commitment these two women felt for the AA program, together with their own personal experiences, that led them to comprehend alcoholism as a family disease. It was undoubtedly their continuous contact and intimate discussions that pulled them both through some extremely difficult times so they in turn might show other wives the ways they had found to better cope with life.
So when Annie took seriously ill in late May of 1949, Lois rushed to Akron to be at her side. While Annie had been in bad health for several years, which her smoking didn’t help, she rarely worried about herself. Her main concern as always was Bob, who had been diagnosed with cancer only the year before. As this generous and loving woman lay in her hospital bed with a serious case of pneumonia, her only worry seemed to be that her husband would be left all alone. She made Bill and other close AA friends promise her they would always be around Bob and watch over him.
Her struggle with pneumonia led to a massive heart attack. Annie Smith died in St. Thomas Hospital in Akron on June 1, 1949, at the age of sixty-eight. Lois, like Annie’s family and many friends, was devastated. At that moment, she wished the whole world had known the wonderful things her confidante had done for so many people. Lois was pleased when she saw the editorial that accompanied Annie’s obituary in the Akron Beacon Journal. It read, “It seems a pity Mrs. Smith’s wonderful work could not have received the public’s recognition while she was still alive, but she must have known the gratitude in the hearts of many people she had helped. . . . Akron should always be proud of the AA movement which was born here and proud of the fine woman who did so much to foster that movement.”11
Recalling his mothe
r’s passing, Bob Smith, Jr., said, “After being involved with drunks for a while, nothing could ever shock or surprise her anymore. Even though their ways might be foreign to her own upbringing, Mother was extremely tolerant of others. She just would not criticize. She always sought to excuse their actions.
“Her advice was never given on the spur of the moment to anyone, but was reserved until she had time to pray and think about the problem. As a result, her answer was given in a very loving, unselfish way to whoever was involved.”12
While deeply saddened by Annie’s passing, Lois never forgot nor would she let anyone else forget the vital role her dear friend played in the development of Al-Anon. She would always point to the love and caring Anne Smith showed not only to the spouses of alcoholics but to their children as well. Dr. Bob’s wife recognized early on that alcoholism is a disease that affects the entire family and that there needed to be a program to help the entire family recover.13
Regarding her own many warm and wonderful memories of her departed friend, there was one that stood out above all the rest. It was Annie’s surprise visit to Clinton Street shortly after Lois received the dispossession notice. Over the banana split they had at Schrafft’s, Annie emphasized how important it was that they share their personal experience with the wives of other alcoholics no matter what kinds of problems they might be facing themselves. Sharing with others helped lessen one’s problems.
“You and I discovered that by living with this disease, we got as sick as our husbands,” she recalled Annie telling her again that night. “The problem is, not many wives realize that. That’s why we have to help them.”14
What Lois and Annie had found, and what Lois was now passing on to other spouses, was that they needed the same tools of recovery their husbands had been given in the AA Fellowship. Once they embraced this set of principles, both spiritual and practical, they too could change and find the serenity and happiness they sought.
But the Fellowship and the program that was to become Al-Anon was very slow in evolving. It did not have the sudden and dramatic genesis of Alcoholics Anonymous, when Bill and Dr. Bob met at Henrietta Seiberling’s gatehouse and miraculously understood that they needed each other to stay sober . . . and stay alive. Nevertheless, its gradual but certain maturation was just as important in the lives of suffering spouses and their families. One of the reasons for its slow evolution was, perhaps, the lack of that same sheer desperation alcoholics feel when they reach the point where they must get sober or die—or at least escape the hell of the Bowery, a mental institution, or jail. Or then again, maybe it was the denial factor of many spouses who truly believed that the drinking wasn’t their problem. It was their husband or their wife, and once they stopped, everything would be fine.
Even Lois and Annie had taken a long time to fully recognize the impact the disease of alcoholism had on their lives—how living with and coping with an active alcoholic had changed their attitudes, their thinking, their actions, their morality, their very character.
Long before Annie’s death, Lois and Annie had talked frequently about wives of alcoholics needing more help and direction than they were getting, but neither was in a position to do anything about it at that time. Annie was in very poor health, and Lois was either homeless or working to make ends meet.
But now, just when Lois had everything in her life she ever really wanted—a sober and loving husband, a home of her own, gardens to tend, peace and serenity—her Higher Power was about to request that she give all that up, at least for a while, and be of service to Him once again. That is, if she were willing to accept His request.
It all began with Dr. Bob’s death. Even though expected, it stunned the world of Alcoholics Anonymous and sent Bill into another depression. Fortunately, he had spent considerable time with his partner in sobriety during those final days of his terrible bout with cancer. They had both agreed they must get out of the driver’s seat and turn the Fellowship over to its members. That the “Group conscience” should, as it had from the beginning, run the most democratic society man had ever created.
Certainly the board of trustees, which was now made up of both alcoholic and nonalcoholic members, would continue to suggest policy and direction, but the membership would always have the final say. On that Bill and Bob had finally come to total agreement.
Lois remembered the look on her husband’s face the day they left Akron in early November of 1950, shortly before Bob passed away. Bill couldn’t envision his life without his “anchor,” as he always called his closest friend. But Bob assured him his spirit would never leave his side.
Dr. Robert Holbrook Smith died on November 16, 1950, just seventeen months after his wife’s passing. The funeral service was conducted in the old Episcopal church by Rev. Walter Tunks, whose answer to a telephone call made by “a drunk from New York” fifteen years earlier had opened the way toward the formation of the worldwide Fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous. Dr. Bob was buried without great fanfare in Mount Peace Cemetery next to his wife, Annie. There was no monument, only a simple headstone. However, every member of AA, then as now, would argue that the Fellowship was the greatest monument he could have ever wanted.
To shake his depression over his loving friend’s passing, Bill decided to travel the country, visiting AA groups new and old, in major cities and country hamlets. He talked about Dr. Bob wherever he went, letting everyone know about the important contributions his friend and cofounder had given this burgeoning Fellowship of drunks. He also talked about the need to hold a General Services Conference for AA in order to officially turn over the work and responsibility of the movement to its members, alcoholic and nonalcoholic alike, as he and Bob had agreed.
Wherever he went, he also noticed that Family Groups were sprouting up all over, usually small gatherings of spouses—both men and women—and their families who were trying to learn more about the terrible malady that had wreaked havoc in their homes and on their children. But Bill also noticed that most of these groups had no program, no organization. They were simply doing their best under very confusing circumstances.
Lois believed it was better that Bill go off on his own this time, that he be alone with his old friends in the Fellowship while meeting new ones along the way. By immersing himself totally once again with his fellow drunks he might find some much-needed solace. And he did. He returned home not only renewed, but with another vision—the vision that the work his wife and Annie Smith had started must be carried on, not just across the country, but around the world, where AA was now bringing sobriety to many lands, but still leaving families behind.
Lois said that upon his return home, Bill was bubbling over with excitement about all the family groups he ran into around the country, gatherings of spouses and children looking for direction, for some way out of all the hurt and confusion the alcoholics brought into their lives.
That’s when he turned to his wife and suggested she might want to do something about it since she and others were already meeting and finding some kind of answers for themselves. He thought perhaps that Lois could open a service office to provide a place for these groups to register and share experiences and advice.
At this time, however, Lois loved being at home and working in her gardens, enjoying the kind of life she had always dreamed of. Now her husband was asking her to give it all up and get back into the fray of alcoholism. She found his suggestion far from appealing so she didn’t respond right away. But the one thing it did was keep her awake for the next few nights thinking about it.15
Lois later said she realized how selfish she was. The more she thought about the need, something she and Annie had always talked about, the more she realized it had to be done. Recognizing this would not be a one-woman job, Lois immediately reached out for her close friend Anne Bingham. Anne also lived in Westchester County and had continued to be active in the growing Family Group movement. She quickly said yes to
her friend’s request for help although neither of them had any idea how they would begin to tackle such a challenging task.
Like Lois, Anne was also born in Brooklyn. She was, by her own admission, a sickly child. She once said she had every known childhood disease all in one year, including diphtheria. Her sister died of heart disease when she was twelve, leaving Anne an only child. When she herself was eight, she contracted Saint Vitus’s dance, a nervous disorder, and it was the family doctor who suggested a move to the country for the sake of the young girl’s health.
Anne always regretted that she never had a close relationship with her mother and admitted that was probably the reason she married so young. She met Devoe Bingham at a Baptist Sunday school when she was seventeen and married him two years later. They had one daughter, who was named after her mother. Devoe, who was a few years older, owned his own filling station and sold and serviced high-priced foreign cars as well, until the outbreak of World War II.
According to Anne, her husband did not start drinking until he was thirty. Delayed at a business meeting one evening, he decided to stop at a bar to phone his wife, telling her he would be late for dinner. It was a chilly night so he thought a highball might warm him up. He never arrived home until the wee hours of the morning—totally ossified. Devoe Bingham’s progression into alcoholism was rapid and severe. During Devoe’s four trips to Towns Hospital and his several stabs at AA before finally getting sober, Anne turned constantly to Lois for support and consolation. Lois often said Anne helped her more than she helped her friend. Be that as it may, the two became very close, and when Lois and Bill moved to Bedford Hills, the foursome spent many an enjoyable Saturday evening together.
The Lois Wilson Story Page 32
