The Lois Wilson Story

by William G Borchert

  This reply by Lois, meant for all members of Al-Anon, once again underscored her belief that they should become avid readers of AA’s Big Book since it spelled out the very program they themselves had supposedly come to live by.

  Inevitably, the Clearing House outgrew the small space at the old clubhouse and moved to much larger quarters at 125 East Twenty-third Street, eventually taking over a second floor in that building as well. By this time, Margaret D., one of the young movement’s earliest volunteers, had started working with Lois on the newsletter, choosing comments and news items from their mail to pass on to their rapidly growing list of member groups. Lois once described Margaret, who lived with her husband, Jack, in Yonkers, as the jolliest and most colorful of the original “pioneers,” as she called those early workers.

  “Margaret would bring in sandwiches for the small group of us for lunch,” Lois recalled with a smile. “Then Anne or I would boil some water on a hot plate for tea or we’d make a small pot of coffee and sit around and have an informal Al-Anon meeting. Margaret would stick a cigarette into her long, gold cigarette holder and regale us with hilarious stories about her poor husband Jack. Then others would chime in with more funny stories about their husbands. As hard as we tried not to talk about our spouses, I think that finally being able to laugh at the past, at least some parts of it, helped us all get well again.”18

  While Lois and Anne’s volunteer corps was growing, there was still much pressure on Lois to oversee their efforts, to discuss and plan the future needs of Al-Anon, from literature to conferences, and to guide its internal affairs, from organizational squabbles to enforcing the Traditions. All of this, together with her traveling and handling the chores at Stepping Stones when Harriet wasn’t there, began to wear on Lois’s health. She was now sixty-two, and even Bill was suggesting that she slow down just a bit.

  It was January 23, 1954, and it had snowed quite heavily in Bedford Hills. Lois spent several hours that day shoveling their long driveway since Bill was in the city at Foundation meetings. She was to meet him there the following day to celebrate their thirty-sixth wedding anniversary. After all her shoveling she felt extremely tired, so she went to bed early that night.

  The next morning she was still not feeling well, but nothing could keep her from their anniversary celebration. She left early for the city to do some shopping and to pick up the gift she had ordered for her husband, who was at the Bedford Hotel, where they planned to meet.

  Lois was just leaving the store when it happened. She felt a sharp pain in her chest. She stopped for a moment and caught her breath, and the pain eased. She saw a movie theater down the street and thought seeing a good flick might relax her. However, only moments after she was seated, the pain started again. This time it was worse and it frightened her. She took a taxi to Bill’s hotel. By the time she arrived, she could hardly walk through the lobby. Bill panicked when he saw Lois’s condition. He immediately phoned Leonard Strong, and then rushed Lois to New York Hospital where a top heart specialist was waiting to treat her.19

  In his wedding anniversary card to his wife, written before he knew of her heart attack, Bill’s prophetic message was: “Come any peril, we know that we are safe in each other’s arms because we are in God’s.”20

  After some time in the hospital, Lois came home to Stepping Stones. Since the heart attack was a serious one, the doctors insisted she rest for several months and do no strenuous work for at least a year. For someone who had always been very active, this was difficult. But Bill took a long sabbatical from his AA affairs to make sure his wife did exactly what the doctors ordered.

  And she did just that, spending time enjoying some books she had always wanted to read and watching many colorful birds that would pay brief visits to her windowsill.21 Lois later said that most of all, the time off gave her a chance to be with Bill again, to be close to him and spend time talking about things they had just let drift by in their constant busyness.

  One afternoon as they sat together looking through the window at the rolling hills surrounding their home, Lois remembered her husband squeezing her hand and pleading with her to do everything the doctors asked. Then he smiled and said: “After all I’ve put you through, I need you to stay around a while longer so I have time to make it all up to you.”22 That’s when something became suddenly clear, Lois said, something she had finally come to realize after all these years. They had both taken such long journeys to find what they had both been looking for—a program, a way of life that had brought them back to each other in a way she had always hoped for, had always dreamed. For today they both loved each other unconditionally, and she knew in her heart—a heart that would soon be well again—that this love, this bond would last forever so long as Bill remained sober.

  “I know it may sound kind of silly,” Lois once shared with a close friend, “But I believe that a heart attack can sometimes be good for the soul. I know in my case it was. It helped me to realize again just how fragile life is, just how fleeting. There were no more days to be wasted. I had to focus on what was really important, like how dear Bill was to me and how much God had given us both through this terrible disease of alcoholism and this wonderful gift of recovery.”23

  Harriet was also there at Stepping Stones to help nurse Lois back to health. In fact, she stayed at the house for several weeks in order to be at Lois and Bill’s beck and call.

  “I had never stayed over at the house before that,” Harriet said, remembering her shock at seeing her usually energetic friend so pale and weak upon her return from the hospital. “After I got her and Mr. Wilson off to bed that night, I found I couldn’t go to sleep myself. As I lay there in the dark listening to that old house creak and whistle in the wind, I thought I’d be seeing ghosts. I had all I could do to make it through those two weeks.”24

  Lois laughed when Harriet told her the story and said she offered to move her bed in next to Harriet’s to calm her down.

  Lois wrote in her memoirs that Harriet was an absolute blessing. “Her loyalty, devotion and responsibility are outstanding, and it was a lucky day indeed when she came to us. She is my memory and checker-upper. I trust, need and love her.”25

  As soon as Lois had gained some strength, she began urging Bill to take her to Vermont. It was already May and the maple trees would be blooming and the wildflowers would be breaking through their green buds. While the Burnham cottage on Emerald Lake was no longer theirs, they could stay at the nostalgic Wilson House in East Dorset and visit with some old friends. Her doctors had recommended walking, and Lois promised to behave and not do anything too strenuous. So, Bill finally gave in and off they went.

  Lois was never happier than the times she spent in Vermont and now that she was getting healthy again, her joy knew no bounds.

  During the month she and Bill were there, walking through the woods and down the back roads, the sights and sounds brought back memories of their youth. They watched lizards slithering across fallen trees, frogs hopping into green ponds, and squirrels trying to transport large acorns across narrow tree limbs.26 Lois’s memoirs convey her happiness at this time. Perhaps just being there brought back her delightful “tomboy” days at the lake, those growing-up adventures, and her young womanhood when she met and fell desperately in love with the man of her dreams—who was now holding her hand once again as they traipsed through the countryside.

  By the time they returned to Stepping Stones, she said, the flowers had blossomed, the lawns had turned green and the deer were once again nibbling on the small trees growing along the hillside. She said she felt refreshed and ready to go back to work even though Bill and the doctors told her it was still not the time.

  Perhaps to celebrate her recovery, Lois decided to have a picnic upon her return home that June. Without hesitation, she invited every Al-Anon group in the country. She even suggested that Bill ask a large group of his AA friends. Lois would provide s
ome refreshments, and her guests would bring picnic baskets. Harriet decided to cook up a large batch of Southern fried chicken specially for those who couldn’t afford much more than a bus ticket or train fare to Bedford Hills. With bright sunshine and not a cloud in the sky, the picnic attracted a large crowd from the local area and a number of surrounding states. It turned into a beautiful day of sharing about the transformations in the lives of those gathered on the sprawling lawns of Stepping Stones. And it started a tradition that continues to this day—the Annual Stepping Stones Family Picnic for Al-Anons, AA’s, and Alateens alike on the first Saturday of June.

  The Al-Anon Clearing House was well ensconced in its new headquarters on Twenty-third Street by the time Lois arrived back. She was proud of the way Anne, Margaret D., and the others had kept things humming. But it wasn’t long after her return that they all concluded there was much more to be done in terms of providing greater guidance and organization to the movement, which was now growing by leaps and bounds along with AA. Lois wrote in an Al-Anon newsletter:

  In the early days of Al-Anon we felt we should learn as much as possible about alcoholism, so we could help our mates. But again by degrees the emphasis began to shift toward detachment-with-love from the alcoholic. The idea was not only that the latter could not learn from mistakes if nursed and protected, but that the nonalcoholic should strive for spiritual development first and foremost. No one can directly change anyone but oneself.

  However, detachment-with-love does not exclude knowledge about alcoholism, and such knowledge can be helpful as long as the spouse does detach with love. But the idea of “detachment” can be misunderstood and overemphasized. “With-love” is the important part of this idea. True love does what is believed to be best for the person loved, not what is easiest at the moment. Spoiling and pampering do not spring from love, but from lack of knowledge or from lack of discipline in the “spoiler.” This is where many of us made our mistakes. For example, in protecting the one I loved from the consequences of his own actions, I was not helping Bill.

  Most people come to Al-Anon meetings to get the alcoholic in their lives sober and are shocked to learn they themselves need to change. It is sometimes harder for them to recognize that they are part of the problem than it is for drinkers to admit their own alcoholism.

  The fundamentals of our program can be learned from our general literature. However, we soon realized that for people in certain relationships, such as male spouses, parents and children of alcoholics, specific literature would be helpful, and we started preparing it. The male spouse was often reluctant to join a group of females, so in addition to literature for men, stag groups evolved.27

  At the Clearing House, Lois and Anne and their colleagues had been particularly concerned for some time about the special needs of the children of alcoholics, both early adolescents and teenagers. Many of these children had been coming to Family Group meetings from the very beginning, both at Annie Smith’s home in Akron and in Lois’s kitchen at Clinton Street. They came mainly because their mothers could not afford babysitters or did not want to leave their offspring home alone with a drunken father, especially an abusive one.

  But as the Al-Anon program evolved and the sharing at meetings became more intimate, many women started to feel uncomfortable with children around, even their own. So they found another room for them to draw, play games, or simply talk among themselves. What these young people really needed was a program of their own, since many of them had also been severely affected by the disease and its consequences.

  In 1958, Lois and her staff voted to appoint a devoted member and mother, Wanda R., to chair a committee to develop such a program. She and her volunteers wasted no time in gathering information from Family Groups across the country and meeting with many for their input. Soon her committee came up with the name Alateen, which was agreed upon. Then, with the approval of all the groups across the country, Al-Anon’s basic program book, Living with an Alcoholic, was revised to include a chapter on the new Alateen program. It consisted of the same basic Twelve Steps and recommended that all Alateen groups have an Al-Anon sponsor to guide them, an individual who already was practicing the Twelve Step program of Al-Anon in his or her life.

  In 1960, at the AA International Convention in Long Beach, California, workshops were held for the first time especially for these younger children of alcoholics, now members of Alateen, which had quickly grown to more than one hundred groups. AA and Al-Anon attendees were thrilled by these Alateen sessions and reported that the young people seemed to have grasped the program with more understanding and enthusiasm than they themselves had.

  An article in the Sunday newspaper supplement Parade was the first publicity to appear about Alateen. It was followed by many pieces in other magazines and newspapers. These stories were so dramatic and moving that there was a surge of interest all over the country. An article in Life magazine, for example, brought in over five hundred inquiries within three weeks. Lois and Anne and their hardworking volunteers had to set up a special staff, headed by Wanda R., to serve the needs of this rapidly growing and much-needed offshoot of Al-Anon.

  By now, the financial contributions from the expanding number of Family Groups in the United States, Canada, and overseas were able to fund the necessary growth of headquarters activities. Henrietta S., one of Lois’s early “pioneers,” was asked to serve as the first paid head of the Clearing House, which later became Al-Anon World Services, Inc.

  Shortly afterward, Margaret D., another “pioneer,” was hired to work full-time as editor of The Forum newsletter and to oversee the movement’s other literature needs. In time, and as funds from donations and the sale of books and pamphlets grew, other paid staffers were brought on board to help plan, organize, and conduct national and international Al-Anon conventions and related functions. However, dedicated volunteers remained the backbone of the movement’s service to its members, and Lois remained a chief recruiter until the day she passed away.

  As Lois often pointed out, downplaying her role in Al-Anon’s founding and development, she and Anne Bingham simply followed the path that AA had already laid out. However, she also recognized the great need and the great growth potential that lay ahead for Al-Anon since, as statistics show, every alcoholic affects at least four other people, from family members to co-workers.28

  After holding several regional and one national Al-Anon Service Conference to elect delegates to serve as the movement’s “group conscience,” the Fellowship held its first World Service Conference in New York in April of 1961. Twelve delegates had been chosen from the twelve states and Canadian provinces with the largest Al-Anon populations: British Columbia, California, Florida, Illinois, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Ontario, Pennsylvania, and Texas. By the following year there were twenty-four delegates, and by 1963, thirty-six. That year the number of Family Groups had reached fifteen hundred and had spread to distant lands.

  Al-Anon was growing far faster than either Lois or Bill ever dreamed. And by now the groups themselves were running the Fellowship and the general public was becoming more aware of its existence.29 When the Al-Anon Fellowship celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 2001, there were thirty-five thousand Family Groups in one hundred and fifteen countries around the world, and its World Services headquarters moved into a large new complex in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

  In 1985, Lois Wilson received the prestigious Humanitarian Award from the National Council on Alcoholism, now the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence, the organization founded by Marty Mann, the first woman to recover within Alcoholics Anonymous. (Mann died of a stroke on July 22, 1980, at the age of seventy-six.) In giving the award, the council’s board of directors cited Lois for her “unique role in the history of alcoholism” and “her own living testimony of recovery.”30 The award also noted that Lois had demonstrated “that one dedicated individual seeking neither personal recogn
ition nor financial gain can have a positive impact on the health of a society and on the lives of millions of people,” and that she had “pioneered calling attention to alcoholism as a family disease and in bringing hope and health to the spouses and children of alcoholics.” The citation concluded, “We salute Lois W. for her extraordinary contribution to the field of alcoholism.”

  In accepting the national honor, Lois, who was ninety-four at the time, said in a moving and gracious address:

  I guess I am supposed to say something about how we never thought AA would ever amount to anything, but the truth is, as many of you know, my husband never had any small ideas.

  From the moment of his spiritual awakening in Towns Hospital, Bill always believed that if such a miracle could happen to him, it could happen to others, and if it could happen to others, it could happen to all the drunks in the world.

  The progress which has been made against alcoholism had other important beginnings of course, and among them is the day when Marty M. first heard of AA. At the time, Marty was a patient at Blythwood Sanitarium in Greenwich, Connecticut. Her psychiatrist had read the Big Book and was greatly impressed. But when he handed it to Marty, she threw it out of the window. Her doctor insisted that if she wanted his help, she would go after the book, read it and go to a meeting in Brooklyn.

  I well remember the day she came to her first meeting. We were still holding the meetings in our home on Clinton Street at the time. Marty was afraid of what she would find down there in the parlor with all those men and she wanted to stay upstairs with me. But I finally persuaded her that the AA’s both wanted and needed her, and we went downstairs together.

  After that meeting, Marty sat around with a few others asking Bill questions. She had read the Big Book about twenty times by then and had loads of things to ask about. To her amazement, and everyone else’s too, Bill answered them all to her satisfaction.