The Lois Wilson Story

by William G Borchert

  Another beginning was when Marty got the idea for the National Council on Alcoholism. Like Bill, she had a desire to help every suffering alcoholic she could and created an organization which for more than forty years has been dedicated to educating the public and removing their feelings of hopelessness, and ignorance, as well as the stigma, concerning this terrible disease.

  I am deeply honored that the NCA has chosen me as the recipient of its Humanitarian Award for 1985. As many of you know, Bill always made it a policy never to accept awards or honors himself but rather to accept them on behalf of the Fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous. I have followed a similar policy in regard to Al-Anon.

  Therefore in closing, let me say that I accept this award gratefully on behalf of all the members of the Fellowship of Al-Anon, and I thank them and you from the bottom of my heart.31

  In March of 2000, twelve years after her death, Lois was honored by the State of New York as one of the twentieth century’s most important women, an acclamation that was part of the nation’s celebration of Women’s History Month. The state’s Office of Alcoholism and Substance Abuse Services lauded her for her “exceptional role and achievements in assuring service to individuals with alcohol and other drug-related problems,” describing her as “a beloved symbol and inspiration to millions of AA and Al-Anon members.” Throughout her life, the statement noted, “Lois was modest about her achievements, preferring instead to acknowledge the contributions of others.”

  It repeated her often-quoted expression that “It takes only one person to start something, but many others to carry it out” and concluded: “Throughout her life, Lois Wilson maintained a simple vision of the worldwide Al-Anon Fellowship. She talked easily about the spirituality of the program, always pointing towards Al-Anon’s common purpose of recovery and service to others.”32

  As the prestigious honor from the Empire State highlighted, Lois always made light of her own accomplishments, trying to give the credit to others. This was certainly true in her relationship with Anne Bingham, with whom she remained close even after Anne’s husband, Devoe, passed away and she eventually moved to California to reside near her daughter. The two cofounders were last together in Palm Springs in 1983, when Lois visited for a week and they reminisced about old times.

  According to friends, Anne teased Lois about the occasion when they were invited to speak together at an Al-Anon meeting in western New Jersey and planned to spend the night. Anne left all of the details to her longtime cohort, even the driving, which Lois loved to do anyway. When they finally arrived at the church hall for the meeting, no one was there. They were a day early.

  But Lois had a snappy comeback, reminding Anne of the time she had sent Lois all the way to Burlington, Vermont, supposedly to make a long talk to a large family group only to have a few people show up and limit Lois’s remarks to five minutes. Concerning their visit in Palm Springs, Lois later shared with another close friend, “Anne and I just couldn’t believe how far we had come and how fast the time had gone by.”33 Anne Bingham passed away the following year at the age of eighty-four. She died as she had lived in Al-Anon, quietly and peacefully. Her legacy in the Fellowship lives on.

  Lois Wilson never lost her deepest belief that the principles upon which AA and Al-Anon were founded are fundamental and fitting for all people at all times. She knew, however, that unless individuals accept and apply these principles to their lives, the Fellowship will stagnate, retro-gress, and perish. For, as she often said, “There is no standing still, in life or in Al-Anon.”34

  Lois spoke on behalf of Al-Anon many times and in many places, throughout the United States and in many foreign lands. And always in sharing her experiences, she talked about love, the pure, unconditional kind of love members find in the Fellowships of AA and Al-Anon—the kind of love that, if taken home, into the workplace, or out into the world, can bind people together against all strife, all illness, all hurt, and all disappointment. Late in her life, Lois Wilson penned in her memoirs:

  AA and Al-Anon are great demonstrations of the love of one human being for another, of people for people. The joy and empathy felt at one of our gatherings are beyond description. Nowhere else have I seen folks so enjoy being together, and in no church or other assembly have I ever heard a prayer recited more movingly than at our Fellowships’ meetings.

  What is love? What is it that passes between two people who love each other?

  Science has discovered that the emotions of fear and anger actually produce emanations in the human body that can be sensed by other men and women, children, animals and perhaps plants. But I have never heard that science has studied the great force of love.

  I suspect that love, too, is an actual physical emanation as well as a spiritual force—a telepathy of the heart and not just the absence of hurtful emotions.

  I deeply believe it is love that makes the world go ’round. God is love, and love is the creative force, the force that ties family and friends together. It inspires us to greater endeavor in all fields of activity, in love of God, love of man, love of ideas, love of self, love of things. The well of love refills itself. The more one gives of love, the more one has to give.

  Children who are not loved grow up unhappy and rebellious. Even though they may be treated with kindness, that is not enough! They need the positive warmth and security of love. They may even need it physically as well as emotionally and spiritually.

  This force, embodied as it is in God’s love, kept Bill and me together and finally, through various channels, sobered him up. There are moments even now when the wonder and beauty of Bill’s regeneration still fill me with awe.

  I used to believe thinking was the highest function of human beings. The AA experience changed me. I now realize loving is our supreme function. The heart precedes the mind.

  Gazing at the sky on a bright starlit night, we are overwhelmed with wonder at the seemingly limitless universe. Our finite minds cannot envision its extent and complexity, much less the possibility of other universes beyond. Likewise our finite minds sometimes question why a loving God seems to permit apparently God-loving and virtuous people to suffer the tragedies that occasionally befall them.

  But our hearts do not need logic. They can love and forgive and accept that which our minds cannot comprehend. Hearts understand in a way minds cannot.35

  16

  Bill’s Legacy:

  Alcoholics Anonymous—

  Love, Controversy, and Triumph

  AS AA AND AL-ANON GRADUALLY SPREAD THEIR HEALING tentacles around the world, doctors, scientists, spiritual leaders, and social architects were eager to know more about the astonishing results these two Fellowships were having on a segment of society once almost forgotten and abandoned. Prominent politicians and celebrities soon wanted to align themselves with the dramatic successes of these movements. Newspapers, magazines, and motion picture producers sought out stories of their “miraculous cures.” Lois and Bill Wilson suddenly found themselves, as one AA old-timer put it, “the royal couple of recovery.”1

  Lois winced when once told of that appellation although she couldn’t deny the growing demands on her and Bill’s time and attention, and not only from people in the Fellowships. Bill was now explaining the workings of the program to the American Psychiatric Foundation, the American Medical Association, the American Bar Association, church organizations, and other groups around the country and around the globe.

  “People mainly wanted to know more about Alcoholics Anonymous,” Lois would say. “It took a while before a lot of them came to understand the effects of alcoholism on families, that it’s a family disease. But we finally broke through.”2 Still, the recovery of a poor, hopeless drunk—particularly one who had once been a movie star or sports celebrity—was apt to draw wider attention. So the spotlight was mostly on Bill and AA throughout the 1950s and 1960s.

  Oftenti
mes in their travels, when out amid a throng of AA admirers, Lois sometimes watched in awe as people mobbed her husband as though he were some kind of mystic or messiah or recently canonized saint. As soon as they were alone, however, she would quietly nudge him and say, grinning: “Sweetheart, your halo’s on crooked.”3

  But the truth was, alcoholics throughout the Fellowship, both here and abroad, literally believed Bill and Dr. Bob had saved their lives. And now with Dr. Bob gone, they couldn’t get close enough to the remaining founder, both physically and emotionally.

  John L. Norris, M.D., who served as one of AA’s nonalcoholic trustees for twenty-seven years, often talked about this phenomenon. A very close friend of Bill’s, “Dr. Jack,” as he was fondly called by many AA members, once said, “One of the amazing things to me about Bill was the amount of devotion and real adoration he was getting almost everywhere he turned. How any human being could have been on the receiving end of the kind of devotion that he had from so many people, and keep any sort of personal humility was amazing.”4

  Lois was to face the same kind of devotion and adulation herself later on as the cofounder of Al-Anon, and it would only intensify right up to the day she died at the age of ninety-seven.

  While Lois always remained her husband’s biggest fan—perhaps becoming even more “addicted” to him than ever, in a more loving and less dependent way—she liked to tease him on occasion about his shortcomings, maybe to help keep his feet on the ground and his ego within bounds.

  Still, it must be said that Bill Wilson was usually the first to admit he had many character defects and shortcomings, right up to the day he left this world and the great universal movement he and Dr. Robert Holbrook Smith had founded almost seventy years earlier. Lois usually smiled and nodded at such confessions, but not at the flaws she found exasperating at times.

  One such shortcoming was Bill’s penchant to monopolize the conversation when surrounded by guests in their living room at Stepping Stones after Harriet had served them all a home-cooked meal and a lip-smacking dessert. Lois recalled how he’d lean back in a straight chair, arms in motion, holding the floor as he expounded on whatever aspect of AA was occupying his mind at the moment. Once he got started, few had the audacity or temerity to interrupt. Even when Lois tried, as the clock ticked away, Bill would scowl in her direction and continue without missing a beat. He let everyone know when he was finished by plunking the legs of his chair noisily back down and folding his arms as if to say, “Now it’s your turn.”5

  And then there was his tendency to exaggerate. One AA old-timer who knew Ruth Hock claimed she was constantly correcting Bill’s “overgenerous” estimates of membership figures or conference attendees. One example of this flaw was his often-quoted statement that there were more than five thousand members at AA’s 1955 International Convention in St. Louis, when those handling the registration count said the number was actually closer to thirty-one hundred.

  When Ruth teased her boss about such matters, the old-timer said, Bill would wink good-naturedly and reply: “You’re spoiling all the fun.”6

  While Bill did handle the “hero worship” rather well, Lois often recalled with a twinkle in her eye just how disappointed her husband was if he were not recognized at all, even though he claimed he preferred anonymity. “He told me every time he went to a meeting in New York,” she once shared with a friend, “he would try to sneak in unnoticed. But sooner or later someone would spot him and he would be asked to make a few remarks. Then he would come home and complain how he just wanted to be another AA member attending a meeting anonymously.”

  “Then on our first trip across the country by car,” she continued, “we stopped off in Barstow, California, a little town out in the desert. We learned there was an AA meeting that night at a local church. When we arrived, no one had any idea who Bill was. Since we were from back East, however, they wanted to know if we had met any of the old-timers who started the program. I could tell Bill was just busting to tell them he not only met the founders but he was one of them. But I kept pinching his arm and we left the meeting without anyone being the wiser. Later in the car Bill laughed and said it was good for his humility. I said, ‘What humility?’ and we laughed some more.”7

  The truth was, Bill Wilson loved to be recognized. In fact, when Time magazine was doing a major story about Alcoholics Anonymous in the 1960s and wanted to put his picture on the cover, calling him, as Aldous Huxley once said, “the greatest social architect of the century,”8 Lois remembered how he struggled with his decision: it would be against the very tradition of anonymity he himself wrote. He grudgingly turned down the request.

  Some years later, after Bill had passed away, one of his closest friends, a great philanthropist named Brinkley Smithers, was asked how the AA cofounder was able to muster enough humility to pass up such an immense honor. Smithers laughed and replied, “You just didn’t know Bill Wilson. How many guys do you know who could go around for years bragging about turning down the cover of Time magazine?”9

  When Lois later heard about Brinkley’s comment, she also laughed and said, “That was my Bill and I loved him for exactly who he was.”10

  Lois enjoyed sharing another incident involving her beloved husband’s lifelong struggle to simply be, as his cofounder Dr. Bob used to put it, “just another anonymous drunk.” She was with her husband hurrying through LaGuardia Airport to catch a plane to an AA conference in Atlanta when Bill literally bumped into Joe Hirshhorn, the well-known financier whom he hadn’t seen in over thirty years—and whose wine cellar he once ransacked. They were both so excited about meeting that they kept shaking hands and patting each other on the back.

  Finally, Joe wanted to know what had happened to Bill, why he disappeared from sight, why he hadn’t heard anything from him or about him all these years.

  Lois looked on as her husband stammered, “Haven’t you heard, Joe? I . . . I mean, about this AA thing?”

  “I could tell from the blank look on Joe Hirshhorn’s face that he had no idea at first what Bill was talking about,” Lois remembered. “Then suddenly his face lit up and he smiled at Bill and said, ‘Hey, that’s great! You really needed AA, that’s for sure.’ Then Joe rushed away. I could see how disappointed Bill was over Joe’s reaction.”11

  Lois knew that the wealthy art collector was one man her husband would have wanted to acknowledge his enormous contribution to society, a prominent figure who knew him only as a drunk and now failed to recognize his great achievement. She said she squeezed his hand, kissed him on the cheek, and led him off to catch their flight.

  While Bill would have liked Joe Hirshhorn’s recognition, he already had it from an even greater financial tycoon—John D. Rockefeller, Jr. For some years now a Christmas card sat atop the fireplace mantel at Stepping Stones containing the following message:

  “How gratifying it must be to know how many people your organization has helped! Your leadership throughout has been an inspiration. Sincerely, John D. Rockefeller, Jr.”12

  As for Bill’s flaws, his ego, his outspokenness, his tendency to exaggerate, they were all part of his biggest character defect—one he often spoke of himself—his drive for power and success. But Lois said she came to understand that without these tendencies, these innermost desires to always want “doubles of everything,” AA would never have gotten off the ground, much less grown into the worldwide organization it is today.

  A former Chicago bartender, sober in AA for more than twenty years, astutely said, “God put a bright, ego-driven Wall Street promoter together with a laid-back practical country doctor, mixed well, shook and stirred, and out poured the miraculous cocktail of Alcoholics Anonymous.”13 And over the years it has become a proven potion that saves lives and restores families, but only when those in need reach out for it. According to national statistics, there are more than forty million people in the United States alone who drink alcoholica
lly. Yet, the sad truth is, even today only a small percentage of them are willing to try this “miraculous cocktail.” And among those willing to give it a sip, many soon reach back for their tried-and-true “magic elixir” called booze because it works faster to ease their fears and frustrations, to take the edge off their anger and despair. AA admittedly takes more time, and too many impatient alcoholics refuse to wait. So they drink again even though deep down they know it is taking them down. That’s the insidious, inexplicable disease of alcoholism.

  As Bill often said, alcoholic behavior is “self-will run riot,” and “self-centeredness is the root of our problem.” And the answer? “Only through utter defeat,” he wrote, “are we able to take our first steps toward liberation and strength. Our admissions of personal powerlessness finally turn out to be firm bedrock upon which happy and purposeful lives may be built.”

  While AA does take time to work its own magic, its history from the beginning shows that about 50 percent of alcoholics who come and give the program a serious try stay sober. Another 25 percent who come with reservations as to whether they are “real alcoholics” do find sobriety after some relapses. The remainder who come to the Fellowship under pressure or in serious denial soon leave, and their disease continues to progress until they hit a much lower “bottom.” But many of these people in whom the seed is planted return over time.14

  “It is frequently the denial of their disease that keeps them from coming to AA in the first place,” Lois noted. “It is a pity that so many alcoholics still have to suffer the same pain and loss that Bill did before trying Alcoholics Anonymous. Although I am happy to see both men and women coming to the program today at a much younger age. They can have such a wonderful life.”15 And that’s exactly what Bill Wilson found—a wonderful life. For after his spiritual experience and his meeting with Dr. Bob, he came to truly love and care for his fellow drunks. This ability to love again helped reunite him with his long-suffering wife, opened the door to her own discoveries, and enabled him to be mindful and considerate of others as well.