The Lois Wilson Story

by William G Borchert

  Lois also observed how her husband’s dramatic change from almost total self-centeredness to sincere concern for others also affected his relationship with his mother and father, whom he had seldom seen or communicated with during those terrible years of drinking.

  Bill’s father, Gilman, and his second wife, Christine, had moved from Florida shortly after the highway project he had been working on was completed. He returned to the quarries in British Columbia, where his health began to deteriorate. He suffered from hardening of the arteries. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, Bill scraped together at least a hundred dollars each month to send to his father to help with his medical expenses. Bill also brought Gilman and Christine to Bedford Hills for extended visits. After so many lost years, they finally built a loving father-and-son relationship.

  Soon, however, Gilman’s health worsened. Through some AA friends in Vancouver, Bill had his father admitted to a nursing home. Gilman Wilson died on February 14, 1954, just three weeks after Lois had her heart attack. He was eighty-four. Bill had his ashes returned to East Dorset, where he buried them in the small country cemetery amid the Wilson clan. Then it was left to Bill to inform his mother, the woman who long ago had been his father’s wife.

  By now, Bill and Dr. Emily Griffith had grown very close even though she still lived on the West Coast. He visited his mother on his travels, and she often wrote or phoned simply to say how proud she was of his work. She said she knew so many people in California who were benefiting from AA.

  Lois and her mother-in-law had long since buried the hatchet. Once Bill sobered up and Lois came to realize that she herself needed to change, she and Dr. Emily became very good friends. In fact, now a widow, Bill’s mother was a frequent guest at Stepping Stones. While there, she fell in love with Al-Anon, which made Lois immensely proud. They often went to meetings together. After Lois invited her to volunteer at the Al-Anon Clearing House, Dr. Emily was soon “bossing” the other volunteers around. Lois would simply smile and shrug as if to say, “Some things never change.”

  In 1956, Bill persuaded his mother to move East. She agreed, but although she was now eighty-five, she insisted on having her own place in Westchester. Lois and Bill took Emily for rides in the countryside and for brief visits to East Dorset. They were brief because Emily was always in a hurry to leave Vermont. Perhaps it held too many upsetting memories for her.

  It was in the winter of 1960 when Bill was forced to put his mother into a nursing home in Dobbs Ferry, New York, where he could visit with her often. Her physical and mental condition was such that she required constant care. Emily Griffith died there on May 15, 1961, at the age of ninety-one. Despite whatever upsetting memories there might have been, Bill and Lois buried her in East Dorset.

  Lois said she came to admire the way her husband was able to handle the many ups and downs in his life, the adversities that in the past would have made marvelous excuses for him to drink again. But each new difficulty, every new challenge only seemed to strengthen his sobriety and his ability to lead his now vast army of recovered alcoholics.

  Lois often recalled one of the most pivotal times in her husband’s life. It was at AA’s International Convention in St. Louis in 1955. Until then, Bill still held tightly to the reins of the Fellowship, listening but also guiding the voice of the “group conscience,” especially in matters that could, in his judgment, prove controversial or harmful to the movement.

  But at that four-day event, Bill finally dismounted the tiger he had been riding for more than twenty years. He sat on stage as the membership unanimously approved merging the Alcoholic Foundation and AA’s General Service Office into one organization called Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc. He forced himself to let go and let the elected board of alcoholic and nonalcoholic trustees run the Fellowship with as little interference from him as his “humility” would allow. He would now become its “roving Ambassador.”

  AA’s cofounder was fifty-nine. He now had a good income from the sale of the Big Book and was finally free to pursue many of the interests and subjects that had been whirling around in his brain for some years. He wanted to write more books and more articles for AA’s Grapevine magazine. He wanted to travel more and share experiences with AA members around the globe. He wanted to seek out and investigate some of the lesser-known and more intriguing paths to spiritual and mental health, both to find help for his own recurring depressions and to assist others with similar problems.

  As Lois once said, Bill suddenly possessed the rabid curiosity of that schoolboy back in East Dorset who wanted to know what made a boomerang return and a tiny crystal radio crackle with voices hundreds of miles away. At the same time, like a father who never ceases worrying about his children no matter how old they are, Bill could not break completely with his own “offspring.”

  “He kept an office at AA headquarters,” Lois remarked with a smile, “just to make sure he knew what was going on. I think it was to be sure everyone was doing things right—his way. He also loved to walk down the hall to the conference room to check the world map on the wall that had pins indicating the number of groups now officially registered with World Services. In fact, he loved to put the new pins in himself.”16 By the late 1950s, after Bill had resigned his stewardship, there were more than 12,000 AA groups in some 75 countries including the United States, with an estimated membership of more than 200,000. By 2002, there were more than 100,000 groups in over 150 countries and an estimated membership of three million recovering alcoholics still attending meetings. No one knows how many thousands more left AA but remained sober by continuing to practice the Twelve Steps in their lives.

  As for his writings, Bill turned out numerous articles for the Grapevine concerning the principles of the program and the importance of “walking the walk, not just talking the talk.” A series of his essays became a book published by AA World Services, The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. In 1957, he wrote about the early history of the movement, its first twenty-one years, and the people and concepts behind its growth and success in another book, Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age.

  Lois used to remark that her husband seemed to become a more prolific writer with age, perhaps because he had more time or became more productive or simply because he came to see things much more clearly through sober eyes.

  Lois said Bill loved the studio he and his friends built on a hill near their house. “He would spend hours there meditating and writing whenever we were home. He called the studio ‘Wits End’ because that’s where he found so much peace and contentment, writing about what he loved and dreaming about the things he still wanted to do.”17

  And then there were the traveling years. Lois and Bill first toured the Northwest together, then the West Coast, and then all sections of America where new AA and Al-Anon groups were being established. They would speak at these groups and attend various regional conferences, explaining in detail the concepts and Traditions that made both Fellowships so meaningful and so beneficial.

  Bill also visited drunks in the alcoholic wards of local hospitals and at halfway houses while Lois met with families and shared with them the inspiring program of Al-Anon. Soon they were traveling overseas, accepting invitations from AA and Al-Anon groups in England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark.

  “We were like motorcycle hobos all over again,” Lois would laugh, “only this time we were traveling all around the world, but without our bike and sidecar. And wherever we went, everyone greeted us so warmly, like they were close friends we simply hadn’t met yet.”18

  Lois loved to tell the story of their first visit to Oslo, Norway, and how AA and Al-Anon had reached the shores of that distant land. “It wasn’t until we arrived,” she recounted, “that we discovered the Oslo group had actually been founded by a coffee shop owner from Greenwich, Connecticut. He had come to America from Norway and after twenty years of drinkin
g he wound up as a derelict. But in 1947, he found AA and a brand new life.”

  After getting back on his feet, Lois explained, the man opened a coffee shop and began to make a good living. As his shame and guilt left, he finally wrote to his family back in Oslo telling them his story. Within a matter of weeks he received a letter back pleading for his help. His only brother had also become a hopeless drunk and was about to lose his job on an Oslo newspaper. The family also feared he was about to lose his life.

  The coffee shop owner quickly sold his business and bought a ticket to Norway. But upon arriving home, his brother expressed no interest in hearing about AA or listening to a translation of the Steps or any stories of sober members. He only wanted to keep drinking. Thoroughly discouraged, the coffee shop owner began talking with local doctors and ministers, but found a shocking lack of interest wherever he went. So he started making plans to return to Connecticut.

  On his last night in Oslo, his brother called, sick and fearful of dying. He asked how these anonymous American friends found a way to stop drinking. So the two sat down and his brother explained the program of Alcoholics Anonymous. This time it worked. Sober and back at his job, the brother ran a small ad in his newspaper, asking that anyone with a drinking problem call him. The wife of a florist answered his ad and the two brothers made their first Twelfth Step call. Soon there was another call, then a third and a fourth, and AA was established in Norway. Al-Anon was soon to follow.

  When the Wilsons arrived at the airport in Oslo, Lois recalled, a large number of sober AA’s were waiting to welcome them. They learned that there were hundreds of members and that new groups were popping up all the time.

  While Lois would tease about Bill’s “flaws,” she was always willing to expound on her husband’s positive attributes and accomplishments. However, she was reticent when it came to discussing those events that created controversy in AA or Al-Anon. She was deeply concerned, particularly after Bill’s passing, about protecting his reputation and preserving his legacy. But the truth was, being a seeker unafraid to investigate and test ideas and potential remedies that might benefit himself and his fellow alcoholics, Bill was bound to stir up a hornet’s nest now and then. And he did just that on several occasions, sometimes dragging his unsuspecting wife into it with him.

  Two major controversies actually began with a chance meeting with famed physicist Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, known as the “father of the atomic bomb.” Lois and Bill had finally saved enough money to take a two-week vacation at Trunk Bay in the Caribbean. They found themselves staying at the same resort as the Oppenheimers. The couples hit it right off. During long walks on the beach, Dr. Oppenheimer, after hearing about his friend’s alcoholism and lifelong bouts with depression, revealed his efforts to discover the possible chemical composition of neuroses—especially in the form of depression. He invited Bill to visit his Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University to evaluate his work on the chemistry of the brain.

  Perhaps another factor that sparked Dr. Oppenheimer’s interest was Bill’s fascination and involvement with psychic phenomena. In fact, soon after Bill sobered up, he came to think of himself as having some psychic ability and believed he was capable of picking up energy from others, even those who had passed from this life.

  His belief in clairvoyance and other extrasensory manifestations came from his deeply held conviction following his spiritual experience that life after life is a matter of fact as well as faith. This led to his attempts to get in touch with other lives in other times. Both he and Lois had discovered early on that Dr. Bob and Annie Smith also had great interest in the field of extrasensory phenomena.

  Bill and Lois came to hold frequent Saturday evening “spook sessions” at Stepping Stones, joined by such friends as Anne and Devoe, Ruth and Wilbur, Tom P. and Adelaide, and Dr. Bob and Annie when they were in town. They would conduct various psychic experiments, often involving a Ouija board, in a downstairs bedroom that was quickly dubbed by Anne Bingham as the “Spook Room.”

  While reluctant to discuss all that went on because of its somewhat controversial nature, Lois did describe once how some of the dramatic sessions were conducted.

  She said Bill would lie down on the couch. People would come in and they’d carry on some story. There would be long sentences Bill would utter, sometimes in different languages, and Anne would try to write them down. Lois said sometimes it made sense and sometimes it didn’t. And sometimes even stranger things would happen.19

  Lois said her husband’s motives in almost everything he did were always somehow connected to AA—in this case they were to deepen his spirituality by trying to discover more about God’s workings, wonder, and wisdom.

  Lois revealed that Dr. Oppenheimer actually invited her husband to work with him at Princeton, mainly to oversee the research being done on the possible physiological and chemical aspects of depression, a problem Bill had always approached in terms of its psychological and spiritual ramifications. She said Bill had to politely turn down the scientist’s invitation because, as the “symbolic” leader and the cofounder of Alcoholics Anonymous, he was concerned that its members might feel he would be violating the Sixth Tradition: “An A.A. group ought never endorse, finance, or lend the A.A. name to any related facility or outside enterprise, lest problems of money, property, and prestige divert us from our primary purpose.”20

  Nevertheless, Lois said, Bill’s frequent visits to Dr. Oppenheimer’s institute and their numerous conversations opened his mind to many new discoveries that might help those in the Fellowship suffering as he did from other maladies related to or beyond the disease of alcoholism. He soon learned that while he had been concentrating his energies on arresting alcoholism through what he called spiritual means, many scientists had begun looking into the interrelated social, psychological, and biochemical aspects of the illness.

  Two such men were Drs. Humphrey Osmond and Abram Hoffer, both psychiatrists who were working with alcoholics and schizophrenics at a mental hospital in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Through some mutual friends, Bill was introduced to the doctors and quickly became excited by their experiments since he believed he and they were working on “parallel tracks.”

  Bill had already discovered that many “hopeless cases” such as himself could be reached through what he called “ego deflation at depth”—hitting a bottom that finally breaks through the wall of the ego. Drs. Osmond and Hoffer were trying to reach the same end with their alcoholic patients through chemical means. The psychiatrists were using an experimental synthetic chemical called lysergic acid diethylamide, which would later become notoriously known as LSD.

  Lois always disliked discussing this particular chapter in her husband’s life because of its “complete misunderstanding” and the “terrible rumors that were spread” when all Bill did, she said, was simply involve himself in an investigation he believed might possibly help his fellow drunks. Encouraged by the two psychiatrists to be a “comparison case,” Bill participated briefly in their controlled experiments, taking small doses of LSD in August of 1956. But this quickly came to an end when word somehow began spreading through the AA community that “Bill Wilson is taking drugs.”21

  Upon returning to New York, members and trustees alike, including Dr. Jack Norris, expressed outrage that the cofounder of Alcoholics Anonymous would even consider experimenting with a then totally unfamiliar, poorly researched, and possibly mind-altering substance—even though no one at the time knew anything about “acid trips” or whether it was an addictive chemical. Bill assured everyone his involvement in the research was over and then had both scientists confirm to his colleagues that the chemical contained “no addictive properties.”22 “Bill tried to explain the reasons he did it,” Lois once remarked, “but nobody would listen. Bill actually had the doctors give me some when I was with him one day in Saskatoon and it had no effect on me at all. It wasn’t until much later that w
e all learned what effect much larger doses could have on the mind.”23

  Nell Wing was willing to elaborate a bit more on the controversy.

  “Bill wanted to see what it was like,” she said. “He was intrigued with the work that [the doctors] were doing in Saskatoon with alcoholics. And he thought: anything that helps the alcoholics is good and shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. Techniques should be explored that would help some guy or gal recover who could not do it through A.A. or any other way.”24

  The truth of the matter was, Bill Wilson had always been on record against giving alcoholics drugs, at least those narcotics whose severe addictive effects were already well known. But LSD was then an “experimental chemical.” Even the psychiatrists themselves abandoned their project once they saw there were few, if any, beneficial effects. Bill closed that particular chapter in his life when he told a close friend one day that he considered the chemical to be of some value to some people and practically no damage to anyone. He added that it will never take the place of any of the existing means by which we can reduce the ego and keep it reduced.25

  Just when Lois felt relieved that the controversy was finally behind them, Bill jumped from the frying pan into the fire. And to her dying day, Lois could never really understand what all the fuss was about.

  It concerned her husband’s sudden, outright, and unabashed endorsement of one of the lesser-known vitamins at the time—vitamin B-3, better known as niacin. He began proclaiming its beneficial effects for alcoholics after becoming engrossed himself in the many studies that had been done on its properties and alleged curative powers. Bill became absolutely convinced of three things. First, giving niacin as part of the alcoholic’s detoxification process could lessen the effects of alcohol withdrawal. Second, studies showed that it stimulated the blood vessels, particularly in the brain, which helped alleviate depressive mood swings. And third, it prevented to some extent a drop in blood sugar, which researchers said improved the feelings of both physical and psychological well-being.