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III. Husband, father, and drunk

Dr. Bob’s drinking had its inevitable effect on family life, as well as on professional practice. But his two children were unaware of it in their early years, and their memories of childhood are mostly happy.

In Anne’s mid-forties, she was advised that she could not have any more children. Sue was adopted then, five years after the birth of the Smiths’ son. “They didn’t want to raise Smitty as an only child and spoil him rotten,” said Sue. “So they got me and spoiled us both rotten. Oh, we got spankings all right. Not often, but when we did, we really deserved it. We learned early that the louder we yelled, the sooner it was over.”

Sue, who was five years old when she was adopted, recalled that she was more frightened than anything else when she first met her father. “I didn’t know what to expect. I remember him driving up the big circular driveway at City Hospital and telling me to wait while he went inside for a minute. I thought that was where I was going to live. The first night, I picked a fight with a neighborhood girl and got bawled out. I remember I didn’t think that was right at all.”

There was only five months’ difference in the children’s ages. Since school authorities didn’t know Sue was adopted, this was hard for them to understand. And both Sue and Smitty remembered their father’s answer when they said their teacher had asked them how old their parents were. Dr. Bob said, “Tell them we’re 70.” They did, causing further mystification.

With his stern, rather forbidding appearance, Dr. Bob was not the type children would flock to. And he wasn’t exactly comfortable around them, either. But he made the effort. He would go out and play ball with the neighborhood kids. “We’d have a lot of fun,” said Sue, “with 15 or 20 people out there, him six-foot-two and a little kid three years old.”

“He appeared to be stern,” said Smitty. “But he was a real confidant. He would come home and talk to us.”

This was echoed by Sue. “He looked stern, but he was really quite a softy.”

Smitty also noted that he was 21 years old before he knew that there was any medicine but bicarbonate of soda. “I used to ask Dad for medicine,” Smitty recalled, “and he told me, ‘Why, hell, son, these are for selling, not for taking.’ ”

“As a father, he was the best,” Sue said. “He was loving and at the same time would want to be obeyed. He was fun to be with. I enjoyed many an evening playing cards and had as good a time with him as I have ever had with anyone.”

Sue felt that Dr. Bob’s strict upbringing not only was responsible for his stubborn resistance to authority, but also led him to give more freedom to his own children. “As I look back on it,” she said, “I see he was ahead of his time, or didn’t want us to go through what he did when he was a child, having to go to bed at five o’clock in the evening.”

Dr. Bob had tremendous drive and great physical stamina, according to Smitty, who said that except for the effects of drinking, he was never sick a day in his life up until his last illness. “I remember when he was 56 years old, he played six sets of tennis with my sister and me. It wore us both down. He had more steam at that age than anyone I ever knew.”

“He wasn’t idle much of the time,” said Sue. “And he always took off at a run. We often used to take long hikes in the woods—Dad, my brother, myself, and a dog. We had great times like that. He loved to take his car down a dirt road to see where it went.”

Their recollections of their mother also show deep affection. “She was quiet and unassuming—a lady in the true sense of the word,” Smitty recalled in correspondence with Bill Wilson. “She was of medium build and always battling to keep her weight down. She had a delightful sense of humor and a melodious laugh. All of us spent a good deal of time playing tricks on her, because she took it so well.”

One trick that their mother never even suspected was played on her after she started to smoke—at 56! Sue and Smitty were not only stealing her cigarettes, but swiping the butts as well, since all Anne ever did was take a few puffs and lay the cigarette down before lighting another. “If she ever inhaled, it was a mistake,” said Sue, who felt that the chain smoking was a sign of the tension created by Dr. Bob’s alcoholism. “She was broiling inside. She had to be.”

It was the middle of the Depression, and Anne bought a roll-your-own machine. “We thought this was beneath our dignity,” said Smitty. “We volunteered to roll her some and mixed pencil shavings with the tobacco. When she lit one, it flamed up, and she had to blow it out. The same thing happened with the next. Finally, she said, ‘You know, these don’t taste as good as the ones you get in the package.’ ”

Smitty also remembered that his mother chided him when she found he had started to smoke. “What about you?” he replied. “You smoke.”

“Don’t you say anything to me about smoking now,” Anne replied. “And if you wait until you’re 50 years old before you start, I won’t say anything to you, either.”

Dr. Bob also smoked, but would say, “Me? I don’t smoke. Anne’s the one who smokes in this family.”

“Mom was easily shocked, and her shyness and un-worldliness were a source of constant delight to Dad, who loved to bring home some items of unconventional action and watch her reaction,” said Smitty.

“After being involved with drunks for a while, however, nothing could surprise or shock her,” he said, as his memories moved ahead to the A.A. years. “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, but was reserved until she had time to pray and think about the problem,” Smitty said. “As a result, her answer was given in a very loving, unselfish way and served to steady Dad to a very great degree.

“Mother always had a very deep loyalty to our family, and later to the A.A., which made no personal sacrifice too great. She just would not spend any money on herself, in order to help the family get the things she thought they needed.

“By nature a rather timid person, she could nevertheless rise to great heights if she thought the occasion warranted,” said Smitty. “I am thinking of the times when she thought the A.A. program was in danger. When this happened, Mother would be ready to do battle with anyone for the principles she believed were right. I have also seen her rise out of her quiet disposition in defense of Dad or myself personally.”

But memories of the family’s last pre-A.A. years are naturally darker. As the children were growing up, the Smiths became more or less ostracized by their friends. They couldn’t accept invitations—because Bob was sure to get drunk and cause a scene. And Anne, to whom hospitality was second nature, didn’t dare ask people to their home for the same reason.

Dr. Bob’s alcoholism became more and more noticeable to the children as they grew older. He began to promise them, as well as Anne and their few remaining friends, to stop drinking. “Promises,” he said, “which seldom kept me sober even through the day, though I was very sincere when I made them.”

Smitty’s earliest recollections of his father’s drinking, as recorded by Bill Wilson in 1954, a few years after Dr. Bob’s death, were mostly about its effect on his mother.

“She was very much opposed to it and had quite a problem with Dad in that when he got on a real toot, he wouldn’t come home. I imagine I was 13 or 14. I know I wasn’t old enough to drive, so I couldn’t go looking for him.

“Mother tried time after time to extract promises from him. He was always going to give it up. He said he would never touch another drink in his life.

“I remember one time she became so desperate that she took me upstairs and said, ‘Now I’m going to take a drink of whiskey, and when he comes home tonight, you tell him I’m drunk.’ She took a drink of it and tried to act like she was drunk. It ended up in quite an uproar and didn’t accomplish much. I don’t think he thought she was drunk. He was just embarrassed by the show she was putting on. But you can see how desperate she was to show him what he was doing to himself. I don’t think she ever had a drink before or after.

“It was 1933, and times were awful hard,” Smitty continued, “not only with Dad, but with everybody. Akron was a one-industry town, and when the rubber shops were down, everything was down. We had a second car, but not enough money to license it. The mortgage moratorium was all that saved our house. And we ate enough potato soup to float that.

“Dad had almost no practice left. He would be in hiding, or home and indisposed. Mother lied to his patients, and so did Lily, his office girl.

“He very seldom drove when he had been drinking,” Smitty said. “He had the boys in the central garage trained to drive him home.

“Mother always tried to frisk him when he came in. She wanted to see if she could possibly keep him in good shape for the next morning. But Dad had ways of getting around it. He wore heavy driving mittens during the winter, car heaters being very poor then. He’d put half a pint of medicinal alcohol in one of them and toss it up on the second-story sun porch.

“After Mother had frisked him, he would go upstairs and get his whiskey. When he came down again, it would be obvious he had been drinking. She never did figure that one out.”

That wasn’t the only trick Dr. Bob had up his glove. Like many another alcoholic before, after, and yet to come, he was expert at obtaining and maintaining his supply.

“If my wife was planning to go out in the afternoon, I would get a large supply of liquor and smuggle it home and hide it in the coal bin, the clothes chute, over doorjambs, over beams in the cellar and in cracks in the cellar tile,” he said. “I also made use of old trunks and chests, the old-can container, and even the ash container.”

He never used the water tank on the toilet, because “that looked too easy.” It was a good thing, too, for if Bob was

Number 855 faced Ardmore Avenue in full respectability.

Its rear provided discreet spots for hiding bottles.

expert at hiding, Anne was expert at seeking. This was one place she inspected regularly.

Bob also told the bootlegger to hide booze at the back steps, where he could get to it at his convenience.

“Sometimes I would bring it in my pockets,” he said. “I used also to put it up in four-ounce bottles and stick several in my stocking tops. This worked nicely until my wife and I went to see Wallace Beery in ‘Tugboat Annie’ [where Beery pulled the same stunt in an attempt to deceive Marie Dressler], after which the pant-leg and stocking racket was out.”

When beer became legal in early 1933, Dr. Bob thought this might provide a solution to satisfy everybody. And he would not actually have to stop drinking. “It was harmless,” he said. “Nobody ever got drunk on beer.”

Perhaps Bob had superhuman powers of persuasion. Perhaps Anne was in such a state of desperation, she was willing to try anything. In any case, it was with her permission that he filled the cellar with beer.

“It was not long before I was drinking at least a case and a half a day,” he said. “I put on 30 pounds of weight in about two months, looked like a pig, and was uncomfortable from shortness of breath.”

Then it occurred to him that if he was “all smelled up with beer,” nobody could tell what he had been drinking. So he began to needle the beer with straight alcohol. There were the usual results. “And that ended the beer experiment,” Dr. Bob said.

During this beer-drinking phase, in 1934, Smitty had gone with his father to visit Dr. Bob’s mother and old friends in Vermont. “I was 16,” Smitty recalled, “and got to do most of the driving, because he was drinking. I remember that he was afraid Vermont might still be dry, so we loaded up with cases and cases of beer at the New York line. Then we found out it was wet.”

Sue was about the same age, in high school, when her father’s problem with alcohol dawned on her. “I remember Mom worrying about where he was, or making excuses,” she told Bill Wilson in 1954. “But it really hit me when my friends came to the house. Dad got irritable, and I couldn’t understand why. I finally asked Mom, and she told me. He never appeared to be tight, but my friends and I would be downstairs, and he would get annoyed because we were in his way when he wanted to get to his supply in the cellar. My friends just thought he was cross.

“Later, when I knew what was going on, he would get touchy about the subject and would get into little arguments with you. They weren’t anything serious. Just enough. Well, he was New England and bullheaded. And I was bullheaded. Dad’s drinking never made him mean. He was mostly irritable. He sort of snuck in most of the time. Or he was in bed resting. It got worse and worse. We were in debt, and he was sick many mornings until noon.”

The money problems grew. Sue remembered how her mother would have to pay debts with money received for Christmas or birthdays. Emma K. recalled commenting on a beautiful little statuette that had been a Christmas present during this period, only to hear Anne reply, “Oh, my dear, if only they had sent food instead!”

“No, I didn’t get annoyed at him, but he did put you on the spot a lot of times,” Sue said. “You couldn’t be loyal to him and Mom both. I felt that put me in the middle.

“I remember once he asked me to get his bottle for him. I wouldn’t do it, and he offered me money. He finally got up to ten dollars, and I still wouldn’t do it. That was when I realized I didn’t know much about what was going on with him—how much he wanted it.

“I think he felt guilty about things, and he began to make promises to us after he knew we were aware of the problem. I had a dime bank, and of course, I knew how to get the dimes out. I’d open it and find maybe two or three extra dollars there. I think he tried to make it up to me that way.”