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VI. Two alcoholics meet

Bill had called Henrietta out of his own desperation when, after pacing up and down the lobby of the Mayflower Hotel on South Main Street in downtown Akron, he suddenly realized that he needed to talk to another drunk in order to keep from drinking himself.

The Mayflower, with its sleek Art Deco façade, was practically new—the best, most modern hotel in Akron. And on Saturday night, people came downtown to shop, maybe eat at a restaurant, and go to a movie. Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire were starring in “Roberta” at the Rialto, and James Cagney was featured in “G-Men” at another theater.

There was a festive air in the Mayflower lobby that night—with the warm, tempting laughter Bill remembered

In the lobby of the Mayflower Hotel, a stranger in town

turned to this directory, to stay out of the bar.

coming from the bar. Probably, the bar was unusually crowded and many private parties were being held in the hotel suites, because guests were gathering for the annual May Ball given by the St. Thomas Hospital Guild. Sister Ignatia would have been there, along with the young doctor Tom Scuderi. As a member of the courtesy staff, Dr. Bob, too, might well have put in an appearance, had he been sober.

Instead of joining the merrymakers at the bar, “Bill got the guidance to look at the ministers’ directory in the lobby,” Henrietta said. “And a strange thing happened. He just looked there, and he put his finger on one name—Dr. Walter Tunks.

“So Bill called Dr. Tunks, and Dr. Tunks gave him a list of names. One of them was Norman Sheppard, who was a close friend of mine and knew what I was trying to do for Bob. Norman said to Bill, ‘I have to go to New York tonight, but you call Henrietta Seiberling. She will see you.’ ”

As Bill described it, he had already called nine names on his list of ten, and Henrietta’s was the last. Bill remembered having once met a Mr. Seiberling, former president of Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, assumed that this was his wife, and couldn’t imagine calling her with such a plea. “But,” Bill recalled, “something kept saying to me, ‘You’d better call her.’

“Because she had been enabled to face and transcend other calamities, she certainly did understand mine,” Bill said. “She was to become a vital link to those fantastic events which were presently to gather around the birth and development of our A.A. Society. Of all the names the obliging rector had given me, she was the only one who cared enough. I would

The Reverend Walter Tunks played important roles in

the beginning of Dr. Bob’s sober life—and the end.

like here to record our timeless gratitude,” Bill concluded.

Henrietta, of course, was not the wife of the rubber-company president, but his daughter-in-law. She lived in the gatehouse of the Seiberling estate on Portage Path, a short distance from the Smiths’ home.

Henrietta tried to get Bob and Anne over to her house that Saturday. Could they come over to meet a friend of hers, a sober alcoholic, who might help Bob with his drinking problem?

At the moment, Bob was upstairs in a stupor, after having brought home a large Mother’s Day plant, putting it on the kitchen table, and collapsing on the floor. It had been all Anne and the children could do to get him upstairs.

Anne merely said at first that she didn’t think it would be possible for them to make it that day. But as Dr. Bob recalled, “Henri is very persistent, a very determined individual. She said, ‘Oh, yes, come on over. I know he’ll be helpful to Bob.’

“Anne still didn’t think it very wise that we go over that day,” Dr. Bob continued. “Finally, Henri bore in to such an extent that Anne had to tell her I was very bagged and had passed all capability of listening to any conversation, and the visit would just have to be postponed.”

Henrietta called the Smiths again on Sunday. “Will Bob be able to make it today?”

“I don’t remember ever feeling much worse, but I was very fond of Henri, and Anne had said we would go over,” Bob went on. “So we started over. On the way, I extracted a solemn promise from Anne that 15 minutes of this stuff would be tops. I didn’t want to talk to this mug or anybody else, and we’d really make it snappy, I said. Now these are the actual facts: We got there at five o’clock and it was 11:15 when we left.”

Smitty recalled that although his father was pretty nervous, he was sober when they drove over to Henrietta’s to meet this fellow who might help him. “I did not sit in on that meeting, of course, being a kid at the time, and Mother wanted Dad to open up in front of Bill. So I have no knowledge of what transpired there. However, I remember Bill came to stay at our house shortly afterward.”

Describing his meeting with the man “who was to be my partner . . . the wonderful friend with whom I was never to have a hard word,” Bill said, “Bob did not look much like a founder. He was shaking badly. Uneasily, he told us that he could stay only about 15 minutes.

“Though embarrassed, he brightened a little when I said I thought he needed a drink. After dinner, which he did not eat, Henrietta discreetly put us off in her little library. There Bob and I talked until 11 o’clock.”

What actually happened between the two men? One of the shortest and most appealing versions came from Dr. Bob’s old schoolmate Arba J. Irvin, who at least gave proper recognition to what was to become A.A.’s unofficial beverage—coffee—then selling at 15 cents a pound.

“ . . . And so they got together and started talking about helping each other and helping the men with similar difficulties. They went out into the city’s lower edges, the city of Akron, and gathered together a group of drunks, and they started talking and drinking coffee. Bob’s wife told me she had never made as much coffee as she did in the next two weeks. And they stayed there drinking coffee and starting this group of one helping the other, and that was the way A.A. developed.”

This is true; but as we know, there was more to it than that. (There is such a thing as keeping it too simple.) A number of people had been chipping away at Bob for years. The Oxford Group had a “program.” Henrietta had told him, “You must not touch one drop of alcohol.” Obviously, Bill brought something new—himself.

What did he say to Dr. Bob that hadn’t already been said? How important were the words? How important compared to the fact that it was one alcoholic talking to another? No one can say precisely. Indeed, Dr. Bob and Bill themselves placed slightly different emphases on the factors involved.

In “A.A. Comes of Age,” written about 20 years later, after Bill had analyzed the event in the light of subsequent experience, he said that he “went very slowly on the fireworks of religious experience.” First, he talked about his own case until Bob “got a good identification with me.” Then, as Dr. William D. Silkworth had urged, Bill hammered home the physical aspects of the disease, “the verdict of inevitable annihilation.” This, Bill felt, brought about in Dr. Bob an ego deflation that “triggered him into a new life.”

Describing their talk as “a completely mutual thing,” Bill said, “I had quit preaching. I knew that I needed this alcoholic as much as he needed me. This was it. And this mutual give-and-take is at the very heart of all of A.A.’s Twelfth Step work today.”

In “Alcoholics Anonymous,” published almost exactly four years after their first meeting, Dr. Bob noted that Bill “was a man . . . who had been cured by the very means I had been trying to employ, that is to say, the spiritual approach. He gave me information about the subject of alcoholism which was undoubtedly helpful.

“Of far more importance,” he continued, “was the fact that he was the first living human with whom I had ever talked who knew what he was talking about in regard to alcoholism from actual experience. In other words, he talked my language. He knew all the answers, and certainly not because he had picked them up in his reading.”

Whatever Bill said—and in the course of some five hours of conversation, he must have thrown in everything he ever knew or thought or guessed about alcoholism, and told the long version of his story to boot—Bob stopped drinking immediately.

Bill seemed to place more emphasis on what he was saying than on the fact that it was he himself saying it, while Bob indicated that, although it was helpful, he had heard most of it before. Important to him was the fact that another alcoholic was telling him. If William James, Carl Jung, and Dr. Silkworth, along with Frank Buchman and all the members of the Oxford Group, had been doing the talking, it would have been just another lecture.

Sue remembered that she kept expecting her parents home almost any minute that Sunday evening, but they didn’t come until almost midnight. When they did return, her father seemed more at ease than he had been. Although he still wasn’t in good shape, he apparently looked better all around.

“He was quite enthused about his talk with you,” she told Bill. “I can remember that. He didn’t go into it a whole lot, but I do remember Dad saying that you seemed to hit it off with him more because you both had the same thing. He realized that it wasn’t just him. He told me that members of the Oxford Group just didn’t have the same type of problem.”

As Bill put it, “The spark was struck.

“Then,” Bill recalled in a conversation with T. Henry Williams, “the group was formed here in the middle of your group.”

“And it grew fast because you folks worked harder, I guess,” T. Henry said.

“We had to,” Bill said. “We were under awful compulsion. And we found that we had to do something for somebody or actually perish ourselves.”

“Bill stayed in Akron,” Henrietta said. “There was a neighbor of mine who had seen the change in my life brought about by the Oxford Group. And I called him and asked him to put Bill up at the country club for two weeks or so, just to keep him in town, because I knew Bill had no money left.”

It was late May, and while Bill and Dr. Bob may have realized that something very special had happened between them, there is no evidence that they had any idea of its full significance. That is, neither of them said anything to this effect: “Well, we’re co-founders of Alcoholics Anonymous, and we better get started writing the Twelve Steps.”

Dr. Bob cited another point of identification, the association of both with the Oxford Group, “Bill in New York, for five months, and I in Akron, for two and a half years.” But there was a significant difference: “Bill had acquired their idea of service. I had not.”

This idea, which Bill brought and Dr. Bob never forgot, was put into action immediately. They started trying to help yet another drunk.

In a letter to Lois, Bill noted that he was writing from the office of “one of my new friends,” Dr. Smith, who “had my trouble.” He said together they were working to “change” a once-prominent surgeon who had developed into a “terrific rake and drunk.” (Conceivably, this could have been the fellow Betty B. remembered—the doctor who wheeled patients into the operating room in the dead of night.)

Bill’s letter was dated May 1935, and thus shows they had started carrying the message together at least within two weeks or so of their first meeting.

In this and subsequent letters to Lois, Bill made frequent if casual mention of the Smiths—that he had been there for meals and found the rest of the family to be “as nice as he is”—that he had to “buzz off to Dr. Smith’s (Vermonter and alcoholic) for supper.”

In one letter with a June date, Bill described Bob and Anne as “people 10 or 12 years older than ourselves” (Bill was then 39, while Bob was 55). “He was in danger of losing his practice,” Bill said, “though he is apparently a very competent and mighty popular fellow. You will like them immensely.”

In another letter, Bill mentioned that he was going to move into the Smiths’ house. Anne, too, wrote to Lois, who reported this kindness to Bill in her next letter. (Bill didn’t save letters then; Lois did.)

“Mrs, Smith is quite flattering,” he responded. “You see, Bob had been in the group [the Oxford Group] and sort of backslid. They didn’t have anyone who really understood alcoholics. And I was used to help him a lot, I think.”

According to Bill, Anne Smith had decided that practical steps needed to be taken to protect her husband’s newfound sobriety. She invited Bill to come live with them. “There, I might keep an eye on Dr. Bob and he on me,” Bill said.

The invitation came at an opportune time. Bill was about broke, even though he had received some money from his partners in New York and was again hoping to come out ahead in the proxy fight that had first brought him to Akron.

“For the next three months, I lived with these two wonderful people,” Bill said. “I shall always believe they gave me more than I ever brought them.”

Each morning, there was a devotion, he recalled. After a long silence, in which they awaited inspiration and guidance, Anne would read from the Bible. “James was our favorite,” he said. “Reading from her chair in the corner, she would softly conclude, ‘Faith without works is dead.’ ”

This was a favorite quotation of Anne’s, much as the Book of James was a favorite with early A.A.’s—so much so that “The James Club” was favored by some as a name for the Fellowship.

Sue also remembered the quiet time in the mornings— how they sat around reading from the Bible. Later, they also used The Upper Room, a Methodist publication that provided a daily inspirational message, interdenominational in its approach.

“Then somebody said a prayer,” she recalled. “After that, we were supposed to say one ourselves. Then we’d be quiet. Finally, everybody would share what they got, or didn’t get. This lasted for at least a half hour and sometimes went as long as an hour.”

Young Smitty was aware of the early-morning prayers and quiet time, but he didn’t attend. “I was too busy siphoning gas out of Dad’s car so I could get to high school,” he recalled.

“All of this would take place after breakfast, which with you around took place as early as six in the morning,” Sue said in her talk with Bill. “You’d get down there in your bathrobe and scare the daylights out of all of us. You’d sit there draped around this drip coffeepot, then pour it around for everybody.”

“I was more jittery then,” Bill said. “Jittery as hell.”

“I also remember the bottle on the kitchen shelf,” Sue said. “To prove temptation wasn’t there.”

“Oh yes, I forgot about that,” said Bill. “I was adamant on having liquor. I said we had to prove that you could live in the presence of liquor. So I got two big bottles and put them right on the sideboard. And that drove Anne about wild for a while.”

“But I don’t really remember you coming to the house until Dad went on the medical convention,” Sue said.

Bill replied, “I had already started to live there, and he said one day, ‘Well, what about my going down to Atlantic City for this convention?’ ”

This would have been the last week in May, when Dr. Bob had been sober about two weeks. The American Medical Association Convention began the first week of June, and he hadn’t missed one in 20 years.

“Oh, no!” said Anne when Dr. Bob brought up the idea. For all her faith, she evidently had a practical side and some instinctive knowledge about alcoholic thinking. Bill, however, was more agreeable to the idea. To him, attending a convention was evidently like keeping liquor on the sideboard; he felt alcoholics had to live in the real world, with all its temptations and pitfalls.

Anne didn’t want to go along with it, but she finally gave in.

Dr. Bob, who later recalled he had developed a thirst for Scotch as well as for knowledge, began drinking everything he could get as soon as he boarded the train to Atlantic City. On his arrival, he bought several quarts on his way to the hotel.

That was Sunday night. He stayed sober on Monday until after dinner, when he “drank all I dared in the bar, and then went to my room to finish the job.”

On Tuesday, Bob started drinking in the morning and was well on his way by noon. “I did not want to disgrace myself,” he said, “so I then checked out.”

He headed for the train depot, buying more liquor en route. He remembered only that he had to wait a long time for the train. The next thing he knew, he was coming out of it in the Cuyahoga Falls home of his office nurse and her husband.

The blackout was certainly more than 24 hours long, because Bill and Anne had waited for five days from the time Bob left before they heard from the nurse. She (in response to Bob’s call) had picked him up that morning at the Akron railroad station in what was described as “some confusion and disarray.”

Bob was not fully aware of what was happening. “Bill came over and got me home and gave me a hooker or two of Scotch that night and a bottle of beer the next morning,” he recalled.

As Bill and Sue remembered, however, there was a three-day sobering-up period after what was, incidentally, Dr. Bob’s last A.M.A. Convention.

“Do you remember your mother and me going over to the home of his office nurse early in the morning to pick him up?” Bill asked Sue. “We brought him home, and he went to bed. I stayed with him up in that corner room, where there were two beds.”

“I know he wasn’t in too good shape,” Sue said. “Then the dishes of tomatoes and Karo syrup came out.”

“That was for the operation,” Bill explained. Upon Dr. Bob’s return, they had discovered that he was due to perform surgery three days later. “It was a worrisome thing, because if he was too drunk, he couldn’t do it. And if he was too sober, he would be too jittery. So we had to load him up with this combination of tomato juice and sauerkraut and Karo corn syrup. The idea was to supply him with vitamins from the tomatoes and sauerkraut and energy from the corn syrup. That was a theory we had. We also gave him some beer to steady his nerves.”

As Bill described it on another occasion, this typical tapering-off process took three days. There wasn’t much sleep for anybody, but Bob cooperated.

“At four o’clock on the morning of the operation, he turned, looked at me, and said, ‘I am going through with this,’” Bill recalled.

“ ‘You mean you are going through with the operation?’

“ ‘I have placed both operation and myself in God’s hands. I’m going to do what it takes to get sober and stay that way.’ . . .

“At nine o’clock, he shook miserably as we helped him into his clothes,” Bill said. “We were panic-stricken. Could he ever do it? Were he too tight or too shaky, it would make little difference. His misguided scalpel might take the life of his patient.”

On the way to City Hospital on the east side of town, Dr. Bob held out his hand from time to time to see whether the shakes had subsided. Just before they stopped, Bill, who also had his practical side, gave him a bottle of beer.

Bill and Anne went back to the house to wait. After many hours, Bob phoned to tell them that the operation had been successful. Still, he didn’t return right after the call. Had he gone out to celebrate? Anne and Bill had no idea; they could only wait.

Finally, Dr. Bob came home. He had spent the hours after the operation making restitution to friends and acquaintances in Akron. The bottle of beer Bill gave him that morning was the last drink he ever had.

Although arguments have been and will be made for other significant occasions in A.A. history, it is generally agreed that Alcoholics Anonymous began there, in Akron, on that date: June 10, 1935.