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II. Postgraduate work: M.D. and alcoholic

Now that Bob held a diploma, it was suggested that he set out to make a living and carve a solid, secure future for himself. When it came to things he really wanted, Bob was hardworking. He was also ambitious, and he wanted to become a medical doctor like his maternal grandfather. For some reason we have never learned, however, his mother opposed this quite strongly. He had no choice at the time but to get a job.

Thus, Bob spent the next three years in Boston, Chicago, and Montreal, in a business career that was short, varied, and unsuccessful. For the first two years out of Dartmouth, he was employed by Fairbanks Morse, the St. Johnsbury scales manufacturing company for which his father had once been an attorney.

Arba J. Irvin, another Dartmouth classmate, recalled seeing Bob occasionally when he came to Chicago on business for Fairbanks Morse (and probably to see Anne, who was then teaching school at nearby Oak Park). “Bob wasn’t interested in business,” Mr. Irvin said. “In fact, every weekend he usually went on a bit of a binge.”

After two years with Fairbanks Morse, Bob went to Montreal to sell railway supplies, gas engines, and other items of heavy hardware. A few months later, he moved to Boston, where he worked for a short time at Filene’s department store, “which he didn’t like and wasn’t good at,” according to his son, Smitty.

Although Bob’s friends were aware of only occasional binges, he was drinking as much as he could afford throughout this period. Signs of progression in his illness appeared as he began to wake up with what he called “the morning jitters.” Yet he would boast that he lost only half a day’s work during those three years.

If he ignored, denied, or was unaware of his alcoholic progression, he did not deny the lack of progression in his business career. He still wanted to be a doctor, and somehow managed to persuade his family to let him pursue that aim. In the fall of 1905, when he was 26 years old, he entered the University of Michigan as a premedical student.

In spite of Bob’s high goals and good intentions, all restraints seemed to ease as he once again set foot on a college campus. He was elected to membership in a drinking society, of which, as he put it, he “became one of the leading spirits . . . drinking with much greater earnestness than I had previously shown.” All went well for a time. Then the shakes began to get worse.

On many mornings, Bob went to class and, even though fully prepared, turned away at the door and went back to the fraternity house. So bad were his jitters that he was afraid he would cause a scene if he should be called on.

This happened again and again, going from bad to worse. His life in school became one long binge after another, and he was no longer drinking for the sheer fun of it.

Dr. Bob didn’t mention having had blackouts at this time. He said nothing about compulsion, nameless fears, guilt, or the morning drink. Nonetheless, the shakes, missed classes, and binge drinking would have been more than enough to qualify him for A.A. But this was 1907, the spring of his second year at Michigan, and A.A. was 28 years in the future.

Still, Bob did make a surrender of sorts that year. He decided he could not complete his education and tried a “geographic cure” instead. He packed his bags and headed south to recuperate on a large farm owned by a friend.

The hospitality extended to him might have been part of his problem. All through the years of drinking, Bob could call on friends and colleagues to bail him out one more time. They rescued him, covered for him, smoothed things over for him.

After a month on the farm, the fog began to clear, and Bob realized that he might have acted hastily in leaving school. He decided to return and continue his work. The faculty had other ideas, however. They felt that the University of Michigan might survive, even prosper, without the presence of Robert Holbrook Smith. After long discussions, with promises and protests on one side, threats and admonitions on the other, Bob was allowed to return and take his exams.

That he did well might be considered a sign of natural ability and intelligence. It might also be considered a mark of the determination some alcoholics have to work harder, longer, and better than everyone else—for a while.

Following the exams, there were further painful discussions in the dean’s office. Despite his good last-minute showing, Bob was asked to leave. But he was given his credits, so that he was able to transfer as a junior in the fall of 1907 to Rush University, near Chicago.

There, his drinking became so much worse that fraternity brothers sent for his father. The judge made the long journey in a vain effort to get him straightened out. In later years, Dr. Bob recalled that his father always met these situations quietly, with an attempt at understanding. “Well, what did this one cost you?” he would ask. And that would only heighten Bob’s feelings of remorse.

He kept drinking, with hard liquor replacing the beer. He went on longer and longer binges, waking up with even more intense shakes. Just before final exams, Bob went on a particularly rough drunk. When he came in to take his tests, his hand trembled so badly that he could not hold a pencil. As a result, he handed in three absolutely blank examination booklets.

He was, of course, called on the carpet once again. More promises and protestations. The dean of this medical school decided that if Bob wished to graduate, he must come back for two more quarters, remaining completely dry.

This he was able to do, and as a result, he was given his medical degree in 1910, when he was 31 years old. In fact, his scholarship and deportment were both considered so meritorious that he was able to secure a highly coveted two-year internship at City Hospital, Akron, Ohio.

The two years as an intern were problem-free. Hard work took the place of hard drinking, simply because there wasn’t time for both. “I was kept so busy that I hardly left the hospital at all. Consequently, I could not get into any trouble,” Dr. Bob said.

At one time during his internship, Bob ran the hospital pharmacy. This, added to other duties, took him all over the building. Because the elevators were too slow, he was in the habit of running up and down the stairs, rushing as if the devil were after him. This frenzied activity often brought about an explosive “Now where is that cadaverous young Yankee!” from one of the older doctors, who became particularly fond of him.

In 1912, when his two years of internship were completed, the 33-year-old M.D. opened an office in the Second National Bank Building, Akron, where he was to remain until he retired from practice in 1948.

Perhaps as a result of the irregular hours and tense work of a new general practitioner, Dr. Bob developed considerable stomach trouble. “I soon discovered that a couple of drinks would alleviate my gastric distress, at least for a few hours at a time,” he said. It didn’t take him long to return to the old drinking habits.

Almost immediately, he began to “pay very dearly physically,” to know the real horror and suffering of alcoholism. “I was between Scylla and Charybdis now,” he wrote. “If I did not drink, my stomach tortured me, and if I did, my nerves did the same thing.” (Smitty noted, incidentally, that the stomach trouble disappeared after his father stopped drinking—although there was then a bit of insomnia, which led to his reading a lot at night.)

When things got too bad and Bob was unable to function, he put himself into one of the local drying-out spots—not once, but at least a dozen times.

After three years of this nightmare existence, the young doctor ended up in one of the smaller local hospitals, which, like other drying-out places and sanitaria in the vicinity, catered to patients with such socially unacceptable ailments as alcoholism, drug addiction, and mental illness.

The hospital staff did its best, but Bob couldn’t or wouldn’t allow himself to be helped. He persuaded well-meaning friends to smuggle in whiskey by the quart. When that source of supply failed, it wasn’t difficult for a man who knew his way around a hospital to steal medicinal alcohol. He got rapidly worse.

Early in 1914, Judge Smith dispatched a doctor from St. Johnsbury with instructions to bring Bob home. (In a way, St. Johnsbury was always home for Dr. Bob. Although he lived and worked in Akron for the rest of his life, he continued to go back to Vermont every year, drunk or sober.)

Somehow, the Vermont doctor managed to get Bob back to the house on Summer Street where he was born. There, he remained in bed for two months before he dared venture out. He was utterly demoralized. Then, it was two more months before he returned to Akron to resume his practice. “I think I must have been thoroughly scared by what had happened, or by the doctor, or probably both,” Dr. Bob said.

He was still sober at the beginning of the following year. Perhaps he believed he was that way for good, and perhaps Anne Ripley believed this, too. He went to Chicago to marry her. The ceremony took place in the home of her mother, Mrs. Joseph Pierce Ripley, “at half after eight o’clock” (as the wedding invitation read) on January 25, 1915.

Dr. Bob brought his bride back to Akron and a house on a corner at 855 Ardmore Avenue, a tree-lined street in the fashionable west end of town. The $4,000 house was new then, a two-story clapboard structure with large, airy rooms.

The kitchen was modern and fitted with all the latest conveniences, but Smitty remembered it as being long and narrow. “Dad had one particular chair he sat in. He never varied. That was his seat. Every time someone wanted something from the refrigerator, he would have to stand up. But he wouldn’t change.

“Mom was a good cook,” he said, “but she didn’t care for it. She always wanted to dine by candlelight, and Dad wanted to see what he was eating. We practically had a spotlight overhead.

“He was no help around the house—worse than that. Once, Mother prevailed on him to take the wallpaper off the living-room wall. He stuck a garden hose in the window and turned it on. The house was carpeted. Mother almost fainted. And he had the worst mechanical ability in the world. I did all the fixing.”

The first three years of the Smiths’ married life were ideal, free from any of the unhappiness that was to come later. Dr. Bob continued to stay sober, and any lingering doubts Anne might have had were stilled. They were then, as always, an extremely devoted couple. (“Mother was always deeply in love with Dad,” Smitty recalled. “I never heard them have an argument.” Sue concurred, but did admit to overhearing what might be called “discussions.”)

Dr. Bob’s professional life was going smoothly, too; he was developing a reputation as a physician, work he loved. He inspired confidence in his patients. A bit authoritative and difficult to approach, he was sympathetic and understanding once you started talking. And he had a way of looking at you over the top of his glasses. “He was a great one for that,” said Emma K. (close to the Smiths in their final years). “Just how you expect a doctor to be.”

As Dr. Bob’s practice grew, the Smiths made many friends and became respected members of the community. And in 1918, they became parents.

But the year of Smitty’s birth was also the year of a national event that had a very different impact on Dr. Bob’s life. The 18th Amendment was passed—Prohibition.

At the prospect of the whole country’s going dry, “I felt quite safe,” Dr. Bob recalled. A few drinks at that point would make little difference, he thought; if he and his friends managed to lay in a modest supply of liquor while it was still legal, it would soon be gone.

And that would be that, he reasoned. He could come to

Anne Ripley was a Wellesley student when she and Bob met;

during their 17-year courtship, she taught school.

no harm. His thinking, if not quite logical (except by alcoholic logic), was quite typical at that time. Dr. Bob and the rest of the country were soon to learn the results of the Great American Experiment.

Before the amendment went into effect, he was not aware that the government would oblige him by allowing doctors almost unlimited supplies of grain alcohol for “medicinal purposes.” Many times during those “dry” years, Dr. Bob went to the phone book, picked out a name at random, then filled out the prescription that would get him a pint of medicinal alcohol.

Soon, a newly accredited member of American society, the bootlegger, appeared on the scene. Quality was not always his long suit. Yet the family bootlegger was more obliging than a liquor store. He delivered at any hour, day or night, including Sundays and holidays. Sorry, though; no checks or credit.

Dr. Bob started out moderately. Within a relatively short time, he drifted out of control again, but not back into the old pattern, for the progression of his disease was evident.

He soon “developed two distinct phobias,” in his own words: “One was the fear of not sleeping; the other was the fear of running out of liquor. Not being a man of means, I knew that if I did not stay sober enough to earn money, I would run out of liquor.”

This irrefutable logic led him into a squirrel-cage existence — a 17-year “nightmare.” Staying sober to earn money to get drunk . . . getting drunk to go to sleep. Then over again—and again!

Instead of taking the morning drink, which he craved, Dr. Bob turned to what he described as “large doses of sedatives” to quiet the jitters, which distressed him terribly. He contracted what in later years would be called a pill problem, or dual addiction.

Whenever Bob did yield to the craving for the morning drink instead, there was a major disaster. First, he was unfit for work within a few hours. Second, he lost his usual skill in smuggling home enough liquor to put him to sleep. This led to a night of “futile tossing around in bed followed by a morning of unbearable jitters.”

There were also occasional binges. Sometimes, he hid out at the City Club or registered at the Portage Hotel under a fictitious name. After all, who would believe “Robert Smith”? “But my friends usually found me, and I would go home if they promised that I should not be scolded,” he said.

And yet Dr. Bob managed to keep functioning as a physician. “I had sense enough never to go to the hospital if I had been drinking, and very seldom did I receive patients.”

Indeed, his career even advanced during these years. After his start as a general practitioner, Dr. Bob developed an interest in surgery. Following further training at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and Jefferson Medical School in Philadelphia, he began in 1929 to specialize as a proctologist and rectal surgeon. He was also first-call surgeon in Akron for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad for many years—that is, if there was illness or accident in the area, he was the first doctor called. This provided him with some extra money and a railroad pass.

But as the drinking years went by, the effort it took to do his work and keep up a facade of normality became more and more grueling. His usual pattern was to stay dry but well-sedated every day until four o’clock, then go home. In this way, he hoped to keep his drinking problem from becoming common knowledge or hospital gossip.

Gradually, the façade was crumbling. Dr. Bob may have thought no one knew, but there is considerable evidence that quite a few people were aware of his problem with alcohol. For instance, at the start of his recovery, when he announced to a nurse at City Hospital that he had a “cure” for alcoholism, her first remark was: “Well, Doctor, I suppose you’ve already tried it yourself?”

Anne C., an A.A. member who knew Dr. Bob before she ever took her first drink, remembered how he would come down to the lunch counter in the Second National Bank Building and order Bromo Seltzer, tomato juice, and aspirin. “I never saw him eat. One day, I asked Bill, the owner, what was wrong with that man. ‘Does he have palsy?’ ‘No, he has a perpetual hangover,’ Bill said.”