Aa history Lovers 2004 moderators Nancy Olson and Glenn F. Chesnut page

others.

"Growing up in Alabama, I was taught to hate myself," one gay member told an

My business in A.A. is to stay sober and help you if you want it."

A.A. surveys do not inquire whether members attend religious services or if

they believe in God. There are no questions about ethnic or racial origins,

sexual preference or whether alcoholism runs in the family. But a family

predisposition to alcoholism is reflected strikingly within A.A. Often,

speakers at meetings begin: "My name is Mary, and I am an alcoholic...and my

father [or mother] was an alcoholic."

Longtime A.A. members believe that it is hopeless to drag another into

sobriety if the alcoholic is determined not to be helped or refuses to believe

he is ill. Even so, the courts in some states are sending thousands of

offenders to A.A. meetings instead of to jail. But the A.A. program sometimes

catches on even with unwilling alcoholics.

There are many things outsiders believe A.A. to be that it is not. It is not a

temperance organization or Prohibition society. A.A. does not want to save the

world from gin. Nobody invites you to join A.A. You are a member if you say

you are, or if you walk into an A.A. meeting with the thought that you have a

drinking problem and you want to stop. There are no papers to sign, no pledges

to take, no obligations to speak up, no arms twisted. The attitude of members

toward those outside who drink moderately is, "I wish I could drink as you do,

but I can't."

A.A. is not a religious cult. Some members are agnostics or atheists. Many

choose to believe that their "higher power" is their A.A. group. Most members

prefer to call A.A.'s program "spiritual." Yet God is mentioned directly or

indirectly in five of the Twelve Steps, which A.A. uses to help heal

individuals, and this sometimes repels outsiders who might otherwise be

attracted. (Boiled down to six instantly understandable principles, the Twelve

Step program might read: We admitted we are licked and cannot get well on our

own. We get honest with ourselves. We talk it out with somebody else. We try

to make amends to people we have harmed. We pray to whatever greater Power we

think there is. We try to give of ourselves for our own sake and without stint

to other alcoholics with no thought of reward.)

A.A. does not work for everybody. But then, nothing does. About 60 per cent of

those coming to A.A. for the first time remain in A.A. after going to meetings

and assiduously "working the program" for months or even years. Usually, they

stay sober for good. But about 40 percent drop out. These statistics refute a

widely held notion that A.A. is always successful or an "instant fix." Even

so, its success rate is phenomenally high.

Freudian analysis and religious faith, for example, may be two great ways to

heal the human spirit, but they do not work on their own for alcoholics. The

vast majority of doctors, psychologists and members of the clergy who are

familiar with A.A. as well as almost all experts in alcoholism, make A.A.

their No. 1 choice for a long-term program of recovery. A.A. precepts are

built into the programs of every respected intensive alcoholism treatment

center in the country, including those of Hazelden in Minnesota, Smithers in

New York and the Betty Ford Center. John Schwarzlose of the Betty Ford Center

expresses a typical opinion. "Patients ask how important it is that they go to

A.A. after they're through here. I say, 'I can give you a guarantee. When you

leave here, if you don't go to A.A., you won't make it.'"

A.A. has no ties with political parties, foundations, charities or causes, nor

does it sponsor research into alcoholism.

And unlike most tax-exempt organizations, A.A., whose current annual budget is

$11.5 million, does no fund raising. Nor does A.A. accept money from

outsiders. The funds supporting headquarters services come mainly from A.A.'s

huge publishing empire, which distributes authorized literature to members.

Each group is self-supporting, passing a basket at every meeting to help pay

for coffee, snacks, literature and rent for the meeting space. Those present

often give a dollar. Others may just drop a coin in the basket. Some cannot

give anything.

No member may donate more that $1,000 a year to A.A. Nor may a member bequeath

more than $1,000, or leave property to A.A., which has never owned any real

estate.

nonalcoholic who served for 35 years as the controller at A.A. headquarters,

"is that we don't ever want some person dropping a million bucks in the A.A.

hopper and saying, 'Now, I'm going to call the tune.'"

About half of the groups contribute nothing at all for headquarters services.

Many members feel that carrying the expenses of their "home group" is enough.

This kind of autonomy and decentralization typifies Alcoholics Anonymous.

The average A.A. member, according to surveys, attends four meetings a week.

After about five years of regular attendance, some A.A.'s go to fewer and

fewer meetings. They may stop altogether when they feel they are able to

function comfortably without alcohol. However, some speakers at meetings are

full of cautionary tales about how they drifted away from A.A. and drank

again, sometimes disastrously and for long, periods of time, before returning

to the fold.

The movement works in quiet and simple ways. Members usually give of

themselves without reservation; exchange telephone numbers with newcomers;

come to help at any hour when a fellow member is in crisis; are free with tips

on how to avoid that first drink. Most people in A.A. are flexible, tolerant

of eccentrics, suspicious of "rules" and "musts." The lack of ritual can be a

surprise to beginners. So is the absence of confrontation, finger-pointing,

blame-laying, angry debate and chronic whining.

The essence of A.A. can only be guessed at in big, showy gatherings, such as

its international conventions every five years. It is in the intimacy of the

neighborhood meetings that the truth, the flavor and the inkling of the

reasons for A.A.'s success can be grasped. The members may meet in groups as

small as 2 or 3, or as large as 200, but the usual attendance is somewhere

between a dozen and 40 people. In New York City, the most active single A.A.

spot anywhere, there is a choice of 1,826 listed meetings held by 724 groups

every week.

As A.A. grew and diversified, the stigma of alcoholism gradually faded. There

were many stages along A.A.'s road to respectability, beginning in the 1940's,

that gradually transformed the public's perception of the society of recovered

drunks from a butt of disbelief and even ridicule to that of an accepted and

admired organization. None was more significant than the action taken by the

American Medical Association. In 1956, the AMA's trustees and its House of

Delegates declared that alcoholism was a disease, thereby validating a central

belief of A.A., from its co-founders on, that it is a sickness, not a sin.

Now the Supreme Court of the United States is debating the legality of the

issue. Last Dec. 7, the court heard a challenge by two Vietnam War Veterans

against the Veterans Administration for excluding "primary alcoholism" (in

which drinking itself is the root disorder) from the list of illnesses and

disabilities that allow veterans more time to claim education benefits.

Extensions can be granted to veterans hindered by physical or mental problems

"not the result of their own willful misconduct." The justices are expected to

hand down an opinion before the Court's term ends in June.

The structure of A.A. is a little harder to grasp than the disease theory of

alcoholism. It is close to the truth to say that A.A. consists of a million

Indians and no chiefs. And that it is less an organization than an organism

that keeps splitting amoeba like, into ever more groups. If a member doesn't

like how things are run in his group, he can start another one with people he

finds more compatible. This has given rise to an A.A. saying: "All you need to

start a new group is two drunks, a coffee pot and some resentment."

There is a structure in Alcoholics Anonymous, but it would set any

conventional notion of how to run a business on its head. Basically, the local

groups are boss and the board of trustees and the staff at the General Service

Office are supposed to carry out their orders. The board of trustees is made

up of 14 A.A. members and 7 non-alcoholics.

Although alcoholics hold all the top administrative jobs, they never handle

money. A.A.'s financial operation is run by non-alcoholics. The reason is that

Bill Wilson and the early A.A.'s were afraid that if anybody running A.A. fell

off the wagon, that would be bad enough, but if he were handling finances as

well, the results could be disastrous. The philosophy has endured.

The manner in which A.A. directs its collective affairs and sets policy can be

seen most clearly - or in all its democratic confusion - at its yearly General

Service Conference, the closest approximation to a governing body of A.A.

About 135 people attend, including 91 delegates elected at regional A.A.

assemblies in the United States and Canada. Also on hand are the trustees of

the board and representatives of the head-quarter's staff.

The day-to-day business of Alcoholics Anonymous has been carried on since 1970

in a brick building at 468 Park Avenue South, in midtown Manhattan. Whatever

policies are decided at the conference are carried out by the headquarters

staff. Their jobs are divided into specialties such as literature, treatment

centers, prisons, public information and cooperation with professionals -

doctors, counselors, social workers and teachers, for example - in the

alcoholism field. And just in case somebody should become overly fond of a

specialty, all the top staff members, except the general manager and the

Hispanic coordinator, regularly rotate jobs every two years. The same frequent

rotation occurs at every level in A.A. Officers in local groups usually step

down every six months.

The seven nonalcoholic trustees, who are often experts in some profession,

such as medicine, law, banking or social work, serve a special need. Joan K.

Jackson, a sociologist with long experience among alcoholics, explains: "We

can use our full names in public. We are not perceived by outsiders as having

any vested interest. Privately within A.A., our greatest function is as

gadflies and questioners."

What makes A.A. headquarters run is the A.A. World Service publishing empire.

It now brings in $8.8 million annually or 76 per cent of A.A.'s yearly

corporate revenues. It is the cause of some trepidation among those who have

taken what amounts to a vow of poverty. Each year, A.A. distributes 7 million

copies of more than 40 pamphlets (mostly gratis for members), and almost a

million and a half copies of 6 books and two booklets. Seven million copies of

the Big Book (A.A.'s central text, published in 1939, whose formal title is

"Alcoholics Anonymous") have been sold. Last year alone, about a million Big

Books were purchased, virtually all of them at A.A. meetings, alcoholic

rehabilitation centers or through mail orders.

At the time of his death, early in 1971, Bill Wilson was earning about $65,000

a year in royalties from the Big Book and three other books he wrote for A.A.

Last year, his widow, Lois, received $912,000 in royalties. Under the terms of

the agreement Bill concluded with A.A. headquarters in 1963, she was allocated

13.5 per cent of Wilson's royalties. Another 1.5 percent went to his last

mistress, who died a few years after Bill.

There has been almost no negative publicity about Alcoholics Anonymous over

the five decades of its history. Extensive research turns up only a handful of

critical views in the press. Writing in The Nation in 1964, Jerome Ellison

charged that A.A.'s conservative top councils had lost touch with the ever

more diverse rank-and-file. The same year, Arthur H. Cain, a New York

psychologist, in a book and articles for various magazines, called A.A. a

"cult" that enslaved its members to self-righteous sobriety. Bill Wilson's

reaction was typical of the man's tolerance. The co-founder trying to calm the

ensuing fuss at headquarters, said: "In all the years, this is the first

thorough- going criticism our fellowship ever had. So the practicing of

absorbing stuff like that in good humor should be of value." It was the first

public criticism, and it proved to be one of the last.

Privately within A.A., there has been a growing dissatisfaction with

headquarters. Some members say staff members are becoming frozen in

bureaucracy and are overly sensitive to pressure from the most rigid and

narrow-minded members, particularly old-timers, who regard the Big Book and

other authorized literature almost as Holy Writ.

"If anything is going to destroy A.A.," says Dr. John Norris, a nonalcoholic

physician, friend of Bill Wilson's and for many years chairman of A.A.'s board

of trustees, "It will be what I call the 'tradition lawyers.' They find it

easier to live with black and white than they do with gray. These 'bleeding

deacons' * these fundamentalists are afraid of and fight any change."

Source: The New York Times Magazine©, February 21, 1988

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++++Message 1782. . . . . . . . . . . . Significant May Dates in AA History

From: NMOlson@aol.com . . . . . . . . . . . . 5/1/2004 3:25:00 AM

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May 1

1941 - First Wisconsin AA meeting was held in a Milwaukee hotel.

1941 - Jacksonville, FL, newspaper reported start of a new AA group.

1941 - First meeting was held in San Bernardino, California.

May 3

1943 - Democrat Chronicle in Rochester, NY, reported first annual AA dinner at

Seneca Hotel with 60 attending.

May 4

for Education on Alcoholism on the "We the People" radio show.

May 5

1940 - Washington, DC, Sunday Star reported formation of first AA group in the

May 7

May 8

sober.

May 10

May 11

him to Henrietta Seiberling who introduced Bill to Dr. Bob.

May 12

1935 - Mothers' Day - Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith met for the first time in

May 14

1998 - Sybil C., first woman to enter A.A. west of the Mississippi, died. Her

date of sobriety was March 23, 1941. Her name at the time was Sybil Maxwell,

though she later opened her talks by saying, "My name is Sybil Doris Adams

Stratton Hart Maxwell Willis C., and I'm an alcoholic."

May 15

May 16

Alcoholics Anonymous) had a "wet brain."

May 17

1942 - The Journal-Herald in Dayton, Ohio, ran a story on A.A. with photos of

May 18

after hearing that local A.A.'s wanted a huge memorial.

May 19

2000 - Dr. Paul Ohliger died at the age of 83. His story, "Doctor, Alcoholic,

May 22

Nelson Davis of St. Luke's Hospital, Philadelphia, and other A.A.s speaking.

May 28

1974 - The first World Service meeting of AA outside of America was held in

May 29

history of early Mid-

west AA, was published.

May 31

__________

Other May events for which we have no specific date:

1939 - Clarence Snyder told Dr. Bob, his sponsor, he would not be back to the

Oxford Group meetings in Akron and would start an "A.A." meeting in Cleveland.

1942 - Richmond Walker, author of "Twenty-Four Hours a Day," had his last

drink.

1946 - Long Form of Twelve Traditions was published in the AA Grapevine.

1947 - Avalon, California (Catalina Island Group) was formed.

1948 - The AA Grapevine reported $2.00 was sent to the General Service

headquarters of AA in New York, asking for a bottle of Alcoholics Anonymous.

1951 - Al-Anon was founded by Lois Wilson and Anne B.

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++++Message 1783. . . . . . . . . . . . A MINOR HISTORY OF AA IN KANKAKEE,

ILLINOIS

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(Kankakee is about 60 miles south of Chicago)

According to an article published in the Kankakee Journal in

December, 1958, A.A. here had endured 10 years in October of 1958. In

1948 a man named Doc Mills went up to Evanston to the Georgian Hotel

to hear Bill W. speak. He wanted to try the program here so he and

three others met at the courthouse the first time. As others joined,

they met once a week at different homes or wherever they could do it.

This first group was listed with G.S.O. in 1949 as the Kankakee Kounty

Kourthouse Group with 5 members. They tried to get churches to meet

in, but the churches would have no part of it. They met at the St.

Rose School in one corner of the gym while the basketball team

practiced at the other end. They met at a roller rink that used to be

where the old Radeke Brewery was. They met in a tavern storeroom on

south Washington. They met at the Salvation Army. They met in DeSelm

at a fellow's house who had a farm spraying business.

Whoever was elected chairman got the Book and coffee pot and was in

charge. It was an honor that they thought that much of you. They

didn't have a lot of meetings but they spent a lot of time with one

another. They were a close knit group. At the time, if one was in

trouble, the other ones were there. By 1950 there were 12 members.

Uncle Billie came in later for a while and he was sober for about a

year, but he went back out. He came back and stayed straight. Uncle

Billie was chairing a meeting at the Salvation Army with four others.

They were paying the Salvation Army five dollars for the meeting.

They passed the basket and there were only four dollars in it. He

said, "Well, we don't have enough." The other members said there would

be if he had put his dollar in. He had forgotten to put his money in.

Uncle Billy kept it going, because he was home during the day.

If they had a Twelfth Step call they ended up over at Uncle Billie's

kitchen with coffee. It grew slowly in the beginning, from six to nine

to 12 members.

Every once in a while they would take a big trip. One time they got

together to go to Indianapolis to hear Father John Doe talk. Three or

four of them would get together and go to Danville or Chicago or

another place for an out-of-town meeting. (This was before the

Interstate Highways we take for granted now.)

It was in 1972 they thought they had enough members to rent space on

Durham St. in Bradley for a meeting place and Alano Club. They ended

up with the space next to it being donated bcause the landlord didn't

have any luck renting it.

The late John Hefner came here from Chicago in 1960 to start an

alcohol rehab unit at Kankakee State Hospital. In 1984 They purchased

a building on East River Street for an Alano Club for meetings. As a

postscript, Doc Mills never did stay sober. Besides Kankakee, Bradley

and DeSelm, there were members from Momence and Bonfield.

(from interviews with Spike V. and John H.)

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++++Message 1784. . . . . . . . . . . . One Page At A Time (2004)

From: Lash, William (Bill) . . . . . . . . . . . . 5/4/2004 5:25:00 PM

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One Page At a Time

Susan Cheever's Chilling Glimpse of AA's Tormented 'Saint'

By David Von Drehle

Washington Post Staff Writer

Monday, May 3, 2004; Page C01

During her research for a biography of Alcoholics Anonymous co-founder Bill

Wilson, author Susan Cheever dug through the just-opened archives at Stepping

Stones, Wilson's longtime home outside New York City. Alongside an archivist,

she sifted reams of material that had not been looked at in decades.

One day, the archivist handed her a sheaf of wide, green-lined pages -- hourly

logs kept by the nurses who tended Wilson on his deathbed.

Cheever glanced at them. They seemed mundane.

"Keep reading," the archivist urged her.

Cheever came to the pages covering Christmas 1970. On the eve of the holiday,

Bill Wilson passed a fitful night. A lifelong smoker, he had been fighting

emphysema for years, and now he was losing the battle. Nurse James Dannenberg

was on duty in the last hour before dawn. At 6:10 a.m. on Christmas morning,

according to Dannenberg's notes, the man who sobered up millions "asked for

three shots of whiskey."

He was quite upset when he didn't get them, Cheever writes.

Wilson asked for booze again about a week later, on Jan. 2, 1971.

And on Jan. 8.

And on Jan. 14.

"My blood ran cold," Cheever said recently of the discovery. "I was shocked

and

horrified." With time to ponder, though, she found herself thinking, "Of

he wanted a drink. He was the one who talked about sobriety being 'a daily

remission.' I realized that this was a story about the power of alcohol: that

even Bill Wilson, the man who invented sobriety, who had 30-plus years sober,

still wanted a drink."

In the Big Book, as AA's foundation text is known, Wilson recalled the time in

1934 when doctors concluded that he was a hopeless drunk and told his wife

that

tell me," he added. "I knew, and almost welcomed the idea."

On Jan. 24, 1971, the man known modestly to legions of alcoholics as "Bill W."

was finally cured.

Powerless Over Alcohol

Cheever's discovery, reported in her book "My Name Is Bill," doesn't really

change what little we know about alcoholism, a cruel, confounding and

mysterious

disease. It doesn't really change what we know about Wilson, a rough-hewn and

unorthodox American saint sketched by Cheever in all his chain-smoking,

womanizing, Ouija-board-reading, acid-tripping holiness.

But it might change, at least a bit, the way some of us think about miracles

--

the shelf life of miracles, the limited warranty they carry, and how

with

endlessly and effortlessly. More like an old mansion, precious and beautiful,

but demanding endless, unglamorous upkeep.

The miracle of Wilson's sobriety -- and the birth of AA -- arrived like

something out of the Old Testament. It was 1934, late in the year, when the

doctors had given up on Bill. Booze, which once put its arm around his

shoulder,

now had its jaws around his throat. A smart, handsome, charming man, Wilson

had

become the kind of drunk who could set off one morning to play golf and awaken

day later outside his house, unsure how he got there, with his head bleeding

mysteriously and his unused clubs still at his side. "The more he decided not

to

drink," Cheever writes, "the more irresistible drink seemed to become."

York that specialized in drying out "rum hounds," as he called himself. He

knew

what to expect: doses of barbiturates, assorted bitter herbs, castor oil and

would not work, that just about every hard case like him went back to drinking

after being discharged.

The prospect was so dismal that Wilson picked up a few bottles of beer for the

cab ride.

Wilson had a friend named Ebby Thatcher, another alcoholic, who had a friend

named Roland Hazard, yet another drunk, who was wealthy enough to seek help

from

serious Hazard's drinking problem was, he told his patient that the only hope

was a religious conversion -- in Jung's experience, nothing else worked. The

American psychologist William James had arrived at a similar conclusion,

declaring in "The Varieties of Religious Experience" that "the only cure for

dipsomania is religiomania."

Well, by God, Hazard got religion and sobered up, for a while. He preached

this

"I was in favor of practically everything he had to say except one thing,"

Wilson later recalled of his conversations with Thatcher. "I was not in favor

of

God."

feeling really low. Science could do nothing for him. He now realized that he

couldn't kick the booze by himself. Yet he was unable to believe in the only

power experts knew of to save a drunk.

Then:

"Like a child crying out in the dark, I said, 'If there is a Father, if there

a God, will he show himself?' And the place lit up in a great glare, a

wondrous

white light. Then I began to have images, in the mind's eyes, so to speak, and

one came in which I seemed to see myself standing on a mountain and a great

clean wind was blowing, and this blowing at first went around and then it

seemed

to go through me. And then the ecstasy redoubled and I found myself

'I am a free man! So this is the God of the preachers!' And little by little

the

ecstasy subsided and I found myself in a new world of consciousness."

Carry This Message

Brimming with vision and new consciousness, Wilson blew back into the familiar

world as if everything had changed -- not just for him, but for all of

creation.

He bragged that he was going to save every drunk in the world. He went

scavenging for men to preach to, finding them in missions and hospitals and

jails and among his own drinking buddies. Some of his targets thought he

sounded

an awful lot like the Bible-brandishing temperance ladies he had rebelled

of

God" -- God was an authority figure and drunks don't deal well with authority.

was keeping at least one drunk sober -- himself.

But within months, even that project was at risk. Having been blinded like

Saul

the miraculously enlightened -- was discovering little by little that he was

much the same as before.

Tempted while on a business trip in Akron, Ohio, Wilson fought off the bottle

by

cold-calling churches from the hotel directory in search of a drunk to help.

call led him to an alcoholic surgeon named Bob Smith. Initially, Smith

objected

to being saved -- this was after one of those sad-but-hilarious tales that

give

a sort of rosy glow to a truly savage disease: Wilson's first scheduled

carrying an enormous potted plant for no discernible reason. He deposited the

non sequitur before his bewildered wife, then passed out.

The next day, when they finally met, Wilson answered Smith's reluctance by

saying that he wasn't there for Smith, he was there for Bill Wilson. This was

a

key insight in the development of AA -- the realization that helping another

about

miracles in the lives of others. Now, he was just trying to maintain the

miracle

in his own.

harder than Wilson, got sober. Bill W. and Dr. Bob shared the story of their

recoveries with more drunks in this same spirit. Some of those men and women

got

years and out around the planet to the largely anonymous millions of today,

who

range from celebrities to legislators to schoolteachers to busboys, from a

desperate

soul working on a second sober sunrise. AA is now so widespread and well known

that creators of the children's movie "Finding Nemo" could playfully include a

12-step meeting for fish-addicted sharks, confident that every parent in the

global reach of Disney would get the joke.

It's impossible to know exactly how many people have tried AA, how many stayed

sober, how many attend meetings and how often. The group is not only

anonymous,

it is non-hierarchical, nondenominational, non-centralized, nonpartisan.

According to the Twelve Traditions that govern AA, there is no requirement for

membership except a desire to stop drinking, and the group endorses no cause

apart from that one. All it takes to convene an AA meeting is two alcoholics

who

choose to attend. Group consensus rules in all things, so in any good-size

city

there are smoking meetings and nonsmoking meetings, meetings for early risers

oriented to the newly sober.

The 12 Steps and decentralized structure have proved so effective and popular

that other groups have copied the template for dealing with other problems:

Narcotics Anonymous, Gamblers Anonymous, Overeaters Anonymous and so forth.

But

Unlike many spiritual visionaries, Wilson came to understand "that when he

heard

the voice of God, it was often just the voice of Bill Wilson," as Cheever puts

pledged

him," with italics right there in the Big Book. Prospective converts are often

assured that they may take as their God the nearest radiator if that's what

works for them. Almighty God with the white beard, or a gentle breeze in the

treetops, or the sublime engineering of a molecule, or the vastness of space,

or

the love of friends, or the power of the AA meeting itself: Choose your own

Whatever works.

In the can-do land of the bottom line, even our spirituality tends to be

results-oriented.

But the language of AA plays provocatively with a simple word: "work." In one

sense, sobriety is something that just happens, much like Wilson's great clean

wind. It is a gift from the Higher Power to the alcoholic. At the same time,

"work" means work, as in tangible, sometimes even grudging, effort. In the

early

days, Bill W. and Dr. Bob would sit in the Smith parlor refining their

Bible. They were partial to the Epistle of James, which reminded them that

"faith without works is dead." AA members speak of "working the steps," and

many

This means returning again and again to the state of mind and the exercises

that

constitute the upkeep on each miracle of sobriety. Beginning with the

that they are powerless over alcohol and continuing through labors of

humility,

repentance, meditation and service, AA members maintain the dam that holds

back

the obliterating tide of booze from their lives.

Cheever is a forthright woman with a big laugh and no immediately obvious

illusions, a hard-working writer who publishes books like clockwork, pens a

column for Newsday and teaches at Bennington College. She decided to write

about

Wilson because "I loved him. I loved how he changed the world without knowing

she seems to mean a range of qualities, from the Emersonian flinty optimism,

to

the unsentimental practicality, to the hovering dark clouds and the weirdo

No doubt she also loved Wilson for the fact that his miracle, worked and

reworked through the long chain of drunks, touched her own family, late in the

life of her father, the short-story artist John Cheever. Booze was the

lubricant

of Cheever's masterpieces. He was the poet laureate of postwar suburbia, in

which hope, striving, lust and angst were all refracted through the bottom of

a

cocktail glass.

life, as his daughter explained in her acclaimed memoirs "Home Before Dark,"

and

booze washed into Susan Cheever's life as well. In her book "Note Found in a

plenty

an

amazing gift to the whole family, not a gift of bliss so much as a gift of

his family and friends with him.

Her homage to the family benefactor is pro-Wilson but not hagiographic. "I

like

spiritual bases in her portrait of Wilson, but seems more moved by the

concrete

elements. Over lunch at a Manhattan bistro, she recalls her first visit to

Wilson's boyhood home in East Dorset, Vt., not far from the Bennington campus.

Cheever noticed the low ceiling of the stairway leading to Wilson's room, and

caught a glimpse in her mind's eyes, so to speak, of the gangly boy having to

duck his head each time he passed.

"And I was him," for that moment, she says. "I understood what it was to be a

depressed 10-year-old boy trapped in that house" after his parents had

abandoned

him to his remote and austere grandparents.

It's not easy making a spiritual figure compelling and real without slipping

into iconoclasm. Cheever's approach is to apply a writerly version of Wilson's

humility. She gets the goods on his serial adultery, for instance, but

declines

Cheever says. "They were married 53 years. All we really know is that they

were

friends through an amazing life. He was a good-enough husband."

Huxley without getting mired in a puritanical inquisition into whether this

constituted a "slip" in his sobriety or hypocrisy in his creed.

This attitude allows Cheever to see that Wilson's inconsistencies and quirks

weren't blemishes on his record -- they were the essence of a flawed man who

was

Cheever says. "But he wasn't interested in problems. He was interested in

solutions." Most of the key traditions of AA operations, including its

independence, anonymity and governance-by-consensus, ran counter to Wilson's

personal disposition. "He wanted fame and fortune, but somehow was able to

figure out that AA would have to be a group in which nobody represents it,

nobody speaks for it and nobody's in charge of it."

Sobering Reality

The striking thing about Wilson's story -- which only settles in upon

reflection

-- is how hard his life was even after he sobered up.

What, really, had that bright light and clean wind changed? He and Lois

remained

penniless, even homeless, for years. Sometimes it seemed that AA was

determined

to keep him poor forever. He had a chance to cash in by allying his message

with

a particular hospital, but his fledgling flock forbade him to do it. He

hope that John D. Rockefeller Jr. would lavish money on him, but instead

Rockefeller came through with a tiny stipend. Alcoholics Anonymous struggled

for

article in the Saturday Evening Post.

Then, as the group flourished, Wilson was attacked by jealous colleagues and

abandoned by old friends. He sank into a crushing depression, and "often just

sat for hours with his head on the desk or with his head in his hands,"

Cheever

children but was childless. Cigarettes were killing him but he couldn't stop

smoking.

He wrote of "being swamped with guilt and self-loathing . . . often getting a

misshapen and painful pleasure out of it."

It was enough to drive a man to drink.

Yet for 36-plus years of this troubled and very human life, he was able to

resist that next drink. Perhaps the most efficacious miracles are the small

ones. And because "his mind was the right lens" and his will was "the right

machine," in Cheever's words, for mass-producing that limited but crucial

victory, Bill Wilson's miracle keeps working, one person and one day at a

time.

Of Alcoholics Anonymous founder Bill Wilson, Cheever says, "He changed the

world

without knowing it, just as a way to stop drinking himself." (Helayne Seidman

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++++Message 1785. . . . . . . . . . . . One Solitary Voice by Jack B...any

info.?

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Does anyone have any information on a gentlemen by the name of Jack

B. who wrote a publication called "One Solitary Voice"?

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++++Message 1786. . . . . . . . . . . . Re: One Page At A Time (2004)

From: Arthur Sheehan . . . . . . . . . . . . 5/6/2004 10:40:00 AM

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I found Cheever's book to be a big disappointment - not based its so-called

"revelations" but from numerous factual errors in the material. Having read

most of the books cited in its bibliography, I don't get the sense Cheever

studied them very thoroughly. The book is acclaimed to be well researched but

I don't get a sense that it measures up to those claims. I'm somewhat tempted

to develop an itemized list of its errors (they are not trivial).

Outside of revealing a letter from Bill that his first drink was a beer (a few

weeks or so before drinking a Bronx cocktail) I didn't see anything that

hadn't appeared elsewhere. In regards to Bill asking for whiskey on his death

bed, the delirious comments of a dying man should not be projected as being

representative of anything other than the delirious comments of a dying man.

Regrettably there are those who persist in wanting to elevate Bill to demigod

status and deprive him of his human fallibility. All things considered,

despite his infidelities, séances, LSD, niacin, smoking himself to death,

etc., etc., Bill's shortcomings do not need to be either rationalized or

vilified. Bill left a priceless legacy of recovery, unity and service that has

saved the lives of countless millions since 1935. That legacy gets obscured by

what seems to be a disturbing and ever-increasing trend these days to churn

out titillating exposés and editorials masquerading as well-researched

biographies.

Arthur

----- Original Message -----

Sent: Tuesday, May 04, 2004 5:25 PM

Subject: [AAHistoryLovers] One Page At A Time (2004)

One Page At a Time

Susan Cheever's Chilling Glimpse of AA's Tormented 'Saint'

By David Von Drehle

Washington Post Staff Writer

Monday, May 3, 2004; Page C01

During her research for a biography of Alcoholics Anonymous co-founder Bill

Wilson, author Susan Cheever dug through the just-opened archives at

Stepping

Stones, Wilson's longtime home outside New York City. Alongside an

archivist,

she sifted reams of material that had not been looked at in decades.

One day, the archivist handed her a sheaf of wide, green-lined pages --

hourly

Cheever glanced at them. They seemed mundane.

"Keep reading," the archivist urged her.

Cheever came to the pages covering Christmas 1970. On the eve of the