Chapter 4 Father Ed Receives

When Father Dowling discovered the Alcoholics Anonymous movement in the Fall of 1940, then began experimenting with setting up twelve step groups himself, and finally got to meet Bill Wilson himself in December of that year, it was one of the most momentous few months of his life. As Father Robert Fitzgerald, S.J. noted in his article in The Catholic Digest,¹⁰⁴

But Father Ed meant it. He was able to apply what he learned from his study of the twelve steps to all the small group programs and religious activities he was involved in all over the United States: Recovery Inc., the Montserrat Circle, Divorcées Anonymous, the Catholic Action summer school programs, the Christian Family movement, his writing for The Queen's Work, and so on.

But meeting Bill Wilson seems to have also given him a personal boost that filled him with a new life and creativity and dedication to serving God by helping his fellow human beings.

Father Ed and Bill Wilson:
Two Spiritual Masters
Chapter 5
Discovering A.A. and

Meeting Bill W: 1940

Fr. Dowling founds the first A.A. meeting in St. Louis on October 30, 1940: In April 1939, the new Alcoholics Anonymous movement published 4,730 copies of its Big Book, which set out its famous twelve steps and explained in careful detail how the program worked. The Big Book said they had one hundred members, who were centered mainly in Akron, New York City, and Cleveland.

By the Fall of 1940 (when Father Dowling first became involved with the Alcoholics Anonymous program), there were A.A. groups holding regular weekly meetings in twenty-two American cities, still concentrated mostly on the East Coast and in the upper Midwest (although there were now A.A. groups in Little Rock, Arkansas; Houston, Texas; and in San Francisco and Los Angeles, California). The total membership however was still small—1,400 men and women, according to A.A.’s New York office—and not very many copies of the first printing of the Big Book had sold.¹⁰⁵

We are told that Father Ed Dowling first became involved in A.A. during the Fall of 1940 when he “was contacted by F., who said his son-in-law had a drinking problem. Of course, it was F. himself who had the drinking problem and was seeking help.” Father Ed took F. up to Chicago with him, along with four other problem drinkers whom he had recruited there in St. Louis, to see how a well-run A.A. group actually functioned.¹⁰⁶

How did Father Ed know about Chicago A.A.? He had important Catholic connections in that city, dating back to when he had been a young Jesuit doing his Regency teaching at Loyola Academy in 1926-1929. But several of the Chicago A.A. members were newspaper people, and he continued to keep in contact with the newspaper world for his whole life, so he may also have known about A.A. through those friendships.¹⁰⁷

Mrs. Marty Mann commented on this later on, in an article with an interesting topic: “The Pastor’s Resources in Dealing with Alcoholics: Alcoholics Are Consumed with Guilt; They Do Not Need to Be Reminded of Their Sins.”¹⁰⁸ Father Dowling, Marty said, was a superb example of the good pastor: instead of condemning and scolding alcoholics from the pulpit and increasing their sense of being stigmatized, he climbed down out of the pulpit, took these alcoholics by the hand, and climbed on a railroad train with them and went with them to visit the Chicago A.A. group. This good priest, Marty said, who was both extraordinarily brave and totally humble, was one of the stories from early A.A. that showed us how to do it right:
Ten years ago when there were not many groups, a Catholic priest in St. Louis shepherded several alcoholics whom he was trying to interest in A.A. up to Chicago where they could see it for themselves. The St. Louis group was started.¹⁰⁹
It is also important, on a pastoral note, to pay special attention to one line from the obituary which Bill W. wrote for Fr. Dowling after his death in 1960: “St. Louis old-timers recalled how he helped start their group; it had turned out to be largely Protestant, but this fazed him not a bit.”¹¹⁰ The truly good people who were associated with the new A.A. movement—the ones who had really worked the twelve steps or their equivalent in their own spiritual system—acted out of pure love toward all. Catholics like Fr. Dowling and Fr. Pfau helped Protestants in the same way that they helped Catholics, with never a thought as to which was which, and the Protestants responded with undying gratitude.

Chicago A.A. 1937-1940: The central figure in early Chicago A.A. was an alcoholic named Earl Treat, who originally came from the Akron area. His story, “He Sold Himself Short,” is in the 2nd, 3rd and 4th eds. of the Big Book. In 1937, Earl’s father brought him back to Akron to visit the newly formed A.A. group there. He sobered up with the help of Dr. Bob and the early Akron group, and returned to Chicago, where he had one brief slip in July 1937, but then sobered up again.¹¹¹ As Earl explained it, he was at first totally on his own, but “I would go to Akron every two months for a meeting in order to maintain my sobriety and work with others.” “It took a year before I could find anyone to work with [in Chicago], and two years without the book before we had six people.”¹¹²

Sylvia Kauffmann (whose story, “The Keys to the Kingdom,” is in the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th eds. of the Big Book) was another important member of the early Chicago A.A. group. Earl Treat sent her to Akron, and after spending time there and in Cleveland, she came back to Chicago where she eventually got sober on September 13, 1939.¹¹³

On September 20, 1939, Chicago had its first official group meeting in Earl Treat’s apartment in the Chicago suburb of Evanston. There were only eight present: Earl, Earl’s wife Katie, Sylvia Kauffmann, Dick R., Ken A., Sadie I., George M., and a nonalcoholic, Grace Cultice (Sylvia Kauffmann’s personal secretary), who became the group’s secretary. But the group grew with amazing speed over the next few months, and in January 1940, when Bill Wilson came to visit, there were thirty people present at Sylvia’s apartment for the dinner and meeting.¹¹⁴ And by the end of that year, when Jack Alexander visited, he reported in the Saturday Evening Post article which he wrote immediately afterward, that “in Chicago, twenty-five doctors work hand in hand with Alcoholics Anonymous, contributing their services and referring their own alcoholic patients to the group, which now numbers around 200.” One of the things that most impressed Jack (as a newspaperman) was that in Chicago, “on one of the most influential newspapers in the country, I found that the city editor, the assistant city editor, and a nationally known reporter were A.A.s, and strong in the confidence of their publisher.¹¹⁵ That would have similarly impressed Father Ed, an old newspaperman himself.

So Father Dowling and his little group from St. Louis were able to see a large and vigorous A.A. community at work when they visited Chicago in the Fall of 1940.

In an article he wrote for the A.A. Grapevine later on, Jack Alexander described how his attitude toward the Alcoholics Anonymous movement changed as he continued his research. He began his research, he said, by spending a week talking with Bill Wilson and the New York A.A. group. At the end of the week, he told Bill that he frankly did not believe all the marvelous things he was being told. The A.A.’s sounded to him like actors playing a role on stage, and his ear did not seem to be hearing the ring of truth. So Bill took Jack to Philadelphia to spend all day Sunday, December 15, 1940, and then took him that Sunday night to see the people in Akron. While they were there, Dr. Bob drove Jack and Bill to visit the A.A. group in Cleveland, so he could see yet a further group in action.¹²⁰

Jack Alexander said that he began to lose a little of his skepticism by the time they had finished talking to the people in Cleveland, as he began to note that, although the alcoholics in all the different cities came from widely different backgrounds—factory workers, lawyers, accountants, professional men (whom Jack characterized as being kind of “oily”), along with people in hospitals and psychopathic wards who had recently been undergoing the blind staggers—they nevertheless told the same stories and displayed the same patterns.¹²¹

But the grand tour of early A.A. did not stop there. They continued on, to Chicago and finally to Father Dowling’s town, St. Louis. As Jack Alexander described it:

The important thing to note for our story here, is that the little A.A. group in St. Louis which had been created by a St. Louis journalist who became a priest—created to help some of his hard-drinking buddies from the newspaper world—was the force that made Jack Alexander a believer. What an extraordinary thing Father Dowling accomplished for alcoholics all over the world, by struggling through the pain of his arthritis to climb on a train to Chicago, and setting up meetings in St. Louis hotel rooms instead of staying at home in the evenings and giving his legs and back a rest, and putting his personal time and energy into trying to help a little group of people who were despised by almost everyone else, simply because he was a good man and a courageous priest.

It is perhaps not surprising then that the first black A.A. group in the United States was formed in St. Louis. They held their first meeting on January 24, 1945, with five members present, and designated Torrence S. as their secretary. Proud of their accomplishment, they called themselves the “AA-1 Group.” Eight months later, in September, another member of the group, Howard W., wrote Bobbie Burger at the Alcoholic Foundation (the central A.A. office in New York City) asking the New York office and the A.A. Grapevine to “withhold publicity about our group that may occasion controversial discussions of racial problems within A.A.” That is, the existence of the black A.A. group was kept almost totally secret, at their request, for fear that white racists would try to raise a public controversy about it. But at the beginning of 1946, still going strong, they celebrated with their First Annual Dinner Meeting with “two Negro doctors, the secretary of the YMCA, and a representative of the Urban League” as honored guests.¹²⁴

Because of the St. Louis black A.A. group’s desire to stay out of the public limelight, even the people in New York forgot about their existence, and very quickly. By 1955, the official New York A.A. position, which subsequently was simply repeated over and over for the next half century, was that the first black group was formed in Washington D.C. in March 1945. But in fact the order in which the first three black A.A. groups were started was St. Louis on January 24, 1945, Chicago in March 1945, and Washington D.C. in April 1945.¹²⁵

Father Ed meets Bill W.—early December 1940—at the A.A. clubhouse on West 24th Street. In September 1936, when Lois’ father died, the bank foreclosed on the mortgage on the house he owned at 182 Clinton St. in Brooklyn. But the bank told Lois and Bill Wilson that they could continue living there for twenty dollars a month until the house was sold.¹²⁶ In April 1939, that day finally came. The very week the Big Book was published, the bank told Bill and Lois that they had found a buyer for the house, and that they had to leave now.¹²⁷ They moved all their belongings out of 182 Clinton St. on April 26, 1939, and for almost two years, they had to move continually from place to place (54 different places according to Lois).¹²⁸

In February 1940, the first ever A.A. clubhouse was set up at 334½ West 24th St. in New York City, and Bill and Lois finally decided to take advantage of that, and on November 4, 1940, moved into one of the two small upstairs bedrooms where they stayed for about a year.¹²⁹ Lois’ diary entry for June 11, 1940, described the clubhouse building: “One large room, with fireplace and paneled in knotty pine, and kitchen are downstairs. Upstairs there is a large room with skylights and two small bedrooms and two toilets.” The bedroom was barely big enough for a double bed, but she tore out some of the shelving to give a bit more room. Then she painted the walls white and the trim red, and sewed curtains to put over the window and to cover the fronts of the orange crates which she had converted into dressers.¹³⁰

There was almost no real privacy. The other upstairs bedroom was used by old Tom Mulhall, a former New York fireman living on his fireman’s pension, who had been rescued from the Rockland Asylum to make coffee for the A.A.’s, work in the kitchen, put coal in the furnace, and help lead drunks outside if they got too unruly.

This was where Father Dowling met Bill Wilson for the first time. It is important to note that Dowling had not only read the Big Book before he traveled to New York, but had also visited the highly successful Chicago A.A. group, and begun working with alcoholics himself in St. Louis (where his little A.A. group had already held its first meeting on October 30, 1940).¹³¹

The date was sometime at the end of 1940. Bill and Lois did not actually move into the A.A. clubhouse until November 4, so the visit had to have taken place after that point. In the earliest account of Dowling’s visit,¹³² it was described as a “wild” and “wintry” night where “hail and sleet beat on the tin roof,” and Father Ed’s black hat was described as “plastered with sleet.” It could have been the end of November, but was more likely early December. Father Ed’s visit had to have taken place before December 15, because that was when Bill Wilson went out of town with Jack Alexander to visit the A.A. group in Philadelphia.

Bill W. had been walking the path of disappointment and suffering: It is necessary to remember how rough the preceding year and a half had been for Bill Wilson. When they finally got the Big Book published in April 1939, they had started to settle back into warm fantasies about being able to take it easy now. The book would instantly be a huge publishing success, and they would start raking in unbelievably large sums of money. Everyone knew—or thought they knew—how much money successful popular authors made! Alcoholics Anonymous would rapidly gain tens of thousands of members, they fantasized, and would set up alcoholism treatment centers and clubhouses all over the country. But the reality, sadly, was one disappointment after another.
April 1939 — 4,730 copies of the Big Book were printed—many in early Alcoholics Anonymous thought the book would be an instant success and Bill Wilson and Hank Parkhurst thought it was going to earn them a million dollars.¹³³ But hardly any copies sold.

An editor at the Reader’s Digest had promised them a story about A.A. as soon as the book was published, but he now denied any such agreement.

April 26, 1939 — Bill and Lois had to move out of their home at 182 Clinton Street in Brooklyn and were homeless for the next two years.

April 29, 1939 — Morgan Ryan (one of the first two Roman Catholics in A.A.) appeared on Gabriel Heatter's radio program. The A.A. group mailed out 20,000 post cards, addressed to all of the physicians in the U.S. east of the Mississippi, expecting thousands of orders for the book. But they only got twelve replies, only two of which were serious orders for the new book.

September 30, 1939 — Fulton Oursler, the editor of Liberty magazine, published an article called “Alcoholics and God,” which brought in around 800 inquiries about A.A., a number which was better than anything they had accomplished before, but was still disappointingly small by typical popular market book publishing standards.

October 14, 1939 — the review of the Big Book in the Journal of the American Medical Association was very unfavorable—the medical profession looked like it was going to be almost totally against them.

February 8, 1940 — John D. Rockefeller Jr. held a dinner for A.A. (Nelson Rockefeller ended up representing his father, who was ill). It raised a little money for A.A.—$2,200—and they continued to provide about $3,000 a year for several years after that. But this was still far indeed from the huge financial and organizational success which Bill Wilson had been dreaming of.

April, 1940 — Hank Parkhurst, who had been sober for four years, had been Bill Wilson’s closest A.A. associate on the East Coast, in some ways closer than Dr. Bob—but now Hank started drinking again. He wanted to divorce his wife and marry Ruth Hock (Hank and Bill’s secretary). She turned him down, but this made Hank’s drunken rages (and dangerously violent temper) even worse. Hank also never forgave Bill W. for moving the Alcoholic Foundation’s central office from New Jersey to New York City (which Bill had done in March).

May/June, 1940 — Hank Parkhurst went to Cleveland and made the totally and ludicrously false claim that Bill W. was getting rich by taking huge sums of money from Rockefeller, from Big Book sales, and from other A.A.-related sources, and was putting the money in his own pocket. Hank teamed up with Henrietta Seiberling in Akron and Clarence Snyder in Cleveland to start an anti-Bill Wilson movement. Clarence kept on attacking Bill for a long time afterward, and claiming that he (not Bill) was the real founder of A.A.
In fact, events were getting ready to change in a much more positive direction, but at the time Father Dowling made his visit to meet Bill, there was no way that Bill could have known what was in the process of taking place.
October, 1940 — Bill W. went to Philadelphia to try to get to Curtis Bok, one of the owners of the Saturday Evening Post, to do an article on A.A. But there had already been enough disappointments in that area, from the Reader’s Digest article that totally fell through to the Liberty magazine article that got published but helped much less than they had hoped.

December 1940 — Saturday Evening Post reporter Jack Alexander was assigned to the story, but after his initial conversations with Bill W. and the New York A.A. group, told Bill frankly that he did not believe what the group was telling him.

March 1, 1941 — but then when the Jack Alexander article was actually published in the Saturday Evening Post it was glowingly positive, and beautifully and compellingly written. In response, over 6,000 appeals for help were received in the A.A. postbox in New York. Over the course of that year, A.A. membership increased from 2,000 to 8,000.

April 11, 1941 — Bill and Lois Wilson were finally able to obtain their own home (Stepping Stones), a seven-room house on almost two acres of land in Bedford Hills, New York.

Bill Wilson had been trying to fight his disappointments by working even harder at spreading the A.A. message. But as Robert Thomsen described the A.A. leader’s private feelings (relying on Bill Wilson’s autobiographical tape recordings):¹³⁴

His depression, his deep dissatisfaction, was beginning to color everything; even his A.A. talks were beginning to take on a flavor of self-pity and self-dramatization. After one such talk in Baltimore, when he had moved in heavily on the horrors and the terrifying isolation of the alcoholic, a young clergyman came up to him at the close of the meeting. He thanked Bill and then went on to say that one thing he did not understand was why Bill put such emphasis on his great misfortune. It seemed to the young man that it was indeed these very experiences, terrible as they were, which in the end had humbled Bill so completely that his eyes and his heart had been opened, and had led directly to the wondrous experience of A.A. …. “You A.A.s,” he said, “are certainly a privileged people.”

These remarks from a man he would never see again had a profound and frightening effect on Bill. He’d known that something was wrong, desperately wrong, but he had tried to override it ….

As he battled these questions … on many nights …. this stock-taking led to a depression which, in its prolonged intensity, was worse than any he had experienced since Towns Hospital. And with the depression there was a sense of guilt because he could feel this way, he who had been given so much, whom others looked up to. This, in time, led to a new and hideous fear. What if he should break, if he, Bill W., should crack up as he had seen other men crack …?