Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers. Anonymous
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