Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers. Anonymous
dare ask people to their home for the same reason.
Dr. Bob’s alcoholism became more and more noticeable to the children as they grew older. He began to promise them, as well as Anne and their few remaining friends, to stop drinking. “Promises,” he said, “which seldom kept me sober even through the day, though I was very sincere when I made them.”
Smitty’s earliest recollections of his father’s drinking, as recorded by Bill Wilson in 1954, a few years after Dr. Bob’s death, were mostly about its effect on his mother.
“She was very much opposed to it and had quite a problem with Dad in that when he got on a real toot, he wouldn’t come home. I imagine I was 13 or 14. I know I wasn’t old enough to drive, so I couldn’t go looking for him.
“Mother tried time after time to extract promises from him. He was always going to give it up. He said he would never touch another drink in his life.
“I remember one time she became so desperate that she took me upstairs and said, ‘Now I’m going to take a drink of whiskey, and when he comes home tonight, you tell him I’m drunk.’ She took a drink of it and tried to act like she was drunk. It ended up in quite an uproar and didn’t accomplish much. I don’t think he thought she was drunk. He was just embarrassed by the show she was putting on. But you can see how desperate she was to show him what he was doing to himself. I don’t think she ever had a drink before or after.
“It was 1933, and times were awful hard,” Smitty continued, “not only with Dad, but with everybody. Akron was a one-industry town, and when the rubber shops were down, everything was down. We had a second car, but not enough money to license it. The mortgage moratorium was all that saved our house. And we ate enough potato soup to float that.
“Dad had almost no practice left. He would be in hiding, or home and indisposed. Mother lied to his patients, and so did Lily, his office girl.
“He very seldom drove when he had been drinking,” Smitty said. “He had the boys in the central garage trained to drive him home.
“Mother always tried to frisk him when he came in. She wanted to see if she could possibly keep him in good shape for the next morning. But Dad had ways of getting around it. He wore heavy driving mittens during the winter, car heaters being very poor then. He’d put half a pint of medicinal alcohol in one of them and toss it up on the second-story sun porch.
“After Mother had frisked him, he would go upstairs and get his whiskey. When he came down again, it would be obvious he had been drinking. She never did figure that one out.”
That wasn’t the only trick Dr. Bob had up his glove. Like many another alcoholic before, after, and yet to come, he was expert at obtaining and maintaining his supply.
“If my wife was planning to go out in the afternoon, I would get a large supply of liquor and smuggle it home and hide it in the coal bin, the clothes chute, over doorjambs, over beams in the cellar and in cracks in the cellar tile,” he said. “I also made use of old trunks and chests, the old-can container, and even the ash container.”
He never used the water tank on the toilet, because “that looked too easy.” It was a good thing, too, for if Bob was
Number 855 faced Ardmore Avenue in full respectability.
Its rear provided discreet spots for hiding bottles.
expert at hiding, Anne was expert at seeking. This was one place she inspected regularly.
Bob also told the bootlegger to hide booze at the back steps, where he could get to it at his convenience.
“Sometimes I would bring it in my pockets,” he said. “I used also to put it up in four-ounce bottles and stick several in my stocking tops. This worked nicely until my wife and I went to see Wallace Beery in ‘Tugboat Annie’ [where Beery pulled the same stunt in an attempt to deceive Marie Dressler], after which the pant-leg and stocking racket was out.”
When beer became legal in early 1933, Dr. Bob thought this might provide a solution to satisfy everybody. And he would not actually have to stop drinking. “It was harmless,” he said. “Nobody ever got drunk on beer.”
Perhaps Bob had superhuman powers of persuasion. Perhaps Anne was in such a state of desperation, she was willing to try anything. In any case, it was with her permission that he filled the cellar with beer.
“It was not long before I was drinking at least a case and a half a day,” he said. “I put on 30 pounds of weight in about two months, looked like a pig, and was uncomfortable from shortness of breath.”
Then it occurred to him that if he was “all smelled up with beer,” nobody could tell what he had been drinking. So he began to needle the beer with straight alcohol. There were the usual results. “And that ended the beer experiment,” Dr. Bob said.
During this beer-drinking phase, in 1934, Smitty had gone with his father to visit Dr. Bob’s mother and old friends in Vermont. “I was 16,” Smitty recalled, “and got to do most of the driving, because he was drinking. I remember that he was afraid Vermont might still be dry, so we loaded up with cases and cases of beer at the New York line. Then we found out it was wet.”
Sue was about the same age, in high school, when her father’s problem with alcohol dawned on her. “I remember Mom worrying about where he was, or making excuses,” she told Bill Wilson in 1954. “But it really hit me when my friends came to the house. Dad got irritable, and I couldn’t understand why. I finally asked Mom, and she told me. He never appeared to be tight, but my friends and I would be downstairs, and he would get annoyed because we were in his way when he wanted to get to his supply in the cellar. My friends just thought he was cross.
“Later, when I knew what was going on, he would get touchy about the subject and would get into little arguments with you. They weren’t anything serious. Just enough. Well, he was New England and bullheaded. And I was bullheaded. Dad’s drinking never made him mean. He was mostly irritable. He sort of snuck in most of the time. Or he was in bed resting. It got worse and worse. We were in debt, and he was sick many mornings until noon.”
The money problems grew. Sue remembered how her mother would have to pay debts with money received for Christmas or birthdays. Emma K. recalled commenting on a beautiful little statuette that had been a Christmas present during this period, only to hear Anne reply, “Oh, my dear, if only they had sent food instead!”
“No, I didn’t get annoyed at him, but he did put you on the spot a lot of times,” Sue said. “You couldn’t be loyal to him and Mom both. I felt that put me in the middle.
“I remember once he asked me to get his bottle for him. I wouldn’t do it, and he offered me money. He finally got up to ten dollars, and I still wouldn’t do it. That was when I realized I didn’t know much about what was going on with him—how much he wanted it.
“I think he felt guilty about things, and he began to make promises to us after he knew we were aware of the problem. I had a dime bank, and of course, I knew how to get the dimes out. I’d open it and find maybe two or three extra dollars there. I think he tried to make it up to me that way.”
IV. The physician as co-workers see him
Those who worked with Dr. Bob, while he was drinking and while he was recovering, saw different aspects of the man and his problem.
Starting in the late 1920’s, Dr. Bob had been going quite often to St. Thomas Hospital (where he was appointed to the courtesy staff in 1934). It was on one of his first visits, in 1928, that he met Sister Mary Ignatia. She had taught music, but after being ill, was assigned less strenuous duties in the admitting office at St. Thomas, which was run by the Sisters of Charity of Saint Augustine, as it is today.
“Doctor would call and say, ‘Sister, may I have a bed?’ remembered Sister Ignatia. “I would always recognize his voice with its rich New England accent.