BILL W.
Francis Hartigan
Marty Mann, the first woman to stay sober in AA, was a lesbian and a close friend of the Wilson's, who regularly socialized with Marty and her partner.
page 8, paragraph 3, lines 7-9
Bill's grandfather Wilson also linked Mount Aeolus to a profound spiritual experience. William Wilson may have preferred inn keeping to quarrying, but inn keeping is seldom the right occupation for a hard-drinking man. His attempts to control his drinking led him to try Temperance pledges and the services of revival-tent preachers. Then, in a desperate state one Sunday morning, he climbed to the top of Mount Aeolus. There, after beseeching God to help him, he saw a blinding light and felt the wind of the Spirit. It was a conversion experience that left him feeling so transformed the he practically ran down the mountain and into town.
When he reached the East Dorset Congregational Church, which is across the street from the Wilson House, the Sunday service was in progress. Bill's grandfather stormed into the church and demanded that the minister get down from the pulpit. Then, taking his place, he proceeded to relate his experience to the shocked congregation. Wilson's grandfather never drank again. He was to live another eight years, sober.
page 10, paragraph 5 & page 11, paragraph 1
Bill Wilson never had a "social" drink in his life. Whenever he drank, he got drunk. There were times when, after taking a drink, he could delay getting drunk for a few days by marshaling his will. Once triggered, through, the compulsion was apparently undeniable. The only question was how drunk he would get, and how much damage he would do to himself and others before he was again sober.
page 26, paragraph 2
Although wives were required to live off post and the couple could be together only on weekends, Lois moved to Newport in April. During on of those weekends, they sat watching a sunset from a cliff looking out over the ocean and talking about their future together. Bill would later recall this as his first sense of what he would come to think of as s spiritual experience.
page 27, paragraph 1, lines 4-9
`The Wilson's leave-taking could hardly have been more inglorious. Bill's brief reversal of fortune actually deepened their financial plight. The Mount Royal apartment was also sublet at a loss for the remainder of the lease. The Packard was left with the dealership in hope that it could be sold for the payments still owed. The Wilsons had been living so close to the edge, they did not even have train fare out of town. When Bill tried to prevail upon his formal employer, he was told that fare would be advanced only if he could secure it with collateral. The only thing they had left that might serve the purpose was the life insurance Bill had obtained in the army. To his further humiliation, the policies were accepted and the money advanced.
page 45, paragraph 7
He got drunk and became belligerent in a hotel bar. When a house detective tried to quiet him, Bill started swinging and he was arrested and jailed. Fortunately, the next morning the judge was more impressed by Bill's status as an upper-middle-class businessman than with the hotel detective's complaint. Bill was released, but he started drinking again immediately and was soon in the midst of a blackout.
page 46, paragraph 2, lines 1-7
Lois's mother was being care for in an apartment her father and brother had created for her in the house on Clinton Street. When Bill finally pulled himself together enough to make the trip, he and Lois moved into the large front room on another floor. Bill surely must have wanted to be a support to Lois during her mother's final illness. Her mother had treated him like a son, and Bill was very fond of her. Yet when she died on Christmas Day, Bill had been drunk for days, and on the day of her funeral, he was too drunk to attend. He stayed drunk for many days thereafter.
page 46, paragraph 4
Then he got into a fight in a barroom with a taxi driver. Word got back to his employer, and he was out.
page 46, paragraph 6, lines 2 & 3
Hirschhorn wanted Bill to help him evaluate a Canadian mining company he was interested in. Bill set off for Toronto by train from New York, but he was so drunk by the time the train reached the Canadian border that he was refused entry. To make matters worse, his protests turned so belligerent that he was arrested and jailed.
page 48, paragraph 4, lines 1-5
Somehow, he eventually made his way to the golf course. He purchased a bucket of balls at the course's driving range, but his shots were so erratic and he raised so many divots that he was ejected. Bill kept drinking. He finally arrived home at five o'clock in the morning, so drunk that he fell in the entryway under the stairs and gashed his head.
page 56, paragraph 3
In the 1930's, religious conversion experiences were attaining legitimacy not previously known in modern times. Most of them occurred among people who already believed in God. They were believers who had either lost touch with, or never had a sense of connection to, something larger than they were. Spiritual conversions have in common a sudden revelatory experience followed by a 180-degree shift in the way the individual feels about himself (or herself) and the world. Connectedness, benevolence, and
optimism replace feeling of isolation, alienation, and hopelessness.
page 57, paragraph 5, lines 1-9
James Houck, a surviving member of the Oxford Group who met Bill Wilson in Baltimore in 1935, described Bill as a big, good-looking,and pleasant fellow with a ready wit. He also saw Bill as someone who "carried a powerful message of personal redemption," but Houck's assessment of Bill as an Oxford Grouper is far less positive.
"He was an atheist before he stopped drinking, and I don't think he ever really stopped being an atheist."
page 67, paragraph 6 & page 68, paragraph 1, lines 1 & 2
Anne Smith, wife of AA confounder Robert Smith, who was also directly involved in trying to help other alcoholics. So were the wives of many of the other early members. In fact, Lois considered herself a member of AA as well as Al-Alon. According to her, all the wives who joined their husbands in working with alcoholics during AA's formative years saw themselves as AA members.
page 70, paragraph 5
There is some reason to wonder about Bill's account of how he came to meet the man who would become AA's confounder. Walter Tunks was one of the founding members of the Akron Oxford Group. As such, he was someone of whom Sam Shoemaker and other New York Oxford Group members were certainly aware. As for Henrietta Seibering, given the Oxford Group's penchant for celebrity and Tunk's position in the Akron Oxford group chapter, that Tunks himself did not know Henrietta Seiberling and her efforts to help Robert Smith seems hardly credible.
Bill Wilson was many things, not the least of them a showman. He was famous for exaggerating AA's membership figures and the attendance at AA events, but it was something he did almost openly. His longtime secretary and administrative assistant, Neil Wing, reports that whenever he would put forth an inflated figure in her presence, she would try to set the record straight. Invariably, Bill would complain good-naturally that she was "trying to spoil his fun."
Wilson was also not above expanding and embellishing on a story to increase its dramatic impact. As he told it, having been abandoned virtually penniless by his partners compounded his anguish in the lobby of the Mayflower Hotel. However, the $10.00 he had was the equivalent of $120.00 in the year 2000 dollars. While this was hardly enough to survive on for very long, there was never any thought that he would have to do so.
Before his partners returned to New York, they made contact with their local allies, and a strategy for the next phase of the battle was hastily sketched out. Bill was to stay in Akron as long is it took to see the fight to its conclusion, and money would be wired to defray his expenses.
The case for the essential truthfulness of Bill's version is, however stronger than it may appear. The issue goes to the heart of his relationship to the Oxford Group. Walter Tunks may have been a household name to Sam Shoemaker and other maximum Oxford Group members in New York, but the testiness of Bill's relationship with the OG and the single-mindedness of his focus on alcoholism make it plausible that he wouldn't know much about the Akron Oxford Group.
Certain defining characteristics of Akron's social fabric also help to make Bill's version of these events credible. Akron was the home of family dynasties, the Seiberlings, the Firestones, and others, who competed with each other in the rubber business. None of them thought much of losing. The competition spilled over into most anything the families or anyone connected with them did. Consequently, the rubber capital of the world was also one of the world's most faction-ridden cities.
By the time of Bill's arrival in Akron, Robert Smith's drinking had come to have implications well beyond its effects on his family and his medical practice. Henrietta Seiberling may have been estranged from her husband, but she was still Frank Seiberling's daughter-in-law, and she was living in the gatehouse of the Seiberling estate.
Although Henrietta had been trying to help Bob Smith for two years, Bob's drinking had only gotten worse under her tutelage. Smith knew that he was powerless over alcohol, but try as he might, he could not stay sober. Give the investment Henrietta had made in him, this would not have been an acceptable outcome under any circumstances. The history behind the formation of the Oxford Group's Akron chapter made the prospect of a Seiberling failure even less palatable.
In 1928, an OG member named James Newton moved to Akron to become personal assistant to Harvey Firestone, Sr., founder of the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company. Newton quickly became close to one of Firestone's sons, Russel Firestone, also known as "Bud." Bud was bright, good-looking, well educated. He had made a good marriage, and he seemed to have inherited his father's talent for business. He had everything going for him, except for one thing: he could not control his drinking.
Newton took him in hand, and together they tried to apply the Oxford Group approach. Although Firestone seemed totally sincere, he kept drinking. All this changed when he accompanied Newton to a church conference in Denver. Other Oxford Group members were there, Sam Shoemaker among them. After the conference, Shoemaker joined them on their train trip east. During the trip, Shoemaker and Firestone had a private talk, and Bud emerged from it a changed man. He stopped drinking, and this made his father a believer in the Oxford Group.
In January 1933, Harvey Firestone sponsored and Oxford Group conference in Akron. Frank Buchman was there, accompanied by a twenty-nine-member Oxford Group team. There were ads in the local papers and stories listing the names of the Akron notables who attended meetings held in churches, factories, and other locations, including the Mayflower Hotel.
Russel Firestone and his attractive wife represented proof of the power of the Oxford Group to change lives, and they were frequently called upon to give witness. The blitz proved extremely successful: almost overnight, Akron had a large and solid
contingent of OG members. Henrietta Seiberling first learned about the Oxford Group at this conference. It is where T. Henry and Clarace Williams, who would later be mainstays of Akron OG activity with alcoholics, became members. It would also seem to be where Robert and Anne Smith learned about the Oxford Group. Bill Wilson was reluctant to contact an Akron Oxford Group member about working with an alcoholic, but it was because of the help Oxford Group members had extended to an alcoholic that there was an Oxford Group in Akron at all, and helping alcoholics would be the focus of many Akron Oxford Groupers for years to come.
All this was behind Henrietta's delighted response to a telephone call from an alcoholic Oxford Group member from New York. It was also, of course, behind the way Reverent Tunks had responded to Bill. The Oxford Group in Akron was inextricably a part of rubber family politics. Everyone in Akron who was not directly connected with the rubber families was at the least concerned not to do anything to offend them. Tunks was certainly aware of Henrietta Seiberling's Oxford Group membership. He may well have been aware of her friendship with Anne Smith and her efforts to help Robert Smith stop drinking. Telling Wilson about Seiberling or Smith may not have been viewed as sporting by the Firestones. At the same time, giving him the name of someone who would tell him about Sieberling may have come naturally to Tunks. Seiberling would later say that she had met Bill because "a man" had given Bill a name to call, and this person had referred him to her.
Henrietta Seiberling's personal investment in Bob Smith, and the unique social setting in which it took place, may help to explain why, long after Bob stopped drinking, she continued to have such a strong personal interest in Alcoholics Anonymous. That in helping Bob Smith, Bill Wilson succeeded where she had failed, may also help to explain something else. A decade later, Bill announced his plan for the establishment of a governing structure for AA based on democratic representation. Among other things, the plan was designed to guarantee that AA would never become an "Oxford Group for alcoholics."
Seiberling reacted by announcing publicly that "Bill Wilson had finally lost his mind completely." To defeat this proposal, she then mounted a personal campaign, which, included traveling to AA groups around the country to urge its rejection. The campaign had the tone of a personal vendetta against Bill, and in a way, it was. There had never been another example of a nonmember taking such an extraordinary interest in the affairs of the fellowship, but Henrietta and many of the others who were so vehemently opposed to Bill's conference plan seemed to sense how much was at stake. If the ultimate control of AA were to devolve to the groups, a battle for the heart and soul of the organization would be lost. With the group conscience determining the direction of the fellowship, AA would be immune to the importuning of those both within and outside the fellowship who thought that alcoholics should undergo the sort of complete spiritual overhaul the Oxford Group advocated. With the group conscience in charge, the constant flooding of newcomers into AA would guarantee that the organization's sole focus would
forever be exactly what Bill had envisioned for it: helping alcoholics stay sober.
page 77, paragraphs 2-6 & pages 78 & 79
The sense of fellowship and joy that Bill identified very early among sober alcoholics can commonly be found in AA today. He thought its source lay in their being people who had found a common solution in an all-consuming, life-threatening problem. To Bill, this joy was the glue that held the fellowship together. He would always try to nourish it in everything he did and said. In time, Bill's interest in preserving this aspect of AA would be reflected in one of the most interesting features of the fellowship's decision-making process. Alcoholics Anonymous may be the only organization in the world that, in adherence to one of its governing principles, can fail to take a proposed action because of the opposition of a minority of its members. It was Bill's hope that this principle would help guard against AA ever straying from its primary purpose of helping alcoholics to stay sober.
page 99, paragraph 2
The regular Tuesday night meeting of the alcoholic squadron had no such problem. The ground rules for this emerging organization had yet to be worked out, but there was one thing he and Bob had been sure of from the first: there could be leaders, but no bossed. They had to stick together, all of them. No decision could be taken in opposition to what the majority wanted.
What is more, no decision was to be taken that created divisions, or classes, of members. Everyone had to be able to feel at home. No matter what their differences in money, position, or background might be, in regard to the reason that brought them together, they were all equal. No AA member has ever more fervently believed in, or more closely adhered to this principle than Bill Wilson.
page 100, paragraphs 1 & 2
Bill said he was an agnostic at the time of his spiritual awakening, but an agnostic is someone who does not know whether there is a God or not. Wilson also said many times that before he stopped drinking, he did not believe there could be a God in a world fill with horrors. This isn't agnosticism, it's atheism. In 1934, atheism based on the incompatibility between the seeming godlessness all around one and the notion of a loving creator was far from uncommon.
page 121, paragraph 4
From AA's earliest beginnings, Bill also promoted and open-door policy for gay and lesbian alcoholics. Marty Mann, the first woman to stay sober in AA, was a lesbian, attending her first meeting in April 1939.
page 182, paragraph 1, lines 1-3