Could you tell us about
the early days and the meetings in your home on
Clinton Street?
Answer
In those days we were
associated with the Oxford Group and one of its
founders was Sam Shoemaker and the Group was
meeting in Calvary Church. Our dept to the
Oxford Group is simply immense. We might have
found these principles elsewhere, but they did
give them to us, and I want to again record our
underlying gratitude. We also learned from them,
so far as alcoholics are concerned, what not to
do - something equally important. Father Edward
Dowling, a great Jesuit friend of ours, once
said to me, "Bill, it isn't what you people put
into A.A. that makes it good - it's what you
left out." We got both sets of notions from our
Oxford Group friends, and it was through them
that Ebby had sobered up and became my sponsor,
the carrier of this message to me.
We began to go to Oxford Group
meetings over in Calvary House, and it was
there, fresh out of Towns Hospital, that I made
my first pitch, telling about my strange
experience, which did not impress the alcoholics
who were listening. But something else did
impress him. When I began to talk about the
nature of this sickness, this malady, he pricked
up his ears. He was a professor of chemistry, an
agnostic, and he came up and talked afterward.
Soon, he was invited over to Clinton Street -
our very first customer. We worked very hard
with Freddy for three years, but alas, he
remained drunk for eleven years afterward. Other
people came to us out of those Oxford Group
audiences. We began to go down to Calvary
Mission, an adjunct of the church in those days,
and there we found a bountiful supply of real
tough nuts to crack. We began to invite them to
Clinton Street, and at this point the Groupers
felt that we were over doing the drunk business.
It seemed that they had the idea of saving the
world and besides they'd had a bad time with us.
Sam and his associates, he now laughingly tells
me, were very much put out that they gathered a
big batch of drunks in Calvary House, hoping for
a miracle. They put them upstairs in those nice
apartments and had them completely surrounded
with sweetness and light but the drunks imported
a flock of bottles and one of them pitched a
shoe out of the apartment window and it went
through a stained-glass window of the church. So
the drunks were not exactly popular when the
Wilson's showed up.
At any rate, we began to be with
alcoholics all the time, but nothing happened
for six months. Like the Groupers, we nursed
them. In fact, over in Clinton Street, we
developed in the next two or three years
something like a boiler factory, a sort of
clinic, a hospital, and a free boarding house,
from which practically no one issued sober, but
we had a pile of experience.
We began to learn the game, and
after our withdrawal from the Oxford Group - a
year and a half from the time I sobered in 1934
- we began to hold meetings of the few who had
sobered up. I suppose that was really the first
A.A. meeting. The book had not yet been written.
We did not even call it Alcoholics Anonymous;
people asked who we were and we said, "Well,
we're a nameless bunch of alcoholics." I suppose
that use of the word "nameless" sort of led us
to the idea of anonymity, which was later
clapped on the book at the time it was titled.
There were great
doings in Clinton Street. I remember those
meetings down in the parlor so well. Our eager
discussion, our hopes, our fears - and our fears
were very great. When anyone in those days had
been sober a few months and slipped, it was a
terrific calamity. I'll never forget the day, a
year and-a-half after he came to stay with us,
that Ebby fell over, and we all said, "Perhaps
this is going to happen to all of us." Then, we
began to ask ourselves why it was, and some of
us pushed on.
At Clinton Street, I did most of
the talking, but Lois did most of the work, and
the cooking, and the loving of those early
folks.
Oh my! The
episodes we had there! I was away once on a
business trip (I'd briefly got back into
business), one of the drunks was sleeping on the
lounge in the parlor. Lois woke up in the middle
of the night, hearing a great commotion. One of
the drunks had gotten a bottle and was drunk; he
had also gotten into the kitchen and had drunk a
bottle of maple syrup and he had fallen into the
coal hod. When Lois opened the door, he asked
for a towel to cover up his nakedness. She once
led this same gentleman through the streets late
at night looking for a doctor, and not finding a
doctor, then looking for a drink, because, as he
said, he could not fly on one wing!
On one occasion,
a pair of them were drunk. We had five, and on
another occasion, they were all drunk at the
same time! Then there was the time when two of
them began to beat each other with two-by-fours
down in the basement. Then one night, poor Ebby,
after repeated trials and failures, was finally
locked out one night, but lo and behold, he
appeared anyway. He had come through the coal
chute and up the stairs, very much begrimed.
So you see, Clinton Street was a
kind of blacksmith shop, in which we were
hammering away at these principles. For Lois and
me, all roads lead back to Clinton Street.
(Manhattan Group, 1955)
