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)
