April 16 in A.A. History

In 1934, James “Jim” R. returned to Baltimore, Maryland, from the Keswick Colony of Mercy [right], a religious recovery mission in Whiting, New Jersey, where he had sobered up on 7 Jun 1933, more than ten months earlier. This was over fifteen months before Bill W. entered Towns Hospital for the last time.

    Upon his return, the memory of Jim’s past behavior led his wife to insist that he demonstrate a full year of sobriety before moving back into their home at 2936 St. Paul Street [left]. He spent the next year living with his brother and, still sober, was later reunited with his family. During this time, he began working with other alcoholics. In 1940, he would become a co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous in Baltimore.

In 1939, the Cleveland Indians’ Ralston “Rollie” H. [right] got sober, becoming A.A.’s 77th member. In Akron, Dr. Bob S. hospitalized him under a false name to protect his identity. Over the course of the previous ten years, Rollie had drunk himself off four different teams: the Pittsburgh Pirates, Chicago Cubs, Cincinnati Reds, and St. Louis Browns.

In 1940, Ruth Hock responded to a letter that John D. Rockefeller, Jr. had forwarded to the Alcoholic Foundation in New York City. On March 28, Dave W. from Seattle, Washington, had written to Rockefeller, presumably after reading news reports about the February 8 dinner he hosted on behalf of Alcoholics Anonymous. This marked the beginning of a lengthy correspondence between Ruth and Dave, who would later become one of the three founding members of Seattle's first A.A. group.

In 1940, on his one-year sobriety anniversary, Rollie H. caught Bob Feller’s opening day no-hitter—the first one since 1909—and drove in Cleveland’s only run with a triple. This was presumably the occasion for him to break his anonymity, although there were no traditions or prevailing customs regarding anonymity at the time. His story was reported in newspapers nationwide. Since his alcoholism was a well-known matter of public record, his sobriety became big news, at least on sports pages [left: one such article].

In 1945, September Remember [right], a novel by Eliot Taintor about A.A., was published by Prentice-Hall. Chapter XXI, “Boomerang,” was serialized in the March and April 1945 issues of the A.A. Grapevine under the titles “The Pleasures of Pre-Publication Reading” and “from ‘September Remember’: a Novel about A.A.,” respectively. [“Eliot Taintor,” referred to in the A.A. Grapevine as “a writing team, one of whom is an A.A.,” was actually a pseudonym for Ruth F. and Gregory M., a married couple.]

In 1973, Dr. Jack Norris, Chair of the General Service Board, presented [left] Presi­dent Richard Nixon with the 1,000,000th copy of Alcoholics Anonymous at the White House.

In 2005, Nancy F., 97, died in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, after 57 years of sobriety [right: gravestone]. She joined A.A. in June 1945 at the age of 38, struggling to stop drinking. When she arrived, she didn’t believe in God and was resistant to hearing anything about Him. Later, she became a Quaker and taught English to migrant workers. Once sober, she attended high school in her 50s and went to college in her 70s, where she studied for 9½ years and graduated cum laude with a degree in behavioral science. Her story, “The Independent Blonde,” appeared in the second edition of the Big Book, Alcoholics Anonymous. She remarked, “We had several writers around and they wrote my story. I didn't write the story—someone wrote it for me. I don’t even remember being interviewed. I never thought much about my story, to tell you the truth. I don’t even think I knew it was in the Big Book.”