Other significant events in May, day unknown

In 1923, Lois W., Bill’s wife [right: Bill and Lois on their Harley-Davidson, c. mid-1920s], suffered a third ectopic pregnancy, a condition in which the fertilized egg develops outside the uterus; her first two occurred in June and July 1922. In her memoir, Lois Remembers, she wrote:

    In May 1923 the improbably happened—a third ectopic. I was tutoring a young girl in Latin when I felt the first symptoms. After another operation I made a quick recovery. By then both tubes and the complete cystic ovary had been removed. A small portion of the other ovary was kept so that I might retain my feminine characteristics, it was said. Bill was often too drunk, for days at a time, to come to see me in the hospital.
    We had both deeply desired a family. But after my second ectopic, Bill and I knew positively that we could never have children. My tubes had apparently been closed since birth. Bill, even when drunk, took this overwhelming disappointment with grace and with kindness to me. But his drinking had been increasing steadily. It seemed that after all hope of having children had died, his bouts with alcohol had become even more frequent.
    I knew I had done nothing to prevent our having children; yet somehow I could not help feeling guilty. So how could I blame him for the increase in his drinking?
    This kind of thinking made me try harder to understand him and to be tolerant when he was drunk. But there were many times when I lost my temper. He never hit me, but I hit him. I remember with shame on time toward the end of his drinking, when I was so angry as he lay drunk on the bed that I beat his chest with both my firsts as hard as I could.

In 1932, Bill W., who had been sober for five weeks, and several engineers traveled to Bound Brook, New Jersey, to investigate a new photographic process at Pathé Laboratories [left]. Bill was the managing partner of a stock-buying syndicate, which he had formed with Arthur Wheeler and Frank Winans in April. His partnership agreement specified that if he drank, he would forfeit the full value of his share, including his original investment.

    After dinner, the engineers started a poker game and invited Bill to join them, but he declined. A jug of applejack called Jersey Lightning [right] appeared, and Bill also refused their repeated offers of a drink. By midnight, he found himself reminiscing about his drinking career: the Bronx cocktail that had been his first, the brandies he had on the ship to Europe during World War I, and the French wines. It became a game to list his drinking history and wonder what he hadn’t tasted. When the engineers offered him a drink once more, it occurred to him that he had never tried Jersey Lightning. He thought, “Why not? What harm could one taste do?”
    He was drunk for three days, and when his partners heard the story, he forfeited his entire interest in the syndicate.