September 3 in A.A. History

1905: Felicia G. [left, with her mother] was born in Narvosielica, in present-day Ukraine. Her father, the fortune-hunting Polish Count Józef G., was a hard-drinking womanizer with a bankrupt estate in Russian Poland. Her mother, Eleanor Medill Patterson, was a Chicago-born newspaper heiress and the granddaughter of Joseph Medill, founder of The Chicago Tribune. Felicia would come to Alcoholics Anonymous (A.A.) in 1943, relapse briefly during her first year, and have her last drink in 1944. Marty M. served as her sponsor. Her story, “Stars Don’t Fall,” appears in the 2nd and 3rd editions of the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous.

1923: The U.S. Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce published “The German coal-tar chemical industry: production, export, and import statistics” [far right] by Dr. Frederick B. [near right, 1923], American trade commissioner to Germany.

1927: After receiving a letter from Frank Shaw of J. K. Rice & Co. inquiring about rumors of his drinking again, Bill W. replied. He was researching the Cuban sugar industry [below: cutting sugar cane on a Cuban plantation] for Frank while staying at the luxurious Hotel Sevilla in Havana, Cuba. Bill wrote and promised that he and Lois were “going to move to another place which will be more reasonable and which from now on will answer our purpose just as well.” However, Lois later recalled that they never left the Sevilla. Bill’s letter continued:

Thank you for your remittance and your letter which followed. Now a few lines for your eyes alone. I have never said anything to you about the liquor question, but now that you mention it and also for the good reason that you are investing your perfectly good money in me, I am at last very happy to say that I have had a final showdown (with myself) on the matter. It has always been a serious handicap to me, so that you appreciate how glad I am to be finally rid of it. It got to the point where I had to decide whether to be a monkey or a man. I know it is going to be a tough job, but nevertheless the best thing I ever did for myself and everybody concerned. That is that, so let us now forget about it.

Later, Lois would write that Bill drank the entire time they were in Cuba.

1930: After being fired in the fall by his “good friend” Dick Johnson (who had given him a job in Montreal, as mentioned in “Bill’s Story” on p. 4 of Alcoholics Anonymous: “Next morning I telephoned a friend in Montreal…”), Bill Wilson wrote a pledge in the family Bible to Lois to stop drinking: “Finally and for a lifetime, thank God for your love.” This would be the fourth and final pledge he wrote there [right], but I was on deck the next day, pretty much of a wreck, but I was there to start to Akron. Following this, in despair, he would refrain from making any further promises, at least in their Bible.

1938: [Possibly the 4th] Archie T. [left], who had been homeless until he moved in with his “unsuspecting” friend, Ralph, was facing the prospect of having to leave:

Something went wrong with my drinking schedule on the 3rd of September, on a Friday^* night. Instead of getting drunk in the morning and being asleep in the afternoon and being out and getting drunk in the evening and coming home after Ralph went to bed, I got tangled up somewhere and found myself at home in bed at at [sic] ten o’clock at night and he was home too. The time was drawing near when his family were [sic] returning from their vacation and I was going to have to get out of there and incapable of finding myself a room because I couldn’t stay sober long enough to face a perspective [sic] landlady and I had no money with which to pay room rent although in that marvelous alcoholic way, I always had money to drink with. Now don’t ask me to explain that. I lay in bed thinking about approaching him, and thought, “No, he’s been very good to me, he’s done a great deal for me in the past. I don’t want to bother him. I don’t want to bother anybody anymore.”

If I can’t find a solution to this problem by next Monday, this was Labor Day weekend, I’ll put an end to everything. But I finally concluded that before I did anything like that I’d better go in and talk to him. I went in with nothing on my mind for the solutions to my problems except to ask him if he would lend me $50. He got out of bed, where he’d been reading, and walked up and down the floor and said: “You don’t need $50, you need a great deal more than that.” Well, I agreed with him on that. But he said “You need a new lease on life, a new interest. I can’t give you those things, but I know someone who might.” He asked me if I’d be willing to go and talk to this woman [Sarah Klein^†]. I knew her very slightly, and I said, “Yes”. Because I would have said yes to anything or anybody who might have some answers for me because I no longer had answers for anything. So he grabbed the telephone and started to make a date for me for the next day and I started to back water [sic]. But it was too late and he made an appointment for me to see this woman the next day.

At four o’clock in the afternoon! [sic] He took me out, bought me some drinks, brought me home, and put me to bed. And I lay there somewhat quieted by the drinks and I wondered how I was going to keep an appointment at four o’clock in the afternoon. And be reasonably sober! And I finally hit on a marvelous solution. I would get up a little earlier than usual and make an effort to get drunk faster. So that I would come home knowing my own habits and sleep off the first of the day’s drinks and then go straight over and see her to keep this appointment. I did these things and they worked out that way.

I don’t know when I had my last drink. It was on Saturday morning on the third of September before Labor Day in 1938. What time of day it was in the morning I don’t know. I blanked out. I got in this car 25 minutes after six. At about half-past seven is the latest my memory serves me. What time I left there and went home and passed out I don’t know. I saw this woman, and to be brief, she offered me a chance to go down to Akron and to meet some men who had found a solution to their problem which was my problem. She offered to take me, she and her husband offered to take me there, and to do it the next day if I were willing to go. She however insisted that I make up my own mind about it, perfectly freely and without any pressure from her. This took me quite a while. I spent a long time in her house sitting there thinking about it.

I finally made the decision. I left her house with the full intention of hurrying as fast as my car would take me to the nearest saloon in getting a drink. Half way [sic] to the saloon something stopped me. I can’t tell you what it was. I know what I think it was. Today I’m sure of what it was. I’m sure that her prayers, which were all that were left to her, to do after she let go of me, that her prayers did that. However, I went home and went to bed after 18 days of continuous drinking I went home and went to bed and sweated it out all night. I don’t need to describe that part of it to you. It makes me shutter [sic] to think of it and it would make all you to [sic] shutter [sic], but I was on deck the next day, pretty much of a wreck, but I was there to start to Akron.

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^*The first Friday of September 1938 fell on the 2nd.

^†Sarah Klein [right] was referred to as “The Angel of AA” for her role in helping Archie establish AA meetings in Detroit and for her dedicated service in conveying the AA message to other alcoholics, particularly those in hospitals and prisons.

1940: The Wichita Beacon (Kansas) published an article [left] titled “Wichita Will Have Chapter Of ‘Alcoholics Anonymous.’” An unnamed hospitalized Wichitan said that “he has contacted numerous of Wichita’s habitual drunkards and during this week will seek them out to enroll them in the organization.” The article ended by noting, “In telling the story of the A.A. who began the organization, the Wichitan illustrated the fundamental help to alcoholics—religion.” (It was in Wichita, Kansas, on 27 December 1900, that Carrie A. Nation [right] first began using a hatchet—rather than the rocks and bricks she had previously used—against saloons.)

September 2 in A.A. History

1977: The three-day 20th International Conference of Young People in Alcoholics Anonymous (ICYPAA) began at the Shamrock Hilton [back­ground image] in Houston, Texas. The theme of the conference was “Sharing Everyone’s Recovery” [left: flyer/registration form; right: con­ference memorabilia].

September in A.A. History—day unknown

1905: While living at 42 Chestnut Ave. [left, recent] in Rutland, Vermont, 9-year-old Bill W.’s father, Gilman, took him for a late night buggy ride [right: AI-generated portrayal] after a bitter argument with his wife, Emily. As Bill later recalled, his father said to him, “You’ll take care of her, won’t you, Billy? You’ll be good to your mother and to little Dotty [his sister, Dorothy] too.” Then he answered his own question, “Sure you will. Sure. You’re okay, Billy.” And as his father raised a jug to his lips and took a long, slow drink, Bill knew that the explanation he was waiting for would not be given.

The next morning, Dorothy told him that their father had left them. Until that point, Bill’s mother had been away from home for extended periods. Gilman went to western Canada and Bill did not see him again for nine years. Emily sent word to her father, Fayette Griffith in East Dorset, Vermont, to come to Rutland and pick up Bill and Dorothy [left: c. 1905]. Emily stayed in Rutland for a while to make arrangements.

1912: Entering his senior year at Burr and Burton Seminary [right] in Manchester, Vermont, Bill W. was the class president, a star football player, the pitcher and captain of the baseball team, and the first violinist in the school orchestra.

1923: Bill W returned to Brooklyn Law School [left: Brooklyn Eagle Building, which housed the law school, 1923]. All of his classes were third-year courses, except for Equity, a second-year course he had failed in February. When he retook the course, he passed.

1927: [October?] On their way home from Havana, Cuba, where Bill and Lois W. had gone to investigate the predominantly U.S.-owned sugar in­dustry, they stopped in Miami Beach, Florida, to visit Bill’s father, Gilman, and his second wife, Bill’s stepmother, Christine. During this visit, Bill met his half-sister, Helen [right, 1931], born in 1916, for the first time.

1935: Bill W. began working with Hank P. [left] who was from Teaneck, New Jersey. Hank would become Bill’s first or second 12th-step success in New York City, the other being Fitz M. This event marks the beginning of A.A. in New Jersey.

1936: Bill W. returned to Akron. He wrote, likely to Lois, that his arrival was 

… a signal for a house party, which was very touching. Anne and Bob [S.] and Henrietta Seiberling [right, respectively] have done a great job. There were several new faces since spring.

1936: James Dellie “J.D.” H. [left] got sober and became A.A. #10 [though other sources say he was #8 or #17]. A native of Graves County, Kentucky, J.D. was a newspaper writer living in Akron, Ohio, and was nicknamed “Abercrombie” by Dr. Bob S. for reasons J.D. never understood. He later recalled being taken care of by “nine or ten who preceded me.” He remembers meeting Dr. Bob and hearing his…

… screwball idea about the drink problem. He was a Vermonter and I was a Southerner, and to me, he had the professional Northern type of attitude—gruff and blunt. But later, after he told me his story, I knew it was just his manner of speaking.

There is evidence that J.D. slipped a few months into sobriety but returned to A.A. after approximately four months. He would go on to establish Indiana’s first A.A. group in Evansville on 23 April 1940, which became known as the Tri-State Group. Subsequently, with Doherty “Dohr” S. [right, 1953], he would help spread A.A. throughout the state.

September 1 in A.A. History

1898: Edward Patrick “Ed” Dowling [left: at far right, with siblings, c. 1907] was born in St. Louis, Missouri. He would become a Jesuit priest and important spiritual advisor to Bill W.

1918: Major Frederick Ernest B. [near right, 1919] wote a letter [below right] to Dr. Henry Milton Whelpley, the dean of the St. Louis College of Pharmacy and editor of Meyer Brothers Druggist magazine, enclosing a questionnaire for Whelpley to complete. The War Department wanted to know the military status of all chemists. This letter was written on Chemical Warfare Service letterhead and indicated that Frederick was the Chief of Personnel there. Presumably he sent the same request to chemists throughout the U.S.

1939: “Earl T―― and the Earlytimers” met^* in Evanston, Illinois, forming the first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in the Chicago area. This meeting took place in the apartment of Earl [left] and his wife, Katie,^† at 1324 Central Street [right]. Eight people attended^‡: Earl, Katie, Dick R., Ken A., Sadie I., Sylvia K. [left], George M., and a non-alcoholic, Grace Cultice [right], who would later become the secretary of the group and be known as “The Angel of Chicago A.A.”

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^*One source notes that the meeting occurred on “a Tuesday night in September,” suggesting the 5th, 12th, 19th, or 26th, while others indicate the 13th, 20th, or 21st.

^†Some sources claim the meeting was held “at Sylvia Kauffman’s apartment on Central Street.”

^‡There are discrepancies regarding attendance; one source states there were “six brand-new A.A.s and three non-alcoholic spouses,” while another reports that “eight people were present, four men and four women, two of whom were non-alcoholics.”

1954: Bill W. began dictating “the story of myself and the story of AA from true recollection only” to Ed Bierstadt at the Hotel Bedford [right], 118 E. 40th St. in Manhattan. Bill also said,

[I]t is my purpose to start in with childhood recollections bearing upon my background and ancestry and the events of that time as they related primarily to my personality structure and the defects in it, which no doubt laid the groundwork for my alcoholism.…

I have always been intensely averse to anything autobiographical being done in print. Indeed, I have always been very much against a biography of any sort, due to our studied policy of playing the founding of this movement down, for as people in it know, this is a society which can function peculiarly well without too much sanction from the top. Of course, I realize that someday biographies may be written, and there is no legal means of preventing them. Therefore the early part of this narrative is intended to set the record somewhere near straight, and for this immediate purpose I will just try to hit a few highlights in the sketch to follow.

A transcript of this recording led to the publication of Bill W.: My First 40 Years [far left: 3rd edition] by Hazelden in 2000. The first printing consisted of only 2,500 copies, making it somewhat rare. It also served as the foundation for the first section of Robert Thomsen’s Bill W. [near left: 1st edition], first published in 1975.

September in A.A. History—day unknown

1885: Robert S. [left, as a young man] (the future Dr. Bob) entered Summer Street Elementary School [right: former school?] in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, just two blocks from his home at Central and Summer Sts.

1894: Robert S. entered St. Johnsbury Academy [near right, c. 1908], located about 0.3 miles [~480 meters] from his childhood home.

1894: Bill W.’s parents, Emily Griffith [far left, c. 1905] and Gilman W. [near leftt], were married. 

August 30 in A.A. History

1926:While camping in Holyoke, Massachusets [left: downtown, c. 1925], Lois W. [right, 1925] wrote in her diary, Diary of Two Motorcycle Hobos,

I called up Esther Congdon Blanchard, an old Brooklyn friend, and although Esther was on vacation, her mother invited us to supper at six. I foolishly said we’d be there, without consulting Bill, who had gone with a Mr. Nickelson, superintendent of the coarse grades mills, to inspect a factory. I waited and waited for him to come home, preparing everything so he could just jump into clean clothes—but all in vain. I had to call Mrs. Congdon that we couldn’t make it before 6:30.

It was then that the tent blew down and in trying to raise it I punched the pole through the fabric, thus presenting myself a nice little job of mending. The folks at the foot of the hill, seeing my predicament, invited me to wait for Bill in their house, out of the wind, and kindly offered me a cup of tea and a piece of pie. Afraid to spoil my supper, I hesitated before accepting, but it turned out I was having it, because at 7 o’clock it was again necessary to call Mrs. Congdon, this time that we couldn’t make supper but would be there later in the evening.

About 7:30 Bill and his friend showed up. They had changed plans and gone to a factory in Connecticut, fifty miles distant and stopped for supper on their way back. We had a pleasant evening when we finally did reach the Blanchards’. Gordon, whom I had not met before, is sales manager for a rival writing paper company and evidently doing splendidly, for he and Esther have a beautiful home. We are sorry to miss her and the children.

The next day Gordon conducted Bill through the mill, more modern and up-to-date than the American Writing Paper Co., but Gordon considers Willson the best paper man in the country.

1943: The Selective Service finally responded to Clarence S.’s application to become an officer in the U.S. Army, informing him that his request had been referred to another department. He had previously served a brief stint at Officer Candidate School in the U.S. Army in 1942. A month earlier, he had been classified as 1-A by the Selective Service [left: Clarence in uniform].

A.A. History—month & day unknown

1966: Ernest “Ernie” Kurtz [right: in Egypt] began his studies at Harvard University in the fall. He “ploughed a very wide and wandering path” in his 12 years at Harvard, completing an MA in history in 1968 and a PhD in the History of American Civilization in 1978.

1967: Switzerland’s first General Service Office opened as the Gremium, which means “committee” in German, and started serving German-speaking members of Alcoholics Anonymous [far left: cover of German Big Book; near left: Geneva, Switzerland].

1967: The copyright for the 1st edition of Alcoholics Anonymous [right: 1st edition, 1st printing] expired because it was never renewed.

All our editions of A.A.’s Big Book were registered with the U.S. Copyright Office in the years they were published, including the 2nd edition, in 1955. However, there was apparently a misunderstanding that the copyright for the 2nd edition would automatically renew the copyright for the 1st edition. In reality, only the additional material unique to the 2nd edition was protected. This failure to renew the copyright for the 1st edition resulted in its expiration.

Furthermore, it seems highly likely that because a number of multilith copies [left: 1st page of Chapter 5, “How It Works” from the multilith edition] were distributed in early 1939 without the required notation that they were “Loan Copies,” the original copyright on the 1st edition was never enforceable.

Whatever the reason, the consequence is that the heart and soul of the Big Book—the first 164 pages—have been in the public domain since at least 1967 and remain so today.

August 29 in A.A. History

1886: T. Henry Williams was born in South Woodstock, Connecticut. In the 1930s, he and his wife, Clarace [right], hosted meetings of the Oxford Group in their Akron, Ohio home [left]. The home became a weekly gathering place for early members of Alcoholics Anonymous, who called themselves the Alcoholic Squad of the Oxford Group. By the end of 1939, this group had begun meeting separately as an independent A.A. group.

1956: Bill W. first took LSD in California under the guidance of Gerald Heard, a British-born American historian, science writer, public lecturer, educator, and philosopher. Heard had introduced Bill to Aldous Huxley, the English writer and philosopher, as well as to British psychiatrists Drs. Humphry Osmond^* and Abram Hoffer, who were then working with schizophrenic and alcoholic patients in Canada. At the time, LSD was believed to hold psychotherapeutic potential, and research into it was being funded by the NIH and the National Academy of Sciences. Osmond and Hoffer sought to induce an experience resembling delirium tremens (DTs), hoping to shock alcoholics away from drinking. Bill took LSD with Heard and Huxley.

Among those Bill later invited to experiment with LSD—and who accepted—were Nell Wing, Father Ed Dowling, Sam Shoemaker, Lois W. (a reluctant participant), Marty M., and Helen W. These sessions took place in New York under the medical supervision of a psychiatrist from Roosevelt Hospital. The experiments would go on to have significant repercussions within Alcoholics Anonymous, yet Bill continued his own LSD experiments into 1959, and possibly into the 1960s [below: all persons named herein].

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^*Osmond coined the term psychedelic in a reply to a letter from Huxley [right], who had proposed his own coinage, phanerothyme, in a short rhyme: “To make this mundane world sublime, just half a gram of phanerothyme.” Osmond countered with a couplet of his own: “To fall in Hell or soar Angelic, you'll need a pinch of psychedelic”—from the Greek ψυχή (psyche, meaning “mind”) and δῆλος (delos, meaning “manifest”). The exchange took place in April 1956; Osmond went on to formally propose the term to the New York Academy of Sciences the following year.

Today in A.A. History—August 29–September 1

1991: The 34th International Conference of Young People in Alcoholics Anonymous (ICYPAA) took place at the Hilton San Francisco [right: c. 1971–73] in San Francisco, California [far left: registration form; near left: one bit of swag from the event].

A.A. History—month & day unknown

1966: Bill W. wrote to Herbert “Herb” M., General Manager of the General Service Office from 1960 to 1968, expressing his feelings after the General Service Conference finally agreed in April to change the ratio of Class A (alcoholic) to Class B (non‑alcoholic) Trustees on the General Service Board from 7–8 to 14–7, which marked Bill’s “last official business with the Fellowship.… Bill’s A.A. work was finished.” He wrote:

You cannot imagine how happy and grateful I am that the decision was taken that A.A. should try to go on its own at the level of the board. Chief among my sources of happiness at this outcome is the remembrance that without your good offices, nothing might have been accomplished for years, if ever.

At the January 1958 Board meeting, Herb.—then a Class B (alcoholic) trustee moved that the Board could function with more alcoholic than non-alcoholic trustees and would act on it if the Conference asked. That vote split three in favor, three opposed, and three abstaining—it didn’t pass, but it opened the debate formally within the Board.