September 4 in A.A. History

In 1897, John S. [right: as a young man] was born in Houlton, Maine, to Rev. Richard and Kate Bolton S.
    In the mid-1930s, he would become an oil tanker captain. In 1946, would get sober in Alcoholics Anonymous (A.A.), where he was known as “Captain Jack.” He would play a crucial role in establishing the Loners Internationalists Meeting and its confidential bulletin, a meeting-in-print for “Loners,” “Homers,” “Internationalists,” “Port Contacts” (who serve as contacts for Internationalists visiting their port city), and “Loner Sponsors.” He and hundreds of Internationalists like him, who sailed the seven seas, would carry the A.A. message wherever they dropped anchor, significantly contributing to A.A.’s phenomenal worldwide growth.

September 3 in A.A. History

In 1905, Felicia G. [right, with her mother] was born in Narvosielica, in present-day Ukraine. Her father was a hard-drinking womanizer with a bankrupt estate in Russian Poland, the fortune-hunting Polish Count Józef G. 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. became her sponsor. Her story, “Stars Don’t Fall,” appears in the 2nd and 3rd editions of the Big Book, Alcoholics Anonymous.

In 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 [left: cutting sugar cane on a Cuban plantation] for Frank while staying at the luxurious Hotel Sevilla in Havana, Cuba. Bill 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.

In 1930, after being fired in the fall by his “good friend” Dick Johnson, who had given him a job in Montreal—mentioned in his Big Book story on p. 4: “Next morning I telephoned a friend in Montreal…”—Bill W. wrote a pledge to Lois to stop drinking in the family Bible: “Finally and for a lifetime, thank God for your love.” This would be the fourth and final pledge he wrote there [right]. Following this, in despair, he would refrain from making any further promises, at least in their Bible.

In 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 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]

---

*The first Friday of September 1938 fell on the 2nd.
^†Sarah Klein [right] was known as “The Angel of AA” for her role in helping Archie establish A.A. meetings in Detroit and for her dedication in carrying the A.A. message to alcoholics, particularly n hospitals and prisons.

In 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 Carry 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

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

September 1 in A.A. History

	In 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 St. [right].

	Eight† people attended: Earl, Katie, Dick R., Ken A., Sadie I., Sylvia K. [left], George M., and a non-alcoholic, Grace Cultice [right, 1951], who would later become the secretary of the group and be known as “The Angel of Chicago A.A.”

^*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.
^**Other 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.”

In 1954, Bill W. began dictating “the story of myself and the story of AA from true recollection only” to Ed B. 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 [left: 3rd edition cover] 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. [right: 1st edition cover], first published in 1975.