December 22 in A.A. History

In 1959, Frank Shaw, 73, died [right: obituary, The New York Times; funeral notice, The Bridgeport Post]. He had been an early supporter of Bill W.’s stock market theories, and married Elsie Valentine, a close childhood friend of Bill’s wife, Lois. 

In 2015, The Saturday Evening Post republished “Alcoholics Anonymous: Freed Slaves of Drink, Now They Free Others,” authored by Jack Alexander [left]. The republished version duplicated the original article [below left: 1st page] but included a note stating, “Jack Alexander introduced Alcoholics Anonymous to a national stage when this article was published on March 1, 1941.” Additionally, it featured an Editor’s Note:

    AA had its beginnings in 1935 when a doctor and a layman, both alcoholics, helped each other recover and then developed, with a third recovering alcoholic, the organization’s guiding principles. By 1941, the group had demonstrated greater success in helping alcoholics than any previous methods and had grown to about 2,000 members. But for most of North America, AA was still unknown. Following the March 1, 1941, publication of an article in The Saturday Evening Post describing AA’s extraordinary success, inquiries began to flood in, leaving the small staff of what was then a makeshift headquarters overwhelmed. Alcoholics Anonymous tripled in size in the next year and continued to grow exponentially. Today, 75 years later, AA claims 2 million members worldwide, 1.2 million of them in the U.S.…