1934: Bill W.
[far left] was admitted to Charles B. Towns Hospital
[near right] for the third time. His brother-in-law, Dr. Leonard V. Strong
[near left], once again paid for his stay. Dr. William D. Silkworth
[far right] pronounced Bill hopeless and informed his wife, Lois, that Bill would likely
need to be committed. After leaving the hospital, Bill felt broken and scared;
he stayed sober for a brief period, driven primarily by his fear of drinking
again. Eventually, he found work on Wall Street, which helped him regain some
of his confidence, but only briefly.
1968:At the 28th International Congress on Alcohol and Alcoholism in
Washington, DC, Dr. Jean-Pierre von Wartburg
[left, 1976] of the University of Bern, Switzerland, received the first E. M. Jellinek
Memorial Fund Award for outstanding contributions to the advancement of
knowledge on alcohol and alcoholism. Dr. Wartburg had conducted recent
experiments that “isolated an abnormal liver enzyme which oxidized alcohol
five to six times faster than the
normal enzyme in a test tube.” He suspected
that the abnormal version of the enzyme, alcohol dehydrogenase, “may be
significant in alcoholism”
[right: “Liver Enzyme May Be Drinking Factor,”
The News and Observer (Raleigh, North Carolina), 18 September 1968,
p. 41]. The award included a bronze bust of E. M. “Bunky” Jellinek
[left] and $1,000 [~$9,600 in 2026].
The congress was the largest gathering ever dedicated to the prevention and
treatment of alcoholism. The Governor of Iowa, Harold E. Hughes [left], also
delivered a speech at this convention in which he announced,
I am an alcoholic. I was born an alcoholic. I never took a normal drink in my life. I realized in my late 20s that for me, to drink was to die. I could not drink and maintain sobriety [right: “Alcohol Under the Microscope,” The Windsor [Ontario] Star, 17 September 1968, p. 23].
1975: [The New York Times says the 16th] John “Jack” Alexander [left], 73,
died
[right: New York Times obituary, 20 September 1975]. His obituary in the West Texas Register credited him as the
newspaperman who made “Alcoholics Anonymous a major organization by the
articles he wrote about its work,” referring to the article he wrote titled
“Alcoholics Anonymous: Freed Slaves of Drink, Now They Free Others” in the
March 1941 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. This article resulted in
6,000 inquiries to the New York City office of the Alcoholic Foundation over
the next nine months. Jack also served as a Class A [non-alcoholic] Trustee of
the Alcoholic Foundation from 1951–56.
1976: The A.A. Loners
meeting-in-print merged with the original
Internationalists meeting-in-print.
1979: Hazelden published
Not-God: A History of Alcoholics Anonymous [far left: cover, 1st printing] by Dr. Ernest
“Ernie” K. [near left].
1979: A second Swiss General
Service Office was opened in Geneva to serve French- and Italian-speaking
members and groups:
Alcolisti Anonimi Regione della Svizzera Italiana (AASRI). The first,
serving German-speaking members, had opened in Lucerne in 1967.
1979: Norris Embry
[near right] (1921-1981) created an 18"×23⅝" mixed media work, titled “Alcoholics
Anonymous,” that includes oil stick and watercolor on paper. The piece
[far right] was described by the curator of the Five Colleges and Historic Deerfield
Museum Consortium as being a depiction of “non-representational profiles of
men with highball glasses, an eye and amorphous colorful shapes with [the]
word NO scattered through image.”
No comments:
Post a Comment