Once the family groups had a name, being separate from AA meant building everything a fellowship needs, and finding out who it was for.
“…we would look up in the atlas to find the nearest group.”
The letters came from Nebraska, or from up in Minnesota, and the people who wrote them were desperate. At Al-Anon’s office in New York, a room upstairs at an AA clubhouse, a volunteer would open the atlas and look for the nearest family group.
If it was within 400 miles, they were glad to tell the writer. A few years later, as Margaret D. remembered it, the nearest group might be only 200 miles away, and she couldn’t help feeling grateful.
By the spring of 1952 the family groups had a name, Al-Anon Family Groups, and AA’s Twelve Steps for their own (Captain of My Soul tells how). Now they had to build everything a fellowship needs, from money to a newsletter, and learn who Al-Anon was for.
That April AA’s second General Service Conference gave two sessions to the family groups, and nearly half its 77 delegates spoke. The family groups, it concluded, were “filling a distinct need,” with their own committees and their own program, and didn’t impinge on AA.
The money started coming before anyone asked for it. A man from Lynn, Massachusetts, sent the first contribution, and the next came from Syracuse, New York, Montgomery, Alabama, and Yankton, South Dakota. They gave the office, Anne B. remembered, the courage to ask the groups.
In March 1952 the office asked each member for about a dollar twice a year, “on the same basis as the A.A. groups do.” That year only 151 of its 441 groups sent a contribution.
The office took in about $2,800 in 1952, most of it in gifts. From 1955 on, the pamphlets and books it sold brought in more than members gave, as they have through most of Al-Anon’s history.
The newsletter didn’t have a name at first. Members sent in ideas, among them We Wives, from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan; Mrs. Grapevine, from Richmond, Indiana; and The Stepette, from Benton Harbor, Michigan. In 1954 it became the Family Group Forum (Go deeper tells where that name came from).
Literature took longer. At first the office had only two pieces of its own. In July 1953 it took 275 copies of a booklet for wives, Alcoholism, the Family Disease, written with an Al-Anon group in Kentucky by Harold Black, who wasn’t a member.
Black admitted it left out the husband of the alcoholic woman; he knew little about him. Lois W. wrote back that husbands, parents and children were in groups all over the country. Some husbands would find help in Al-Anon, she thought, but most had none of a wife’s reasons to stay with a drinker.
“…a lot of husbands would not bother to try to understand.”
For Al-Anon’s first book, two years later, she wrote a chapter for them: “Do Husbands of Alcoholics Need Family Groups, Too?”
In 1957 the teenagers became Alateen (Captain of My Soul tells it), and the next year the office sent out a pamphlet for parents (Not only wives, below). By then each month’s newsletter welcomed fifteen to twenty new groups.
One of them started in November 1958 in Siloam Springs, in the back room of an old, empty shoe store, while AA met in the front. The night was bitter cold, with one stove.
Three women came to help from the group in Tulsa, 90 miles away. Whatever was going on around them, they told the newcomers, they could find the tools in Al-Anon to be happy.
On Sunday, November 10, 1957, NBC’s Loretta Young Show broadcast “The Understanding Heart,” a drama about a family’s struggle with alcoholism, with Al-Anon in its story. The office got copies of the film and lent them to groups to show at meetings.
A girl who would one day be Hawaii’s delegate to Al-Anon’s World Service Conference watched it that Sunday night. She cried through the whole show, and came away sure of one thing: “I would never marry an alcoholic.”
The man she married didn’t drink like the husband on the screen. Twenty-three years later she walked into her first Al-Anon meeting, and in her first year as a delegate she saw the film again, crying this time for joy.
It’s 1952, in a room upstairs at an AA clubhouse in New York. The family groups have a name now, Al-Anon, and an office of their own. Letters come in from desperate people in Nebraska and Minnesota, and the volunteers look in the atlas for the nearest group. If it’s within four hundred miles, they’re glad.
Being separate from AA means starting from scratch: money, a newsletter, literature of their own. And it means asking who Al-Anon is for. Nearly everyone at the meetings is a wife. Then a mother comes to a group in California, and the wives write to the office for help.
Over the next few years the office finds ways to reach husbands, teenagers, grown children of alcoholics, and parents. By 1958, fifteen or twenty new groups are starting every month.
One letter at a time
The first family groups were mostly AA wives. Here are the other members Al-Anon made room for in its first decade, in the order they turn up in its records.
From Many Voices, One Journey, Al-Anon’s history of itself (2011), which quotes the office’s letters and its early literature. Quotations are short excerpts.
1952
A mother
A mother comes to a group in Hawthorne, California, and leaves without much help. The group’s secretary writes to the office: “Do you have a mother who would write to us and tell her experience?”
Anne B. passes the letter to a member of the office’s Advisory Committee whose son drinks. There’s no literature yet for parents.
Many Voices, One Journey, chapter 2
1953
Grown children
The Kentucky booklet Alcoholism, the Family Disease asks readers who had an alcoholic parent: “Did you have a strong sense of shame?” “Did you frequently live in a dream world?”
Grown children who are “nervous, worried, and unhappy,” it says, find what they need in the program. Part 5 will tell what came of that.
Many Voices, One Journey, chapter 2
1953
Husbands
Invited to add a chapter on husbands to the booklet, Lois W. writes that the program is the same for everyone, but that most husbands have none of a wife’s reasons to stay.
1955: her chapter for husbands in Al-Anon’s first book. 1961: seven men at the first World Service Conference (part 3).
Many Voices, One Journey, chapters 2 and 4
1956
Teenagers
Robert, 17, whose father is in AA and mother in Al-Anon, starts a group for teenagers in Pasadena, California: “I didn’t think the adults would understand.”
1957: so many teenagers write to the office that it adds a section for them. Within a year there are 45 registered Alateen groups.
Many Voices, One Journey, chapter 3
1958
Parents
The office sends out To the Parents of an Alcoholic, adapted from a pamphlet by Mary G. of New Zealand. Al-Anon’s history calls it the first literature addressing “a minority within the fellowship,” though the teenagers’ Youth and the Alcoholic Parent had gone out with every order the year before. Parents, Lois wrote, particularly the mothers, “have very poignant stories.”
1962: The Stag Line, written with men from groups in California and New York, follows for husbands.
Many Voices, One Journey, chapters 3 and 4
One letter at a time
Al-Anon began as groups of AA wives. Within its first decade it was hearing from mothers, husbands, teenagers and grown children, and starting to write for them, often after someone wrote in to ask.
For a closer look
Where the newsletter’s name came from, what members read before Al-Anon had books of its own, and Al-Anon on television.
Several groups asked for the name of The Family Forum, the newsletter Ruth G. had published in San Francisco. She had stopped it by early 1953 and offered the title to the groups. From September 1954 the office’s monthly was the Family Group Forum, later the Al-Anon Family Group Forum. Margaret D., a volunteer, edited it from June 1954 for 20 years and 229 issues.
Its pages carried members’ questions. One group had a member who answered every question first, “an automatic answering service.” Her group wrote in: “How can this be managed without offending our eager beaver?”
Before it had books of its own, the office sent members a list. Its 1952 “Suggested Reading for Al-Anon Family Groups” began with the Bible, then the Big Book and the Grapevine, then Emmet Fox’s The Sermon on the Mount, The Imitation of Christ, Fulton J. Sheen’s Peace of Soul, the novel The Robe, William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience (The Educational Variety), How Never to Be Tired and Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking, among others.
Of these the office sold only the Big Book, the Grapevine and Marty M.’s Primer on Alcoholism (People Like You), and after 1953 only the Primer.
Al-Anon’s own first book, The Al-Anon Family Groups, went on sale at AA’s convention in St. Louis in July 1955, for $2.50, with stories from husbands, teenagers, grown children and parents as well as wives. In 1960 a revised edition was retitled Living with an Alcoholic, out of concern that the public still didn’t know what “Al-Anon Family Groups” meant.
In early 1953 Lois W. appeared on a CBS program, Lamp Unto My Feet, with her face not shown. After a short skit about an alcoholic family she sat on a panel with a university professor and an official of the Presbyterian Church. Anne B. wrote to the groups with the times it would air in their cities, and asked them to tell their friends.
After the Loretta Young Show episode aired in 1957, the office asked the show’s sponsor for a copy, and the company gave it eight. Groups wrote in to borrow them, and by 1958 they had been sent to 50 groups, and to Canada, Ireland, New Zealand and Puerto Rico. “We would suggest no further publicity about the film in The Forum,” the office reported, “as our copies are wearing out.”
(A Bunch of Actors tells how films and television told the world about AA.)