Anne answered the phone the day Bill W. came looking for a drunk, and then she took him into her house.
“…as dear Anne well guessed, that first tendril was a fragile thing. Practical steps had better be taken.”
On Saturday, May 11, 1935, the day before Mother’s Day, Dr. Bob came home drunk, carrying a big potted plant for Anne, and passed out. That afternoon the telephone rang. It was Henrietta Seiberling, their friend from the Oxford Group. A sober alcoholic from New York, Bill W., was at her house. Could Bob and Anne come over and meet him?
What Anne said is the one part of the story nobody tells the same way twice. The tellings are set side by side below. Every telling agrees that the next day Bob and Anne went. He felt as bad as he could ever remember, but he was fond of Henrietta, and “Anne had said we would go over,” he recalled. On the way he made her promise they would stay fifteen minutes at most. They came at five and left at a quarter past eleven.
Bill stayed on in Akron, and within a few weeks Anne asked him to come and live with them. As Bill told it, she saw how fragile the new sobriety was, and decided he and Bob should keep an eye on each other. Every morning there was a quiet time in the living room. Anne read from the Bible in her chair in the corner and often ended with a line from the Book of James: “Faith without works is dead.”
A few weeks after Mother’s Day (about two by Good Oldtimers’ count, three or four by Bill’s), Bob wanted to go to the American Medical Association’s convention in Atlantic City, as he had for twenty years. “Very frightened, Anne said, ‘Oh, no, no!’” Bill wrote. Bill thought he should go, and she gave in. Five days went by without a word. Then his office nurse called: she and her husband had picked him up at the Akron railroad station.
He had an operation to perform in three days, Bill remembered, and he and Anne took turns around the clock, tapering him off. On the morning of the operation they drove him to the hospital, and just before he went in, Bill gave him a bottle of beer for the shakes. Then they went home to wait. It was his last drink. In his own story, Dr. Bob remembered it more simply: a few drinks the night he got home, and “one bottle of beer the next morning.” (The last drink, in I Just Work Here, tells that day.)
It’s Saturday, May 11, 1935, the day before Mother’s Day, at 855 Ardmore Avenue in Akron. Dr. Bob has come home drunk, carrying a big potted plant for Anne. Now he’s passed out.
The telephone rings. It’s their friend Henrietta Seiberling. There’s a man from New York at her house, a sober alcoholic. Can Bob and Anne come over and meet him? Not today, Anne tells her. But the next day, they go.
Bob makes her promise they’ll stay fifteen minutes. They stay six hours. And within a few weeks, Anne has asked the man from New York, Bill W., to come and live with them, so the two men can keep an eye on each other.
A few weeks later, Bob goes off to a medical convention and comes home drunk. Anne and Bill sober him up in time for an operation, drive him to the hospital, and go home to wait. It’s the last drink he ever takes.
Compare the accounts
Only Anne and Henrietta heard that telephone call, and neither of them wrote it down. Here is how two men who weren’t on the line told it, in the order the accounts were printed.
By his own account Dr. Bob was upstairs, passed out. Bill was at Henrietta’s house and heard only her side. Lois W.’s memoir (1979) follows Bill’s 1957 telling (Anne is sorry, they can’t make it, and Bob has just brought her a plant), and adds that she “might have added” the rest. Where Bob was lying is compared in The gate lodge. Quotations are short excerpts, shown side by side for comparison.
4 years after
“…a lady called up my wife one Saturday afternoon saying she wanted me to come over that evening to meet a friend of hers who might help me.”
He doesn’t say what Anne told her, only that “the next day she called again.”
His own story, “The Doctor’s Nightmare,” in Alcoholics Anonymous (1939), the Big Book.
16 years after · Anne had died in 1949
“The pot is on the table but, alas, Bob is on the floor. Could we try to make it tomorrow?”
Bill gives Anne the joke, and the idea of trying again tomorrow. Henrietta answers with a dinner invitation.
“Dr. Bob: A Tribute,” his memorial to Dr. Bob in the AA Grapevine, January 1951, now in The Language of the Heart (1988).
22 years after
“I’m sorry, Henrietta. I don’t think we can make it today. Bob always makes a great fuss over me on Mother’s Day.”
Now Anne keeps the joke to herself. “What Anne didn’t say,” Bill writes, was where Bob was. It is Henrietta who suggests tomorrow.
Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age (1957), Bill’s own history of AA.
Told in his lifetime · printed 45 years after
“Finally, Henri bore in to such an extent that Anne had to tell her I was very bagged…”
At first, he said, Anne “still didn’t think it very wise that we go over that day.” Henrietta called again on Sunday.
Dr. Bob’s own recollection, quoted in Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers (1980), AA’s history of Dr. Bob and the Akron pioneers.
Did Anne say he was drunk?
Whose idea was the next day?
How many calls
Bill’s line
The words this page is named for are Bill’s, written sixteen years later, and six years after that he wrote that Anne hadn’t said them. In Dr. Bob’s memory she held out as long as she could and told the truth only when Henrietta pressed. Every telling agrees on what mattered: the next day they went, and in Dr. Bob’s memory it was because “Anne had said we would go over.”
For a closer look
The evening at Henrietta’s, the liquor Bill kept in Anne’s house, and the convention she didn’t want him to go to.
Henrietta asked them to dinner, and at five o’clock on Mother’s Day Bob and Anne stood at her door. Their son, Smitty, came along. Bob ate nothing, and after dinner (or at once, in Bill’s 1951 telling) Henrietta put the two men in her little library.
Smitty didn’t go in. “Mother wanted Dad to open up in front of Bill,” he said. What Anne and Henrietta did for the next six hours, nobody wrote down.
Bill liked Bob and Anne at once. They were “people 10 or 12 years older than ourselves,” he wrote to Lois W. in June. “You will like them immensely.”
Once he moved in, Bill wanted liquor kept in the house: he and Bob, he said, had to show they could stay sober with it in plain sight. “So I got two big bottles and put them right on the sideboard,” he remembered. “And that drove Anne about wild for a while.”
To Bill, Good Oldtimers suggests, the medical convention was the same experiment on a bigger scale: alcoholics had to learn to live in the real world. Anne knew better, and said so.
Dr. Bob hadn’t missed the American Medical Association’s convention in twenty years, and Anne remembered the earlier ones. For all her faith, Good Oldtimers says, she “evidently had a practical side and some instinctive knowledge about alcoholic thinking.” She was against it, and in the end she gave in.
He started drinking on the train. Anne and Bill waited five days for news. Bob never went to another AMA convention.