Illustration · An imagined sideboard at Christmas in the hard years: a card with two dollar bills, a stack of bills to pay, a china bird and an open account book. Not drawn from a photograph.

Christmas money

Dr. Bob’s drinking from Anne’s side: promises, excuses to his patients, and debts paid with Christmas money.

“Oh, my dear, if only they had sent food instead!”

Anne S., about a Christmas present from the hard years, as Emma K. remembered it · Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers, 1980

The drinking years, from her side

For the first three years of their marriage Dr. Bob stayed sober, and, AA’s history of Akron says, “any lingering doubts Anne might have had were stilled.” His practice grew, and they made friends. In 1918 their son, Robert, called Smitty, was born. That was also the year the states began ratifying the Prohibition amendment, and Dr. Bob, sure that whatever liquor was left would soon run out, started drinking again. (How he got it and where he hid it are in The hiding places, in I Just Work Here.)

Anne fought it the only ways she knew. She tried “time after time to extract promises from him,” Smitty said. She searched Bob’s pockets when he came in at night, hoping to keep him in shape for the next morning, and she checked the toilet tank. Once, desperate, she drank some whiskey herself and told Smitty to say she was drunk when his father got home. It didn’t work.

As the children grew up, friends fell away. Bob and Anne stopped accepting invitations, since he would only get drunk and make a scene, and Anne, “to whom hospitality was second nature,” didn’t dare ask anyone home. By 1933, with Akron’s rubber factories idle, his practice was nearly gone. “Mother lied to his patients,” Smitty said, “and so did Lily, his office girl.”

Money ran out. Sue, their daughter, remembered her mother paying debts with the money that came at Christmas and on birthdays. Years later a friend, Emma K., admired a pretty little figure someone had given them one Christmas in those years, and Anne said she wished they had sent food.

She kept praying. “How my wife kept her faith and courage during all those years, I’ll never know,” Dr. Bob wrote in 1939, “but she did. If she had not, I know I would have been dead a long time ago.”

Listen Christmas money About 1 minute

Before and after

The same house

In 1915 Anne came to 855 Ardmore Avenue as a bride, married to a man who had stopped drinking. Here is the same house in 1915 and eighteen years later.

From Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers (1980), much of it from what Smitty and Sue told Bill W. in 1954. Quotations are short excerpts.

The house

1915

New, on a corner of a tree-lined street in the west end of Akron: two stories of clapboard, large airy rooms, and a kitchen with all the latest conveniences. It cost $4,000.

1933

“The mortgage moratorium was all that saved our house,” Smitty said. “And we ate enough potato soup to float that.” They had a second car, and no money to license it.

The doctor

1915

Sober since a stay at home in Vermont the year before, and making his name as a doctor, the work he loved best.

1933

“Dad had almost no practice left,” Smitty said. “He would be in hiding, or home and indisposed.”

Friends

1915

As his practice grew, Good Oldtimers says, they made many friends and won the town’s respect.

1933

Few were left. Bob and Anne turned down invitations, and Anne had stopped asking anyone home.

Anne

1915

A bride. Whatever doubts she had about marrying a drinking man were, for now, at rest.

1933

Desperate enough, Good Oldtimers suggests, to try anything. When beer became legal again that spring, Bob told himself that “nobody ever got drunk on beer,” and with her permission he filled the cellar with it. Soon he was going through a case and a half a day, and spiking it with alcohol.

What held

The practice went, most of the friends went, and the house nearly did. The marriage held. “Mother was always deeply in love with Dad,” Smitty said. “I never heard them have an argument.” Sue admitted to overhearing what Good Oldtimers calls “discussions.”

For a closer look

Go deeper

Their daughter, life at home, and a roll-your-own machine.

Sue

In her forties, Anne was told she could have no more children, and five years after Smitty was born, Bob and Anne adopted a girl of five, Sue. “They didn’t want to raise Smitty as an only child and spoil him rotten,” Sue said. “So they got me and spoiled us both rotten.” (Lois W., who met the family in 1935, remembered Sue as a few years younger than Smitty.)

In high school Sue noticed that her father got cross when her friends were downstairs, between him and the bottles he kept in the cellar. She asked her mother why, and Anne told her.

After that she was caught between them. “You couldn’t be loyal to him and Mom both,” Sue said. “I felt that put me in the middle.”

Candlelight

“Mom was a good cook,” Smitty said, “but she didn’t care for it. She always wanted to dine by candlelight, and Dad wanted to see what he was eating. We practically had a spotlight overhead.”

Bob was no use around the house, Smitty said. Once Anne talked him into stripping the living-room wallpaper. “He stuck a garden hose in the window and turned it on,” Smitty said. “The house was carpeted. Mother almost fainted.”

She was easily shocked, her son said, and her shyness was “a source of constant delight to Dad,” who liked to bring home some outrageous bit of news just to watch her face. The children played tricks on her, too, “because she took it so well.”

Pencil shavings

Good Oldtimers says she started smoking at 56, which by the birth year in Arthur S.’s timeline would be about 1937. Smitty remembered that in the middle of the Depression she bought a roll-your-own machine. He and Sue thought it beneath their dignity and offered to roll for her, with pencil shavings in the tobacco. Each cigarette flared up and she blew it out. “You know,” she said at last, “these don’t taste as good as the ones you get in the package.”

She hardly smoked them: a few puffs, the book says, and she laid the cigarette down and lit another. Sue thought the chain smoking came from the strain of Bob’s drinking, and Lois W.’s memory doesn’t fit the book’s age: in June 1935, when Lois first met her, Anne was 54 and already “smoking endless cigarettes,” sitting in a dim corner of the living room because of her weak eyes.

Sources

Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers. AA World Services, 1980. Chapter II, “Postgraduate work: M.D. and alcoholic” (the first three years; 855 Ardmore; Prohibition), chapter III, “Husband, father, and drunk” (Sue and Smitty, from their 1954 conversations with Bill W.; Emma K. on the statuette; the beer experiment; smoking), and chapter V, “The alcoholic in the Oxford Group” (Anne’s prayers).
Alcoholics Anonymous (the Big Book), first edition. Works Publishing, 1939. Dr. Bob’s story, “The Doctor’s Nightmare.”
Lois Remembers. Al-Anon Family Group Headquarters, 1979. Chapter 8 (Anne and Sue in the summer of 1935).
Arthur S., A Narrative Timeline of AA History (her birth in 1881, from the AA Grapevine of June 1950).