Illustration · An imagined telephone table at first light, with a cup of coffee, a little book of members’ telephone numbers and a pencil, ready for the morning’s calls. Not drawn from a photograph.

Every single morning

Anne opened her house to drunks and their families, and telephoned a frightened new wife every morning for a year.

“Somebody introduced her to me as Mrs. [S.], and she said, ‘Call me Anne.’ Well, that did it.”

Dorothy S. M., remembering her first meeting in Akron, in 1938 · Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers, 1980

The wives

Late in June 1935, Dr. Bob and Bill W. found a third alcoholic at Akron’s City Hospital, a lawyer named Bill D. (855 Ardmore, in I Just Work Here, tells how.) Dr. Bob told the lawyer’s wife, Henrietta D., “The little woman wants to see you at the house.” She didn’t want to go. A friend drove her anyway.

“When Anne came to the door, I said, ‘Are you Mrs. [S.]?’” Henrietta remembered. “And she said, ‘Anne to you, my dear.’ That broke the ice.” She took them for rich people, and later found that Bob and Anne didn’t have a cent either. Then, for about a year, Anne called her every single morning to ask whether she had had her quiet time. “Anne calling me every day meant everything to me,” Henrietta said.

Anne urged the wives who were already coming to seek out the newcomers’ wives, even at their homes. Early in 1936, Henrietta wrote years later, Anne started a women’s group for the wives of alcoholics, and tried to teach them “patience, love, and unselfishness.”

Meanwhile the house filled up. Anne “never knew who would be on her davenport when she got up in the morning,” one regular said. In 1938 a man from Detroit, Archie T., arrived too frail and too broke to look for work, and stayed ten months. He was quietly planning to kill himself, he said later, when Anne told him that as long as she and Bob had a home, it would be his home too. He went back to Detroit sober and started AA there.

Money was still short. Some nights Bob and Anne had bread and milk for dinner, a Cleveland wife remembered, and there was always more for guests, served “just as graciously as though it had been a complete turkey dinner.” When Frank Amos, sent by John D. Rockefeller Jr. to look into the new movement, visited in 1938, he found Anne with her hands full “with the home and with her work with wives of alcoholics, also with an occasional woman alcoholic who turns up.”

Listen Every single morning About 1 minute

Messages taken

In her words

Apart from her notebook and a few letters, Anne left little in writing. What she said survives because the people she said it to remembered it. Here are six of those sayings.

Five are from Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers (1980), which drew on people’s memories, most of them recorded after her death. One is from Henrietta D.’s letter to Dr. Bob in 1949, now in AA’s archives, as quoted by Mary C. Darrah (1992). Quotations are short excerpts.

ToHenrietta D.
June 1935

“Anne to you, my dear.”

At the front door of 855 Ardmore, when Henrietta asked if she was Mrs. S.

Remembered by Henrietta D. · Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers
ToHenrietta D.
1935–36

“Did you have your quiet time? Did you get anything special out of it?”

On the telephone, every morning for about a year.

Remembered by Henrietta D. · Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers
ToBob E.
From 1937

“God is love.”

One of two phrases she gave him to repeat when he felt low or muddled. He used it, he said, consistently.

Remembered by Bob E. · Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers
ToArchie T.
1938

“Archie, Bob and I want you to know that as long as we have a home, that home will be yours, too.”

Out of a clear sky, he said, at 855 Ardmore. He had told no one what he was thinking.

Remembered by Archie T. · Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers
ToDorothy S. M.
1938

“Call me Anne.”

At Dorothy’s first meeting, in a packed living room, after someone introduced her as Mrs. S.

Remembered by Dorothy S. M. · Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers
ToHenrietta D.
Undated

“…love of God is triangular—it must flow from God, through me, through you, and back to God.”

One of the things Anne taught her, as Henrietta wrote to Dr. Bob after Anne died.

Henrietta D.’s letter to Dr. Bob, 1949 · quoted in Darrah, Sister Ignatia

Anne to you

Two of the six are the same gift: her first name, offered to a frightened newcomer who knew her only as Mrs. S. Both women still remembered it years later, and it gave this piece its name.

For a closer look

Go deeper

Lois W.’s first visit, Anne’s faith in her own guidance, and the Big Book chapter Bill wanted her to write.

Lois’s week

Lois W. spent her one week of vacation from a Brooklyn department store at 855 Ardmore in the summer of 1935, at Anne’s invitation. “I loved Annie and Bob from the moment I saw them,” she wrote.

Bob and Bill were busy with Bill D. at the time, Lois remembered, so the two wives spent the days together. Anne was the person she could relate to “as another wife of an alcoholic,” Lois said, though they didn’t talk much about their troubles.

Lois noticed that Anne, whose eyes were weak, kept to a shadowy corner of the living room. “In the years to come,” she wrote, “that little, dark corner of 855 Ardmore Avenue became a haven for those in trouble, both alcoholics and their families.”

Guidance

Anne had a “deep sense of believing in her guidance,” Dorothy S. M. said. Once, staying overnight, Dorothy heard Anne announce that she wasn’t going to the next day’s picnic; something told her it wasn’t right. At about five the next morning, Detroit telephoned: could they send a man down? It was Archie T.

Another member, J. D., remembered that Bob and Anne were due to leave for Vermont just before he joined. Anne woke in the night, sure they should stay home because someone would need them.

Her notebook sets out what she believed about it: “The basis of guidance is faith, not feeling, not analysis. Act on simple thoughts, and more will come.” She shared it, too. Before meetings at the house, John R., an Akron member from 1939, remembered, Anne would “pull out a little book … and quote from it,” and they would talk it over.

The chapter she didn’t write

When Bill started writing the Big Book in 1938, he suggested that Anne write its chapter for wives. She didn’t. Good Oldtimers suggests it may have been her modesty, “her inclination toward staying in the background.” Mary C. Darrah suggests she may also have been sparing Lois W.’s feelings.

Bill wrote the chapter, “To Wives,” himself, Good Oldtimers says. Lois wasn’t asked either, and when she offered, Bill told her it should match the rest of the book; forty years later she was still hurt. Darrah adds that Akron’s records credit the chapter to Marie B., a member’s wife, and says Bill took her version and revised it. When the fifth chapter, “How It Works,” reached Akron, Anne and Dorothy S. M. sat up at 855 Ardmore reading it until four in the morning. “And we thought, ‘Now, this is it. This is really going to bring people in.’”

Sources

Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers. AA World Services, 1980. Chapter VII, “A.A. number three arrives” (Henrietta D.), chapter VIII, “The first group forms, in Akron” (Lois’s visit), chapter IX, “Twelfth Step approaches evolve” (J. D.; Dorothy S. M. on guidance; Archie T.; Bob E.), chapter X, “The co-founders face money problems” (Frank Amos’s report), and chapter XI, “Early meetings and Big Book controversies” (Dorothy S. M.’s first meeting; bread and milk; the chapter for wives).
Mary C. Darrah, Sister Ignatia: Angel of Alcoholics Anonymous. Loyola University Press, 1992. Chapter 4, “Akron’s Magic Blend” (Henrietta D.’s 1949 letter to Dr. Bob, in AA’s archives; the chapter for wives and Marie B.). Quotations are from the scanned text, checked against the page images.
Lois Remembers. Al-Anon Family Group Headquarters, 1979. Chapter 8 (her week in Akron; the dark corner).
Pass It On. AA World Services, 1984. Chapter Eight.
Dick B., Anne Smith’s Journal, 1933–1939: A.A.’s Principles of Success. Revised edition, Paradise Research Publications, 1994. Chapter 1, “A Lady of Faith, Courage, and Love” (John R. on the little book), and chapter 2, “The Elements of the Twelve Steps” (page 9 of Anne’s notebook, on guidance). Quotations are from the scanned text.