One Drunk to Another Call Me Anne
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Illustration · An imagined front porch at dusk, its door standing open on a lamplit hall, for the open door at 855 Ardmore Avenue. Not drawn from a photograph.

Call Me Anne

Meet Anne

A shy schoolteacher who married a drinking doctor, opened her house to the drunks he brought home, and looked after their frightened wives.

“In the full sense of the word, she was one of the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous.”

Bill W., the month after she died · “Anne S.,” AA Grapevine, July 1949

Anne S. grew up in Oak Park, Illinois, went to Wellesley College on a scholarship, and taught school. She met Dr. Bob S. at a dance in Vermont when he was a schoolboy, and waited seventeen years to marry him. For seventeen of their years together he drank, and she held the family together, searched his pockets at the door and made excuses to his patients.

In 1933 she took him to the Oxford Group, and in May 1935 she answered the telephone call that brought Bill W. into their lives. Then she took Bill into her house, and after him a long line of drunks and their families. In the mornings she read to them from the Bible. For about a year she telephoned one frightened new wife, Henrietta D., every morning to ask whether she had had her quiet time. When someone introduced her to another, Dorothy S. M., as Mrs. S., she said, “Call me Anne.”

She never wrote her own story. Apart from a notebook from her Oxford Group years, much of it in print since 1992, nearly everything known about her comes from what others remembered: Bill and Lois W., her son and daughter, and the men and women she took in. This piece is built from those memories, mostly as Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers (1980), Pass It On (1984), Lois Remembers (1979) and Bill’s own writings set them down. Where they disagree, these pages say so.

Start with 1 · On a scholarship

Her life at a glance

  1. 1881Born Anne Robinson Ripley, in Illinois: in Moline by one account, in Oak Park, outside Chicago, by another.
  2. 1897–98A Wellesley student, she meets Bob at a dance at St. Johnsbury Academy, in Vermont, in his last year there.
  3. 1915Marries him on January 25, in her mother’s house in Chicago, and moves to 855 Ardmore Avenue in Akron.
  4. 1918Their son, Robert, called Smitty, is born. Before long Bob is drinking again.
  5. 1923They adopt a daughter, Sue, aged five.
  6. 1933Persuades Bob to go to the Oxford Group, takes up its ways herself, and starts the notebook she keeps until 1939.
  7. 1935Answers Henrietta Seiberling’s call on May 11. Bill W. moves in, and in June Bob has his last drink.
  8. 1936Starts a group for the wives of alcoholics.
  9. 1938Archie T., from Detroit, lives with the family for ten months.
  10. 1939Akron’s alcoholics leave the Oxford Group and meet in her living room.
  11. 1940In January the Akron group moves to King School, where she looks out for the newcomers.
  12. 1941Lavelle K. comes to Dr. Bob for help, with his wife, Emma, a nurse. As cataracts take Anne’s sight, Emma looks after her.
  13. 1948Speaks with Lois W. at a meeting for AA families in Los Angeles.
  14. 1949Dies June 1, at St. Thomas Hospital in Akron.

Walk through her story

Each part has a short story, a one-minute audio stop, and a closer look for anyone who wants to go deeper. Read them in order, or start anywhere.

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