Anne helped, by one account, to take Akron’s alcoholics out of the Oxford Group, looked out for newcomers at King School, and kept calling as her eyes failed.
“The women decided it, as was usually the case in things like that. And Doc went along with Annie.”
In the spring of 1939 the Big Book came out, and the Cleveland alcoholics broke away from the Oxford Group to meet on their own, soon calling themselves Alcoholics Anonymous. Anne and Dr. Bob felt they should leave too, Dorothy S. M. remembered, “but they felt, in loyalty to T. Henry and Clarace, that it was going to be a very difficult thing.” T. Henry and Clarace Williams had opened their home to the Akron meetings for years.
Akron argued about it for a month or more, Elgie R. said. Henrietta Seiberling didn’t like the new book, Bob E. said, and she and Anne fell out over it; Anne and Clarace fell out too, over something no one ever learned. “There were some hot conversations on the telephone,” he said. “It was a three-way thing between Clarace, Henrietta, and Anne.” Late in 1939 Dr. Bob told T. Henry the alcoholics would meet somewhere else. Henrietta, Elgie remembered, told him it was the biggest mistake of his life. “Bob and Annie just went,” Elgie said. The first meetings were in their own living room, with the Christmas tree up. In January 1940 they moved to King School.
At King School, Bob and Anne always sat in the same places, toward the back on one side, Anne next to the aisle. The coffee afterward, downstairs in the school cafeteria, was her part. She went from table to table looking for new faces. “I want to welcome you and your lovely wife to Alcoholics Anonymous,” Dan K. remembered her saying. “We hope you’ll keep coming back.” When a woman alcoholic turned up and Dr. Bob wondered aloud whether he shouldn’t stick to working with men, Elgie said, “Annie would say, ‘Let’s try and see.’”
Her eyes were failing. Cataracts covered them, Good Oldtimers says; she gave up driving and could no longer tell who was across a room. She still knew people by their voices, Dorothy said, and could “recall every single thing about them.” Emma K., a nurse whose husband, Lavelle, had come to Dr. Bob for help in 1941, began minding the house whenever Bob and Anne went away, and in the last years she was with Anne every weekday.
And she kept telephoning. In the year before Anne died, a woman named Peggy remembered, “there was seldom a morning when she didn’t call.”
It’s a Wednesday night in the 1940s, at King School in Akron. The meeting is over, and the coffee is poured. This part of the evening belongs to Anne.
She goes from table to table, looking for new faces. “I want to welcome you and your lovely wife to Alcoholics Anonymous,” she says. “We hope you’ll keep coming back.”
Her eyes are failing. Before long she can’t tell who is across the room. So she gets up close, and listens. She knows people by their voices, calls them by their first names, and remembers their children.
In the spring of 1949, already weak and tired, she and Dr. Bob fly to Texas to see their son. On the way home she gets worse. She dies on June 1, at St. Thomas Hospital in Akron.
One stop at a time
Her last year, from a trip west with Bill and Lois W. to a bed at St. Thomas Hospital.
From Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers (1980), Lois Remembers (1979), Sister Ignatia’s letter to Dr. Bob after Anne died, and Mary C. Darrah’s biography of Sister Ignatia (1992). Quotations are short excerpts.
1948
Anne and Dr. Bob met Bill and Lois in Los Angeles, where some 6,000 people came to hear the two founders. Anne and Lois spoke together at a big meeting for AA families. Lois remembered it as the first and last such trip Anne and Bob made together. (She also remembered Anne dying later that year; it was the next June.)
Lois Remembers, chapters 15 and 17
1948
That summer Dr. Bob found out he had cancer. He gave up his practice so the two of them could have their remaining time together in peace. The same year, at his tenth anniversary in Detroit, Archie T. introduced Anne to 1,500 people and told them how she had taken him in. Dr. Bob gave his last major talk.
Good Oldtimers, chapters IX and XXVII
May 1949
They flew to Texas to visit their son, Smitty, and his family. “You know, Emma, I don’t really care to go,” Anne said, “but Dad wants to. It will make him happy.” Dr. Bob told it the other way round: “I don’t really want to go, but Mama wants it.” The morning they left, she called Peggy to ask why she had missed the meeting the night before.
Good Oldtimers, chapters VII and XXVIII
June 1, 1949
On the way home their plane was held up by a rainstorm, and Dr. Bob called Sister Ignatia for a bed. Sister Ignatia remembered pneumonia followed by a severe heart attack; her biographer puts the heart attack first. As a patient, Sister Ignatia wrote, Anne “was more concerned about the well-being of her visitors than herself.” She died on June 1.
Next: LegacyGood Oldtimers, chapter XXVIII; Darrah, chapter 4
For a closer look
Anne and Sister Ignatia on the telephone, the dresses she wouldn’t wear, and what she asked for in the hospital.
From 1939 Sister Ignatia admitted Dr. Bob’s alcoholics to St. Thomas Hospital, and when she had a worry about one of them, she often called Anne instead. “I didn’t like to bother Doctor too much,” she said, “so I would call Anne.” Anne, she said, “always found the correct answer,” and in her diplomatic way would take the problem to Dr. Bob and telephone back with his advice.
The two women rarely met. Anne’s daughter, Sue, remembered that it was mostly over the telephone: “I know she talked to Sister Ignatia at least once a day.” Anne worked with the patients’ wives at home while their husbands were in the ward.
Before an Akron New Year’s party, someone gave Anne three new dresses. Dorothy S. M. asked which one she would wear. Anne said she couldn’t bear to wear any of them, because some of the new people had nothing, and she came to the party in the same black dress Dorothy had always seen her in.
She gathered clothes for anyone who needed them. When Dorothy had only a summer coat, Anne took the fur collar from someone’s old suit, and together they stitched it onto the coat for winter. And once, when Dorothy was busy chatting with her own friends after a meeting, Anne called her over: “There’s a new woman sitting over there in the corner, and nobody’s talking to her.”
Good Oldtimers says she had an operation to remove one of the cataracts. Pass It On says she had three, and then refused any more.
All she asked, going into the hospital, was that someone keep Bob company. She was afraid he would fret and feel alone without his friends.
Emma K., who nursed her, never could bring herself to use her first name. “I sometimes think everybody called her Anne but me,” she said. “I couldn’t do it. I called her Mrs. [S.]”