New York and Newark · April–December 1939
Good reviews, a national radio interview and 20,000 postcards to doctors sold almost no books. Then a magazine article did.
“This is all there is, sir.”
The printing was ready in April 1939. Dr. Fosdick reviewed the book, as he had promised, and so did the New York Times. Neither brought orders, and all summer no national magazine would run a piece. Hank P. was broke and looking for work. Ruth Hock was paid in Works Publishing stock, worth next to nothing. That spring the bank sold the house on Clinton Street, and Bill and Lois W.’s furniture went into storage.
Then Morgan R. had an idea. (Bill put the broadcast after that summer; Lois W., in April. Go deeper has both.) He knew Gabriel Heatter, whose network radio program, We the People, ran three-minute interviews, and Heatter agreed to interview him and plug the book. Hank raised $500 on promissory notes and sent postcards to some 20,000 doctors east of the Mississippi, telling them to listen and to buy the book, “a sure cure for alcoholism.”
Morgan was only lately out of an asylum, so for several days before the broadcast they kept him in a room at the Downtown Athletic Club and never let him out of their sight. He went on the air sober. Three days later they climbed the post office steps with suitcases. The clerk handed them twelve cards. Some made fun of them, some were illegible, and two were orders for the book.
A few days later a sheriff turned up at the Newark office with an eviction notice. The company moved into a room barely big enough for Hank’s desk, his chair, two file cases, and Ruth with her typewriter. By July Hank had a job, and the book was left to Ruth and Bill. Ruth’s pay was one $25 stock certificate a week.
Charles B. Towns had found them a writer: Morris Markey was doing a piece for Liberty magazine, to run in September. To last until then, Bert T., a member whose drinking had nearly wrecked his Fifth Avenue tailoring shop, got one of his customers to take a $1,000 note from the book company, with Bert’s own endorsement on it. In September “Alcoholics and God” came out. Liberty passed on 800 pleas for help, Ruth answered every one, and several hundred books sold at $3.50.
It’s 1939, at a post office in lower Manhattan. Bill W., Hank P. and their friends climb the steps carrying empty suitcases.
Three days ago, Morgan R. went on national radio to tell his story and plug the book, and twenty thousand doctors were mailed postcards telling them to listen. Box 658 should be overflowing.
Through the little glass door they can see a handful of cards. The clerk hands them twelve. Some make fun of them. Some can’t be read. Two are orders for the book.
Soon after, the book company is evicted, and its secretary is paid in stock. Then, in September, Liberty magazine prints a story called “Alcoholics and God,” and eight hundred letters pour in.
1939 in orders
The mailing to doctors, by the numbers, and what the rest of the year’s publicity brought.
From Bill W.’s account in Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age, 1957; Lois W.’s memoir, Lois Remembers, 1979; and Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers, 1980.
April–summer
Dr. Fosdick’s review, reprinted mostly in religious papers, and another in the New York Times. Magazine after magazine turned the story down. Bill and Hank had also paid $200 for an ad in the Times, Lois W. remembered.
No orders to speak of
Bill W., 1957; Lois W., 1979
Spring or summer
Morgan R. on Gabriel Heatter’s We the People, with the postcards to doctors. They cost $500: raised in notes, Bill wrote; the last money in the bank, Lois W. remembered.
Twelve cards, two orders
Bill W., 1957; Lois W., 1979
September
“Alcoholics and God,” by Morris Markey. The magazine passed on 800 pleas for help, and Ruth Hock answered every one with a personal letter and a leaflet about the book. Lois W. counted 350 book orders among them.
Several hundred books at $3.50
Bill W., 1957; Lois W., 1979
Fall
A series in Cleveland’s Plain Dealer brought orders and newcomers by the score. By the fall the book was selling about 60 copies a week.
About 800 recoveries by early 1940, up from 100 when the book came out
Cleveland, in Keep Coming BackBill W., 1957; Good Oldtimers
What worked
Not the reviews, not the radio, not the doctors. What moved the book was a magazine story for ordinary readers, and a secretary who answered every letter it brought in.
For a closer look
Keeping Morgan sober for the broadcast, and when it went out; the loans that carried the book company to the fall; and how the Liberty article landed in Akron.
Morgan R. was the same Morgan who had carried a loan copy to the Archdiocese (5 · Loan copy). With the broadcast a week away, someone pointed out that a man so lately out of an asylum might be drunk on the day.
Hank talked a resentful Morgan into being locked up. One of the more prosperous newcomers belonged to the Downtown Athletic Club, a room was arranged, and they took turns staying with him around the clock. On the night, the members gathered around their radios. Morgan, Bill wrote, was “no slouch as a radio man.”
Lois W.’s memoir tells it a little differently. Morgan, “handsome and charming,” was just out of Rockland State Hospital (Bill had said Greystone), and the broadcast was ten days off. They locked him in an AA member’s own room at the club and guarded him night and day. The $500 for the postcards, in her telling, was the last money in the bank.
The two also disagree on when. Bill puts the broadcast after a summer of rejections from the magazines. Lois’s chronology puts it in April 1939, the month the book came out, and her chapter has the reviews coming in the summer after it.
Bert T. had inherited his tailoring shop on Fifth Avenue from his father. When Bill asked for help, Bert phoned a wealthy customer, a man Bill calls only Mr. G., who was on the bone-dry side of the drink question.
Mr. G. wouldn’t give, wouldn’t buy stock and wouldn’t lend to a company with plenty of books and no cash. But he would take a $1,000 note from the book company if Bert endorsed it. The money carried Works Publishing to the late fall of 1939. Bert, Bill wrote, had “hocked his own business” to save the book.
Lois W. names Mr. G. as a Mr. Cockran, a Prohibitionist, and remembers him lending the money to Bert personally. Bill took it gratefully, she wrote, but made sure it put the book company under no moral obligation to the Prohibitionists. The chronology at the back of her book dates Bert’s loan to December 1939.
She also remembered a second $1,000, from Fitz M.’s sister Agnes, an administrator at the Corcoran Art School in Washington, who lent it from her small savings. Lois’s memoir places that loan twice: once while the book was being written, and once while the books sat unpaid for at the printer’s warehouse.
Ernie G., the second Akron member of that name, was with Dr. Bob when the Liberty article came out. “Let’s go down to the drugstore and get the Liberty,” Dr. Bob said. Ernie had never seen such an elated person. Anne S. said it looked as if they might be getting “a little bit respectable.”
The two books count the response differently. Bill gives 800 pleas for help; Ernie remembered reading that 300 or 400 letters came in almost overnight.
That August Dr. Bob had written an article on AA and the book for a magazine called Faith, and may even have signed it. It brought him inquiries from a dozen doctors.