Illustration · A brown-shingled house on a wooded hilltop at dusk in April, one lamp lit behind a row of glass doors. Not drawn from a photograph of Stepping Stones.

New Jersey, Manhattan and Bedford Hills · 1939–1944

About fifty homes

For two years he and Lois had no home. When they found one, it came with a spook room.

“Never. Never any.”

Father Ed Dowling, S.J., when Bill asked if there was never to be any satisfaction · as told in Pass It On, 1984

Living around

The Big Book came out in April 1939, and it wasn’t selling. On April 26 the mortgage company sold 182 Clinton Street. Bill and Lois put their furniture and Lois’s grand piano into storage, and spent that night with friends. Lois wrote in her diary: “Left 182 for good.”

For two years they had no home. They lived in a borrowed bungalow at Green Pond, New Jersey, then in a room at Monsey, New York, so cold it was called “Upper Siberia,” then in friends’ spare rooms. Lois’s best guess was about 50 places. Bill’s version: “We were invited out to dinner a lot.” In February 1940, walking through Grand Central, Lois sat down in the middle of a flight of stairs and cried.

Sober, Bill wanted to be the breadwinner. He tried selling wire rope one summer, and hoped for a job raising money for medical aid to China that didn’t come through. In November 1939 more than 50 members signed a letter asking him to keep working for AA instead. From November 1940 he and Lois lived in a room upstairs at the new clubhouse on West 24th Street, a former stable. A dressing table was made out of an orange crate.

Late in 1940, on a night of sleet, a stranger climbed the stairs to that room on a cane. He was Father Ed Dowling, a Jesuit from St. Louis, who had noticed how much the Twelve Steps had in common with the spiritual exercises of his order. Bill poured out his hopes and his frustrations, and later called it the night he took his Fifth Step. When he asked whether there was never to be any satisfaction, the priest told him no, and called it a “divine dissatisfaction.” They were friends for twenty years.

A country cottage among trees at Bedford Hills, New York, in a photograph from 1948. — A cottage on Rock Gate Farm, Bedford Hills, photographed in 1948. It isn’t Stepping Stones; no cleared photograph of that house has been found.Gottscho-Schleisner Collection, Library of Congress

In January 1941, staying with friends nearby, they drove to see an empty house on a hilltop at Bedford Hills, and broke in, twice. The owner sold it to them for $6,500, with nothing down and $40 a month. On April 11, 1941, “for the first time in the 23 years of their marriage, Bill and Lois spent the night in their own home.” In 1944 they named it Stepping Stones, after a house they saw on Nantucket.

Rumors of money followed him. Probably in 1942, members in Cleveland heard that the book was a racket and that he and Dr. Bob had split $64,000. Bill showed them a certified audit. “My total income was $55 a week.” In March 1942, at 46, he tried to join the Army, and a physical turned him down, he wrote, “because of ulcers.”

And from 1941, on Saturdays, he and Lois held “spook sessions” in a downstairs bedroom. “It was not just a hobby,” said Tom P., who took part.

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Bedford Hills, from 1941

The house on the hill

Bill and Lois lived there for the rest of their lives. Here is the house as Pass It On describes it, and what Bill did to it.

Descriptions from Lois, Bill’s half sister Helen and Bill, as Pass It On quotes them. The house is kept today by the Stepping Stones Foundation, which Lois set up in 1979.

A diagram, not a plan of Stepping Stones. Each place is shown where it helps tell what happened there.

1. The living room
On the day they broke in, Lois wrote of “a huge living room, 32 x 25 perhaps, with a big stone fireplace.” Six French doors opened onto the porch. On the couch here Bill lay and “received” messages, “sometimes a word at a time, sometimes a letter at a time.”
2. The spook room
One of the downstairs bedrooms, where they held the Saturday sessions with a Ouija board.
3. The tank in the attic
The pump couldn’t get water upstairs, “where our bedroom was,” Lois said, so Bill bought a cattle tank from Sears Roebuck and put it in the attic. A red light in the kitchen came on when it ran low, and a bell rang until someone shut off the pump. One evening they forgot: “Inside, water was cascading down the stairs.”
4. The furnace
Bill rigged an alarm clock, a string and a cement block to open the coal furnace door at six. When coal dust jammed the clock, he bored a hole beside his half sister Helen’s bed, and she pulled the string. “When I stayed in town — why, everybody froze to death.”
5. The pumphouse
Down the hill, where a pump pushed water up from the spring.
6. Wits’ End
The cement-block studio Bill and a friend built in the woods, where he “spent much time writing.” Pass It On doesn’t say when it was built, so the diagram marks it “later.”
7. The trails
The wooded paths around Bedford Hills. When he could, he walked five miles a day on them. That walking is the next part of his story.

A contraption man

Lois did the painting, the sewing and the linoleum. “Bill never stood when he could sit, and he never sat when he could lie down.” When he did take on a job, it came out a contraption.

For a closer look

Go deeper

The night Father Dowling came up the stairs, more about the spook room, and how the royalties were settled.

Father Dowling in the sleet

Bill was at a low point that night: no job, no home, and a book that wasn’t selling. “I was suffering from an imaginary ulcer attack — I used to have a lot of those. I felt very sorry for myself.” He was alone in the room over the clubhouse. “Hail and sleet beat on the tin roof over my head; it was a wild night.”

About ten, the old caretaker came up to say “some bum from St. Louis” wanted to see him. A lame man climbed the stairs, carrying his hat. When he opened his coat, Bill saw the collar. Father Dowling edited a Jesuit magazine in St. Louis, and had come to talk about the Twelve Steps.

The Fifth Step is admitting “the exact nature of our wrongs” to another person, and Bill counted that evening as his. He also called it a second conversion. Dowling told him that God’s chosen were always marked by their restlessness and thirst. The two men wrote to each other until Dowling died in 1960.

The spook room, more

Pass It On is candid about the séances. Bill described a Ouija board session as “a strange melange of Aristotle, St. Francis, diverse archangels with odd names, deceased friends — some in purgatory and others doing nicely, thank you!”

One evening, as Lois told it, Bill lay on the couch spelling out letters while a neighbor wrote them down. They looked like Latin. Willard Richardson, a Rockefeller adviser and AA trustee who read the classics, said it was good Latin, the start of a story about the founding of the Church in Italy. Bill knew almost no Latin. Susan Cheever, in her 2004 biography, gives Nell Wing’s version: Richardson was in the room, and the Latin was a sermon by St. Boniface.

On Nantucket in 1944, Bill said, spirits of old sailors came to him early one morning in a friend’s kitchen, one of them saying he wanted to go whaling. The next day he found one of their names, David Morrow, on the island’s Civil War monument. And in a 1952 letter to Father Dowling, printed in a 1995 collection of their letters, he wrote about a spirit that called itself Boniface. The sessions weren’t a party game. “It was very serious for everybody,” said Tom P.

Take the royalties

The Cleveland rumor, as Bill put it, was that he, “the Wall Street promoter,” had his truck “backed right up to Mr. John D. Rockefeller’s strongbox.” After a thinly attended dinner, the group chairmen took Bill and Dr. Bob into a hotel parlor, where an attorney and an accountant were waiting. Bill happened to have a certified audit with him. Pass It On adds in a note that he “had probably been warned ahead of time.”

The audit showed that Dr. Bob had never been paid his royalty, and that Bill lived on $30 a week from a fund raised at a Rockefeller dinner and $25 from the book’s publishing company. The committee apologized. Bill still went back and forth about taking royalties at all. Father Dowling settled it, as Bill told it: “But what about Lois?”

The royalty on the book was “at first very modest,” Pass It On says, but it became substantial, and it kept Bill and Lois for the rest of their lives. He wrote to a friend afterward about leaving “a certain Middle West town we both know well with a great feeling of emptiness, futility, and heartache.”

Sources

Pass It On. AA World Services, 1984. Chapters 12 to 16, quoting Lois’s diary, Bill’s letters and recollections, his half sister Helen and Tom P.
Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age. AA World Services, 1957. Bill on Father Dowling, and on the Cleveland hearing.
Susan Cheever. My Name Is Bill. Simon & Schuster, 2004. Nell Wing’s version of the Latin message, as excerpted by Beliefnet, March 2004.
Robert Fitzgerald, S.J. The Soul of Sponsorship: The Friendship of Fr. Ed Dowling, S.J. and Bill Wilson in Letters. Hazelden, 1995. The letter of July 17, 1952, as reported by later writers; not yet checked against the book.
Rock Gate Farm Dairy, Bedford Hills, New York. General view of cottage (photograph, 1948), Gottscho-Schleisner Collection, Library of Congress. No known restrictions on publication.