Illustration · An imagined corner of Calvary Cemetery in north St. Louis, some years after 1957: a small stone for Dred Scott among older ones, with pennies left on top. Not drawn from a photograph.

St. Louis and Memphis · 1955–1960

Backing away from hell

He watched one of Bill W.’s LSD sessions, marked a forgotten grave in a cemetery three streets from his boyhood home, and kept traveling on a failing heart.

“I have a feeling that if I ever find myself in Heaven, it will be from backing away from Hell.”

Father Ed at St. Louis, July 3, 1955 · Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age, 1957

The negative approach

He said it at AA’s 1955 convention, in his talk on “God as We Understand Him.” Just before it he had said: “I doubt if there is anybody in this hall who really ever sought sobriety. I think we were trying to get away from drunkenness. I don’t think we should despise the negative.”

In August 1956 Bill W. took LSD for the first time, in California, and he soon had a group in New York trying it (Mr. Anonymous, in Number One Man, tells it). Father Ed came to one of their sessions, Bill wrote to Sam Shoemaker, where the drug was given to a researcher from Duke. “Father Ed declared himself utterly convinced of its validity, and volunteered to take LSD himself.” Pass It On says he accepted Bill’s invitation, and Glenn C. writes that he took it, but neither gives a date or a place, and the letters show only that he watched and volunteered. By 1959 he had doubts, and Bill thanked him for setting out his “apprehension about the LSD business.”

In November 1956 the Old Baden Society, with Father Ed leading it, announced a campaign to mark the grave of Dred Scott, the enslaved man whose suit for his freedom the Supreme Court threw out in 1857. Scott lay in an unmarked grave in Calvary Cemetery, three streets from where Father Ed grew up. Early in 1957 a newspaper photograph showed Father Ed with Scott’s great-grandson, pointing with his cane to the spot: “We have in mind putting up only a simple monument.” A descendant of the family that had owned Scott paid for the stone, and for a long time afterward visitors left Lincoln pennies on it.

His body was giving out (As usual follows it), and in his last article he was frank about why: “My 240-pound gluttony gave me two heart attacks.” An alcoholic doctor had got him down toward 180 by telling him to abstain completely from starch, butter, salt and sugar. “Abstinence was so much easier than temperance.”

On Saturday, April 2, 1960, he flew to Memphis for a Cana conference, and spent the evening with Cana friends and two AA members at the house where he was staying. He was found dead in bed at eight the next morning. On Wednesday he was buried from the College Church in St. Louis, in the Jesuit cemetery at Florissant, where he had entered as a novice in 1919. Bill W. came to the funeral.

Listen Backing away from hell About 1 minute

1957–1960, in letters

As usual

In his last years his letters, and Bill’s about him, follow a body giving out and a man who kept going. Here they are, each setback beside what he did next.

Most of these come from letters printed in Robert Fitzgerald’s The Soul of Sponsorship (Hazelden, 1995), which we haven’t seen, as Glenn C. quotes or sums them up, and from Father Ed’s letters to Sister Ignatia, which Glenn C. prints. The Grapevine’s editors said he finished his last article just before he died. Quotations are short excerpts.

August 1957

His bodyDown twenty-five pounds, by his own count.

ThenHe writes to Sister Ignatia that he “will sail for Rome via Ireland on September 4th, on the Queen Mary.”
1958

His bodyTwo small strokes by May, mentioned in a letter between him and Bill. In August, a heart attack.

ThenWithin a month he has been to see Bill, who writes to one of Father Ed’s former students: “He has had a heart attack only a month since; nevertheless he carries on as usual.”
December 1958

His bodyEight days in the hospital.

ThenHe goes to New York for Bill’s twenty-fourth AA anniversary, carrying a portable oxygen tank.
December 1959 to March 1960

His bodyNine days in the hospital in December; a doctor, he wrote, said he had overextended himself. In March, the hospital again.

ThenHis sister Anna writes to AA’s convention in Long Beach to ask how long his talk should be; he is given thirty minutes. On March 25 he writes to Sister Ignatia: “I have been here for about a week and feel quite well.” He finishes an article for the Grapevine’s anniversary book, and on April 2 he flies to Memphis for a Cana conference.
April 3, 1960

Found in his bed in Memphis at eight in the morning. He had died in his sleep, at sixty-one.

Nevertheless

Sixteen days after his sister wrote that he was in the hospital, he flew to Memphis to talk to married couples. He never gave the thirty-minute talk Long Beach had saved for him in July.

For a closer look

Go deeper

What he saw at the LSD session, the talk he never gave at Long Beach, and the two cemeteries.

One of our LSD sessions

Bill first took LSD on August 29, 1956, in California, guided by Gerald Heard and Dr. Sidney Cohen, a Veterans Administration psychiatrist. Pass It On says Father Ed accepted Bill’s invitation to join him. The session Bill described to Sam Shoemaker was in New York, “while he was here recently,” and on that day the drug went to a precognition researcher from Duke; Bill’s letter gives no date.

By the fall of 1959 Father Ed had told Bill he was worried. Bill answered on November 23: “Please be sure that I am very glad that you set out your apprehension about the LSD business.” The New York group, he added, had disbanded early that year. We haven’t seen Father Ed’s own letter.

The talk he didn’t give

AA’s 1960 convention was in Long Beach, California, in July, and the Archdiocese of Los Angeles was Cardinal James McIntyre’s. On March 25 Father Ed wrote to Sister Ignatia that the Cardinal had already refused one priest, and had told him that he did not want an alcoholic priest talking and objected to AA’s idea that alcoholism is a disease. He would let Father Ed come if he was not an alcoholic, and if he followed a pamphlet called Help Your Alcoholic Friend.

“My talk will not touch the issue of disease or non-disease,” Father Ed wrote, and he urged Sister Ignatia to come too: “America will be reached morally rather than mentally, by works rather than words.” Nine days later he was dead.

Two cemeteries

Calvary Cemetery, where he found Dred Scott’s grave, begins three streets south of his boyhood home in Baden. He was buried instead in the cemetery of St. Stanislaus Seminary at Florissant. The pastor of the College Church, Glenn C. writes, tried to keep the funeral out of his church, and the provincial overruled him. At the grave, as a fellow Jesuit remembered it years later, another priest said, “So this is the man they would not bury from the College Church?”

The seminary closed in 1971. Glenn C. writes that in 1972 his body was moved to the Jesuit section of Calvary, the cemetery he grew up beside. But a researcher who has looked into it reports a dispute: the local Jesuit historical society, especially, says that no bodies were actually moved.

Sources

Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age. Alcoholics Anonymous Publishing, 1957. “Religion Looks at Alcoholics Anonymous” (his St. Louis talk).
Pass It On. AA World Services, 1984. Chapter 23 (Bill W.’s LSD experiments and his letter to Sam Shoemaker).
The Language of the Heart. AA Grapevine, 1988. Bill W., “To Father Ed—Godspeed!” (June 1960).
Glenn C., Heroes of Early Black AA: Their Stories and Their Messages. Hindsfoot Foundation, 2017. Chapter 1 (Dred Scott’s grave).
Glenn C., Father Ed Dowling: Bill Wilson’s Sponsor. Draft of May 1, 2015, posted in his archive at Indiana University South Bend. Chapter 1 and chapter 16 (Dred Scott and the Old Baden Society), chapter 40 (LSD, with Bill’s 1959 letters from Robert Fitzgerald, The Soul of Sponsorship, Hazelden, 1995), chapter 41 (his health and his letters to Sister Ignatia), chapter 42 (“A.A. Steps for the Underprivileged Non-A.A.,” 1960) and chapter 43 (Memphis, the funeral and the burial). Quotations are from the online text.
AA Grapevine, June 1960: the editors’ note with Bill W.’s farewell, on his last article, as transcribed on the AA History Lovers list (message 1731).
“Father Ed Dowling — Bill W.’s Confidant and Friend.” Box 4-5-9, August–September 2006.
Robert Fitzgerald, S.J., “Father Ed and A.A.’s Bill W.” Catholic Digest, April 1991, as transcribed at silkworth.net.