One Drunk to Another My Sponsor, Ebby
Watch The Kitchen Table
MANCHESTER
Illustration · A bench on a small depot platform in Manchester, Vermont, at dusk, with a hat, a bag and a timetable. Not drawn from a photograph.

My Sponsor, Ebby

Meet Ebby

A mayor’s brother, a charming drunk, and the old school friend who sat across the kitchen table from Bill W.

“And there sat my sponsor Ebby, who had first brought the word that lifted me out of the alcoholic pit.”

Bill W., on seeing Ebby in the audience at AA’s twentieth-anniversary convention in St. Louis, 1955 · Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age, 1957

Ebby T. was born in Albany, New York, in 1896, the youngest son of one of the city’s leading families. He was drinking by his teens. By his mid-thirties he had left Albany for Vermont, where his drinking was less of an embarrassment to his brother, the mayor.

In the summer of 1934, facing a possible six months in jail, he found three or four bottles of ale in a cellar and couldn’t bring himself to drink them. Three men from the Oxford Group helped him stay stopped. That November he looked up an old school friend in Brooklyn who was drinking the way he had been, sat across Bill W.’s kitchen table, turned down a drink, and told him what had happened. Bill had his last drink that December. The next spring, in Akron, Bill passed the message on to Dr. Bob.

Ebby drank again in 1937 and spent most of the next thirty years drinking and trying to stop, with seven sober years in Texas. He died sober in 1966. Through all of it, Bill introduced him the same way: “my sponsor, Ebby.”

This is his story in seven parts, from a soda fountain in Albany to a farmhouse on Peaceable Street. It’s built from Mel B.’s Ebby: The Man Who Sponsored Bill W. and three AA histories. Most of Ebby’s own words come from recordings Bill made of him in 1954. Where the sources disagree, these pages say so.

Start with 1 · The first deceit

His life at a glance

  1. 1896Born April 29 in Albany, New York, the youngest of five brothers.
  2. 1911Meets Bill W. in Manchester, Vermont, where his family spends its summers.
  3. 1915Leaves Albany Academy without graduating and goes to work in the family foundry.
  4. 1929Hires a plane to fly himself and Bill, both drunk, from Albany to Manchester.
  5. 1932Moves to Manchester, Vermont, and keeps drinking.
  6. 1934Arrested in the summer; on the Saturday before court, gives away the ale in the cellar. In late November, sits at Bill’s kitchen table.
  7. 1937Drinks again in late April, after two years and seven months sober.
  8. 1937–53In and out of sobriety in Albany, Philadelphia and New York.
  9. 1953Flies to Dallas in September and enters the Texas Clinic.
  10. 1954Records his memories for Bill in Fort Worth. Late in the year, his last drink for seven years.
  11. 1955Bill’s guest at AA’s twentieth-anniversary convention in St. Louis.
  12. 1961Chloe K., the woman he loves, dies in September, and he drinks again.
  13. 1964Moves to McPike’s Farm in Galway, New York, on May 30.
  14. 1966Dies sober on March 21, about two and a half years after his last drink.

Seven parts and Legacy

Walk through his 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.

    New to the story? The Kitchen Table tells how AA began, from one drunk talking to another to millions around the world.

    Watch The Kitchen Table