Illustration · A pay telephone and a turnstile in a 1930s subway station, with a few coins on the ledge. Not drawn from a photograph.

Calvary Mission and 182 Clinton Street · November–December 1934

Ten cents

Broke and living in a mission, he spent a few cents to reach an old friend who was still drinking.

“It wasn’t like the water wagon business at all.”

Ebby, as Bill remembered his words at the kitchen table · Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age, 1957

What he carried

That fall Ebby was in New York, sober and broke. After a stay with Shep C., he found a bed at the Calvary Mission on East 23rd Street, a rescue mission for homeless men run by Sam Shoemaker’s Calvary Church, a center of the Oxford Group in New York. He joined “the brotherhood,” the men who helped run the place, and the mission recorded his surrender as November 1, 1934.

Men seated on benches in a mission hall, singing from hymnbooks. — A stand-in: evening hymns at a city mission for homeless men in Dubuque, Iowa, April 1940. No cleared photograph of the Calvary Mission has been found.Photo: John Vachon, FSA/OWI Collection, Library of Congress

Friends on Wall Street told him Bill W. was in bad shape. In Ebby’s memory, he phoned the house and got Lois, Bill’s wife, “and she invited me over to dinner a night or two later.” Bill remembered Ebby on the phone, and himself hoping for a night of drinking.

Late in November, Ebby sat across the kitchen table from Bill at 182 Clinton Street, in Brooklyn. He turned down the drink Bill pushed across to him and said he had got religion. The Kitchen Table, the film on this site, tells that evening from Bill’s side. From Ebby’s side, what mattered was how this differed from every time he had quit before: “It wasn’t like the water wagon business at all. This time I felt completely released of the desire.” Afterward Bill walked him to the subway and said he wanted whatever Ebby had found.

Bill kept drinking. One day he went looking for the mission, stopping in bars along the way, and turned up at nightfall with a Finnish fisherman named Alec. The man in charge wanted to throw them out. Then Ebby “turned up, grinning,” and asked, “What about a plate of beans?” That night, when Bill went forward at the altar call, “Ebby reached for my coattails, but it was too late.”

On December 11 Bill checked into Towns Hospital for the last time. Three days later Ebby came by. “Mighty sorry you had to land up here again,” he said. “Thought I’d come up and say ‘hello.’” He didn’t preach. When Bill asked, he went over it all again, what Bill called “your neat little formula.” Soon after, he brought Bill a book he hadn’t read himself, William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, which Oxford Group friends had recommended.

Ebby stayed on at the mission for about a year, working with the men there, then moved in with Bill and Lois at Clinton Street.

Listen Ten cents About 1 minute

Ebby at Towns, 1934

“…you pray to whatever God you think there is, even as an experiment…”

The six steps, 1938

“We prayed to whatever God we thought there was for power to practice these precepts.”

Where the Steps came from

Bill called that early program “the substance of the formula for sobriety that Ebby had given me.” Most of the ideas, he said, came from the Oxford Group, William James and Dr. Silkworth. Ebby was the one who carried them to the kitchen table. When Bill wrote the Big Book’s fifth chapter, the six became twelve.

For a closer look

Go deeper

What the call cost, whether Ebby was at the mission that night, and the book he hadn’t read.

Nickels, or a dime?

Postcard view of Brooklyn Borough Hall, a columned building with a cupola. — Borough Hall, Brooklyn, on a postcard from about 1930 to 1945. Bill and Lois’s house on Clinton Street was a short walk away.Tichnor Brothers Collection, Boston Public Library

Bill, in 1957: “He called me on the phone and then got into the subway; total cost, ten cents.”

Mel B. counts three nickels: one for a call to Lois, one for a later call to Bill, and one for the subway to Brooklyn. Bill never mentioned a call to Lois. Perhaps he forgot it, or she never told him.

Either way, Bill drew a lesson from it: “Ebby established the principle that A.A. in action calls for the sacrifice of much time and a little money.”

Was Ebby at the mission that night?

An old photograph of a small church building on a city street. — The Free Chapel of Calvary Church on East 23rd Street in 1863, on the block where the Calvary Mission later stood. It isn’t known whether the mission used this building.Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

In Bill’s telling, Ebby turned up with the offer of beans, sat beside him on the bench, and tried to hold him back at the altar call.

Billy D., the mission’s assistant superintendent, remembered it differently in a 1962 letter: Ebby wasn’t there that night at all. In his version, Bill told the meeting he had seen Ebby testify at Calvary Church the Sunday before, and that if Ebby could get help here, so could he. Billy D. also remembered Bill’s companion as a man named Johnson, not Alec.

Mel B. sides with Bill. The letter was written twenty-eight years after the night.

The book he hadn’t read

Bill, in 1957: “It was Ebby, I think, who brought me a copy of William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience.” Pass It On is surer: Ebby, on the third day. Ebby said Oxford Group friends had recommended it; he hadn’t read it himself.

Bill read it cover to cover and found in it a name for what had happened to him: “Deflation at depth—yes, that was it.” The book also made sense of the chain that had reached him: “Dr. Carl Jung had told an Oxford group friend of Ebby’s how hopeless his alcoholism was and Dr. Silkworth had passed the same sentence upon me. Then Ebby, also an alcoholic, had handed me the identical dose.”

The Oxford Group friend was Rowland H., the man who stood up for Ebby in court. His story is in 3 · The ale in the cellar.

Sources

Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age. AA World Services, 1957. “Recovery: The First Legacy” and “Service: The Third Legacy.”
Mel B., Ebby: The Man Who Sponsored Bill W. Hazelden, 1998. Chapters 1 and 7, quoting Ebby’s and Bill’s 1954 recollections and Billy D.’s 1962 letter.
Pass It On. AA World Services, 1984. Chapters 5, 6 and 11.
Alcoholics Anonymous. Works Publishing, 1939. “Bill’s Story.”
Hymn singing during evening services at city mission for homeless men, Dubuque, Iowa, photograph by John Vachon, 1940. FSA/OWI Collection, Library of Congress. No known restrictions.
Chapel of Calvary Church, Twenty-Third Street, photograph by George Stacy, 1863. Library of Congress. No known restrictions on publication.
Borough Hall, Brooklyn, N. Y. (postcard), Tichnor Brothers Collection, Boston Public Library. No known copyright restrictions.