Albany · 1896–1932
A chocolate milk that was really a drink, a trophy cup filled with beer, and a plane that carried two drunks into Vermont.
“I was an in-and-outer from the beginning. Sometimes I could handle it, and sometimes I couldn’t.”
Ebby T. was born in Albany, New York, on April 29, 1896, the youngest of five brothers in one of the city’s leading families. His grandfather had built a business making wheels for the railroads and had been mayor of Albany; one of his brothers would be mayor too. Every summer the family went to Manchester, Vermont. There, around 1911, Ebby got to know a local ballplayer from East Dorset named Bill W.
At Albany Academy, a military school, he lived in the shadow of an older brother’s record. He spent one year at Burr and Burton in Manchester, in the same class as Bill. Back in Albany, a school friend would phone and say, “Eb, let’s go get a chocolate milk.” Ebby repeated it out loud so his family would hear, and the two went downtown for a few drinks instead. He later called it “the first deceit.” In 1914 he walked into the bar of the Hotel Ten Eyck and ordered a beer, the first drink he remembered ordering for himself.
One spring he won a cup in a drill competition and filled it with beer, many times, at Keeler’s Restaurant. The principal wrote his father “that he thought the school couldn’t do any more for me,” and in June 1915 Ebby left without graduating. That fall his father said, “You’d better go work in the foundry.” The first time he came in late, the old timekeeper warned him: “Don’t start that. It’s awful easy to get in the habit.”
The foundry closed in 1922. He sold insurance, then joined a brokerage office where the salesmen met every afternoon to drink. “We’d make out our reports where we said that we reported progress,” he remembered, “which meant progress alcoholically.” His mother died in 1927 and his father in 1929. Bill thought one of Ebby’s troubles was that the family money lasted until he was about forty, too late to learn a trade.
In January 1929 Bill passed through Albany on his way to Vermont, and the two had their first drinks together. Ebby had been running with a crowd of barnstorming pilots, and he “couldn’t see why Bill would have to take that two-by-four railroad up there. Why not hire a plane?” The next day a young pilot flew them to Manchester, the first plane ever to land at the town’s new field. A welcoming committee was waiting. Bill remembered: “We somehow slid out of the cockpit, fell on the ground, and there we lay, immobile.”
After the flight, the drinking only got worse. Several times the Albany authorities warned him about it. In the fall of 1932 he left for Manchester.
Albany, New York, before the First World War. Ebby T. is the youngest of five brothers in one of the city’s leading families.
The telephone rings. A school friend asks if he wants to go get a chocolate milk. Ebby says it back, loud enough for the family to hear. Then the two of them go downtown for a drink. Years later he called it the first deceit.
He leaves school without graduating and goes to work in the family foundry. The first time he comes in late, the old timekeeper warns him: it’s awful easy to get in the habit.
In January 1929 his old friend Bill W. passes through town. Rather than let Bill take the train to Vermont, Ebby hires a plane. They land in Manchester in front of a welcoming committee, too drunk to climb out.
Sometimes, Ebby said, he could handle it. Sometimes he couldn’t.
An in-and-outer
Ebby remembered each of these long afterward. At the time, none of them looked like trouble.
Dates are Ebby’s own, from his 1954 recollections. Mel B. puts the beer at the Ten Eyck “at age nineteen,” but Ebby turned eighteen in April 1914.
School days
A school friend would phone and say, “Eb, let’s go get a chocolate milk.” Ebby said it back loud enough for his family to hear, and they went downtown for a few drinks, home by eleven so nobody would suspect.
Mel B., Ebby: The Man Who Sponsored Bill W., ch. 4
1914
He remembered wine at home. What stayed with him was walking into the bar of the Hotel Ten Eyck, one of Albany’s finest, and ordering a glass of beer himself.
Mel B., Ebby: The Man Who Sponsored Bill W., ch. 4
Fall 1915
At the family foundry, an old watchman who had hurt his leg drinking kept the time clock. When Ebby came in late, he said, “Don’t start that. It’s awful easy to get in the habit.” Ebby remembered it nearly forty years later.
Mel B., Ebby: The Man Who Sponsored Bill W., ch. 4
January 1929
Ebby hired a plane to fly Bill W. from Albany to Vermont. It was the first plane to land at Manchester’s new field, and the two men in it were drunk.
Continue to 2 · ExileMel B., Ebby: The Man Who Sponsored Bill W., ch. 4; Pass It On, ch. 4
In and out
A white lie, a beer, a late morning, a stunt. None of them looked like much. Twenty years after the first one, he was facing six months in jail.
For a closer look
The flight as each man remembered it, whether they had ever drunk together before, and the school he left.
Both men recorded their memories of the flight in 1954, and they don’t match.
Ebby: he put Bill in a hotel for the night, then “went out and drank all night, so I would be sure to make the trip.” He thought the pilot “awfully good-natured to fly two drunks up there.” When they landed, “half the town of Manchester was out there,” and the two of them ducked for the hangar. Ebby took the evening train home to Albany, “and right back into the drinking again.”
Bill: an all-night party, and in the plane “all three of us had been pulling at a bottle of liquor,” the pilot included. The town band had turned out, with a welcoming committee led by Mrs. Orvis of the Equinox House. The next day brought a hangover, “a crying jag,” and “a letter of abject apology to Mrs. Orvis.”
The Big Book, 1939, gives it one line: “There was that time we had chartered an airplane to complete a jag!”
Ebby always said that Saturday in January 1929 was the first time the two of them drank together, “never having had a drink together” before. Bill remembered otherwise, and told it that way in his talks.
Mel B. and Pass It On both side with Ebby. Mel B. suggests Bill may have been remembering drinking with Ebby’s brother Ken, or social evenings in Manchester. Lois, Bill’s wife, remembered that as boys Ebby was closer to her brother Rogers than to Bill.
Before the flight, Ebby said, he saw Bill now and then, in Manchester and in New York, and “the times that I saw him, I was doing most of the drinking and he hadn’t started in yet.”
The Academy was a military school, and Ebby did well at the drill: he rose to corporal and then sergeant in the cadet battalion. He belonged to the literary society but played no sports.
He spent one of his high school years at Burr and Burton in Manchester, and when he came back, Albany Academy wouldn’t give him credit for it. Mel B. thinks the resentment may have helped him decide to quit. After the beer at Keeler’s, the principal, “a lovable old man,” wrote to his father, and Ebby never went back to school.