Illustration · Third Avenue under the elevated railway on a rainy night in the 1940s, with a stair up to the station and a red light in the wet street. Not drawn from a photograph.

Albany, Philadelphia, New York and points between · 1935–1953

The merry-go-round

After two years and seven months sober, he drank again in April 1937, and for sixteen years he went round and round.

“After my flop following the initial spiritual lift and long sobriety I’ve never been able to regain the same feeling.”

Ebby, in a letter from the Keswick Colony of Mercy to Ruth Hock, who ran AA’s first office, about 1939 · quoted in Mel B., Ebby: The Man Who Sponsored Bill W., 1998

Round and round

For more than two years after the kitchen table, Ebby stayed sober. He lived at the Calvary Mission, worked with the men there, and went to Oxford Group meetings at Calvary House and at Bill and Lois’s house on Clinton Street, where he moved in for the first of several times. In the summer of 1935 Rowland H. took him to his ranch in New Mexico. In the summer of 1936 he went home to Albany, and that November he got a job as an inspector at the Ford plant in Green Island, ten miles up the Hudson.

Late in April 1937, full of tension, he went down to New York to have dinner with a woman friend. She always had a drink when they dined, and this time he had one too. By midnight he was roaring drunk. “I fell off the wagon,” he said in 1954. “That was after two years and approximately seven months of sobriety.” Back in Albany, “the old merry-go-round started.” Soon he lost the Ford job.

Late that year Bill and Dr. Bob counted about forty alcoholics staying sober in New York and Akron. “Despite the fact that Ebby had slipped,” Bill wrote, “a benign chain reaction… had started outward from Dr. Bob and me.”

The Trylon and Perisphere at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, lit up at night. — The Trylon and Perisphere at the New York World’s Fair, May 1939. Ebby worked for the New York State commission at the fair that summer.Gottscho-Schleisner Collection, Library of Congress

From then on he went wherever friends could take him in. He spent the summer of 1938 with Fitz M.’s family in Maryland, and two winters at the Keswick Colony of Mercy, a religious home for drunkards in New Jersey. Through a brother’s connections he got a job at the 1939 World’s Fair. Lois thought he was sober that summer. He wasn’t: “with so many people there, and crowds, I wasn’t noticed much.”

In June 1940 he tried Philadelphia. He arrived about ten in the morning, and by noon he was on his way to another drunk. The AA members there got him into the psychiatric ward at Philadelphia General Hospital. Then came a mission, a porter’s job in a hospital laboratory and, after Pearl Harbor, a post as a Navy inspector at a plant making torpedo parts. He stayed sober for a year or more. When he began drinking again, the Navy sent two men to tell him, “Get yourself a good drunk and get it over with. We know your record, you haven’t had a drink.” He couldn’t, and they let him go “without prejudice.” After that, he said, “I’d have a couple of months on the wagon and six months off.”

In the fall of 1945 he came back to New York and moved in with Bill and Lois, who lived in Bedford Hills by then. For a time he worked in the Grapevine’s circulation department. Then came High Watch Farm in Connecticut, Beech Hill in New Hampshire, a farm in Katonah, an orderly’s job at a mental hospital in Rye, and Manhattan again, “right on the old Third Avenue pattern.” On nights with nowhere to sleep, he walked from Fourteenth Street to Seventy-Second and back, three or four times over.

Bill never stopped trying. In 1948 he wrote to one of Ebby’s brothers: “Considering what he did for me years ago, it’s a heartbreaking situation, for which I seem to have no answer at all.”

Listen The merry-go-round About 1 minute

Sixteen years

Where he stayed, 1935–1953

Twelve of the places Ebby lived and worked between the kitchen table and the plane to Dallas, numbered in order.

Places and dates come from Ebby’s 1954 recollections and the letters Mel B. quotes, and some dates are approximate.

A diagram, not a survey map. The places sit at their real latitude and longitude, but the coast and rivers are simplified, and the dotted line only joins the places in order.

1. The mission and 182 Clinton Street1935–36
The Calvary Mission in Manhattan, then Bill and Lois’s house in Brooklyn. Sober, and working with the men at the mission.
2. Albany, and the Ford plant at Green Island1936–37
An inspector’s job, and the slip in April 1937.
3. Fitz M.’s family, Cumberstone, MarylandSummer 1938
Looking after the children while Fitz and Bill traveled. “I had a very lovely summer.”
4. The Keswick Colony of Mercy, New JerseyTwo winters, from late 1938
Outdoor work at a religious home for drunkards. He got in shape, but “was not happy.”
5. The World’s Fair, Queens1939
A job with the New York State commission at the fair, drinking and unnoticed in the crowds.
6. Philadelphia1940–45
The psychiatric ward at Philadelphia General, a mission, the Navy’s torpedo-parts plant, and a couple of hitches as steward of the AA club on South 36th Street.
7. Bill and Lois’s house, Bedford HillsFrom 1945, off and on
About a year living with them, and many returns.
8. High Watch Farm, Kent, ConnecticutSummers of 1946 and 1947
Assistant to the man in charge, who traveled a good deal.
9. Beech Hill Farm, Dublin, New HampshireAbout 1949–50
A rest home for recovering alcoholics on a mountain above Dublin. Assistant manager again, until he drank again.
10. A farm in KatonahEarly 1950s
Painting in the winter, planting corn and potatoes in the spring, three miles from the Wilsons.
11. A mental hospital in RyeEarly 1950s
A job as an orderly. “I didn’t last out there.”
12. Third Avenue, ManhattanTo September 1953
Rooming houses, the city lodging house, and the AA offices, looking for a handout.

Three to five months

Bill summed up the pattern in April 1950: “he stays sober three to five months at a time. Then comes that gradual emotional build-up you know so well and he falls down again.” Each time, somebody took him in.

For a closer look

Go deeper

A visitor to the AA office, what the gratitude cost, and the friends who kept hauling him in.

Nell Wing’s visitor

More than once, Ebby came into the reception room at AA’s headquarters drunk and fell asleep on the couch. Nobody there wanted to call the police on him.

One day, while the staff were wondering what to do, a well-dressed man arrived. He told Nell Wing, Bill’s secretary, that he was writing a book about AA and wanted to know what had happened to Ebby T., who had brought the Oxford Group message to Bill. “I confess I found the moment too dramatic to pass up,” she said. “So I just silently pointed over to the couch.”

Sober, she remembered, he was intelligent, charming and good company. Drunk, he wanted “a half-dollar or a buck,” and though the office had a policy against giving him money, “we all did.”

What gratitude cost

Nobody felt the pull more than Bill. The day before Christmas in 1948, Ebby asked him for money at a meeting. Bill said no, “by a great effort,” and guessed that others there had given in. He wrote to Ebby’s brother: “so many of us feel under such obligations and gratitude that we continue to do this, though we know quite well he will drink it up.”

Lois wrote that “we all felt so deeply in his debt that we hated to refuse him.” Yev G., a New York member from 1941, thought Bill treated Ebby as he would never have treated any other drunk.

Lib S., one of the office’s first secretaries, remembered him as a perfectly awful drunk. But she didn’t want to remember him that way. “Ebby was a channel in God’s work.”

Fishing with a net

The Third Avenue elevated railway over a city street, with its steel supports and a station above. — The Third Avenue elevated railway at 18th Street, September 1942.Photo: Marjory Collins, FSA/OWI Collection, Library of Congress

Few of the earliest New York members stayed sober, Marty M., one of AA’s first women members, said in 1980. Ebby was the one who kept coming back, and that was because “Bill went fishing with a fishing net. He’d haul him in.”

Others did some of the hauling. Yev G. was one of Bill’s “selected emissaries” sent out to find Ebby when he disappeared: “We knew his watering holes, the rooming houses, and the places where he went.”

Letters found him wherever he landed. In 1947, at High Watch, he got one from Mary H., a New York member who had just heard Bill tell the story of Ebby’s visit to the kitchen table: “Where is he, Ebby? Under what is he buried?”

Sources

Mel B., Ebby: The Man Who Sponsored Bill W. Hazelden, 1998. Chapters 6–10, quoting Ebby’s 1954 recollections, letters of Ebby, Bill W. and others, and later interviews with Nell Wing, Lib S., Yev G. and Marty M.
Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age. AA World Services, 1957. “Recovery: The First Legacy.”
Pass It On. AA World Services, 1984. Chapters 6 and 9.
World’s Fair night views. Trylon and perisphere, photograph by Gottscho-Schleisner, May 1939. Gottscho-Schleisner Collection, Library of Congress. No known restrictions on publication.
Third Avenue elevated railway at 18th Street, photograph by Marjory Collins, 1942. FSA/OWI Collection, Library of Congress. No known restrictions.