Illustration · An imagined night in the fall of 1952 in the old wing at St. Vincent Charity Hospital in Cleveland, while AA tradesmen rebuilt it as Rosary Hall: fresh paint, a new washbasin, coffee on a plank, and the sign for over the door. Not drawn from a photograph.

Akron and Cleveland · 1950–1953

No professional job

She kept her name off the St. Thomas plaque. Two years later her order sent her to Cleveland, where AA plumbers, painters and carpenters built her a new ward at night, and a crowd of a thousand wouldn’t let her stay anonymous.

“This was no professional job. The folks who worked on this thing had their hearts in it.”

A plumbing inspector at Rosary Hall, as Bill W. reported it in 1954 · The Language of the Heart

Where we’re sent

By 1950 Sister Ignatia was famous in AA, and wanted none of it. In December 1949, pressed by her superior, she had accepted the College of Steubenville’s first Poverello Medal on AA’s behalf, and the newspapers had started calling her the Angel of Alcoholics Anonymous. When Ohio members unveiled a plaque in the St. Thomas ward on April 8, 1950, she refused to have her name on it; The flower room has the inscription. Her example, Bill W. wrote later, was “the influence that persuaded us both never to accept public honors of any sort,” meaning himself and Dr. Bob.

After Dr. Bob died that November, Bill wrote, there was “great concern lest Sister might not be allowed to continue her work.” For a time, nothing changed. Then, on August 1, 1952, her orders came: “Charity Hospital on the seventh of August.” Darrah traces the move to a quarrel over admissions. The administration wanted the office modernized, and her twenty years of juggling beds for AA stood in the way; an earlier plan to move her had been dropped when the AA members protested. “You know, we’re just like the people in the Army; we go to where we’re sent,” she said. Her farewell outgrew the ward and moved to the cafeteria, and on the evening of August 6 cars jammed the old Akron viaduct leading to the hospital. “I called it an Irish Wake,” she said. Sister Mercede took over the ward.

At Charity there was nothing for her to run. Her orders told her only to call on the second-floor patients and help AA, and at sixty-three she wondered whether this was the first step toward retirement. The hospital had once had a small alcoholic ward, she wrote to Bill on October 6, but it had closed while a new wing went up. (Bill’s 1966 memorial says only that she was put in charge of Charity’s alcoholic ward.) An AA member, Eddie G., came by every day and watched her pace the corridor. “Eddie, I’ll never have another place,” she told him. Back in August, Akron members had gone to the bishop to ask for her back, and been sent on to his chancellor, who told them nothing could be done.

The day after her letter to Bill, October 7, 1952, the Feast of the Holy Rosary, she was called to the office of Charity’s administrator, Sister Francetta, and found her bent over blueprints for an alcoholic ward with the nursing director and an architect. Were the patients violent? Would they be drunk? “Will they need to be put in cages?” the architect asked. She offered to draw what she wanted, and brought her sketch the next day. “I am not personally interested,” Sister Francetta told her. “But I am also not opposed.” Darrah thinks the decision was more practical than kind: Charity had empty beds and too few nurses, and AA patients needed little nursing. When a board member scrawled on the plan that a table would do instead of a coffee bar, she answered, “Let’s forget about it if you’re not going to give us the proper setup.” The coffee bar stayed in. She named the ward Rosary Hall, for the feast.

Word went round, and the AAs of Cleveland and Akron took over the job; Who built it tells how. On Sunday, December 7, moments before the dedication, the workers hung a sign over the doors: “Take Hope All Ye Who Leave Here.” The ward opened to the public the next day, and by the time its first patient, Don L., came in on December 15, it had sixteen beds, two of them for women. A year later, on December 13, 1953, a thousand people filled a small auditorium and its balcony for the first anniversary, Bill W. among them. The program said the sisters and the AA members who had helped “decline all individual credit.” It didn’t work. “Sister Ignatia’s attempted anonymity was busted wide open,” Bill wrote. She was “just about as anonymous in that part of our AA world as baseball’s Cleveland Indians.”

Listen No professional job About 1 minute

The crew

Who built it

Between October and December 1952, AA members from Cleveland and Akron rebuilt an old wing of St. Vincent Charity Hospital for her, mostly at night and mostly for nothing. A few of them have names.

From Mary C. Darrah’s biography (1992), which draws on Father Thomas C.’s 1966 research notes, and on the Cleveland Plain Dealer of December 5, 1952, which Darrah quotes. AA members are named as Darrah names them. Quotations are short excerpts.

Father Otis W.

A priest in AA

“It’s up to us to get her organized.”

He said it at the St. Agnes AA meeting. That same evening a “bucket brigade” formed, and AA members turned out to scrub the old wing’s walls and woodwork.

Darrah, chapter 5.

Keith C.

The plumber

“Are you the same sister who worked with Dr. Bob?”

A plumbing company sent him to fit some old shower units a hospital had donated. He was in AA. His employer let him give his own time, supplier friends gave the tubs, showers, sinks and fittings, and AA friends put them in after hours, late into the night.

Darrah, chapter 5.

Two painters

From the union

The architect offered to supply paint, but the AAs were ahead of him: the painters’ union, through one of its agents, sent two professionals with their own. The whole ward was repainted in two weeks.

Darrah, chapter 5.

Tommy O.M.

The foreman

“Oh, Charlie, if I ever needed a construction engineer, I need one now.”

She said it on the phone to Charlie, a Pittsburgh man she had once treated, who called from the Cleveland airport between flights. One call from Charlie to Tommy O.M., a friend of his in Cleveland, and the job had a manager to organize the trades.

Darrah, chapter 5.

The givers

Money and goods

“A woman sent $1,000.”

Businessmen gave fixtures, furniture and paint, the paper reported, and unions let members put in their off hours; one union paid two carpenters itself. A lawyer and his wife saw to the little chapel, and the workers included Protestants, Catholics and Jews.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer, December 5, 1952, quoted in Darrah, chapter 5.

Sister Ignatia

Food and coffee

“It’s Our Lady and the AAs who are doing it.”

She kept the night crews fed and in coffee, and spent the money people gave on everything from building supplies to pajamas and medicine.

The Plain Dealer (the quotation) and Darrah, chapter 5.

More than $60,000

Bill W. put the cost at “More than $60,000 in funds and night work,” and no source here gives a better figure; Darrah quotes his and gives none of her own. What Bill remembered best was the plumbing inspector, whose words he turned around at the end of his article: “This is no professional job. It comes from the heart.”

For a closer look

Go deeper

How many came through the first year, the alcoholic wards Cleveland had before hers, and three letters over a door.

A thousand and seven hundred

In his article on the anniversary, Bill W. wrote that a thousand alcoholics had come through Rosary Hall in the single year since she had come to Charity, and that Sister Ignatia, who kept up with many of them, believed about seven hundred were sober. Darrah prints Sister Ignatia’s own count, month by month, from a little black notebook: 37 in December 1952, 70 in January, up to 98 in May, 1,018 by the end of 1953. Through November it came to 943, so Bill’s thousand was a fair round number. Only Bill gives the seven hundred.

The evening itself was not smooth behind the scenes, Darrah writes. Some Cleveland old-timers wanted to run the program, and Sister Ignatia let newly sober men from Rosary Hall help plan it instead. The Grapevine noted that Bill had made a special trip, and that this didn’t mean he was traveling and speaking again in general.

Before Rosary Hall

Charity had taken alcoholics before she came, and the accounts disagree about how. Bill W. wrote in 1954 that the hospital had taken alcoholics since 1940 and set aside a ward for them, run by Sister Victorine Keller and the chaplain, Father James Nagle. Darrah tells a slower story. Charity’s superior refused at first: “No beds for alcoholics. Hospital beds are for sick people!” For about two years doctors slipped AA patients onto Sister Victorine’s ward under diagnoses like “evaluation, observation, and avitaminosis.” A real alcoholic ward, Room 231, opened with four beds on April 20, 1945, and closed about a year later, when Sister Victorine was transferred and the hospital began building.

Bill also wrote that St. John’s Hospital in Cleveland had for a time kept a ward of just two beds, with “Sister Merced” in charge, the same Sister Mercede who later took over at St. Thomas. Darrah makes it four beds, from 1946 to 1950. She calls his account of the early Cleveland and Akron hospitals “somewhat inaccurate.”

R. H. S.

Rosary Hall was named for the day the ward was granted, the Feast of the Holy Rosary. Its full name was Rosary Hall Solarium, and the initials R. H. S. were carved over the door. Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers says they “just happened” to be Dr. Bob’s own initials, and The flower room tells it that way. In 1960 she admitted the truth in a speech: she had wanted the ward to honor Dr. Bob’s memory, and “All I need is an ‘S,’ and I’ll have Doctor’s initials.”

The sign over the entrance, “Take Hope All Ye Who Leave Here,” turns around the line Dante put over the gate of hell, which tells those who enter to abandon all hope. After her time, Rosary Hall kept its anniversary on October 7, the day it was granted, rather than in December.

Sources

Mary C. Darrah, Sister Ignatia: Angel of Alcoholics Anonymous. Loyola University Press, 1992. Chapter 3, “The Spiritual Connection” (the 1950 plaque), chapter 4, “Akron’s Magic Blend” (the Poverello Medal; the transfer; her 1954 interview and 1960 speech on it; the Akron Beacon Journal), and chapter 5, “The Cleveland Frontier” (her first weeks at Charity; October 7, 1952; the rebuilding, from Father Thomas C.’s 1966 research notes; the Cleveland Plain Dealer of December 5, 1952; her 1960 speech on the name; the census; the anniversary; Charity’s earlier wards). Quotations are from the scanned text, checked against the page images.
The Language of the Heart. AA Grapevine, 1988. Bill W., “Another Fragment of History: Sister Ignatia and Dr. Bob” (February 1954) and “For Sister Ignatia” (August 1966), both first printed in the AA Grapevine.
Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers. AA World Services, 1980. Chapter XIV (Rosary Hall Solarium and its initials).
Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age. Alcoholics Anonymous Publishing, 1957. The plaque, April 8, 1950.