Bedford Hills and the world · 1957–1971
Alateen, which she loved; travels whenever they could get away; and Bill’s last illness, when at first she did all the nursing herself.
“Can you see why I love the kids?”
Lois had always loved the children of AA members. In the early days teenagers came to meetings with their families and took the program to heart, sometimes more than some of the alcoholics did. But children of alcoholics, she noticed, often had more sympathy for the drinking parent than the other one. The drinker’s trouble was plain: too much drinking. The other parent’s irritability was harder to understand.
In 1955 the Clearing House held a session for children at the convention in St. Louis. Soon teenagers in California had started meetings of their own, and in 1957 the first Alateen group registered with Al-Anon’s office. By 1963 there were more than 200 groups in America (the kids).
She and Bill traveled whenever they could, and AA members kept finding them (two motorcycle hoboes). In 1968, the year of their fiftieth wedding anniversary, Nell Wing, Bill’s secretary, took them out to Sunday dinner at noon. They came home to find the parking lot full of cars, some from distant states. Harriet, who kept house at Stepping Stones, had organized a party for both families. “It was truly a great affair, and our egos were more than satisfied.”
Her memoir says nothing of one part of these years. Three later writers, Nan Robertson in 1988, Francis Hartigan, who was Lois’s secretary in her last years, in 2000, and Susan Cheever in 2004, report that there were other women, and from the mid-1950s a long relationship with a woman named Helen W. AA’s own biography of Bill doesn’t mention it, and the accounts rest largely on old-timers’ memories and on Tom P., who later broke with Bill. Number One Man sets out who says what, and how strong the evidence is.
Bill had emphysema. In July 1970, at AA’s convention in Miami, he could appear only once, in a wheelchair, and rose from it to give a short talk. They stayed on in Miami for a month so he could recover under the care of an AA friend, Dr. Ed B.
At home he soon needed oxygen all the time, and pneumonia sent him to the hospital again and again. “At first, I did all the nursing.” Then a friend came to stay with him at night, and when that was too much for both of them, there were nurses day and night.
In January 1971 Dr. Ed’s hospital in Miami had a new breathing machine that might help, and a small plane was chartered to fly Bill there. They flew on January 24, their 53rd wedding anniversary. That evening, after supper, she saw him in the hospital, and he seemed fairly comfortable. About six the next morning Ed woke her, crying. Bill had died in the night. “Ed and I fell into each other’s arms.”
It’s 1957. Teenagers whose parents drink have started meeting on their own, in California. Lois has always loved the children of AA members, and soon they have a name of their own: Alateen.
Over the years, she and Bill travel whenever they can, two motorcycle hoboes at heart: a freighter through the Panama Canal, the mountains of Oaxaca, the cold, damp Scilly Isles.
Then Bill’s lungs give out. By the fall of 1970 he needs oxygen all the time, and at first she does all the nursing herself.
On their fifty-third wedding anniversary, a small plane flies him to a hospital in Miami. She sees him after supper. In the morning a friend wakes her, crying. Bill has died in the night, and she wasn’t there.
Alateen, 1955–1972
Alateen began with teenagers who wanted meetings of their own. Here is how it grew, as Lois told it.
From Lois Remembers (1979), chapter 18, which takes its title from the last card. Her counts of groups are round numbers; her chronology gives 97 Alateen groups in January 1961. Most quotations are short excerpts from young people’s talks she printed; the one on sponsors is her own.
1955
At AA’s convention the Clearing House holds a session for children of alcoholics. One young speaker tells how the family dog crawled under the covers and shook when Dad stumbled up the steps at night, until his first AA meeting.
“Even a small child can understand the meaning and beauty of the program.”
Lois Remembers, ch. 18
About 1957
A young man writes that he has started meetings for teenagers, and proposes a third division, since their problems differ from those of AA or Al-Anon members. It would be part of Al-Anon. Another group starts in California, and a letter comes from Durban, South Africa, asking for literature for teenagers.
Someone suggests the name Alateen, and a pamphlet, Youth and the Alcoholic Parent, goes out with every Al-Anon order.
Lois Remembers, ch. 18 and chronology
1960
Workshops for teenagers at AA’s convention. AA and Al-Anon members come away saying the young people seem to have grasped the program better than they had themselves.
About 100 groups, five years after St. Louis.
Lois Remembers, ch. 18
1960s
Every Alateen group is to have an adult sponsor. AA members are happy to serve, but “few Al-Anon parents want to be Alateen Group Sponsors.” Some don’t want their children going at all. It proves impractical for a parent to sponsor a child’s own group; children are often reluctant to speak freely in front of their parents.
Lois Remembers, ch. 18
June 1961
Alateen members on the East Coast plan, pay for and run a convention of their own, with their sponsors’ help.
The first of many.
Lois Remembers, ch. 18
1963–1964
Over 200 groups in America, and new ones in South Africa, India, England, Puerto Rico and Trinidad. By April 1964 a full-time Alateen secretary has joined the staff, and one of her jobs is a bimonthly newsletter, Alateen Talk.
Lois Remembers, ch. 18
1965
At AA’s convention a young member tells of a fight with knives with a drunken father, and of a car that went off a small cliff and stopped three inches from a tree.
“It has taught me to accept myself and my father for what we are, to love him, and to understand him.”
Lois Remembers, ch. 18
1970
Three Alateen workshops at AA’s convention.
“I try to overcome attacks of self-pity by concerning myself with others”
Lois Remembers, ch. 18
About 1972
An 11-year-old boy writes to the columnist Ann Landers, asking how he can learn not to hate his drunken father. Her answer brings 300 inquiries to Al-Anon’s office.
By then, Lois wrote, there were 1,000 Alateen groups.
Lois Remembers, ch. 18
Sponsors, then and now
Finding sponsors was hard in her day, and Alateen still depends on them. Since 2003, a note in later printings of her memoir says, every Al-Anon area has had Alateen safety and behavioral requirements, and an Alateen group can’t meet without Al-Anon members certified by the area to serve as its sponsors.
For a closer look
Their travels, the June picnic at Stepping Stones, and two accounts of the day Bill died.
They tried to get away by themselves, and AA kept finding them. At a little inn on a lake in the Laurentian Mountains of Quebec, the cook peeked through the window in his kitchen door at dinner and recognized Bill. The cook was a member, and so was the manager, and a planeload of members flew up from Montreal. On a dirt road in Bermuda a car passed them, slowed, stopped and backed up: “Are you Bill W.?” Those friends, she noted, considerately drove on.
They sailed on a freighter through the Panama Canal and roughed it for a week on the island of Taboga. They spent several weeks in a glassed-in cabin on a beach at St. Thomas, drove down the mountains to Oaxaca with Bill’s mother, and went back to Mexico the next year for the Mayan ruins of Yucatán. They spent more than a month in Spain, Portugal and the Canaries, saw a moose on Isle Royale, and went to Hawaii.
In March 1967 they flew to London and took a train and a helicopter to the Scilly Isles, all daffodils and fruit blossom and damp cold. The maid put hot-water bottles under the quilts each night, and they shivered anyway. “Silly isles indeed!”
Every June from 1952, she wrote, there was an Al-Anon picnic and meeting at Stepping Stones, with 100 or 200 people: “toddlers, teenagers, grandmas,” AA members and Al-Anon members. After lunch, members are asked to speak. While Bill was alive, he always closed the meeting.
In recent years, she wrote, it was the Alateen members who really made the day, with their honest and imaginative talks.
In her account of the day Bill died, a small chartered plane with two pilots had to fly low and slowly, and the trip was long and hard for him. She saw him after supper, fairly comfortable. He sank into a coma soon after she left. The doctors revived him once or twice, and worked all night until his breathing stopped. Ed woke her about six.
AA’s biography of Bill tells it from the memories of Nell Wing and others: a Learjet; Bill conscious and in good spirits, seeing his parents and grandparents in the cabin; Lois at his head, “holding his other hand and talking”; good night at eight; and death at half past eleven that night. That account is in Number One Man.
The doctors hadn’t called her, she reasoned, to spare her, and he might not have known her. “But even so, I wanted to be there, and the hurt of not being at his side is still with me.” The New York Times put his name and picture on its front page, and his anonymity was broken for good. She went on keeping hers, “for the sake of the example it sets other Al-Anons.”
One regret was older. In 1970, while he was ill, she lost her temper with him, in a spat she especially regretted: “I am so sorry that I lost my temper, for I know he was troubled by it.” Of the years after his death she wrote, “Thank God for Al-Anon and A.A. I still have a purpose in life even with Bill gone.”