Illustration · An imagined day in the early 1970s at Stepping Stones: a suitcase open on a bed, a flower lei on the folded clothes, a passport and a luggage tag on the spread. Drawn from Lois W.’s account of her travels after Bill’s death, not from a photograph.

Around the world and Bedford Hills · 1971–1988 and after

Legacy

Seventeen years without Bill: a trip around the world they had planned together, a memoir she chose to write herself, and a fellowship that kept on growing.

“I used to believe thinking was the highest function of human beings. The A.A. experience changed me. I now realize loving is our supreme function.”

Lois W., in the last chapter of her memoir · Lois Remembers, 1979

Worldwide love

After Bill died, thousands of letters came, “from great and small all over the world,” and there were memorial services from Antwerp and Bombay to Melbourne and Oslo. She and Bill had planned to go around the world “someday soon,” to visit the AA and Al-Anon groups that had sprung up since their trip to Europe in 1950. So she went without him, with Evelyn C., one of the early volunteers at the Clearing House. She had money enough: the royalties on Bill’s AA books, “his and my only income,” kept coming.

The groups along the way arranged meetings and looked after them. They went to Kenya, Victoria Falls and South Africa, then to Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Japan, and home by way of Honolulu (around the world without Bill). Seeing so much of AA and Al-Anon’s “loving devotion and oneness,” she wrote, did much to submerge her sense of loss in gratitude.

For years after, she kept traveling: to conventions in England, Ireland, Denver and Mexico, to Al-Anon’s first convention in Puerto Rico, and almost every year to Founders Day in Akron. At conventions, she wrote, she never knew whether she was AA or Al-Anon. “A.A. was my first love. It was in A.A. that I started my own spiritual striving.” In 1976 she turned down, on Bill’s behalf, a doctorate offered by his own college, Norwich University, “to do what I was sure Bill would want me to do.”

About 1976 she began a memoir. She was offered the help of several fine writers who could ghostwrite it from her notes, but she wanted to write it herself (writing it herself). She signed the book’s acknowledgments at Stepping Stones on January 24, 1979, their wedding anniversary, and Al-Anon published Lois Remembers that year, dedicated “To Bill / Who loved both alcoholics and their families.” That year too she set up the Stepping Stones Foundation to keep the house, its contents and its papers, and she was its first president.

She died on October 5, 1988. She was ninety-seven. She had made provision for the foundation to keep the house and its grounds, and it keeps the house as it was when she died and shows it to visitors by appointment. In 2012 the United States named Stepping Stones a National Historic Landmark, for its place in AA’s history and for Bill and Lois.

In 1979 she counted 14,000 Al-Anon groups, 2,200 of them Alateen groups, in 70 countries. Al-Anon now counts more than 24,000 groups (how many groups).

Listen Legacy About 1 minute

Al-Anon, 1951 to today

How many groups

From the groups that answered the first letter in 1951 to Al-Anon today. Each bar is out of 25,000.

1951, 1953 and 1979: Lois Remembers. 1955: Lois’s talk at St. Louis, in AA Comes of Age. 1961: her chronology. Today: Al-Anon’s fact sheet for professionals, which counts Alateen groups separately; her 1979 figure includes them. Her book gives 48 groups for 1951 in one place and 49 in another, and puts 1,500 groups in 1961 in its chronology and in 1963 in a chapter.

1951Groups that answered the first letter and agreed to unite

January 1953Registered with the Clearing House

441

July 1955On the American continent, as Lois told AA’s convention, with groups in ten countries abroad besides

nearly 700

January 1961Al-Anon groups registered; Alateen had 97

1,500

1979Including 2,200 Alateen groups, in 70 countries

14,000

TodayMore than 24,000 Al-Anon groups and nearly 1,500 Alateen groups, in 118 countries

24,000+

Growth in spirit

In 1979 she wrote that the numbers seemed astonishing to those who had been there at the start, “but we also know that Al-Anon hasn’t scratched the surface.” What mattered most, she thought, was growth “in spirit more than in numbers.”

For a closer look

Go deeper

Her trip around the world, the memoir she wrote herself, and what she thought Al-Anon had learned.

Around the world without Bill

In Kenya, at the Ark, a viewing lodge in the game reserves near Nairobi, a buzzer woke them at night when animals came to the water hole. They saw five bull elephants and a rare white rhinoceros, and missed the leopard. Victoria Falls was a highlight, she wrote, “dimmed only by not having Bill along.”

In South Africa the AA members couldn’t get a hall big enough for their open meeting. The large government hall wouldn’t let Black or “colored” members in, and the members wouldn’t meet without them, so they crowded into a small private hall, with people standing in the street and sitting in the windows. At an Al-Anon meeting in a home near Durban, they clasped hands, “black, brown, and white,” and sang “God be with you till we meet again.”

In Japan she and Evelyn spoke through a translator to a joint meeting of Danshu-Kai, a program for alcoholics that used some of AA’s ideas but was “definitely not A.A.,” and a society for their families, and felt they made little impression. In Honolulu, their last stop, they were given so many leis that Evelyn said they looked like walking flowerpots.

Writing it herself

She wrote the memoir, she said, from “sporadic diaries, old sketches, letters, and my memory.” Many of Bill’s letters had been kept, but few of hers. What she had notes for, she told in detail; the rest she passed over lightly. She thanked an editor, Barry, for his help, and took the blame for any flaw herself.

She could have had a ghostwriter, and a more polished book. She wanted to share her experience directly, in her own words, “which is the Al-Anon and A.A. way.” She wrote it for families still living with an alcoholic: “Even when you cannot see a way out, never give up hope.”

Others have told her story since. Television dramatized it twice: in My Name Is Bill W. (1989), with JoBeth Williams as Lois, and in When Love Is Not Enough (2010), with Winona Ryder.

Not secrecy

In her last chapter she looked at how Al-Anon had changed. Its first pamphlet put encouragement for the AA member at home first and the families’ own growth last; soon their own growth came first, and then “A.A.” became “alcoholic(s).” By degrees Al-Anon came to be for anyone affected by another person’s drinking, whether or not the drinker admitted a problem.

The emphasis moved, too, to what she called detachment with love, and she stressed the second half: “‘With-love’ is the important part of this idea.” Protecting Bill from the consequences of his own actions, she wrote, had not helped him. And in 1965, when a male delegate called himself “one of the shaving sisters,” they realized Al-Anon could no longer be called a “sister fellowship.”

On anonymity she pushed the other way. Al-Anon’s Tradition asked for anonymity in the press, radio, films and television, she pointed out, not within the groups or among friends. Acting as if the fellowships were secret societies, she wrote, only fed the shame around alcoholism. “How can we blame the public for its belief that alcoholism is a moral weakness if we seem to believe it ourselves?” Al-Anon’s Traditions are in Rule 62.

Sources

Lois Remembers. Al-Anon Family Groups, 1979. The dedication, acknowledgments and preface; chapter 16, “Worldwide Love” (the letters, the trips, Norwich, the memoir’s place in her days); chapter 17, “The Foundations of Al-Anon” (the 48 groups and the 441); chapter 19, “A Regenerating Force” (Al-Anon’s changes, anonymity, the 1979 count); and the chronology (January 1961). The printing in hand adds later notes, the latest from 2003.
Bill W., Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age. Alcoholics Anonymous Publishing, 1957. “Four o’Clock Sunday Afternoon” (Lois’s count of groups in July 1955).
Pass It On. AA World Services, 1984. The chronology in later printings, for the date of her death.
The Stepping Stones Foundation, “The Foundation” (steppingstones.org), on its founding in 1979, Lois as its first president, the National Historic Landmark designation of 2012, and its tours; and the National Park Service, “Stepping Stones” (nps.gov), on the National Historic Landmark and the house kept as it was at her death.
Al-Anon Family Groups, “Fact Sheet for Professionals” (S-37), for today’s count of groups.
Wikipedia, “Lois W.,” for her age at death (from the New York Times obituary of October 6, 1988) and the two television films; not checked against the paper.