Illustration · An imagined spring morning on the rough stone steps that ran down the hill from the house at Bedford Hills to the old garage: gloves and seed packets on a step, daffodils at the top of the banks, the old Stutz behind the open garage door, the fenced vegetable plot and the little pumphouse below. Drawn from Lois W.’s descriptions, not from a photograph.

New Jersey, New York and Bedford Hills · 1939–1944

Stepping Stones

Two years without a home, fifty-one moves, a crying spell on the stairs at Grand Central, and at last a house on a hill that she made a home with her own hands.

“I suddenly sat down on the stairs and exploded, ‘Will we ever have our own home?’ I wept oceans right there in public.”

Lois W., on a day in February 1940 at Grand Central Station · Lois Remembers, 1979

Living around

In 1939 the mortgage company found a buyer for 182 Clinton Street, and toward the end of April Bill and Lois had to move out. It took her a month to sort out what her parents had gathered there since 1888. The Salvation Army and Goodwill got carloads. What she and Bill kept went into storage, every packed drawer and shelf labeled and its contents listed in a notebook. “I am compulsively orderly in small matters.” They had no money for even a small apartment. The members voted them a “Bill and Lois Improvement Fund,” about $20 a month by her reckoning. Nobody said what was to be improved: “perhaps our dispositions!” Bill’s side of these years is in Number One Man.

A member’s family lent them a bungalow at Green Pond, in northern New Jersey, until the end of May. She watched the new leaves come out on the trees and the geese fly north. They had no car, and it was about four miles to the village and the train, so they rented a friend’s big Lincoln Zephyr at a cent a mile. One rainy afternoon, on her way to meet Bill’s train, she had a blowout in the woods. “Alone, I spent nearly two hours changing that heavy tire in the muddy road.”

Then came what she called the visiting merry-go-round, from one member’s spare room to the next, and to relatives. “During the years 1939 and 1940, we changed our abode 51 times, not counting weekend stops!” She went to most of the meetings with Bill, and in her diary she wrote that “we” had done this or that. “I felt, as I still do, that I belonged to A.A.” At one member’s apartment, where they stayed for a while, the Foundation’s advisory committee met every week, and the spaghetti-and-meatball supper before each meeting “fell to my lot.”

She kept her feelings to herself. Once, in an apartment lent them for a week, she came in late to find Bill with a spoon in one hand and a can of cold tomato soup in the other. “What a way to live, I thought.” She pushed the thought away, she wrote, just as she had pushed away her loneliness in his first sober years, until she threw a shoe (4 · Damn your old meetings). In February 1940 it came out of her on the stairs at Grand Central. Bill understood; he wanted a home too. From then on, wherever they stayed, they looked at houses, though the hunting, she admitted, “was mostly a gesture.”

She tried to earn money too. She wrote a story for the magazine Romantic Stories, and some jingles, and they all came back. That summer a friend of a friend sublet them a furnished apartment on Barrow Street in Greenwich Village for three months. In November they moved into a room upstairs at AA’s new clubhouse on West 24th Street, about ten feet square. They painted it and curtained two orange crates for dressers, and they bought a bed without a footboard so Bill could hang his feet out. When the Saturday Evening Post article on AA came out at the end of February 1941, she was the liaison between the office and the club, and for five or six weeks she and the volunteers there answered telephones, wrote letters and talked with newcomers and their families.

That winter they went to see a house at Bedford Hills, in Westchester County, whose owner had said she would make the price within their means. They bought it with nothing down, and on April 11, 1941, after twenty-three years of marriage, they slept in a home of their own. Her two accounts of finding it don’t agree (two accounts of one house). Nine days later she sailed for South America as a friend’s guest, for six weeks.

The house had no furnace, and the upstairs was unpainted. There was no money for painters. She painted the ceiling of the upstairs library, 43 feet long, and scraped and stained the living-room floor for the Oriental rugs she had inherited. “My knees had calluses on them before I got it done.” She painted draperies on the bare wall around the six French doors, reupholstered an old Victorian chair, made slipcovers, and laid squares of linoleum in the kitchen in a pattern, which all rose up the night Bill’s water tank in the attic overflowed. Bill went in to the office three or four times a week and helped when he was free. From the house to the garage, a shortcut of rough stone steps ran down the steep hill. She wrote that the house was named for them: Stepping Stones.

In late 1943 and early 1944 they toured the groups across the country. She rode a mule down the Grand Canyon, scared out of her wits, and wasn’t allowed into the AA meeting at San Quentin. At the big meetings she said a few words of thanks; at teas and luncheons for the families she told how she had come to live by the Steps herself. “Our next stop was home, where we watched the arrival of spring in the woods around our own house.” That December she wrote her own account of the drinking years and AA’s early days for its new magazine, the Grapevine. In 1944 Bill sank into a long depression (Number One Man).

Listen Stepping Stones About 1 minute

Lois Remembers, 1979

The owner let them move in early, so Lois could set up a kitchen and a bedroom for Bill before she sailed on April 20. The contract ran from May 1.

Pass It On, 1984

April 11, 1941: “for the first time in the 23 years of their marriage,” a night in their own home.

The name

In her memoir they first called the house Bil-Lo’s Break, and renamed it for the stone steps they were forever climbing, a name that “also implied a connection with the Twelve Steps.” Pass It On says the name came in 1944, from a house they saw on Nantucket. Either way, it stuck.

For a closer look

Go deeper

The last years at Clinton Street, a cruise and a bottle of cough syrup, and the wives who met upstairs.

Five men can’t look after one woman

In 1937 Bill took a job investigating companies for a firm of stockbrokers and was away, it seemed to her, more than half the time. She ran the house full of drunks alone. So she made a rule: no one who was drinking would be let into the house.

Wes W., a roly-poly advertising man who lived in the basement, came home half drunk one night and slid down the coal chute. Another time he got stuck in the soapstone washtub in the kitchen, folded like an accordion, and she pulled him out by the arms. Once, late at night, she walked him around Brooklyn Heights ringing a dozen doctors’ doorbells, hoping one would sober him up for a job interview in the morning. When none would, and Wes said he had to have a drink, she took him to Childs and held a whiskey to his lips. He wanted another: “a bird can’t fly on one wing.” She left him on the stool.

Only once, she wrote, did a man make an advance: a dearly loved friend of them both, who came into her room one night while Bill was away. He made no great fuss at being rebuffed; there were others in the house who could have been alerted. And once, feeling that Bill didn’t need her anymore, she spent a lot of time helping one of the men. “I needed to be needed.” Bill was understanding for a long time, until one day jealousy sent him running out of the house to get drunk. He went to a member’s house instead, calmed down and came home sheepish. It was the only time, she wrote, that she ever worried he would drink. Her chronology dates it to June 1938 and puts it down to her anger.

Ironsides

Nine days after they moved in, Lois sailed on a freighter for South America with Fan Williamson, the mother of Chris, whose family had lent them the bungalow at Green Pond. She was the sister of Moore of the Moore-McCormack steamship line, and Bill always called her “Ironsides.” The two women were the only passengers. They ate at the captain’s table and played bridge with him at night, and at Rio they rode a cable car across the bay and danced at a couple of nightclubs.

At home, Bill was alone in a house with boxes of books and barrels of china in the living room and only the fireplace for heat. A cold settled in his chest. He bought cough medicine and, figuring that more would do more good, sipped until the bottle was half empty, and caught himself thinking that whiskey would cure the cold and nobody would know. Then he read the label. The mixture was high in alcohol.

“I had been enjoying myself on a marvelous cruise, while he was working hard, ill and lonely. I felt guilty.” She counted it among the three times in his sobriety that he was tempted to drink.

The wives upstairs

At AA’s new clubhouse on West 24th Street, the members wanted some meetings for alcoholics only. So while they met in the big room downstairs, a handful of wives got to know each other in the skylighted studio upstairs. Her chronology has eight wives meeting there on September 12, 1940. At first they played bridge or gossiped, “but soon we began to discuss our own problems, and what we could do about them.” She told her story. They were mostly AA wives, with a few mothers and daughters, and one man, a father trying to get his son into AA.

When the Post article brought in desperate families whose alcoholics weren’t yet in AA, Lois and a fellow volunteer sent them to open AA meetings. It didn’t occur to them that the meeting upstairs might help them too. “Al-Anon Family Groups were still in embryo.”

She was already speaking in public: in May 1940 she spoke at Steinway Hall, to 150. She later counted 62 places where she gave talks between 1939 and 1951. Bill wrote that she and Anne S., Dr. Bob’s wife, had urged the Steps on the families in their homes, on their travels and “even upstairs” at 24th Street. Where that led is in 6 · The Clearing House.

Sources

Lois Remembers. Al-Anon Family Groups, 1979. Chapter 9, “The Group Conscience” (Bill’s job in 1937); chapter 11, “The Clinton Street Boys”; chapter 12, “Living Around”; chapter 13, “Bil-Lo’s Break”; chapter 14, “Teacher Turns Pupil” (the 1943–1944 trip and the Grapevine); chapter 17, “The Foundations of Al-Anon” (the wives upstairs, and her talks); and the chronology (June 1938, May and September 1940).
Pass It On. AA World Services, 1984. Chapter 12 (leaving Clinton Street, and her diary of 1939–1940), chapter 13 (the clubhouse room), chapter 14 (her diary before the Post article), chapter 15 (her diary of January 1941, the house, its name and the cruise) and chapter 18 (Bill’s depression in 1944).
Bill W., Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age. Alcoholics Anonymous Publishing, 1957. “When A.A. Came of Age” (Anne and Lois “even upstairs”).