Illustration · A table in a smoky room, with the first issue of The Grapevine stacked for mailing beside envelopes for an Army post office overseas. Not drawn from a photograph.

New York, Honolulu and the South Pacific · 1944–1945

Ink-stained wretches

Six New Yorkers started a monthly paper, and one of their first thoughts was the members who had gone to war.

“Best of all, we think, is the Servicemen’s Letter page…”

The six editors, describing their plans in an interview printed in their first issue · The Grapevine, 1944

Mail call

By the spring of 1944, AA’s office in New York had records of about 300 members in the armed forces. Cut off from their groups and facing “unusual temptations,” they had, it seemed to the paper’s editors, a harder fight than most of the members at home.

A handful of New York members had talked for some time about starting a paper. In June 1944 six of them did: The Grapevine, eight pages, fifteen cents a copy, from a post office box at Grand Central. AA’s history names them as Marty M., Priscilla, Lois K., Abbott, Maeve and Kay. Their first issue described them as a cashier, a radio script writer, an author, a bookseller, an art director and “a wife and mother of two,” six “ink-stained wretches” sipping Cokes in a smoke-filled room. They promised to try it for three months.

One of their first thoughts, they wrote, was that the paper might help members in the service. It went to all the groups the office knew of in the United States and Canada, and free to members in uniform. Its “Mail Call” page quoted their letters. In December an Army lieutenant had written from a coconut grove on a new island. A Navy lieutenant on a South Pacific island went to look him up, and found he had been evacuated two days before; for four months he had been only half a mile away.

The first issue also printed letters from Honolulu. A small-boat builder there had found AA’s address at the public library in October 1943. The office answered with a single sheet, typed single-spaced on both sides so it could go airmail with a pamphlet. In December he wrote back: “You may definitely stick a pin in Honolulu on your map.” Five came to the first meeting, and they had trouble leaving in time to get home before the curfew. “If ever there was a place where the blind are leading the blind,” he added, “that place is Honolulu right now.”

The paper noticed a new kind of member, too. A Navy psychoanalyst, Dr. Florence Powdermaker, had tried the Big Book and pamphlets on tired and shell-shocked merchant seamen, “and it worked!” By spring there were about 40 of them, and they wanted a group for seamen only. In July the paper reported an AA group at Camp Peary, a Navy base in Virginia, whose members shared the same barracks.

The three months passed and the paper kept going. Letters were coming in from all over the country and abroad, Bill W. reported after its first year. The groups voted to make it AA’s own magazine, and Lois W. dates the change to December 1945. Licking stamps for thousands of copies became too much for the volunteers, Bill remembered, and the Alcoholic Foundation took it over. He called it a “meeting in print.”

Listen Ink-stained wretches About 1 minute

Eight pages

The first issue, page by page

What the six put into their first eight pages, in June 1944. Half the pages carried something for members far from a group.

Titles as printed in the issue of June 1944, read from the copy posted on silkworth.net. The notes under them are ours.

Page 1
- Two Yale Savants Stress Alcoholism as True DiseaseHaggard and Jellinek, of the Yale Plan Clinics
- “Grapevine” in BowThe six editors, interviewed
Page 2
- The Shape of Things to ComeBill W.’s editorial
- Points of ViewLetters from readers
Page 3
- A. A. Goes to SeaMerchant seamen sober on the book
- Corporation Meets
- Central Committee
- Bucolic Notes
Page 4
- Central Office Notes2,695 letters in March, most of them first inquiries
- A. A. Goes Island-Hopping by MailHonolulu and Pearl Harbor
- Do You Know . . . ?Who the trustees are
Page 5
- Mail Call for All A. A.’s in the Armed ForcesAbout 300 members in uniform
- The Words of a Dangling ManWaiting on the draft
Page 6
- The Pleasures of Reading
- Ounces of Prevention
- Time on Your Hands?
Page 7
- Along the Metropolitan CircuitNews of the New York area’s groups
Page 8
- Honolulu, continued“Stick a pin in Honolulu”
- “Grapevine” in Bow, continued
- Conference on Alcoholism
- A form to subscribe

For members far from a group: at sea, in uniform, on an island, or writing to the office.

Half the paper

Four of the first issue’s eight pages carried something for a member far from a group: at sea, in uniform, on an island, or writing to AA’s office for the first time.

For a closer look

Go deeper

Who the six were and what they called themselves; the name they had to change; and the editorial Bill wrote for their first issue.

Ink-stained wretches

Pass It On calls “six ink-stained wretches” Bill’s affectionate name for the founders. The phrase is already in their first issue, in a mock interview. There the six called themselves “sort of garage mechanics, servicing the paper,” and said every member with some news and “a pencil stub” would write it.

Marty M.’s biographers say most of the founders were women with backgrounds in journalism and publicity, Marty and her friend Priscilla among them.

It wasn’t AA’s first paper. Cleveland’s Central Bulletin and the Los Angeles Eye-Opener came earlier, Bill wrote, and the six said as much: Cleveland had one, “so why not us.”

A name already taken

After the first few months, Bill remembered, it turned out that the FBI had long published a bulletin of its own called the Grapevine, to keep its agents up to date. The paper became the A.A. Grapevine.

It grew. By 1957, Bill wrote, it sold more than 40,000 copies a month, and money from the Big Book had kept it going through its deficits.

In 1947 it printed the paragraph that became AA’s Preamble, still read at the start of many meetings; The Preamble, in Keep Coming Back, tells that story.

Bill’s lamp

Bill’s editorial in the first issue began with a line from the Big Book’s last chapter, “A Vision for You,” written five years before: “Someday we hope that every alcoholic who journeys will find a Fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous at his destination.”

Then it had been a hope, he wrote: two large centers, and “little clusters of twos and threes.” Now there were hundreds. “Now comes another lighted lamp—this little newspaper called ‘The Grapevine.’”

The name of this piece, Jittery and Alone, comes from the same chapter.

Sources

The Grapevine, vol. 1, no. 1, June 1944, the whole issue, as posted on silkworth.net.
AA Grapevine, “A. A. at Camp Peary,” July 1944.
The Language of the Heart. AA Grapevine, 1988. The foreword; Bill W., “Editorial: The Shape of Things to Come,” June 1944, and “The Grapevine: Past, Present, and Future,” July 1945.
Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age. Alcoholics Anonymous Publishing, 1957. “Service: The Third Legacy.”
Pass It On. AA World Services, 1984. Chapter 20.
Lois Remembers. Al-Anon Family Groups, 1979. Chapter 14, “Teacher Turns Pupil.”
Sally Brown and David R. Brown, A Biography of Mrs. Marty Mann. Hazelden, 2001.