One Drunk to Another A Bunch of Actors
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Illustration · A television studio in the 1950s, set for a broadcast: a camera on its pedestal, its red light on, facing two empty chairs, with a mask propped on one of them. Not drawn from a photograph.

New York, St. Louis and Detroit · 1953–1956

Masks

Television wanted faces. It got members in masks and actors in the founders’ parts, radio got voices, and AA wrote down what it was trying to do in public.

“Could this be a ballyhooed promotion stunt, something quite contrary to A.A. Traditions?”

Bill W., on the press room at AA’s convention in St. Louis, 1955 · Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age, 1957

The press room

Television wanted faces. In 1953, the Grapevine’s timeline records, Art Linkletter interviewed a masked woman member of AA on his TV show. On November 15, 1955, ABC’s DuPont Cavalcade Theater told the founding of AA as a play, “One Day at a Time,” with actors in the parts: James Daly as Bill W. and James Bell as Dr. Bob. By 1958 AA’s office newsletter was telling groups where to get prints of it.

In July 1955, at the St. Louis convention where AA marked its twentieth year, members found a press room. “There sat A.A.’s Ralph, handling our contacts with the press,” Bill wrote, among “telegrams in and out—all the gadgets of his trade.” “Not a bit of it,” he answered his own question. Ralph was there “simply to help our friends of press, radio, and television.” Bob P.’s history identifies him as Ralph B., a consultant AA had taken on in 1952 to write its pamphlets. (Legacy, in Rule 62, tells the convention.)

Radio took them as voices. In the spring of 1956 Bill W. and Eve M. of AA’s office were guests on the popular Martha Deane program over WOR in New York, “anonymously, of course,” the office’s new newsletter reported.

Detroit went further. “At two o’clock on a Sunday afternoon, last summer, a miracle started in Detroit,” the Grapevine reported in July 1957: an all-AA television program. The Grapevine’s timeline of 2002 names it, Mr. Hope, and calls it “an actual closed meeting of masked AA members,” and Detroit’s own history says the members wore Lone Ranger masks. Detroit’s AA office was “beset by telephone calls and letters.”

In April 1956 the General Service Conference had approved a statement from the public information committee at AA’s headquarters, a policy for everything AA did in public. It began: “In all public relationships, A.A.’s sole objective is to help the still-suffering alcoholic.” AA’s own landmarks date the committee to 1956, “to assume charge of public relations hitherto handled by Bill W.”

Listen Masks About 1 minute

On the air

Five ways not to be seen

How AA met radio, television and the press from 1953 to 1956 without showing who its members were.

From the Grapevine (1957 and 2002), AA’s office newsletter (1956 and 1958), Bill W. in AA Comes of Age (1957), Bob P.’s history, Detroit’s own history and the Classic TV Archive.

1953 · Art Linkletter’s show

A mask

A woman member of AA is interviewed on television with her face covered.

Her face hidden

Grapevine, 2002

July 1955 · St. Louis

A press room

At AA’s twentieth-anniversary convention, Ralph B. handles “our contacts with the press,” with releases, telephones and telegrams.

Reporters served by a member

Bill W., 1957; Bob P.

November 1955 · ABC

Actors

DuPont Cavalcade Theater tells the founding of AA in “One Day at a Time,” with James Daly as Bill W. and James Bell as Dr. Bob.

The founders played by others

Classic TV Archive; AA’s newsletter, 1958

Spring 1956 · WOR, New York

A voice

Bill W. and Eve M. of AA’s office are guests on the Martha Deane program, “anonymously, of course.”

Anonymous guests

Exchange Bulletin, May 1956

Summer 1956 · WWJ, Detroit

A meeting in masks

Mr. Hope, an all-AA program on Sunday television: members in Lone Ranger masks tell their stories.

Calls and letters at Detroit’s AA office

Grapevine, 1957 and 2002; Detroit’s history

In plain sight

Each time, the story went out, and the members’ faces stayed out of it.

For a closer look

Go deeper

Who ran AA’s public relations, Detroit on the radio eleven years earlier, and what became of Ralph and Eve.

Who ran public relations?

The tellings don’t agree on when Bill handed it over. AA Comes of Age says the trustees were empowered to run AA’s public relations after the radio lectures (On the air tells them). Its own list of landmarks gives the job to the new committee in 1956.

The office newsletter, fifty years on, said the committee took “some” of it off his hands. Bob P.’s history says the committee was a subcommittee until about 1963, when it became a full committee of the board, partly because Bill was at the office less: he “had personally handled A.A.’s relations with the press for 25 years.”

Detroit on the radio

Detroit had put members on the air before. In March 1945 Time reported that a Detroit man had told WWJ’s listeners how he had “hit bottom,” the first, it said, in “a parade of anonymous Detroiters who will describe their alcoholic pasts over WWJ every Saturday.”

Detroit’s members, Time reported, gave the credit to William Edmund Scripps, the head of the Detroit News and the station. Eleven years later the same station carried Mr. Hope. (On the dial has the radio show in its log.)

Ralph and Eve

Ralph B. came to AA’s office in 1952 as a writing and publications consultant, Bob P.’s history says, and wrote many of the pamphlets AA was still using in the 1980s, as well as handling the press room at its conventions. He fell out with the office’s manager, Herb M., over printers, and was fired by telephone. He “remained estranged completely from G.S.O.”

Eve M. came to the office from New York’s intergroup as a junior secretary, and became, Bob P. writes, “widely known in the Fellowship as a dynamic, energetic and highly articulate staff member.” She retired in April 1968 and went on speaking at AA events for years, several times in South Africa.

Sources