Illustration · A secretary’s desk in AA’s office in New York in the mid-1940s, after hours, with the day’s mail still in the tray, a card file of groups, and a map stuck with a pin for each one. Not drawn from a photograph.

Box 459

When Ruth Hock left, an alcoholic named Bobbie B. took over AA’s office and its mail, and for years she carried most of the load.

“Across her desk came thousands of pleas for help from individuals…”

Bill W., on Bobbie B., after her death · AA Grapevine, April 1953

Your National Secretary

Early in 1942 Ruth Hock, the nonalcoholic secretary who had typed the Big Book and answered AA’s mail since 1939, left to be married. (No form letters, in Jittery and Alone, tells her years at the old post office box.) Her desk went to Bobbie B. Pass It On describes her as a former dancer and an AA member. Bill W. counted her AA’s second national secretary.

She took over a job that had just grown. The Saturday Evening Post’s article of March 1941 had taken AA from about 2,000 members to 8,000 by the end of that year, and new groups sprang up, most of them with nothing to guide them but the Big Book, a traveler now and then, and letters from New York. Committees quarreled, groups split wide open, and “sometimes whole groups got drunk,” Bill wrote. For several years, by his account, Bobbie “faced almost single-handed the huge aftermath of group problems” the article left behind.

She answered them by letter. In March 1945 the first group in Australia wrote to her from Sydney to say it had formed. That October she wrote to a new Black group in St. Louis, offering to put it in touch with another in Washington. (Two dollars a night, in The Only Requirement, tells the Washington group’s start.)

On May 1, 1944, the office moved from Vesey Street, downtown, to three rooms at 415 Lexington Avenue, across from Grand Central, because so many members were passing through New York. The mail went to a new address: P. O. Box 459, Grand Central Annex. By 1948 about 200 travelers came through the door each month and more than 2,000 letters came in, and the staff had grown to sixteen full-time workers, four of them AA members.

Out of letters like these, chiefly, Bill wrote, came AA’s Traditions. (Rule 62 tells how.) When Bobbie died, he put it plainly: “It was out of this experience that AA’s tradition was formed.”

The work wore on her. By 1949, Bill wrote, she was “exhausted to the cracking point,” caught in the middle of his fight with the trustees for a General Service Conference. (The quarter mile, in Number One Man, tells that fight.) A later manager of the office places her leaving at about that time; Go deeper has the accounts.

In his Twelve Concepts for World Service, published in 1962, Bill told how the office had once depended on one highly paid staff member with assistants under her, until “suddenly she collapsed,” and soon one of her assistants did too. “Thereafter we installed the principle of rotation in a considerably larger staff.” He named no one, and none of the histories used here says whom he meant, but the office in 1949 fits. Its staff began trading assignments in 1950 or 1951 (the accounts differ), and they have taken turns ever since.

Bobbie died in her sleep on February 17, 1953, of what Bill called “an unforeseen heart ailment.”

Listen Box 459 About 1 minute

One month’s work

March 1944

In the Grapevine’s first issue, in June 1944, Bill W. set out what the office had done in a single month, to show the groups what it did for them. These are his figures, in his order. Below them, the office’s whole year of 1949, as the Alcoholic Foundation reported it to the groups.

From Bill W.’s “Central Office Notes,” AA Grapevine, June 1944. That March the office was still on Vesey Street; it moved uptown on May 1. The 1949 figures are from the Foundation’s pamphlet of 1950, The Alcoholic Foundation; they cover twelve months, not one.

The office · March 1944

2,695
Personal letters. About 2,000 answered first inquiries from alcoholics and their families, averaging 100 words each. About 400 went to groups, “mostly group problems.” The rest were about other things.
- About 2,000 first inquiries
- About 400 to groups
- The rest
600
Telephone calls and telegrams.
100
Visitors. About that many members from out of town came by.
400
Bookkeeping entries, or something like it.
5,000+
Pamphlets wrapped and shipped, with 672 books: about a ton.
1
Report to the trustees, a detailed one.
6
Groups visited by the secretary in a week on the road, besides several meetings about future publicity.
4
People did all of it: the secretary and her three assistants, with some overtime.

The office · all of 1949

30,761
Letters sent, and 22,160 received, “principally to Group problems, public relations matters, and pleas for help from alcoholics and their families.”
36,000+
Bulletins sent out to groups.
1,500+
Visitors to the New York office.
915,000
Pamphlets shipped, with 29,647 copies of the Big Book.
832
New groups registered in the United States and Canada, most of them written to.
67
New groups abroad, registered that year.
18
People on the staff: six alcoholics and twelve “nons.”

Understaffed

He ended by asking for help. The office, he said, had “nearly always been understaffed,” and one good piece of publicity would put it weeks behind on the first inquiries. He hoped for two more typists. Five years later there were eighteen on the staff.

For a closer look

Go deeper

What’s known about Bobbie, and what isn’t; every address the office has had; and why AA’s newsletter is named for a post office box.

Who was Bobbie?

Little of her life has been written down. Nell Wing, who started at the office in 1947 and in 1972 became AA’s first archivist, remembered, by Bob P.’s account, that she had danced in Paris in the 1920s and was “a fantastic communicator,” though “a little shaky on office discipline.” Some histories give her surname; this site follows AA’s custom.

The accounts of her years at the office, in the order they were set down:

1953. She “headed our General Service Office at New York in all the years of AA’s adolescence.” Bill W., in his tribute, which says nothing of her leaving.
1955. Her work, Bill wrote, acquainted her with “uncounted thousands of AAs during the next ten years.” Bill W., in the Grapevine. The same article dates Ruth Hock’s leaving to 1941; his book of 1957 says early 1942.
1957. By 1949 she was “exhausted to the cracking point.” Bill W., in AA Comes of Age.
1985. She was let go when the trustees named a committee to oversee the office, in 1949, and her assistant, Charlotte L., soon after, “because of alcoholic slips.” Both, he writes, had apparently been taking pills for some time before they drank again, and Nell Wing and Ann M., who worked beside them, blamed the load in part. Bob P., the office’s general manager from 1975, in his unpublished history of AA.

Eight addresses

The office has moved seven times. In order:

1938. 17 William Street, Newark: Hank P.’s office, where Ruth Hock typed the Big Book. Bill gave the number as 75 in 1955 and 17 in 1957.
1939. A tiny room in a building nearby, after the sheriff came, with room for Hank’s big desk, his chair, a couple of file cases, and Ruth and her typewriter.
1940. 30 Vesey Street, in lower Manhattan, next door to the post office that held Box 658. AA Comes of Age says the spring of 1940; its own chronology says February.
1944. 415 Lexington Avenue, three rooms across from Grand Central, from May 1. Box 459 began here.
1950. 141 East 44th Street, “still closer to Grand Central.” From 1953 the shipping was done from a building on East 45th Street.
1960. The 18th floor of that building, 305 East 45th Street. Bob P. dates the lease to 1959.
1970. 468 Park Avenue South, with the Grapevine, from April 1.
1992. 475 Riverside Drive, where the office is today.

Through the four moves since Lexington Avenue, the mail has gone to the same box.

Why Box 4-5-9

The office began writing to the groups in a bulletin in November 1940. The accounts differ on the day, the 11th or the 14th, and on how many groups there were to send it to, about 50 or about 150. It went out under several names: The Group Secretary in 1952, the General Service Bulletin from 1954 or 1955, the A.A. Exchange Bulletin from May 1956. With its Holiday issue of 1966 it became Box 4-5-9, after the office’s box, at the suggestion, two accounts say, of a member in Michigan. (One account dates the new name to 1967.)

Why the box was 459, no account says. In 1948 the Grapevine called it an ordinary-looking number, though the letters that came to it were “postmarked all over the world.” Box 4-5-9 still comes out.

Sources

Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age. Alcoholics Anonymous Publishing, 1957. “When A.A. Came of Age” (Bobbie and the aftermath of the Post article); “Unity: The Second Legacy” (Rex A.’s letter from Sydney, March 1945); “Service: The Third Legacy” (Ruth Hock leaving; the new groups’ troubles; 17 William Street and the tiny room; Vesey Street; the move to Lexington Avenue; 141 East 44th Street; exhausted by 1949); and, in later printings, “Landmarks in A.A. History” (Vesey Street in February 1940; the Twelve Concepts in 1962).
Bill W., “Central Office Notes,” AA Grapevine, June 1944 (the move, Box 459, and the office’s work in March 1944).
“P. O. Box 459 Is International Hub,” AA Grapevine, April 1948 (the box, the visitors, the letters, the staff).
Bill W., “In Memory of Bobbie,” AA Grapevine, April 1953.
The Language of the Heart. AA Grapevine, 1988. Bill W., “How AA’s World Services Grew,” Parts I and II (May and June 1955), first printed in the AA Grapevine (the Traditions from the office’s letters; Bobbie’s ten years; Ruth Hock in 1941; 75 William Street).
Pass It On. AA World Services, 1984. Chapter 19 (a former dancer and an AA member).
Arthur S., A Narrative Timeline of AA History, 2009 (Nell Wing, the first archivist, 1972).
Glenn C., Heroes of Early Black AA: Their Stories and Their Messages. Hindsfoot Foundation, 2017. Chapter 1 (Bobbie’s letter to St. Louis, October 1945).
Bill W., Twelve Concepts for World Service, 1962, Concept XI, as quoted in “They’re Doing the Rotation Rock at G.S.O.,” Box 4-5-9, August–September 1999.
Bob P., “General Service Office,” chapter 9 of his manuscript history of AA, 1985, unpublished, at silkworth.net (three rooms at Lexington Avenue; Nell Wing on Bobbie; 1949; rotation; the lease on East 45th Street).
“New Home for Your G.S.O.,” Box 4-5-9, April–May 1970 (305 East 45th Street; 468 Park Avenue South).
Box 4-5-9, February–March 1981, October–November 2002, Holiday 2006 and February–March 1976 (the first bulletin and the newsletter’s names).
“It’s Rotation Time at G.S.O.,” Box 4-5-9, August–September 2007 (rotation since 1951, every two years; about 80 employees).
AA World Services, “The General Service Office” (1970 to 1992; 475 Riverside Drive), “Contact GSO” (Box 459, Grand Central Station), and the GSO staff recruitment announcement, October 2022 (eleven staff members).
The Alcoholic Foundation (pamphlet). The Alcoholic Foundation, New York, 1950. “The Work of the General Service Office” (the office’s year of 1949), from photographs of a copy by Recovery Collectibles.