“The whole world story of AA is hidden in these boxes, waiting only to be dug out.”
The boxes
In June 1955 Bill W. walked Grapevine readers through AA’s offices in New York. Three blocks from the main office on East 44th Street was a loft where six young men shipped the books and mailed the letters. “Down one side of the long packing room, there are shelves reaching to the ceiling.” On them, “boxed up, tons of the old files of our Headquarters, going clear back to the old days at Vesey Street.” (Box 459 tells of the office’s addresses.) In a corner office near the files, he wrote, “two tireless assistants, Ed and Nell,” were digging into AA’s history, and he hoped one day to write it.
Nell was Nell Wing, and she wasn’t an alcoholic. In March 1947 she had been passing through New York on her way to study art in Mexico, a little short of cash, and took a temporary job at the office. In 1950 she became Bill’s secretary. Ed B., a writer and newly sober, was hired in 1954 to help Bill with his writing, and their desks faced each other. Ed threw away pamphlets and letters he thought weren’t worth keeping. “I’d take everything out of the wastebasket,” Nell remembered, “and put it all safely away in storage boxes until I could sort it out.”
Bill was collecting too. In 1954 he recorded the memories of Dr. Bob’s children and of oldtimers in Akron and Cleveland. But the book didn’t come. When he rewrote his paragraph about the loft in 1957, the assistants had become “our research librarian,” and he hoped only “that some day the full-length history of Alcoholics Anonymous will be written.” He died in January 1971 without writing it.
By her own account, Nell was named AA’s first archivist in 1972. The trustees set up an Archives Committee in 1973, and by then, AA’s newsletter said later, the archives took all her time. On November 3, 1975, after a meeting of the board, the archives opened on the eighth floor at 468 Park Avenue South. Lois W. and Tom S., an oldtimer from Jacksonville, cut a blue ribbon. Afterward, the newsletter reported, “It was realized that no one had taped for posterity the remarks at the ceremonial opening of our archives!”
It’s 1955, in a loft in New York, three blocks from AA’s office. Six young men pack books and mail letters. Down one side of the room, shelves reach to the ceiling, stacked with boxes: the office’s old files, going back to its early days on Vesey Street. The whole story of AA, Bill W. writes, is hidden in those boxes.
In a corner office near the files, two assistants are digging into it. One of them is Nell Wing, Bill’s secretary. She isn’t an alcoholic. When the other assistant throws old pamphlets and letters away, she waits until he’s gone home, takes them out of the wastebasket, and puts them in boxes of her own.
Bill hopes to write the history himself. He never does. Twenty years later, in 1975, the old files open as AA’s archives, with Nell as the first archivist. At the ribbon-cutting, nobody remembers to tape the speeches.