Illustration · A telephone table in a Cleveland house in November 1939, with a list of calls and the newspaper open to the first article. Drawn after Dorothy S.’s memory of the month the phone never stopped ringing; not drawn from a photograph.

Cleveland, Ohio · 1939–1940

You had to be sponsored

A newspaper series brought hundreds of calls to a small group in Cleveland, and members sober only a month, or a week, went out to sponsor the newcomers.

“In Cleveland or Akron, you couldn’t just walk into A.A. the way you can today … You had to be sponsored.”

Clarence S., remembering the early days · Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers, 1980

The phone never quit

In the spring of 1939, Clarence S. and his wife, Dorothy, were bringing Cleveland drunks to Akron every week for the meeting at T. Henry Williams’s house. Many of the men were Catholic, and the meeting still belonged to the Oxford Group, whose testimonies felt to them like open confession, which their church didn’t allow. In May (June, in Bill W.’s later history) the Clevelanders started a meeting of their own, at the home of a member, Al G., for alcoholics and their families only. They called it Alcoholics Anonymous, after the book that had just come out.

Getting in took more than walking through a door. The wife called first, and a member went to see her before he ever met her husband. “We’d get all the background we could on this person,” another early member, Warren C., remembered, down to his job and his workplace. Sometimes they talked to his boss. Then the man was put in a hospital to dry out, members came to his bedside, and the member who had called on him took him to his first meeting. That was what being sponsored meant.

On October 21, 1939, the Cleveland Plain Dealer printed the first of five articles on AA by Elrick B. Davis, in the middle of its editorial page, with editorials of its own behind them. In effect, Bill wrote, the paper was saying “Come and get it.” The calls were passed to Clarence and Dorothy. “Our phone never quit ringing for about a month,” Dorothy said. She remembered almost 500 calls, and about 13 men she could send out, each with five or six or eight names an evening.

There weren’t nearly enough old members to go around. Men sober “only a month or even a week,” Bill wrote, had to sponsor drunks still drying out in the hospitals. Clarence handed out names on Monday mornings “like a sales manager” and wanted reports by Wednesday. Newcomers went into hospitals all over town, and “how the bills were paid nobody ever quite knew.”

It worked. On November 10, Clarence wrote to New York that Cleveland had three groups and about 60 members; in December he wrote of about 90, and then that they had “long passed the 100 mark.” A year later, by Bill’s count, there were about thirty groups and several hundred members. Out of the scramble, he wrote, came “organized personal sponsorship for each and every new man and woman.”

Listen You had to be sponsored About 1 minute

One newcomer, start to finish

How a man got in

What being sponsored meant in Cleveland and Akron in 1939, step by step, as the members who did it remembered it.

From members’ recollections gathered for Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers (1980), Clarence S.’s letters of 1939, and Bill W.’s account in AA Comes of Age (1957).

First

The wife calls

A member went to see her before he met the man. Was her husband a steady drinker or a periodic one? How might he be reached? Clarence admitted he might set “some kind of trap” for him.

Then the man

Clarence S.

Before the call

The background

What he did for a living, and where. Sometimes members talked to his boss, who was worried about the drinking too. “When we went and sat down with this fellow, we knew all about him.”

No surprises

Warren C.

The call

The talk

Members sat down with him and told him their own stories. Most wanted to try it. Not all: Warren was thrown out of “some of the finest homes” in town.

Willing, or not

Warren C.

Five to eight days

The hospital

He was put in a hospital to dry out. Cleveland had beds at Deaconess Hospital from the end of May 1939; its first patient was a bartender. After the articles, newcomers went into hospitals all over town.

“Defogged”

Al G.; Good Oldtimers

Every day

The visitors

Members came to his bedside to tell their stories, hoping he would see himself in them. A man from Ashtabula remembered people coming “day and night.”

One of them

Good Oldtimers

Out of the hospital

The first meeting

The member who had called on him took him to his first meeting. Before long he was making calls of his own: “putting the new fellows to work right away,” Clarence wrote in 1939, was the answer.

A sponsor himself

Bill W., 1957; Clarence S., 1939

Sober a week

Before Cleveland, Bill wrote, members supposed that only “greybeards” could look after newcomers. Cleveland found that very new members could open a fresh case “almost as well as anybody.”

For a closer look

Go deeper

Whether the writer of the articles was an alcoholic himself; how many members Cleveland had; and a newcomer who came in by train.

Was the reporter one of us?

When the first article ran, some members were afraid the writer would print their names. Clarence remembered telling them not to worry: the man was “one of us—a rummy.”

The members who were there don’t agree. Warren C. said the writer posed as an alcoholic to get into a meeting, and wasn’t one. Dorothy S. said she was sure he was. Clarence said he talked him into the series when the man was on his way down. Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers leaves it there: “you pay your money and you take your choice.”

Bill W. called Elrick B. Davis “a feature writer of deep understanding,” and said no more.

How many?

Before the articles, the counts don’t agree. The first article itself said 40 or 50 members met every Thursday evening in Cleveland. Bill W. wrote in 1954 that there was “scarcely a score of AAs in the whole town,” and in 1957 about twenty. Dorothy S. remembered meetings of about 15, and 13 men to send out on calls.

After them, Dorothy remembered the meetings growing from about 15 to 100 in two weeks. Clarence’s letters, written at the time, give about 60 members on November 10, 1939, and about 90 in December.

A year later, Bill counted about thirty groups and several hundred members. Pass It On gives 20 to 30 groups. None of the books explains the differences.

The man from Ashtabula

In Ashtabula, about 45 miles east of Cleveland, a drinker read the articles and told his wife he was going to Cleveland to find out what this AA was. He phoned the number and was told which train to take. Five members met him and took him to lunch. He couldn’t eat a thing.

He walked home from the station past the bars without a drink. The next day he went back and checked into a hospital in Cleveland, where people came to see him “day and night.” They were clean-shaven and wore pressed suits, he remembered, and he believed every word they told him.

The first man he brought in was his nephew. In 1940 they started a group in Ashtabula.

Sources

Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers. AA World Services, 1980. Chapter IX (Clarence S. and Warren C. on how a newcomer was approached), chapter XII (Cleveland’s own meeting, May 1939) and chapter XV (Deaconess Hospital, the Plain Dealer articles, Dorothy S.’s and Clarence S.’s recollections and letters, Ashtabula).
Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age. Alcoholics Anonymous Publishing, 1957. The opening chapter, “When A.A. Came of Age” (Cleveland in 1939 and 1940).
The Language of the Heart. AA Grapevine, 1988. Bill W., “Another Fragment of History: Sister Ignatia and Dr. Bob,” AA Grapevine, February 1954.
Pass It On. AA World Services, 1984. Chapter 12 (the Plain Dealer series).
Elrick B. Davis, “Alcoholics Anonymous Makes Its Stand Here,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, October 21, 1939, transcribed at silkworth.net. The series ran October 21 to 26.
Questions & Answers on Sponsorship (P-15). AA World Services, revised June 2025. For the today note.