Doing Anything to Help

Today’s two sentences close the paragraph of advice on a first visit with a newcomer, on page 95 of the Big Book, in “Working with Others.” (December 14 reads the lines just before them.) The next sentence puts the first limit on the promise: if all the newcomer wants is a banker for his debts, or a nurse for his binges, “you may have to drop him” until he changes his mind. In the loan copy, the draft sent out for comment early in 1939, it said simply to drop him.

Before there was a book, Bill W. and Lois W. had tried doing anything. In 1935 and 1936 they made the house where they lived, Lois’s family home at 182 Clinton Street in Brooklyn, a home for drunks. They took the idea, as Pass It On tells it, from Dr. Bob S. and Anne S. in Akron. Bill and Lois kept to the second-floor apartment and gave the rest of the house to the men, some of them for up to a year. Until March 1936 Lois kept her job at Loeser’s department store, and she did most of the cooking. One of the men, Russ R., remembered them all “living rent-free, food-free, everything-free”.

The Wilsons had a theory too, by the same account: alcoholics felt unloved, so Bill and Lois would “love them into sobriety.” It seldom worked. One prospect Dr. William D. Silkworth sent over, a little drunk, spent the night and woke up sick. Lois found out why in the kitchen: a whiskey bottle that had come to them at Christmas full of Vermont maple syrup stood empty. Russ said he couldn’t remember any of the men sobering up while they lived there.

In the summer of 1936, while Bill and Lois were away, a man who had lived with them for nearly a year took his own life in the house. Months afterward they found he had been selling their evening clothes. Bill called his death an example of “killing people with kindness.” He and Dr. Bob both came to doubt the wisdom of letting drunks live with them for long. The Big Book of 1939 set down what they had learned. Yet the same page asks for far more than a kind act now and then, down to lost sleep and a telephone that may ring at any hour.

Some years later Bill wrote to Jennie B., who had started AA in Boston and was discouraged by her own work with drunks. He and Lois, he told her, used to blame themselves for Clinton Street. Lately they had looked back over the names of those they’d tried to help then, and found that a surprising number had since stopped drinking. That, he wrote, showed them that “in God’s economy, nothing is wasted.”

More on the house on Clinton Street in those years: The voice on the subway, in Number One Man. On Lois’s side of it: Damn your old meetings, in Captain of My Soul. On the chapter for the one doing the helping: Working with Others, in You Had to Be Sponsored.