A Priceless Reward

Today’s passage takes words from the two sentences that open “Working with Others,” the Big Book’s chapter on Step Twelve, on page 89. (December 16 reads the first sentence whole, and tells how the loan copy, the draft of early 1939, put both. December 8 reads the next paragraph, the one today’s member quotes.) The book had said it once already, as one man’s experience, in its first chapter, “Bill’s Story.”

Bill W. had finished that chapter by the summer of 1938. Near its end he looks back on his first year and a half sober. His old business associates still doubted him, he wrote, and he found little work. His health wasn’t good, and bouts of resentment and feeling sorry for himself sometimes came near sending him back to drink. But he found “that when all other measures failed, work with another alcoholic would save the day.” Often, he wrote, he went back to his old hospital at his lowest, and a talk with one of the patients there would lift him.

The hospital was Towns, on Central Park West, where Dr. William D. Silkworth had treated him and pointed out prospects to him. In his first six months, by Bill’s own count, he tried drunks there and at Calvary Mission by the score, and none of them stayed sober. People were starting to ask when he would go back to work. Pass It On says he knew the work lifted him, but hadn’t yet grasped that he needed the drunk he was helping. He grasped it one weekend in May 1935, alone in a hotel lobby in Akron, Ohio, after his side lost a fight for control of a company there. Pass It On’s telling of that weekend echoes his story: his “self-pity and resentment began to rise.” As AA Comes of Age printed his talk at AA’s convention in St. Louis in 1955, he remembered then that trying to help others had kept him sober, and saw it clearly for the first time: “You need another alcoholic just as much as he needs you!” (November 17 tells where the calls he made next led.)

Shortly after he got back to New York, at the end of that August, Bill ran into Clint F., an old drinking partner, in a brokerage office. Clint had been on the point of asking him out for a drink or two, and heard instead that Bill hadn’t had one in months. Bill couldn’t stay. He was due at a hospital uptown, where, he said, he would see the worst of the patients and tell them about himself. As Clint remembered it, Bill said, “It’s wonderful to see even one respond.” Clint, lonely and aware of his own drinking, wanted to go along as soon as the elevator had taken Bill away. He came into AA thirteen years later, in 1948.

Paid work came slowly: early in February 1936 he was sent to look into a company in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and a few more assignments followed. The drunks had come sooner. At Towns in the fall of 1935 Bill found Hank P., who became the first of Bill’s New York prospects to stay dry for long, and Fitz M., a minister’s son from Maryland. Both have their stories in the 1939 book.

More on Bill’s first six months, and the one man they kept sober: Stop preaching, in The Little Doctor. On the lobby in Akron and the calls that led to Dr. Bob: The gate lodge, in I Just Work Here. On the house in Brooklyn that filled with drunks that fall: The voice on the subway, in Number One Man.