“It seemed as if every contestant in every group argument wrote us during this confused and exciting period.”
Out of the mail
By 1945 the Alcoholic Foundation, AA’s board of trustees, kept its office at 415 Lexington Avenue in New York, across from Grand Central. Mail had come in a steady stream since the Saturday Evening Post article of 1941. Many letters asked how to start a group, or what to do about some trouble in one. “Letters to metropolitan A.A. centers filled our bulging files,” Bill W. wrote.
Late in 1945, as Bill told it, “a good A.A. friend suggested” boiling all that experience down into a set of principles. His history doesn’t say who the friend was. Bill reasoned that if they were sure enough where they stood on membership, group autonomy, singleness of purpose, endorsing other enterprises, professionalism, public controversy and anonymity, the principles could be written. Some were practice already. That same year the Foundation wrote to John D. Rockefeller Jr. and the guests at his 1940 dinner that AA would need no more of their money.
“Aided by my helpers there, I set to work,” Bill wrote. He took the work to Akron to go over it with Dr. Bob, AA’s other founder, whose plain sense told him what the more cautious members would accept. At Stepping Stones, his and Lois W.’s house in Bedford Hills, thirty or forty people dropped by for coffee on a weekend. Bill read them what he had written, took their ideas, then crossed out his words and started over.
Marion Weaver typed Bill’s drafts at the office. She wasn’t an AA member. One day while he was writing the Traditions, she remembered, he couldn’t find them. He insisted she had them, and she didn’t. He walked out in tears: “Nobody cares what happens to Bill!” Then the door opened. He got down on his hands and knees with the pages in his mouth and crawled across the floor to her “like a little puppy dog.” They had been “jammed in the back of his desk drawer.” She didn’t say what year it was.
The points came out in the Grapevine, AA’s monthly magazine, in the spring of 1946: April by most accounts, May by Bill’s. Some ran a single sentence, others a long paragraph. This first version is now called the long form. In the issues that followed, Bill wrote an essay on each point.
That same spring, after two years of depression with “almost no relief,” Bill canceled every speaking engagement, left the office and went with Lois to a farmhouse in Vermont.
The groups hadn’t voted on the points, and wouldn’t until 1950. At first, Bill wrote, “Only groups in dire trouble took them seriously.”
It’s late 1945, at AA’s office on Lexington Avenue in New York. The files are bulging. Every group with a quarrel seems to have written in: who can belong, who’s in charge, what to do about money, and members whose names keep turning up in the papers.
A friend suggests boiling all those letters down into a few principles. Bill W. sets to work. He takes his drafts to Akron for Dr. Bob, and reads them to the weekend crowd at his house, then crosses them out and starts again.
Once, while he’s writing the Traditions, he can’t find the pages and blames the typist. Then he crawls back across the office floor on his hands and knees, with the pages in his mouth. They were in his own desk drawer.
In the spring of 1946, the Grapevine prints twelve points. The groups haven’t voted on them. At first, only the groups in trouble take them seriously.