Illustration · The downstairs room of the 24th Street clubhouse after a meeting, with a sign over the mantel reading But for the Grace of God. Drawn from Lois W.’s 1940 diary and Pass It On’s description of a 1941 photograph; not copied from any photograph.

What’s the angle?

AA’s first clubhouse needed someone to sweep up, and an old fireman made the members say whether he would be paid.

“I’m doing my Twelfth Step work free, but if you’re going to have me here as a janitor, you’re going to pay me, see?”

Old Tom, the clubhouse caretaker, as Bill W. told it · Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age, 1957

The Old Twenty-Fourth

In 1940 New York’s members wanted a place of their own. A weekly meeting in a rented parlor at Steinway Hall wasn’t enough; they needed “something homelike, maybe a club.” They found it at 334½ West 24th Street, in a former stable behind two brick houses, reached by a covered passage from the street. Artists had paneled it in knotty pine. Downstairs were one large room with a fireplace, and a kitchen; upstairs, a big room with skylights and two small bedrooms. Members guaranteed the rent, $75 a month.

Volunteers painted the place and answered the telephone. At night they handed out keys “for the benefit of the night owls,” and some of the owls got stewed and lay around the club at all hours. Nobody wanted to sweep. “Plainly enough we needed a caretaker,” Bill W. wrote.

They went to old Tom, a retired fireman lately out of Rockland asylum, who had a fireman’s pension. Would he like to live at the club, in a nice room, and look after the place? “What’s the angle?” Tom asked. Make the coffee, they told him, lead the drunks out if they were too bad, and sweep up. “What you guys want is a janitor.” And would they pay him? “Oh, no,” they said, “that would make you a professional.” “Okay,” said Tom, “no money, no work.” Bill admitted that they then “actually haggled with that old man to get him down to the last cent we could.”

The office faced the same question. After the Saturday Evening Post article of 1941, the mail outgrew the volunteers, and the Foundation needed “permanent paid help.” Its first secretary, Ruth Hock, wasn’t an alcoholic, and in 1939 she had been paid in stock. When the office hired an alcoholic full time, was she a “professional A.A.”? “Obviously not,” Bill wrote. “She was being paid for special services, as a secretary.” For years paid secretaries were sometimes shunned; even the charitably disposed called them “a necessary evil,” and committees kept their pay low.

“But old Tom was right,” Bill wrote in 1957. By then AA had two or three hundred paid workers among some 200,000 members: cooks frying hamburgers in clubs, janitors, women answering telephones, and Bill himself, paid a royalty as a writer. The line fell in one place: “For face-to-face treatment of a drunk, no money, ever.” Tom M. stayed sober until he died, in the 1960s.

Listen What’s the angle? About 1 minute

Where the line fell

Paid or not?

Four kinds of work came up before the Traditions were written. AA decided each one differently, for the same reason.

From Bill W.’s accounts in AA Comes of Age (1957) and the Twelve and Twelve (1953), and Pass It On (1984).

1937

Carrying the message

Charlie Towns offered Bill an office at his hospital and a share of the profits, as a lay therapist. The meeting at Bill’s house in Brooklyn said no.

Never paid, by anyone

The offer, in Number One Man

Bill W., 1953 and 1957

1940

The caretaker

Old Tom at 24th Street: a room, the coffee, the broom and the door. A caretaker’s job, Bill wrote, was not Twelfth Step work but “to make Twelfth Step work possible.” Clubs went on paying caretakers, “most of them A.A. members.”

Paid, as a janitor

Bill W., 1953 and 1957

1939–1942

The secretary

Ruth Hock, paid in stock and then a salary; then an alcoholic secretary, full time, “paid for special services.”

Paid, as a secretary

Bill W., 1953 and 1957

About 1942

The founders

Father Ed Dowling advised Bill to take royalties on the book. Money for Twelfth Step work, Bill told him, was out of the question for him or any member.

Paid as writers

The royalties, in By the Carload

Bill W., 1957

Worthy of their hire

“Our Twelfth Step—carrying the message is never to be paid for. But those who labor in service for us are worthy of their hire.”

For a closer look

Go deeper

The two Toms of 24th Street; when the club opened; and what Bill called “a professional AA.”

Two Toms

Old Tom, the caretaker, was Tom M., a retired fireman. Lois W. remembered him as “Hard-boiled, yet kindly and honest,” and said he made a good watchdog.

Tom B. was another of the club’s backers. He guaranteed its light, heat and telephone, and he led the meeting the night the club was behind with its rent and Bill dropped a dime in the hat (The basket tells it).

The Saturday Evening Post’s photograph of 1941, taken before the clubhouse fireplace with the slogan “But for the Grace of God” over the mantel, shows a Tom M. and a Tom B. among the members, by Pass It On’s list.

February or June?

AA’s histories date the clubhouse to February 1940. Bill’s list of landmarks puts the first clubhouse in that month, and Pass It On has two members finding the building and guaranteeing the rent then.

Lois’s memoir (1979) says it opened in June 1940, and her chronology puts the first meeting there on June 18, with 100 present. Her diary describes the place on June 11.

Bill and Lois lived upstairs from November 1940, for five months by Pass It On’s count and “about a year” by Bill’s. About fifty homes tells that winter. The building was torn down in 1959.

“A professional AA”

In 1944 Marty M. took a paid job running a national committee to educate the public about alcoholism. Was she now a professional AA?

At Yale in 1948 Bill recalled his answer: it was “the same as the employment of AAs as janitors, secretaries, etc.” And he defined the term: “(A professional AA is one who teaches AA, face to face with another alcoholic, for money.)”

The trouble with members hired in the field, Bill decided later, was something else: “The violation in these instances was not professionalism at all; it was breaking anonymity.” Something useful tells Marty’s side.

Sources

Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age. Alcoholics Anonymous Publishing, 1957. “Unity: The Second Legacy,” “Service: The Third Legacy” and “Landmarks in A.A. History.”
Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. AA Grapevine and Alcoholics Anonymous Publishing, 1953. Traditions Two and Eight.
Pass It On. AA World Services, 1984. Chapters 13 and 14.
Lois Remembers. Al-Anon Family Groups, 1979. Chapters 11 and 17, and the chronology.
Sally Brown and David R. Brown, A Biography of Mrs. Marty Mann. Hazelden, 2001.