dickb
09-12-2008, 07:26 PM
The First 40 and the 75% Successes among Them
By Dick B.
© 2008 Anonymous. All rights reserved
Their Rosters--with names, addresses, phone numbers, and sobriety data
The world headquarters of Alcoholics Anonymous maintains a scrapbook containing hundreds of newspaper articles, columns, and other published reports of the early members of Alcoholics Anonymous who declared they had been cured of alcoholism by the power of God. The newspapers and magazines are nationwide in composition. Also, there are photographs on the walls of Dr. Bob’s Home at 855 Ardmore Avenue in Akron containing pictures of early AAs who were part of the founding group and maintained long-term sobriety. Over the years, many AAs, including the children of Dr. Bob, A.A. collectors, researchers, archivists, historians, and activists have assembled rosters that specifically name the early AAs. The rosters contain their street addresses, reveal their phone numbers, and often state when the member got sober, whether he had a relapse, whether he stayed continuously sober, and often, where relevant, the date of his death. One of these rosters lists the names and addresses and other data about the first 220 members of A.A. Those of us who have researched A.A. facts usually quickly recognize the names of early members as part of the list. Furthermore, Clarence H. Snyder wrote out in his own hand a list of the names of the men who were among the first forty pioneers, and Clarence’s wife Grace gave that list to me. And I personally collected many of these rosters and donated them to the Griffith Library at the birthplace of Bill Wilson (known as the Wilson House) in East Dorset, Vermont. Recently I donated copies to the newly established Dr. Bob Core Library at the North Congregational Church in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, where Dr. Bob and his parents were extremely active as members. Long before either of these library placements were made by me, I personally sat down with Dr. Bob’s daughter Sue Smith Windows prior to her death and went over several rosters with her. She even corrected the spelling of a name or two, and verified the accuracy of the lists. Sue made it clear that she had herself known these members--as a member of the family (the Smith family of Akron) which hospitalized, housed, sobered up, and brought many pioneers to recovery in the first A.A. Group, Akron Number One of Akron. She even provided me with a copy of her mother’s hand-written address book which contained the names and addresses of many of the same pioneers. In sum, there is overwhelming evidence as to the names and A.A. membership history of those 40 dedicated alcoholics who went to any lengths to recover in the early fellowship. They had really followed the path and achieved success.
Details on the Close Friendships and Frequent Meetings
If you wish to, and do in fact, look to A.A.’s own “Conference Approved” literature, as I have, for confirmation of the record keeping and its veracity, you will find the following:
“They handed out little address books with everybody’s name in it. . . . The ones who had phone numbers, there they were.” “Bob E. made up the little address books [as did Elgie R. and others afterwards], and every one of us got one. They’d say, ‘Put a nickel in that telephone and call before you take a drink. If they don’t answer, call somebody else.’”
The successful, dedicated pioneers who really tried and succeeded were a close-knit group of like-minded believers who, frequently, had lived together; prayed together; visited newcomers together; had social gatherings together; had participated in old fashioned prayer meetings and Bible studies together, and had attended one central meeting together each week. In his last major A.A. address, Dr. Bob recalled:
“We used to have daily meetings at a friend’s house. All this happened at a time when everybody was broke, awfully broke. It was probably much easier for us to be successful when broke than it would have been if we’d had a checking account apiece. We were, every one of us, so painfully broke that . . . well, it wasn’t a pleasant thought. Nothing could be done about it. But I think now that it was providentially arranged. Until 1940, or maybe early in1941, we held the Akron meetings at the residence of that good friend, who allowed us to bang up the plaster and the doorjambs, carting chairs upward and downstairs. And he had a very beautiful home.”
Alcoholics and their families had quiet times together at the Smith home each morning. The meetings were conducted by Dr. Bob’s wife Anne Smith where members prayed together, listened to the Bible reading, asked for God’s guidance, and discussed topics from religious literature or from Anne Smith’s own journal. Sue Smith Windows, daughter of Dr. Bob and Anne recalled:
At that time I was getting involved with the quiet times they had in the morning. The guys would come, and Mom would have her quiet time with them. There was a cookie salesman and he’d bring the stale cookies over, and we’d take up a collection for three pounds of coffee for 29 cents. Then they’d have their quiet time, which is a holdover from the Oxford Group, where they read the Bible, prayed and listened, and got guidance. Then they’d have coffee and cookies. This was early in the morning, when the sky was just starting to get light. Sometimes they’d get out of bed to do this.
The Evaluation and Documentation of the Successful Members
Bill Wilson wrote:
“. . . I spent a week visiting Dr. Bob. We commenced to count noses. Out of hundreds of alcoholics, how many had stuck? How many were sober? And for how long? In that fall of 1937, Bob and I counted 40 cases who had significant dry time—maybe 60 years for the whole lot of them! Our eyes glistened.”
“My wife Lois recalled how for three years our Clinton Street home had been filled from cellar to garret with alcoholics of every description and how to our dismay they skidded back into drink, seeming failures all. . . . Out in Akron, in the houses of Dr. Bob and Wally, the home sobering treatment fared better. In fact, Wally and his wife probably made an ALL-TIME high record for home treatment and rehabilitation of A.A.’s newcomers. Their percentage of success was great and their example was widely followed for a time in the homes of other Akronites.”
“In 1937 I went back to Wall Street for a brief stretch. . . . I went west. . . . Nothing turned up, but this trip gave me a much needed chance to visit Dr. Bob in Akron. It was a November day in that year when Dr. Bob and I sat in his living room, counting the noses of our recoveries. There had been failures galore, but now we could see some startling successes too. A hard core of very grim, last-gasp cases had by then been sober a couple of years, an unheard of development. There were 20 or more of such people. All told we figured that upwards of 40 alcoholics were staying bone dry.”
“When Dr. Bob and I realized on that fall day in 1937 that some two score of us had recovered from alcoholism, we at once asked ourselves, ‘How can this experience be shared.’”
“Dick Richardson was an old friend and confidante of the John D. Rockefellers, Senior and Junior. . . . Present at the early 1940 meeting was yet another of Mr. Richardson’s friends, Frank Amos, a newspaper and advertising executive and trustee of A.A. only lately retired. In 1938 Frank went out to Akron to meet Dr. Bob and to make a careful survey of what had transpired there. It was his glowing report of Dr. Bob and Akron’s Group Number One that had caught Mr. Rockefeller’s interest and had further encouraged the formation of the Foundation.”
After May of 1939, Bill wrote the following in a letter to the Guggenheim Foundation:
“At Akron, Ohio, there is a physician, Dr. Robert H. Smith, who has been responsible during the past four years for the recovery of at least 100 chronic alcoholics of types hitherto regarded by the medical profession as hopeless. . . . For more than four years, without charge to sufferers, without fanfare and almost without funds, Dr. Smith has carried on work among alcoholics in the Akron-Cleveland area. In this human laboratory, he has proved that any alcoholic, not too mentally defective, can recover if he so desires. The possible recovery among such cases has suddenly been lifted from almost nil to at least 50 percent, which, quite aside from its social implications, is a medical result of the first magnitude. . . . Dr. Smith has had more experience and has obtained better results than anyone else.”
Recognizing Dr. Bob’s spiritual leadership, Bill wrote:
“He prayed, not only for his own understanding, but for different groups of people who requested him to pray for them. . . . I was always glad to think that I was included in those prayers. . . . And I sort of depended on him to get me into heaven. Bob was far ahead of me in that sort of activity. I was always rushing around talking and organizing and ‘teaching kindergarten.’ I never grew up myself.”
In Alcoholics Anonymous, 4th ed. (2001), the following statements are made:
“By late 1937, the number of members having substantial sobriety time behind them was sufficient to convince the membership that a new light had entered the dark world of the alcoholic.” [Page xvii]
“Of alcoholics who came to A.A. and really tried, 50% got sober at once and remained that way; 25% sobered up after some relapses, and among the remainder, those who stayed on with A.A. showed improvement.” [Page xx]
In Alcohol, Science and Society, in his lecture given at the Yale Summer School of Alcohol Studies, Bill stated:
“I came across Dr. “Bob” S. out in Akron. That was just 9 years ago this summer. And Bob S. recovered. Then we two frantically set to work on alcoholics in Akron. . . . And little by little we began to grow so that there were 5 of us at the end of that first year [1935]; at the end of the second year 15 [1936]; at the end of the third year 40 [1937]; . . .”
Bill Wilson’s wife, Lois Wilson wrote the following:
“The business depression returned in 1937, and toward the end of the year. . . He [Bill Wilson] went to Detroit and Cleveland looking for new job ideas and, of course, stopped off at Akron on the way. He and Bob assessed the current status of the movement. They were surprised to find that, although many of those they had worked with had fallen by the way, forty members enjoyed an average of two years’ solid sobriety. This was flabbergasting, awe-inspiring. They really had hit on a program for helping alcoholics.”
Authors Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham quoted this letter by Bill Wilson to a member who was trying to get A.A. started in a new city:
“I explain this at some length because I want you to be successful with yourself and the people with whom you work. We used to pussyfoot on this spiritual business a great deal more out here [New York City] and the result was bad, for our record falls a lot short of the performance of Akron and Cleveland, where there are now about 350 alcoholics, many of them sober 2 or three years, with less than 20% ever having had any relapse.”
Supporting this statement, A.A.’s DR. BOB and the Good Oldtimers reported on the even-greater success that Dr. Bob’s pioneer sponsee Clarence H. Snyder had achieved with the new and fast-growing Cleveland group:
“Records in Cleveland show that 93 percent of those who came to us never had a drink again” (p. 261).
Bill W. wrote as to Cleveland’s astonishing success rate and rapid growth: “Had it not taken us four whole years, littered with countless failures, to produce even 100 good recoveries? Yet there in Cleveland we saw about 20 members, not very experienced themselves, suddenly confronted by hundreds of newcomers. . . . How could they possibly manage? We did not know.” “But a year later, we did know,” Bill recalled, “for by then, Cleveland had about 30 groups and several hundred members. . . . Yes, Cleveland’s results were of the best. Their results were in fact so good, and A.A.’s membership elsewhere so small, that many a Clevelander really thought A.A. had started there in the first place” (p. 211).
dickb@dickb.com; http://www.dickb.com/index.shtml; 808 874 4876:idea:
By Dick B.
© 2008 Anonymous. All rights reserved
Their Rosters--with names, addresses, phone numbers, and sobriety data
The world headquarters of Alcoholics Anonymous maintains a scrapbook containing hundreds of newspaper articles, columns, and other published reports of the early members of Alcoholics Anonymous who declared they had been cured of alcoholism by the power of God. The newspapers and magazines are nationwide in composition. Also, there are photographs on the walls of Dr. Bob’s Home at 855 Ardmore Avenue in Akron containing pictures of early AAs who were part of the founding group and maintained long-term sobriety. Over the years, many AAs, including the children of Dr. Bob, A.A. collectors, researchers, archivists, historians, and activists have assembled rosters that specifically name the early AAs. The rosters contain their street addresses, reveal their phone numbers, and often state when the member got sober, whether he had a relapse, whether he stayed continuously sober, and often, where relevant, the date of his death. One of these rosters lists the names and addresses and other data about the first 220 members of A.A. Those of us who have researched A.A. facts usually quickly recognize the names of early members as part of the list. Furthermore, Clarence H. Snyder wrote out in his own hand a list of the names of the men who were among the first forty pioneers, and Clarence’s wife Grace gave that list to me. And I personally collected many of these rosters and donated them to the Griffith Library at the birthplace of Bill Wilson (known as the Wilson House) in East Dorset, Vermont. Recently I donated copies to the newly established Dr. Bob Core Library at the North Congregational Church in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, where Dr. Bob and his parents were extremely active as members. Long before either of these library placements were made by me, I personally sat down with Dr. Bob’s daughter Sue Smith Windows prior to her death and went over several rosters with her. She even corrected the spelling of a name or two, and verified the accuracy of the lists. Sue made it clear that she had herself known these members--as a member of the family (the Smith family of Akron) which hospitalized, housed, sobered up, and brought many pioneers to recovery in the first A.A. Group, Akron Number One of Akron. She even provided me with a copy of her mother’s hand-written address book which contained the names and addresses of many of the same pioneers. In sum, there is overwhelming evidence as to the names and A.A. membership history of those 40 dedicated alcoholics who went to any lengths to recover in the early fellowship. They had really followed the path and achieved success.
Details on the Close Friendships and Frequent Meetings
If you wish to, and do in fact, look to A.A.’s own “Conference Approved” literature, as I have, for confirmation of the record keeping and its veracity, you will find the following:
“They handed out little address books with everybody’s name in it. . . . The ones who had phone numbers, there they were.” “Bob E. made up the little address books [as did Elgie R. and others afterwards], and every one of us got one. They’d say, ‘Put a nickel in that telephone and call before you take a drink. If they don’t answer, call somebody else.’”
The successful, dedicated pioneers who really tried and succeeded were a close-knit group of like-minded believers who, frequently, had lived together; prayed together; visited newcomers together; had social gatherings together; had participated in old fashioned prayer meetings and Bible studies together, and had attended one central meeting together each week. In his last major A.A. address, Dr. Bob recalled:
“We used to have daily meetings at a friend’s house. All this happened at a time when everybody was broke, awfully broke. It was probably much easier for us to be successful when broke than it would have been if we’d had a checking account apiece. We were, every one of us, so painfully broke that . . . well, it wasn’t a pleasant thought. Nothing could be done about it. But I think now that it was providentially arranged. Until 1940, or maybe early in1941, we held the Akron meetings at the residence of that good friend, who allowed us to bang up the plaster and the doorjambs, carting chairs upward and downstairs. And he had a very beautiful home.”
Alcoholics and their families had quiet times together at the Smith home each morning. The meetings were conducted by Dr. Bob’s wife Anne Smith where members prayed together, listened to the Bible reading, asked for God’s guidance, and discussed topics from religious literature or from Anne Smith’s own journal. Sue Smith Windows, daughter of Dr. Bob and Anne recalled:
At that time I was getting involved with the quiet times they had in the morning. The guys would come, and Mom would have her quiet time with them. There was a cookie salesman and he’d bring the stale cookies over, and we’d take up a collection for three pounds of coffee for 29 cents. Then they’d have their quiet time, which is a holdover from the Oxford Group, where they read the Bible, prayed and listened, and got guidance. Then they’d have coffee and cookies. This was early in the morning, when the sky was just starting to get light. Sometimes they’d get out of bed to do this.
The Evaluation and Documentation of the Successful Members
Bill Wilson wrote:
“. . . I spent a week visiting Dr. Bob. We commenced to count noses. Out of hundreds of alcoholics, how many had stuck? How many were sober? And for how long? In that fall of 1937, Bob and I counted 40 cases who had significant dry time—maybe 60 years for the whole lot of them! Our eyes glistened.”
“My wife Lois recalled how for three years our Clinton Street home had been filled from cellar to garret with alcoholics of every description and how to our dismay they skidded back into drink, seeming failures all. . . . Out in Akron, in the houses of Dr. Bob and Wally, the home sobering treatment fared better. In fact, Wally and his wife probably made an ALL-TIME high record for home treatment and rehabilitation of A.A.’s newcomers. Their percentage of success was great and their example was widely followed for a time in the homes of other Akronites.”
“In 1937 I went back to Wall Street for a brief stretch. . . . I went west. . . . Nothing turned up, but this trip gave me a much needed chance to visit Dr. Bob in Akron. It was a November day in that year when Dr. Bob and I sat in his living room, counting the noses of our recoveries. There had been failures galore, but now we could see some startling successes too. A hard core of very grim, last-gasp cases had by then been sober a couple of years, an unheard of development. There were 20 or more of such people. All told we figured that upwards of 40 alcoholics were staying bone dry.”
“When Dr. Bob and I realized on that fall day in 1937 that some two score of us had recovered from alcoholism, we at once asked ourselves, ‘How can this experience be shared.’”
“Dick Richardson was an old friend and confidante of the John D. Rockefellers, Senior and Junior. . . . Present at the early 1940 meeting was yet another of Mr. Richardson’s friends, Frank Amos, a newspaper and advertising executive and trustee of A.A. only lately retired. In 1938 Frank went out to Akron to meet Dr. Bob and to make a careful survey of what had transpired there. It was his glowing report of Dr. Bob and Akron’s Group Number One that had caught Mr. Rockefeller’s interest and had further encouraged the formation of the Foundation.”
After May of 1939, Bill wrote the following in a letter to the Guggenheim Foundation:
“At Akron, Ohio, there is a physician, Dr. Robert H. Smith, who has been responsible during the past four years for the recovery of at least 100 chronic alcoholics of types hitherto regarded by the medical profession as hopeless. . . . For more than four years, without charge to sufferers, without fanfare and almost without funds, Dr. Smith has carried on work among alcoholics in the Akron-Cleveland area. In this human laboratory, he has proved that any alcoholic, not too mentally defective, can recover if he so desires. The possible recovery among such cases has suddenly been lifted from almost nil to at least 50 percent, which, quite aside from its social implications, is a medical result of the first magnitude. . . . Dr. Smith has had more experience and has obtained better results than anyone else.”
Recognizing Dr. Bob’s spiritual leadership, Bill wrote:
“He prayed, not only for his own understanding, but for different groups of people who requested him to pray for them. . . . I was always glad to think that I was included in those prayers. . . . And I sort of depended on him to get me into heaven. Bob was far ahead of me in that sort of activity. I was always rushing around talking and organizing and ‘teaching kindergarten.’ I never grew up myself.”
In Alcoholics Anonymous, 4th ed. (2001), the following statements are made:
“By late 1937, the number of members having substantial sobriety time behind them was sufficient to convince the membership that a new light had entered the dark world of the alcoholic.” [Page xvii]
“Of alcoholics who came to A.A. and really tried, 50% got sober at once and remained that way; 25% sobered up after some relapses, and among the remainder, those who stayed on with A.A. showed improvement.” [Page xx]
In Alcohol, Science and Society, in his lecture given at the Yale Summer School of Alcohol Studies, Bill stated:
“I came across Dr. “Bob” S. out in Akron. That was just 9 years ago this summer. And Bob S. recovered. Then we two frantically set to work on alcoholics in Akron. . . . And little by little we began to grow so that there were 5 of us at the end of that first year [1935]; at the end of the second year 15 [1936]; at the end of the third year 40 [1937]; . . .”
Bill Wilson’s wife, Lois Wilson wrote the following:
“The business depression returned in 1937, and toward the end of the year. . . He [Bill Wilson] went to Detroit and Cleveland looking for new job ideas and, of course, stopped off at Akron on the way. He and Bob assessed the current status of the movement. They were surprised to find that, although many of those they had worked with had fallen by the way, forty members enjoyed an average of two years’ solid sobriety. This was flabbergasting, awe-inspiring. They really had hit on a program for helping alcoholics.”
Authors Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham quoted this letter by Bill Wilson to a member who was trying to get A.A. started in a new city:
“I explain this at some length because I want you to be successful with yourself and the people with whom you work. We used to pussyfoot on this spiritual business a great deal more out here [New York City] and the result was bad, for our record falls a lot short of the performance of Akron and Cleveland, where there are now about 350 alcoholics, many of them sober 2 or three years, with less than 20% ever having had any relapse.”
Supporting this statement, A.A.’s DR. BOB and the Good Oldtimers reported on the even-greater success that Dr. Bob’s pioneer sponsee Clarence H. Snyder had achieved with the new and fast-growing Cleveland group:
“Records in Cleveland show that 93 percent of those who came to us never had a drink again” (p. 261).
Bill W. wrote as to Cleveland’s astonishing success rate and rapid growth: “Had it not taken us four whole years, littered with countless failures, to produce even 100 good recoveries? Yet there in Cleveland we saw about 20 members, not very experienced themselves, suddenly confronted by hundreds of newcomers. . . . How could they possibly manage? We did not know.” “But a year later, we did know,” Bill recalled, “for by then, Cleveland had about 30 groups and several hundred members. . . . Yes, Cleveland’s results were of the best. Their results were in fact so good, and A.A.’s membership elsewhere so small, that many a Clevelander really thought A.A. had started there in the first place” (p. 211).
dickb@dickb.com; http://www.dickb.com/index.shtml; 808 874 4876:idea: