home and gave me a hooker or two of Scotch that night and a bottle of beer the next morning,” he recalled.
As Bill and Sue remembered, however, there was a three-day sobering-up period after what was, incidentally, Dr. Bob’s last A.M.A. Convention.
“Do you remember your mother and me going over to the home of his office nurse early in the morning to pick him up?” Bill asked Sue. “We brought him home, and he went to bed. I stayed with him up in that corner room, where there were two beds.”
“I know he wasn’t in too good shape,” Sue said. “Then the dishes of tomatoes and Karo syrup came out.”
“That was for the operation,” Bill explained. Upon Dr. Bob’s return, they had discovered that he was due to perform surgery three days later. “It was a worrisome thing, because if he was too drunk, he couldn’t do it. And if he was too sober, he would be too jittery. So we had to load him up with this combination of tomato juice and sauerkraut and Karo corn syrup. The idea was to supply him with vitamins from the tomatoes and sauerkraut and energy from the corn syrup. That was a theory we had. We also gave him some beer to steady his nerves.”
As Bill described it on another occasion, this typical tapering-off process took three days. There wasn’t much sleep for anybody, but Bob cooperated.
“At four o’clock on the morning of the operation, he turned, looked at me, and said, ‘I am going through with this,’” Bill recalled.
“ ‘You mean you are going through with the operation?’
“ ‘I have placed both operation and myself in God’s hands. I’m going to do what it takes to get sober and stay that way.’ . . .
“At nine o’clock, he shook miserably as we helped him into his clothes,” Bill said. “We were panic-stricken. Could he ever do it? Were he too tight or too shaky, it would make little difference. His misguided scalpel might take the life of his patient.”
On the way to City Hospital on the east side of town, Dr. Bob held out his hand from time to time to see whether the shakes had subsided. Just before they stopped, Bill, who also had his practical side, gave him a bottle of beer.
Bill and Anne went back to the house to wait. After many hours, Bob phoned to tell them that the operation had been successful. Still, he didn’t return right after the call. Had he gone out to celebrate? Anne and Bill had no idea; they could only wait.
Finally, Dr. Bob came home. He had spent the hours after the operation making restitution to friends and acquaintances in Akron. The bottle of beer Bill gave him that morning was the last drink he ever had.
Although arguments have been and will be made for other significant occasions in A.A. history, it is generally agreed that Alcoholics Anonymous began there, in Akron, on that date: June 10, 1935.
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