about the Dr. Bob of later years, several people recalled that what first struck them was the size of his hands, which appeared to be uncommonly large and strong—seemingly too awkward to have handled the delicate business of medical surgery with such skill. And not even those horn-rimmed glasses could hide the penetrating gaze.
Dr. Bob had a deep and resonant voice, which never lost its New England twang but undoubtedly got huskier and raspier as his intake of whiskey increased.
Emma K., who, with her husband, Lavelle (an A.A. member), cared for Dr. Bob and Anne Smith in their last years, on Ardmore Avenue in Akron, Ohio, described Dr. Bob as “very Eastern. Nobody could understand what he said half the time.
“When I said ‘aunt,’ he used to tell me, ‘Don’t say “ant.” That’s something that crawls on the ground. Say “ahnt.”’ Imagine saying ‘ahnt.’ Or he was at the telephone ordering something. When he’d get ready, he’d look at me and laugh and he would say—I can’t say it—but he would say, ‘Doctah Ah H. Smith, 855 Ahdmaw. No, I said Ahdmaw — Aahdmoah!’”
In Bob’s Dartmouth years, of course, his New England accent hardly set him apart. He embarked on college life with zest. Freed from his parents’ restraining supervision, he saw this as a time to seek out and enjoy new experiences without the necessity of having to give an accounting.
Dartmouth had a name then for being a rugged backwoods school where the 800 or so students spent the long winters ignoring their books and drinking as much beer and hard cider as they could hold. It seems, however, that the real rebels and rakehells in this “wilderness college where there is an unaccountable degree of immorality and vice” were those periodically admonished in the school paper for wearing sweaters, “which cover a multitude of sins,” to church and dinner.
Joe P., an Akron A.A. who went to Dartmouth several years after Bob, recalled, “Dartmouth was the drinkingest of the Ivy League schools when I went there. New Hampshire was dry and you couldn’t get whiskey, so you’d take the train down to a little town in Massachusetts. Everybody ran over and loaded up, then drank all the way back home. Sometimes, we’d go up to Canada for liquor—or have the brakemen on the trains bring it back to us.
“The natives would have hard cider. Every window in Dartmouth had a jug of hard cider sitting on it. On those horribly cold days, they’d drill down through the ice and take the alcohol out. A cupful would knock the hat right off your head.
“It was a school way up in the mountains, and there was nothing else to do. There were about six girls in town who were waitresses at the Hanover Inn. We were known as the Dartmouth animals, and we tried to act the part. You were supposed to be rough. There was no way to get rid of your exuberance, except when you finally got to go down to Smith, or to Wellesley down near Boston.”
Bob’s first discovery in his search for the facts of campus life probably did not come about by accident. More likely, it was exactly what he hoped to find: that drinking seemed to be the major extracurricular activity.
“Almost everyone seemed to do it,” Bob said, using the time-honored words that “almost everyone” uses to justify heavy drinking in a particular place, profession, or society. So, with a combination of dedication, perseverance, and natural ability, he set out to become a winner in this new sport.
In the beginning, he drank for the sheer fun of it and suffered little or no ill effects. “I seemed to be able to snap back the next morning better than most of my fellow drinkers, who were cursed (or perhaps blessed) with a great deal of morning-after nausea,” he said. “Never once in my life have I had a headache, which fact leads me to believe that I was an alcoholic almost from the start.”
At Dartmouth, the oncoming illness was no more apparent to classmates than it was to Bob himself. E. B. Watson, who was president of Bob’s class of 1902, later became a professor at the college. Still later, as a professor emeritus, he commented in a letter that Bob had been friendly and well liked at Dartmouth for his frank and unpretentious ways of speech. “Although he indulged somewhat excessively in beer (the only beverage then obtainable in New Hampshire), he did not become a slave to alcohol until his graduate schooling.”
“I roomed with him in my junior year,” recalled Dr. Philip P. Thompson. “I remember him as a tall, lanky gentleman, a little bit abrupt in manner. He was restless. I have no recollection of ever seeing him study, although he was always up in his classes.”
Dr. Thompson described his roommate as “rather quick-spoken,” remembering a Saturday when several members of the class were having a seemingly endless discussion about where they would go and what they would do that afternoon. Evidently, alcohol was mentioned a time or two, for Bob said, “Well, if we’re going to get drunk, why don’t we get at it?”
In that junior year, Dr. Thompson noted, Bob was devoting more and more of his time to playing billiards and drinking beer. “He told me he had liked the taste of liquor ever since he had had some hard cider as a small boy,” Dr. Thompson said, noting that Bob could drink liquor in quantities “that the rest of us could not stand.”
In addition to learning his way around a billiard table at Dartmouth, it was probably there that Bob started to attain his eventual high proficiency with a deck of cards—whether bridge, poker, or gin rummy. In these and any other games, Dr. Bob was highly competitive and always played to win.
He even learned to pitch horseshoes somewhere along the line. One of the pioneer members in Akron A.A., Ernie G., recalled that a number of A.A.’s including Dr. Bob used to go up to a Minnesota fishing camp in the early 1940’s.
“You couldn’t get him in a boat to go fishing,” Ernie remembered. “I’d say, ‘You ought to get away from that card table.’ Then I said, ‘I’ll beat you in a game of horseshoes.’ He said, ‘Okay, we’ll just see about that. How much are we going to play for?’
“I said, ‘I won’t make it tough on you. Let’s make it a quarter.’ Hell, I didn’t know he was a horseshoe pitcher. He could throw ringers like nobody’s business. I thought I was pretty good, too, but he took me two out of three. If he had been in practice, I wouldn’t’ve stood a chance.”
Smitty often remarked jokingly that his father’s skill at pool, cards, and other games of chance was the result of a misspent youth. Dr. Bob would just smile and say nothing.
Another trick Bob picked up along the way was an ability to chugalug a bottle of beer without any apparent movement of his Adam’s apple. “We said he had a patent or open throat,” said Dr. Thompson.
Dr. Bob never lost the knack of not swallowing, a bar-room trick that must have been good for a free shot or two here and there in his drinking years. In his sober years, he would take a day’s supply of vitamins or medicines and toss them down his open throat all at one time, without water. “What’s the difference?” he’d say. “They all go the same place.”
In addition to describing Bob’s proficiency at chugalugging, Dr. Thompson told of two incidents, with a significant detail that foreshadowed the future.
“Bob and I liked to take long walks. One day, we walked to White River Junction. As we approached through the rail yard, a voice came out of a freight car: ‘Hey, Bub, get me a sandwich, will you?’
“It was dusk and we couldn’t see who it was, but we went into the restaurant and bought a couple of sandwiches, which we put in the car door. ‘Thank you,’ said the voice. We asked him where he was going, and he said Portland, Maine.
“Later
