whole country’s going dry, “I felt quite safe,” Dr. Bob recalled. A few drinks at that point would make little difference, he thought; if he and his friends managed to lay in a modest supply of liquor while it was still legal, it would soon be gone.
And that would be that, he reasoned. He could come to
Anne Ripley was a Wellesley student when she and Bob met;
during their 17-year courtship, she taught school.
no harm. His thinking, if not quite logical (except by alcoholic logic), was quite typical at that time. Dr. Bob and the rest of the country were soon to learn the results of the Great American Experiment.
Before the amendment went into effect, he was not aware that the government would oblige him by allowing doctors almost unlimited supplies of grain alcohol for “medicinal purposes.” Many times during those “dry” years, Dr. Bob went to the phone book, picked out a name at random, then filled out the prescription that would get him a pint of medicinal alcohol.
Soon, a newly accredited member of American society, the bootlegger, appeared on the scene. Quality was not always his long suit. Yet the family bootlegger was more obliging than a liquor store. He delivered at any hour, day or night, including Sundays and holidays. Sorry, though; no checks or credit.
Dr. Bob started out moderately. Within a relatively short time, he drifted out of control again, but not back into the old pattern, for the progression of his disease was evident.
He soon “developed two distinct phobias,” in his own words: “One was the fear of not sleeping; the other was the fear of running out of liquor. Not being a man of means, I knew that if I did not stay sober enough to earn money, I would run out of liquor.”
This irrefutable logic led him into a squirrel-cage existence — a 17-year “nightmare.” Staying sober to earn money to get drunk . . . getting drunk to go to sleep. Then over again—and again!
Instead of taking the morning drink, which he craved, Dr. Bob turned to what he described as “large doses of sedatives” to quiet the jitters, which distressed him terribly. He contracted what in later years would be called a pill problem, or dual addiction.
Whenever Bob did yield to the craving for the morning drink instead, there was a major disaster. First, he was unfit for work within a few hours. Second, he lost his usual skill in smuggling home enough liquor to put him to sleep. This led to a night of “futile tossing around in bed followed by a morning of unbearable jitters.”
There were also occasional binges. Sometimes, he hid out at the City Club or registered at the Portage Hotel under a fictitious name. After all, who would believe “Robert Smith”? “But my friends usually found me, and I would go home if they promised that I should not be scolded,” he said.
And yet Dr. Bob managed to keep functioning as a physician. “I had sense enough never to go to the hospital if I had been drinking, and very seldom did I receive patients.”
Indeed, his career even advanced during these years. After his start as a general practitioner, Dr. Bob developed an interest in surgery. Following further training at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and Jefferson Medical School in Philadelphia, he began in 1929 to specialize as a proctologist and rectal surgeon. He was also first-call surgeon in Akron for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad for many years—that is, if there was illness or accident in the area, he was the first doctor called. This provided him with some extra money and a railroad pass.
But as the drinking years went by, the effort it took to do his work and keep up a facade of normality became more and more grueling. His usual pattern was to stay dry but well-sedated every day until four o’clock, then go home. In this way, he hoped to keep his drinking problem from becoming common knowledge or hospital gossip.
Gradually, the façade was crumbling. Dr. Bob may have thought no one knew, but there is considerable evidence that quite a few people were aware of his problem with alcohol. For instance, at the start of his recovery, when he announced to a nurse at City Hospital that he had a “cure” for alcoholism, her first remark was: “Well, Doctor, I suppose you’ve already tried it yourself?”
Anne C., an A.A. member who knew Dr. Bob before she ever took her first drink, remembered how he would come down to the lunch counter in the Second National Bank Building and order Bromo Seltzer, tomato juice, and aspirin. “I never saw him eat. One day, I asked Bill, the owner, what was wrong with that man. ‘Does he have palsy?’ ‘No, he has a perpetual hangover,’ Bill said.”
III. Husband, father, and drunk
Dr. Bob’s drinking had its inevitable effect on family life, as well as on professional practice. But his two children were unaware of it in their early years, and their memories of childhood are mostly happy.
In Anne’s mid-forties, she was advised that she could not have any more children. Sue was adopted then, five years after the birth of the Smiths’ son. “They didn’t want to raise Smitty as an only child and spoil him rotten,” said Sue. “So they got me and spoiled us both rotten. Oh, we got spankings all right. Not often, but when we did, we really deserved it. We learned early that the louder we yelled, the sooner it was over.”
Sue, who was five years old when she was adopted, recalled that she was more frightened than anything else when she first met her father. “I didn’t know what to expect. I remember him driving up the big circular driveway at City Hospital and telling me to wait while he went inside for a minute. I thought that was where I was going to live. The first night, I picked a fight with a neighborhood girl and got bawled out. I remember I didn’t think that was right at all.”
There was only five months’ difference in the children’s ages. Since school authorities didn’t know Sue was adopted, this was hard for them to understand. And both Sue and Smitty remembered their father’s answer when they said their teacher had asked them how old their parents were. Dr. Bob said, “Tell them we’re 70.” They did, causing further mystification.
With his stern, rather forbidding appearance, Dr. Bob was not the type children would flock to. And he wasn’t exactly comfortable around them, either. But he made the effort. He would go out and play ball with the neighborhood kids. “We’d have a lot of fun,” said Sue, “with 15 or 20 people out there, him six-foot-two and a little kid three years old.”
“He appeared to be stern,” said Smitty. “But he was a real confidant. He would come home and talk to us.”
This was echoed by Sue. “He looked stern, but he was really quite a softy.”
Smitty also noted that he was 21 years old before he knew that there was any medicine but bicarbonate of soda. “I used to ask Dad for medicine,” Smitty recalled, “and he told me, ‘Why, hell, son, these are for selling, not for taking.’ ”
“As a father, he was the best,” Sue said. “He was loving and at the same time would want to be obeyed. He was fun to be with. I enjoyed many an evening playing cards and had as good a time with him as I have ever had with anyone.”
Sue felt that Dr. Bob’s strict upbringing not only was responsible for his stubborn resistance to authority, but also led him to give more freedom to his own children. “As I look back on it,” she said, “I see he was ahead of his time, or didn’t want us to go through what he did when he was a child, having to go to bed at five o’clock in the evening.”
