to put it up in four-ounce bottles and stick several in my stocking tops. This worked nicely until my wife and I went to see Wallace Beery in ‘Tugboat Annie’ [where Beery pulled the same stunt in an attempt to deceive Marie Dressler], after which the pant-leg and stocking racket was out.”
When beer became legal in early 1933, Dr. Bob thought this might provide a solution to satisfy everybody. And he would not actually have to stop drinking. “It was harmless,” he said. “Nobody ever got drunk on beer.”
Perhaps Bob had superhuman powers of persuasion. Perhaps Anne was in such a state of desperation, she was willing to try anything. In any case, it was with her permission that he filled the cellar with beer.
“It was not long before I was drinking at least a case and a half a day,” he said. “I put on 30 pounds of weight in about two months, looked like a pig, and was uncomfortable from shortness of breath.”
Then it occurred to him that if he was “all smelled up with beer,” nobody could tell what he had been drinking. So he began to needle the beer with straight alcohol. There were the usual results. “And that ended the beer experiment,” Dr. Bob said.
During this beer-drinking phase, in 1934, Smitty had gone with his father to visit Dr. Bob’s mother and old friends in Vermont. “I was 16,” Smitty recalled, “and got to do most of the driving, because he was drinking. I remember that he was afraid Vermont might still be dry, so we loaded up with cases and cases of beer at the New York line. Then we found out it was wet.”
Sue was about the same age, in high school, when her father’s problem with alcohol dawned on her. “I remember Mom worrying about where he was, or making excuses,” she told Bill Wilson in 1954. “But it really hit me when my friends came to the house. Dad got irritable, and I couldn’t understand why. I finally asked Mom, and she told me. He never appeared to be tight, but my friends and I would be downstairs, and he would get annoyed because we were in his way when he wanted to get to his supply in the cellar. My friends just thought he was cross.
“Later, when I knew what was going on, he would get touchy about the subject and would get into little arguments with you. They weren’t anything serious. Just enough. Well, he was New England and bullheaded. And I was bullheaded. Dad’s drinking never made him mean. He was mostly irritable. He sort of snuck in most of the time. Or he was in bed resting. It got worse and worse. We were in debt, and he was sick many mornings until noon.”
The money problems grew. Sue remembered how her mother would have to pay debts with money received for Christmas or birthdays. Emma K. recalled commenting on a beautiful little statuette that had been a Christmas present during this period, only to hear Anne reply, “Oh, my dear, if only they had sent food instead!”
“No, I didn’t get annoyed at him, but he did put you on the spot a lot of times,” Sue said. “You couldn’t be loyal to him and Mom both. I felt that put me in the middle.
“I remember once he asked me to get his bottle for him. I wouldn’t do it, and he offered me money. He finally got up to ten dollars, and I still wouldn’t do it. That was when I realized I didn’t know much about what was going on with him—how much he wanted it.
“I think he felt guilty about things, and he began to make promises to us after he knew we were aware of the problem. I had a dime bank, and of course, I knew how to get the dimes out. I’d open it and find maybe two or three extra dollars there. I think he tried to make it up to me that way.”
IV. The physician as co-workers see him
Those who worked with Dr. Bob, while he was drinking and while he was recovering, saw different aspects of the man and his problem.
Starting in the late 1920’s, Dr. Bob had been going quite often to St. Thomas Hospital (where he was appointed to the courtesy staff in 1934). It was on one of his first visits, in 1928, that he met Sister Mary Ignatia. She had taught music, but after being ill, was assigned less strenuous duties in the admitting office at St. Thomas, which was run by the Sisters of Charity of Saint Augustine, as it is today.
“Doctor would call and say, ‘Sister, may I have a bed?’ remembered Sister Ignatia. “I would always recognize his voice with its rich New England accent. He rarely came to the hospital without visiting the admitting office.
“He loved to use slang words. If he was at some big dinner, he’d say, ‘Well, we put on the nosebag yesterday.’ Or he would come into the admitting office, where I’d have many other people around, and ask about his patient. I’d say, ‘I put Mrs. Jones in 408, but there’s another patient there.’ ‘Another patient, Sister?’ ‘Yes, Doctor, another patient.’ ‘You mean a frail, Sister.’ So the next time I would say, ‘Doctor, your Mr. Brown is in 241, and there’s a frail in 218.’ He would just enjoy it.”
Dr. Bob was also in the habit of calling almost everyone by a nickname. “He always called me Abercrombie,” said one of the early A.A.’s. Bill Wilson was Willie or, on state occasions presumably, Sir William. Alcoholics in general were U.D.’s, for “unknown drunks.” And according to Smitty, the good sister had her nickname as well—Ig. However, he was doubtful that his father ever had the nerve to use it in her presence.
As Sister Ignatia recalled, their first meeting seemed of no particular consequence. She knew nothing of Dr. Bob’s problem. “He just always seemed different from the rest,” she said. “He brought something with him when he came into a room. I never knew what it was. I just felt it.”
Another who thought Dr. R. H. Smith was different— “wonderfully different”—was Betty B., then a young student nurse at City Hospital. “He was known to us as Dr. R. H. S., because there were two other Smiths at City Hospital,” she said.
In 1934, Betty had no idea that Dr. R. H. S. was an alcoholic, although she was aware that his hands sometimes shook when he did a dressing and that his eyes were bloodshot. Only years later, when she herself came into the A.A. program, did she learn that City Hospital’s Dr. R. H. Smith and A.A.’s Dr. Bob were one and the same.
Yet the problem of alcoholism among staff members was
Some colleagues at City Hospital were unaware of Dr. Bob’s
drinking problem. Slowly, it became obvious.
not unknown even to student nurses. Betty heard that one doctor who had been chief of surgery was dismissed for this reason. She was told they allowed him to operate surreptitiously. And once, when she was on call, he wheeled someone into the operating room in the middle of the night.
Betty saw Dr. R. H. S. as neither pompous nor condescending at a time when student nurses were at the lowest level in a hospital hierarchy where doctors were demigods, at least in their own estimation.
“He didn’t ignore me or any other student,” she recalled. “When we’d step aside, as required, at an elevator or door so a doctor could precede us, we all knew Dr. R. H. S. would push us ahead, just as he’d stare above his glasses and growl, ‘Sit down, woman,’ when we automatically started to rise upon his entrance to the chart room. Most unusual of all, he’d thank us after we’d made rounds with him or helped change a dressing.
“His patients loved him. So did the nurses,” Betty said, remembering a time when, in her huge white apron and bib, she was still in awe of doctors and afraid of most of them. But not Dr. R. H. S. “I learned that beneath his abrupt and sometimes gruff exterior,
