group problems had been terrifying, but no amount of squabbling could dampen the mass demand for sobriety. Yes, Cleveland’s results were of the best. Their results were in fact so good, and A.A.’s membership elsewhere was so small, that many a Clevelander really thought A.A. had started there in the first place.
The Cleveland pioneers had proved three essential things: the value of personal sponsorship; the worth of the A.A. book in indoctrinating newcomers, and finally the tremendous fact that A.A., when the word really got around, could now soundly grow to great size.
Many of the essentials of A.A. as we now understand them were to be found already in the pioneering groups in Akron, New York, and Cleveland as early as 1939. But there remained much more to be done and lots of questions to be answered. Would many A.A.’s, for example, moving out of the old original groups, be successful in new towns and cities? In those days the first few of our early A.A. travelers, the forerunners of thousands, were on the move.
We had watched one named Earl T. as, soundly indoctrinated by Dr. Bob and the Akronites, he returned home to Chicago in 1937. With much concern we had followed his constant but fruitless efforts to start a group there, a struggle that lasted two whole years, despite the help of Dick R., his first “convert,” and Ken A., who had migrated from the Akron group in 1938. Then in mid-1939 two Chicago doctors came upon the scene. Earl’s friend, Dr. Dan Craske, handed him two floundering patients. One of them, Sadie, began to stay dry.
A little while later a Dr. Brown of Evanston exposed several patients to Earl. Among them were Sylvia, Luke, and Sam and his wife Tee, all of whom have remained sober to this day. Sylvia, however, got off to a slow start. In desperation she visited Akron and Cleveland, the founding centers in Ohio. Here she was exposed to Henrietta and Dr. Bob, and was worked over by Clarence and Dorothy, the Cleveland elders. Still she drank on. She returned to her home in Chicago, where for reasons best known to herself and God, she suddenly got sober and stayed that way.
Chicago now had the solid nucleus from which its coming great growth could issue. Continually encouraged by Dr. Brown, vastly helped by Sylvia’s nonalcoholic personal secretary, Grace Cultice, and cheered on by Earl’s wife Katie, the Chicagoans started to search for still more prospects. Meetings soon began, both in Earl’s home and in Sylvia’s.
As A.A. in Chicago slowly grew and prospered, Grace was continually at the business end of Sylvia’s phone, and she became the group’s first secretary. When the Saturday Evening Post article appeared in 1941, the traffic became very heavy. Sylvia’s place became a sort of Chicago Grand Central, and things were just about as rugged with Earl and Katie. Something had to be done. So they rented a one-room office in the Loop, and secretary Grace was installed there to direct the stream of applicants for Twelfth Step attention, hospitalization, or other help. This was A.A.’s first organized local service center, the forerunner of the many Intergroup Associations we maintain in large cities nowadays. Many an A.A. group within a several-hundred-mile radius of Chicago can trace its origin to the work of that center—notable early ones being Green Bay, Wisconsin, and Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Meanwhile, Katie realized that many A.A. families needed the program as much as their alcoholics did, and she vigorously carried on the precedent already set by Anne and Lois who—in their homes, in their A.A. travels with Dr. Bob and myself, and even upstairs in New York’s Old Twenty-Fourth Street Club—had urged A.A.’s Twelve Steps upon nonalcoholic wives and husbands as a way of restoring family life to normal.
No one knows exactly when the first Family Group as such started. One of the largest, most vigorous, and best accepted of the early family centers developed in Toronto, Canada. There they wrought so well that many A.A. groups in the area customarily invite Family Group speakers to their meetings. By 1950, the Toronto Family Group had created such a wide and deep impression that their speakers were featured at the Cleveland International A.A. Convention of that year. And what was true of Toronto was equally true of Long Beach, California, and Richmond, Virginia. Indeed, some of these latter Family Groups may quite possibly have antedated Toronto somewhat. In any case it is sure that Anne, Lois, and Katie long ago planted the ideas which have since flowered into hundreds of Al-Anon Family Groups, one of the most encouraging developments in the whole A.A. picture in recent years.
Another early A.A. traveler was Archie T. He had been tenderly nursed back to sobriety in the home of Dr. Bob and Anne at Akron. Still sick, frail, and frightened, he returned to his native city, Detroit, the scene of his downfall, where his personal reputation and financial credit still stood at zero. We saw Archie make amends everywhere he could. We saw him delivering dry cleaning out of a broken-down jalopy to the back doors of his one-time fashionable friends in Grosse Pointe. We saw him, helped by a dedicated nonalcoholic, Sarah Klein, start a group that met in her basement. Archie and Sarah next straightened out a man named Mike, a manufacturer, and a socialite lady named Anne K. These were the ones from whom stemmed Detroit’s huge membership of later years.
Then there was Larry J., a newspaperman who had barely escaped death by d.t.’s and exhaustion. Despite a lung ailment that required him to spend much time in an oxygen tent, he courageously set out from Cleveland to Houston, Texas, and on the train he experienced a spiritual awakening that made him feel, as he said, “all in one piece again.” On his arrival in Houston, Larry wrote a series of pieces for the Houston Press that attracted the attention of the townsmen and their Bishop Quinn, and thus finally, after heartbreaking setbacks, the first group in Texas emerged. Larry’s first good prospects were salesman Ed, who was to carry the message to Austin; Army Sergeant Roy, who made the start at Tampa, Florida, and who later helped greatly in Los Angeles; and one Esther, who presently moved to Dallas, where, with characteristic enthusiasm and energy, she founded A.A. in that town and became dean of all the alky ladies in the astonishing state of Texas.
Meanwhile Cleveland A.A. had sobered up Rollie H., a famous athlete. Newspaper stories about this event were sensational and they brought in many new prospects. Nevertheless this development was one of the first to arouse deep concern about our personal anonymity at the top public level.
Still another famous early itinerant was Irwin M., a Cleveland A.A. who had become a champion salesman of Venetian blinds to department stores in the deep South. He used to range a territory bounded by Atlanta and Jacksonville on one side and Indianapolis, Birmingham, and New Orleans on the other. Irwin weighed 250 pounds and was full of energy and gusto. The prospect of Irwin, as a missionary, scared us rather badly. At the New York Headquarters we had on file a long list of topers in many a Southern city and town, people who had not been personally visited. Irwin had long since broken all the rules of caution and discreet approach to newcomers, so it was with reluctance that we gave him the list. Then we waited—but not for long. Irwin ran them down, every single one, with his home-crashing tornado technique. Day and night, besides, he wrote letters to his prospects and got them to writing each other.
Stunned but happy Southerners began to send their thanks to Headquarters. As Irwin himself reported, many a first family of the South had been an easy pushover. He had cracked the territory wide open and had started or stimulated many an original group.
Still thinking of the South, we remembered the Richmond A.A.’s who believed in getting away from wives and drinking only beer, but who became more orthodox through the ministrations of the Virginia squire, Jack W., and certain A.A. travelers. We thought, too, of the Jersey boiler inspector, the tireless Dave R., who had descended upon Charlotte, North Carolina; and of Fred K., another Jersey man, who set the A.A. ferment going in Miami; and of super-promoter Bruce H., who, working in Jacksonville and its environs, was the first to use radio to carry the message.
Shortly after the beginning of A.A. in Atlanta, that shaky group was sparked by the appearance of Sam, a high-powered Yankee preacher, temporarily minus frock and salary. Sam spoke with great effect from both pulpit and A.A. platform. He created a sort of “Chautauqua” brand of A.A. which was mildly deprecated by some members but cheered on by others. Sam has since passed away, but
