Stepstudy.org

“Of course, I used to be an alcoholic,” he wrote, “but now I’m an addict of some twelve years standing, and you know how hopeless that is. But I do see hope for me in this philosophy of yours, and when I get out of here I’m certainly going to try it.”

Subsequently our office struck up a correspondence with him as he’d returned home to that little southern hamlet. He told us in his quiet way of the various difficulties he had getting settled again, but never in any complaining sense. The girls in our office would write him occasional letters of encouragement, and little by little he began to describe the formation of an AA group in Shelby. (By the way, this was one of the earliest groups we formed through the mail, without any direct contact.) Well, it was a great thrill to all of us in the office.

Meanwhile, the southern centers had started — Atlanta, Richmond, Jacksonville. In larger places the groups had become larger, and with that a demand had arisen that I get down among the southerners and pay my respects and see if I couldn’t peddle a little of the older AA experience down there.

You see, AA began to look like a success at that time, and as everyone knows, success is a heady wine. I’m afraid that I was a little bit on the “big shot” side, and I spent some little time debating with the folks in the office whether I would stop off at Shelby. I mean, you know, that chap there was a nice chap, and he had done a nice job, but I should get where I could get to a lot of people. After some debating with myself and others, I finally, grudgingly, conceded that I would stop off there at Shelby.

Well, when I got off the train at King’s Mountain, North Carolina, I saw three men approaching me from down the platform a ways. Two of them I spotted as “souses” right off the bat, you couldn’t mistake it — they were sober, you understand, but we drunks know our own quite well. The third one, well I wondered who and what he was. As he drew near I saw some lines in his face that I didn’t quite place, and as he drew nearer I saw his lips were marked in a strange way. I learned later that in the agony of his dope hangovers he had chewed them, leaving scars. He turned out to be the delightful soft-spoken man we call Dr. Tom.

Well, we got in the car and drove from King’s Mountain over to Shelby. We were set down at the door of a beautiful, typically southern ancestral home. We went inside, and there I first met Tom’s mother, and then his young wife and their new baby. And I could feel the warmth and love and happiness through the atmosphere of that home.

The meal came and went — and from an AA point of view, it was a most unusual meal. I found that Tom was rather reluctant to talk about what he had done in Shelby, so there wasn’t much AA “shop talk” at the table ( practically unheard-of elsewhere), and I wondered myself if dope had a humbling effect — if so, I think that some of us alcoholics should have taken more of it.

At any rate, presently meeting time came, and we got down there, and the meeting place was right under the hotel — right next to the barber shop — very public. And I said to myself, “Well, now, for a small town that’s really going some!” And, yes, even over the door, here were two letters — “AA.” And I got in there and here was the usual jolly crowd, and then the meeting started.

Well now, up in New York — incidentally, I’m not from New York, so I can say what I am going to say with impunity; I’m a Vermonter and therefore one of the damndest of all Yankees — our group there is very cosmopolitan. We have vast numbers of what you might call “stumble-bums,” and we have a great many sophisticates and very wise people there, or at least we used to until AA tamed them down.

In those days we used to rather have to pussy-foot in New York on the subject of God, lest we scare away some of the intellectuals, so when I got to Shelby and there was a great, long invocation, and a choir girl got up and sang a hymn — well, it was reminiscent of my youth in Vermont, but I said to myself, “Well now, the New Yorkers wouldn’t call this AA.”

Well, then they called upon me to talk, and I talked (too long — by the way; shut me off any time you get tired tonight — I have that habit), and then I believe there was another long prayer and the meeting was over. And I began to notice with amazement that there were an awful lot of AAs there. I mean, twenty, thirty of them in this small place, and they told me there was an equal number out in the defense industry nearby.

I was wonderfully and favorably stirred by the whole thing, but the crux of my story turns around what happened the following morning.

I was to leave on an early train, and somebody called up from the lobby and said, “Do you mind, Bill — I’d like to drop up and tell you a few things about Dr. Tom.”

And a man came up, and after he re-introduced himself (I remembered him from the meeting the night before), he said, “I’ve got some things you should know. Speaking of myself, I used to be a banker. I once organized a whole string of banks in these southern states. I was on the high road to success. But I was cut down by alcohol, and then I was cut down by morphine. I was in the asylum in Lexington with Dr. Tom once. He knew my story and knew that I couldn’t stay clean. He asked me to come here for a visit, and I ended up staying here to work with him. I have been sober and clean now myself a year, and he about three.”

And he said, “You know, I’m very gladly working as a janitor at the Masonic Temple, just so I can have time to work with my friend Dr. Tom. But enough of me — let me tell you about Dr. Tom.

“Do you realize that when that man came back here to this little town — can you possibly comprehend what the stigma was upon him? The stigma of both alcohol and morphine was on him. He had dishonored his profession of medicine, and disgraced his highly placed family in this community. People were so scandalized that they hardly spoke to him on the street.” And he said, “I’m sorry to say that even the drunks of Shelby were snobbish, saying that they were going to be sobered up by no damned drug addict.

“Well, little by little he began to work, and little by little he began to succeed, and the group grew.

“Well, now,’ said this man, “you’ve been at Tom’s home — you have seen that happy mother of his, you’ve seen the new wife, and you’ve seen the new baby, but you still don’t know the whole story.

“Tom now has been made the head of our local hospital. He probably has the largest medical practice in this county today. All this was accomplished in just three years, from a start way behind the line. We have a yearly custom in this town in which all the citizens take a vote on which one of them has been the most useful individual to the community in the year past. Last spring Dr. Tom was unanimously nominated as the most useful citizen of the town of Shelby.”