www.WrensJournal.blogspot.com

Leaders & Success
He Took It One Day At A Time
BY KEN SPENCER BROWN

INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY

Posted 8/24/2006

William Griffith Wilson spent his first 39 years squandering everything he had.

He spent the next 36 proving that it's never too late for redemption.

Wilson, better known as "Bill W." to the countless number of people he inspired, gave up the drinking that had plastered his life, and vowed to help others do the same.

He fulfilled that vow in a big way. He created Alcoholics Anonymous, which has grown into one of the biggest and most successful addiction-recovery programs in the world.

Today, the group claims more than 2 million members in over 150 countries. It has changed the way people think about alcoholism — not as a moral failing, but rather an ailment.

Wilson (1895-1971) grew up in a troubled home in Vermont, to a family of granite quarry workers and mine bosses. Though financially secure, the family was unstable. Wilson's alcoholic father left the family in 1905. His mother remarried and moved to Boston, leaving the children in the care of her parents.

This scarred young Wilson deeply. As Ernest Kurtz recounts in "Not God: A History of Alcoholics Anonymous," the 10-year-old blamed himself for the breakup.

"Deep within young Bill Wilson ached a feeling of rejection," Kurtz wrote. "The more painful because, in his mind, it was deserved."

He took his first drink at 22, during a dinner party held for soldiers about to be shipped out to Europe to fight in World War II. Soon, he found drinking an easy comfort for the loneliness of his overseas assignment, an Army desk job.

For years, Wilson's sharp mind and natural talent masked his growing dependence on alcohol — and the havoc it wreaked.

At the end of the war, Wilson entered law school. Showing up drunk at one of his finals, he nearly flunked out. His wife, Lois, grew alarmed at the frequency of his drinking binges.

Wilson lost interest in law school and grew fascinated with Wall Street.

So he honed his stock-picking skills. He became one of the first to sense the value of corporate research. He believed that many people lost money playing the stock market because they didn't have enough good data about the companies they invested in.

Unable to persuade his broker friends to finance a fact-finding mission, Wilson quit his job, packed a motorcycle and took Lois for a yearlong trek along the East Coast.

With little more than a tent, blankets, a change of clothes and three thick financial reference books, the pair visited companies and took meticulous notes to send to investors.

His efforts landed him a top job as a stockbroker on Wall Street and a generous expense account. He made a very good living.

Drinking And Sinking

But his public success belied a crumbling soul. Caught up in the excesses of the jazz age, Wilson drank day and night.

The party ended Oct. 24, 1929. Black Thursday's stock market crash wiped out Wilson's paper wealth as well as that of many others. Soon he was out of a job.

Wilson and his wife moved in with her parents. By this time, he was almost constantly drunk.

"The market would recover," he wrote in his autobiography, "Bill's Story." "But I wouldn't."

Any money he made went to pay off bar tabs. Soon he needed "a tumbler full of gin followed by half a dozen bottles of beer" just to make it to breakfast.

Things got worse. His mother-in-law died, and his father-in-law grew ill. They lost their house. Wilson resorted to sneaking money from his wife's purse.

After blowing yet another chance at a job in 1932, Wilson finally realized he had a problem. Yet he was powerless to stop. Even when family members paid for his stay at a treatment center, he began drinking again after his release. Doctors told his wife that Wilson would die in a year if he kept drinking. Everyone, it seemed, had given up on him.

"No words can tell of the loneliness and despair I found in that bitter morass of self-pity," he wrote. "Quicksand stretched around me in all directions. I had met my match. I had been overwhelmed. Alcohol was my master."

Salvation came in the form of a phone call from an old friend, a renowned drinker who sounded uncharacteristically sober.

Wilson assumed his old pal was looking for their usual drunken revelry. Instead, the friend announced that he'd given up drinking in a religious conversion.

Inspired, Wilson conceded that he couldn't defeat alcohol on his own. He checked into a hospital for his withdrawal symptoms and, in what he called a supernatural experience, gave up drinking.

He became deeply religious, an experience he relied on to help him resist the temptation to drink.

But he soon determined that eschewing alcohol wasn't enough. Certain that the support of someone who understood his problem would help, he called friends in search of another alcoholic.

He finally reached a doctor, Bob Smith, by phone in what's now widely referred to as the first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.

It worked, and Wilson got past his hurdle. He and Smith decided their method might benefit others as well, and within a few years the group formally came into being. The pair set up open meetings at which participants could talk about their struggles and offer encouragement to others. (Smith died in 1950 of cancer, just after AA's first international conference.)

Wilson, originally part of a religious fellowship called the Oxford Group, decided that faith or lack of it shouldn't preclude someone from seeking help. He eventually split the effort off as a separate entity focused on alcoholism.

Reassurance And Support

He called the group Alcoholics Anonymous. The name aimed to reassure those seeking help that they wouldn't be judged or humiliated. The chapters didn't require membership dues, and no one was expected to give a last name.

To lay out the plan in an easily understandable format, Wilson wrote a book about his experience. For his message to reach a wide audience, he described it in simple terms.

He summarized his knowledge in a 12-step program, writing the book "Alcoholics Anonymous" under the name "Bill W." That quest for anonymity would become a powerful way to keep the group from getting too closely tied to individual personalities — even his own. To keep it beholden to no one, he declared that the group wouldn't take outside contributions. Even today, no member can contribute more than $2,000.

Wilson maintained a humble lifestyle. To keep the focus on his cause and not himself, Wilson refused to be photographed for news stories. He eventually ceded control of the group to an advisory board.

Yet he understood the power of good publicity. A Saturday Evening Post article in 1941 propelled the group to the national stage.

So the group wouldn't lose focus, Wilson adopted 12 "traditions," which included not letting the group involve itself in current events or controversies, including those involving alcohol. And while the group supports other sobriety efforts, it doesn't align itself with any.

By the time he died, Wilson had turned down numerous honors. Still, Time magazine recently named him one of the most important people of the 20th century.

http://www.investors.com/editorial/IBDArticles.asp?artsec=21&issue=20060824&view=1