Making of the Big Book

Page 3

He recommended to these friends of ours that we should have at least a token amount of money at first, say $50,000, something like that. That would clear up the mortgage on Smith’s place. It would get us a little rehabilitation place. We could put Dr. Smith in charge. We could subsidize a few of these people briefly, until we got some more money. We could start the chain of hospitals. We’d have a few missionaries. We could get busy on the book, all for a mere $50,000 bucks.

    Well, considering the kind of money we were backed up against, that did sound a little small, but, you know, one thing leads to another and it sounded real good.

    We were real glad. Mr. Willard Richardson, our original contact, then took that report into John D. Jr. as everybody recalls. And I’ve since heard what went on in there. Mr. Rockefeller read the report, called Willard Richardson and thanked him and said: "Somehow I am strangely stirred by all this. This interests me immensely." And then looking at his friend Willard, he said, "But isn’t money going to spoil this thing? I’m terribly afraid that it would. And yet I am so strangely stirred by it."

    Then came another turning point in our destiny. When that man whose business is giving away money said to Willard Richardson, "No," he said, I won’t be the one to spoil this thing with money. You say these two men who are heading it are a little ‘stressed’, I’ll put $5,000 dollars in the Riverside Church treasury. Those folks can form themselves into a committee and draw on it as they like. I want to hear what goes on. But, please don’t ask me for any more money."

    Well, with 50 thousand that then was shrunk to five, we paid the mortgage on Smithy’s house for about three grand. That left two and Smith and I commenced chewing on that too. Well, that was a long way from a string of drunk tanks and books. What in thunder would we do? Well, we had more meetings with our newfound friends, Amos, Richardson, Scott, Chipman and those fellows who stuck with us to this day, some of them now gone.

    And, in spite of Mr. Rockefeller’s advice, we again convinced these folks that this thing needed a lot of money. What could we do without it? So, one of them proposed, "Well, why don’t we form a foundation, something like the Rockefeller Foundation?"

    I said, "I hope it will be like that with respect to money."

    And then one of them got a free lawyer from a firm who was interested in the thing. And we all asked him to draw up an agreement of trust, a charter for something to be called the Alcoholic Foundation. Why we picked that one, I don’t know. I don’t know whether the Foundation was alcoholic, it was the Alcoholic Foundation, not the Alcoholics Foundation.

    And the lawyer was very much confused because in the meeting which formed the Foundation, we made it very plain that we did not wish to be in the majority. We felt that there should be non-alcoholics on the board and they ought to be in a majority of one.

    "Well, indeed," said the lawyer, "What is the difference between an alcoholic and a non-alcoholic?"

    And one of our smart drunks said, "That’s a cinch, a non-alcoholic is a guy who can drink and an alcoholic is a guy who can’t drink."

    "Well," said the lawyer, "how do we state that legally?" We didn’t know. So at length, we have a foundation and a board which I think then was about seven, consisting of four of these new friends, including my brother-in-law, Mr. Richardson, Chipman, Amos and some of us drunks. I think Smithy went on the board but I kind of coyly stayed off it thinking it would be more convenient later on.

    So we had this wonderful new foundation. These friends, unlike Mr. Rockefeller, were sold on the idea that we needed a lot of dough, and so our salesmen around New York started to solicit some money, again, from the very rich. We had a list of them and we had credentials from friends of Mr. John D. Rockefeller. "How could you miss, I ask you, salesmen?" The Foundation had been formed in the spring of 1938 and all summer we solicited the rich.

    Well, they were either in Florida or they preferred the Red Cross, or some of them thought that drunks were disgusting and we didn’t get one damm cent in the whole summer of 1938, praise God!

    Well, meantime, we began to hold trustee meetings and they were commiseration sessions on getting no dough. What with the mortgage and with me and Smithy eating away at it, the five grand had gone up the flu, and we were all stone broke again.

    Smithy couldn’t get his practice back either because he was a surgeon and nobody likes to be carved up by an alcoholic surgeon - even if he was three years sober.

    So things were tough all around, no fooling.

    Well, what would we do?

    One day, probably in August 1938, I produced at a Foundation meeting, a couple of chapters of a proposed book along with some recommendations of a couple of doctors down at John Hopkins to try to put the bite on the rich. And we still had these two book chapters kicking around. Frank Amos said, "Well now, I know the religious editor down there at Harpers, an old friend of mine, Gene Exman." He said, "Why don’t you take these two book chapters, your story and the introduction to the book, down there and show them to Gene and see what he thinks about them."

    So I took the chapters down. To my great surprise, Gene who was to become a great friend of ours, looked at the chapters and said, "Why Mr. Wilson, could you write a whole book like this?"

    "Well, I said, "Sure, sure." There was more talk about it. I guess he went in and showed it to Mr. Canfield, the big boss, and another meeting was had. The upshot was that Harpers intimated that they would pay me as the budding author, 15 hundred in advance royalties, bringing enough money in to enable me to finish the book. I felt awful good about that. It made me feel like I was an author or something. I felt real good about it but after awhile, not so good.

    Because I began to reason, and so did the other boys, if this guy Wilson eats up the 15 hundred bucks while he’s doing this book, after the book gets out, it will take a long time to catch up. And if this thing gets him publicity, what are we going to do with the inquiries? And, after all, what’s a lousy 10% royalty anyway?

    The $15 hundred still looked pretty big to me. Then we thought too, now here’s a fine publisher like Harpers, but if this book when done, should prove to be the main textbook for A.A., why would we want our main means of propagation in the hands of somebody else? Shouldn’t we control this thing?

    At this point, the book project really began. I had a guy helping me on this thing who had red hair and ten times my energy and he was some promoter [Hank Parkhurst].

    He said, "Bill, this is something, come on with me."

    We walk into a stationary store, we buy a pad of blank stock certificates and we write across the top of them ‘Works Publishing Company’- Par Value 25 Dollars.

    So we take the pad of these stock certificates, (of course we didn’t bother to incorporate it, that didn’t happen for several more years) we took this pad of stock certificates to the first A.A. meeting where you shouldn’t mix money with spirituality.

    We said to the drunks "look, this thing is gonna be a cinch. Parkhurst will take a third of this thing for services rendered. I, the author will take a third for services rendered, and you can have a third of these stock certificates par 25 if you’ll just start paying up on your stock. If you only want one share, it’s only five dollars a month, 5 months, see?"

    And the drunks all gave us this stony look that said, "What the hell, you mean to say you’re only asking us to buy stock in a book that you ain’t written yet?"

    "Why sure," we said "If Harpers will put money in this thing why shouldn’t you? Harpers said it’s gonna be a good book."

    But the drunks still gave us this stony stare. We had to think up some more arguments. "We’ve been looking at pricing costs of the books, boys. We get a book here, ya know, 400 or 450 pages, it ought to sell for about $3.50."

    Now back in those days we found on inquiry from the printers that that $3.50 book could be printed for 35 cents making a 1,000% profit. Of course, we didn’t mention the other expenses, just the printing costs. "So boys, just think on it, when these books move out by the carload we will be printing them for 35 cents and we’ll be selling them direct mail for $3.50. How can you lose?"

    The drunks still gave us this stony stare. No salt. Well, we figured we had to have a better argument than that. Harpers said it was a good book, you can print them for 35 cents and sell them for $3.50, but how are we going to convince the drunks that we could move carload lots of them? Millions of dollars.

    So we get the idea we’ll go up to the Readers Digest, and we got an appointment with Mr. Kenneth Paine, the managing editor there. Gee, I'll never forget the day we got off the train up at Pleasantville and were ushered into his office. We excitedly told him the story of this wonderful budding society. We dwelled upon the friendship of Mr. Rockefeller and Harry Emerson Fosdick. You know we were traveling in good company with Pain. The society, by the way, was about to publish a textbook, then in the process of being written and we were wondering, Mr. Paine, if this wouldn’t be a matter of tremendous interest to the Reader’s Digest? Having in mind of course that the Reader’s Digest has a circulation of 12 million readers and if we could only get a free ad of this coming book in the Digest we really would move something, ya see?

    "Well," Mr. Paine said, "this sounds extremely interesting, I like this idea, why I think it’ll be an absolutely ideal piece for the Digest. How soon do you think this new book will be out Mr. Wilson?" I said, "We’ve got a couple of chapters written, ahem, if we can get right at it, Mr. Paine, uh, you know, uh, probably uh, this being October, we ought to get this thing out by April or next May.

    "Why," Mr. Paine said, "I’m sure the Digest would like a thing like this. Mr. Wilson, I’ll take it up with the editorial board, and when the time is right and you get already to shoot, come up and we’ll put a special feature writer on this thing and we’ll tell all about your society."