Making of the Big Book
Page 5
And Mr. Paine replies "Shoot what - Oh yes, I remember you two, Mr. Parkhurst and Mr. Wilson. You gentlemen were here last fall, I told you the Reader’s Digest would be interested in this new work and in your book. Well, right after you were here, I consulted our editorial board and to my great surprise they didn’t like the idea at all and I forgot to tell you!"
Oh boy, we had the drunks with $5,000 bucks in it, Charlie Towns hooked for $2,500 bucks and $2,500 on the cuff with the printer. There was $500 left in the bank...what in the duce would we do?
Morgan Ryan, the good-looking Irishman who had taken the book over to the Catholic Committee on Publication, had been in an earlier time a good ad man.
He said that he knew Gabriel Heatter. "Gabriel is putting on these 3 minute heart to heart programs on the radio. I’ll get an interview with him and maybe he’ll interview me on the radio about all this," said Ryan.
So, our spirits rose once again. Then all of a sudden we had a big chill, suppose this Irishman got drunk before Heatter interviewed him? So, we went to see Heatter and lo and behold, Heatter said he would interview him and then we got still more scared. So, we rented a room in the downtown Athletic Club and we put Ryan in there with a day and night guard for ten days.
Meanwhile, our spirits rose again. We could see those books just going out in carloads. Then my promoter friend said "Look, there should be a follow-up on a big thing like this here interview. It’ll be heard all over the country…national network. I think folks that are the market for this book are the doctors...the physicians. I suggest that we pitch the last $500 that we have in the treasury on a postal card shower, which will go to every physician east of the Rocky Mountains. On this postal card we’ll say "Hear all about Alcoholics Anonymous on Gabriel Heatter’s Program - spend $3.50 for the book Alcoholics Anonymous, sure-cure for alcoholism."
So, we spent the last $500 on the postal card shower and mailed them out.
They managed to keep Ryan sober although he since hasn’t made it. All the drunks had their ears glued to the radio. The group market in Alcoholics Anonymous was already saturated because you see, we had 49 stockholders and they’d all gotten a book free, then we had 28 guys with stories and they all got a free book. So we had run out of the A.A. books. But we could see the book moving out in carloads to these doctors and their patients.
Sure enough, Ryan is interviewed. Heatter pulled out the old tremolo stop and we could see the book orders coming back in carloads.
Well, we just couldn’t wait to go down to old Post Office Box 658, Church Street Annex, the address printed in the back of the old books. We hung at it for about three days and then my friends Hank and Ruthie Hock and I went over and we looked in Box 658. It wasn’t a locked box; you just looked through the glass. We could see that there were a few of these postal cards. I had a terrible sinking sensation. But my friend the promoter said "Bill, they can’t put all those cards in the box, they’ve got bags full of it out there."
We go to the clerk and he brings out 12 lousy postal cards, 10 of them were completely illegible, written by doctors, druggists, and monkeys? We had exactly two orders for the book Alcoholics Anonymous and we were absolutely and utterly stone-broke.
The Sheriff then moved in on the office, poor Mr. Blackwell wondered what to do for money and felt like taking the book over at that very opportune moment, the house which Lois and I lived in was foreclosed and we and our furniture were set out on the street. Such was the state of the book Alcoholics Anonymous and the state of grace the Wilson’s were in the summer of 1939.
Moreover, a great cry went up from the drunks, "What about our $4,500?" Even Charlie (Towns) who was pretty well off was a little uneasy about the note for $2,500. What would we do? What could we do? We put our goods in storage on the cuff; we couldn’t even pay the drayman. An A. A. lent us his summer camp, another A.A. lent us his car, the folks around New York began to pass the hat for groceries for the Wilson’s and supplied us with $50 per month. So, we had a lot of discontented stockholders, $50 bucks a month, a summer camp and an automobile with which to revive the failing fortunes of the book Alcoholics Anonymous.
We began to shop around from one magazine to another asking if they would give us some publicity, nobody bit and it looked like the whole dump was going to be foreclosed; book, office, Wilson’s, everything.
One of the boys in New York happened to be a little bit prosperous at the time and he had a fashionable clothing business on Fifth Avenue which we learned was mostly on mortgage, having drunk nearly all of it up. His name was Bert Taylor. I went up to Bert one day and I said "Bert, there is a promise of an article in Liberty Magazine, I just got it today but it won’t come out until next September. It’s going to be called ‘Alcoholics and God’ and will be printed by Fulton Oursler the editor of Liberty Magazine. Bert, when that piece is printed, these books will go out in carload lots. We need $1,000 bucks to get us through the summer."
Bert asked, "Well, are you sure that the article is going to be printed?"
"Oh yes," I said, "that’s final."
He said, "O.K., I haven’t got the dough but there’s this man down in Baltimore, Mr. Cochran, he’s a customer of mine...he buys his pants in here. Let me call him up."
Bert gets on long-distance with Mr. Cochran in Baltimore, a very wealthy man, and says to him "Mr. Cochran, from time to time I mentioned this alcoholic fellowship to which I belong. Our fellowship has just come out with a magnificent new textbook.. .a sure cure for alcoholism... .Mr. Cochran, this is something we think every public library in America should have, and Mr. Cochran, the retail price of the book is $2.50. Mr. Cochran, if you’ll just buy a couple of thousand of those books and put them in the large libraries, of course we would sell them for that purpose at a considerable discount."
Mr. Cochran, some publicity will come out next fall about this new book Alcoholics Anonymous, but in the meantime, these books are moving slowly and we need, say, $1,000 to tide us over. Would you loan the Works Publishing Company this?"
Mr. Cochran asked what the balance sheet of the Works Publishing Company looked like and after he learned what it looked like he said "no thanks."
So Bert then said, "Now Mr. Cochran, you know me. Would you loan the money to me on the credit of my business?"
"Why certainly," Mr. Cochran said, "send me down your note." So Bert hocked the business that a year or two later was to go broke anyway and saved the book Alcoholics Anonymous. The thousand dollars lasted until the Liberty article came out.
Eight hundred inquiries came in as a result of that, we moved a few books and we barely squeaked through the year 1939. In all this period we heard nothing from John D. Rockefeller when all of a sudden, in about February, 1940, Mr. Richardson came to a trustees meeting of the Foundation and announced that he had great news.
We were told that Mr. Rockefeller, whom we had not heard from since 1937, had been watching us all this time with immense interest. Moreover, Mr. Rockefeller wanted to give this fellowship a dinner to which he would invite his friends to see the beginnings of this new and promising start.
Mr. Richardson produced the invitation list. Listed were the President of Chase Bank, Wendell Wilkie, and all kinds of very prominent people, many of them extremely rich. I mean, after a quick look at the list I figured it would add up to a couple of billion dollars. So, we felt maybe at least, you know, there would be some money in sight. So, the dinner came, and we got Harry Emerson Fosdick who had reviewed the A.A. book and he gave us a wonderful plug. Dr. Kennedy came and spoke on the medical attitudes. He’d seen a patient of his, a very hopeless gal, Marty Mann, recover. I got up, talked about life among the "anonymie," and the bankers assembled 75 strong and in great wealth, sat at the tables with the alcoholics.
The bankers had come probably for some sort of command performance and they were a little suspicious that perhaps this was another prohibition deal, but they warmed up under the influence of the alcoholics.
Mr. Ryan, the hero of the Heatter episode and still sober, was asked at his table by a distinguished banker, "Why, Mr. Ryan, we presumed you were in the banking business."
