The following article was published in the Reader's Digest, April 1986. UNFORGETTABLE BILL W. by Bob P. He has been called the greatest social architect of the 20th century. He called himself Bill W. As a securities analyst he made fortunes for himself and his clients. But he lost everything when he became a hopeless drunk.  Then, the gift of a higher power, he found a road to recovery and helped create a unique fellowship that has brought hope and new life to millions around the world. I am part of that fellowship, and I was given the amazing grace to know this extraordinary man. Twenty-five year ago, doctors told me I was going to die -- soon -- if I didn't stop drinking. But I couldn't face reality without copious quantities of vodka, followed by beer chasers. As a young man, I had come to New York City from Kansas, carved out a career in public relations, married, had three children, and established a home in a fashionable Connecticut suburb. On the outside, I looked prosperous, but inside I was tormented by feelings of inadequacy. When I was 40, an enormous swelling was diagnosed as advanced cirrhosis of the liver. I had been getting purplish bruises all over my body and suffered nosebleeds -- all typical of this kind of liver damage. Once, on a business trip, I couldn't stop vomiting blood and lost half of all I had. My life was saved with transfusions. But I couldn't stop drinking, even after I had another hemorrhage. Finally, my physician gave up on me and sent me to Dr. Harry M. Tiebout, one of the few psychiatrists then practicing who were sympathetic toward Alcoholics Anonymous and who recognized alcoholism as a disease, not a character flaw. Tiebout suggested I go to A.A., but I was too far gone to quit drinking at that point, and so was committed to High Watch Farm in Kent, Conn. There I took the first of AA*a 12 steps; I admitted I was powerless over alcohol, that my life had become unmanageable. On July 4, 1961, I joined the fellowship of A.A. and started a sober life. Three years later when I volunteered to help A.A. with public relations, I met Bill W. He was a legend, and I was nervous as I entered his Manhattan office. Bill was slouched in a chair, his feet up on a battered oak desk that was scarred with dozens of burn marks from cigarette stubs. When he stood he was about six feet, two inches -- slender and loose-limbed. He had a long face and sparkling blue eyes. He acted as if meeting me was the nicest thing that had happened to him in years. "I'm Bill," he said, stretching out his hand. "I'm a drunk." I started mumbling how I owed him my life, and Bill, embarrassed, looked at the floor and said, "Just pass it on." In time, I became a voluntary trustee of A.A. and came into regular contact with Bill W. At conferences and board meetings, I often watched him seek out newcomers off in a corner. He knew the loneliness, the shyness and the insecurity of the alcoholic. "I'm Bill," he'd greet them, just as he had me. "I'm a drunk" I never heard him use the word "alcoholic" when referring to himself. Bill acted and seemed like an ordinary man. But he was an extraordinary ordinary man. It didn't take me long to realize that everybody who knew him had wonderful stories to tell about Bill and his wife, Lois, who co-founded Al-Anon for the families of alcoholic. But nobody had a better story to tell than Bill himself. He called it the "bedtime story." I heard it first in 1966 at the office Christmas party, but he had been telling it for years. We had gathered for fruit punch, cookies and carol-singing. Then, as people sat on desks and chairs, there was an expectant silence. Bill had been standing by the punch bowl. Now, with a slithering, corkscrew motion, he settled on the floor and started to talk. East Dorset, Vt., boasted fewer than 500 inhabitants when Bill W. was born there on November 26, 1895. He grew up in a home torn by arguments, which often led to Papa's going away for a few days. Bill felt that sense of some disaster lurking around the corner which many children of broken homes experience. It tormented him as he got older. When he was ten, his parents divorced and went their separate ways -- something almost unheard of in 1906. Bill was left with his maternal grandparents. To make up for his loneliness and feelings of inadequacy, Bill became an over compensator. At age 12, he began to show drive, ambition, competitiveness. When his grandfather read a book about Australia and told  Bill that only a native of that country could make a boomerang, Bill spent six months whittling until he arrived one that worked. Later, he saw that boomerang as a curse -- because it proved to his ego that he had the tenacity and will to be "number one" at anything -- music, sports, science. For example, he fixed a broken fiddle and practiced until he played first violin in the school orchestra. He was not a jock by nature, but he drove himself and became captain of the baseball team. In nearby Manchester, a popular summer resort, Bill got to know Ebby Thatcher, from Albany. The two young men became lifelong friends. In 1913, two years after meeting Ebby, Bill met and fell in love with another summer visitor, a slim, dark-hared girl from a well-to-do Brooklyn, N.Y., family. Lois's love for Bill was as burning and constant as his for her, a love that was to survive the vicissitudes of all his years of alcoholism. But  alcoholism was still far down the road. Bill W. did not take a single drink of alcohol until he was a 22-year-old army officer stationed near New Bedford, Mass., during World War I. The shy young man from Vermont felt clumsy and out of place at social gatherings -- until someone gave him a Bronx cocktail, a mix of gin, sweet and dry vermouth, and orange juice. "The barrier," he said, sighing, "that had always stood between me and other people came down. I felt I belonged, that I was part of life. What magic there was in those drinks! I could talk and be clever." Unlike some alcoholics who go through a slow process of increasing dependency, Bill became a blackout drinker form the start. He was one of those persons in whom alcohol powerfully alters mind and emotion. The first drink sets up a craving for a second, and the drinker has absolutely no control if he takes the first. Bill was careful to restrain his drinking when he was with Lois and her family. He and Lois were married before he was shipped to France as a second lieutenant in the Coast Artillery. There, he discovered fine burgundy and  cognac. By the time the war was over in 1918 he had proved to himself again that he was a "number one" man, a leader of men, a hero. When Bill returned to the States, he and Lois lived with her parents. By day he worked as a fraud investigator for an insurance firm. At night he attended Brooklyn Law School. Soon he was fascinated by the stock market and became a successful analyst, speculator, and wheeler-dealer, with clients at several brokerage houses on Wall Street. But Bill's drinking was taking over. He was too drunk to pass his final exam at Brooklyn Law. Any disappointment -- or success -- now became an excuse for getting drunk. And when Bill drank, he often became abusive and violent. He got into fights with waiters, cabdrivers, bartenders, strangers. In the  morning after moods of guilt and remorse, he would swear to Lois that he would never drink again. By evening, he was drunk. For a long time, Bill and Lois were able to delude themselves. They lived in a luxurious apartment, joined country clubs. As late as 1928, Bill was making thousands of dollars and drinking much of it away. Some mornings Lois found him dead drunk, asleep, outside the apartment house. The stock-market crash in October 1929 wrecked whatever Bill's drinking had not. Deeply in debt, he and Lois again moved in with her parents. Lois got a job at Macy's. Bill now lived to drink, because he had to drink to live. "Like other alcoholics," told us, "I hid liquor like a squirrel underneath flooring, in the flush box of toilets. When Lois was out working, I'd replenish my secret supply. I was now drinking for oblivion -- two, even three bottles of gin a day."