The following article was published in the Reader's Digest, April 1986. UNFORGETTABLE BILL W. by Bob P. Page 2 By 1932, Bill had begun to fear for his sanity. "Once, in a drunken fit," he said, "I threw a sewing machine at Lois -- my dear Lois. Another time I got mad at her and stormed through the house kicking out door panels, smashing walls with my fists. I remember a night when I was in such hell that I was afraid the demons inside me would propel me through the window. I dragged my mattress downstairs so I couldn't suddenly leap out." By midsummer of 1934, Bill entered New York City's Charles B. Towns Hospital, which specialized in the treatment of alcoholism. Most people regarded alcoholics as persons who lacked willpower, character and oral discipline. But Bill's doctor at Towns, William Duncan Silkworth, was one of the few medical men to conclude that alcoholism is a sickness. He told Lois that not many alcoholics as far down the slops as Bill was ever recovered. He was already showing signs of brain damage. Bill would have to be confined for the rest of his life.  But Bill looked so robust after the treatment that he went home. This time he stayed sober for several months. However the morning following Armistice Day, Lois found him in a stupor, hanging on the fence outside the house. They looked at each other and Bill saw the last gleam of hope dying in her eyes. He knew he was doomed. Well, so be it, he though. He reigned himself. As long as I have my gin. Not long afterward, Ebby Thatcher, Bill's old friend and fellow drinker, phoned. What a strange coincidence: (We in A.A. say that a coincidence is a miracle in which God chooses to remain anonymous.) Bill invited him over. How good it would be to share a few with his former drinking buddy. Soon the doorbell rang. There stood Ebby -- clear of eye and clean of breath. "What's gotten into you, Ebby?" Bill asked. Ebby ginned and replied, "I've got religion." So Ebby had become a starry-eyed crackpot. "I figured he' start preaching at me," Bill recalled. "He didn't, He just told me how his drinking had gotten out of hand, how he'd been in trouble with the law, and how a couple  of friends had given him a place to live." One of them, Roland Hazard, a hopeless drunk, had been in and out of sanitariums for years. He finally went to Carl Jung, the Swiss Psychoanalyst. Was there no hope? Rowland asked. "Yes," Jung had said. In rare instances alcoholics had powerful spiritual experiences, "emotional displacements and rearrangements," which suddenly turned them around. Jung had tried for such a change in Rowland and failed. But one day Rowland attended a meeting of an organization called the Oxford Group -- where people gathered to talk about their shortcomings and to follow certain precepts. There Rowland experienced a profound change of emotions and found a direct contact with God. He stopped drinking. When Rowland told his story to Ebby in Vermont, the first link in the chair of what would become Alcoholics Anonymous was forged. And now Ebby was carrying the message to Bill. "Ebby told me he had to admit he was licked," Bill said. "He had to openly admit his since, make restitution to people he had harmed, and give love without a price tag. He had to pray to whatever God he believed in -- and if he didn't believe in a God, to act as if he did. Ebby told me he hadn't had a drink for six months. "A couple of weeks later, after another bender, I went back to Towns Hospital and checked myself in. Ebby came to see me. Get honest with yourself, he said. Talk it out with somebody else. But I didn't want any part of this God foolishness. Pray to whatever God you think is out there, Ebby said. That's all there was to it." During one more sleepless night, Bill fell to the "very bottom," and "my stubborn pride was wiped out" He called out, "If there is a God, let him show himself! I am ready to do anything!" Suddenly, the hospital room "Lit up with a great white light." A strange ecstasy flooded through him. "A wind not of air but of spirit was blowing," was how he described it. "I felt at peace ... and I thought, No matter how  wrong things seem to be things are all right with God and his world." Bill was discharged on December 18, 1934. He never took another drink of alcohol. But he was always at pains to reassure us that most alcoholics did not have sudden blinding experiences like his. Most of us found a God, a higher power of our own, very slowly. In the beginning months of his own sobriety, Bill pulled drunks out of bars and took them to Oxford Group meetings. He preached at them. Nobody stayed sober. He tried to talk WITH drunks, not AT them, and to stress the hopelessness of the disease. Bill was getting a foothold in Wall Street again, but on a business trip to Akron, Ohio, he felt a strong urge to drink. In his hotel lobby, eh looked at the directory of churches, selected one at random, and made a call. Was  there any hopeless drunk he could talk to, he asked the minister. That led to a surgeon, Dr. Robert Smith -- Dr. Bob, as he is known to us -- a desperate alcoholic who had tried to stop drinking and couldn't. The two men talked for hours. Bill didn't preach or exhort. He quietly told his story, and the urge to drink passed. And, after one final binge, something happened to Dr. Bob. On June 10, 1935, he took his last drink  Alcoholics Anonymous -- although it did not have a name -- began that day. Before long, Bill was holding meetings at his home and eventually at a place on West 23rd Street. In 1938 he wrote a 164-page manuscript entitled "Alcoholics Anonymous." And that's how our fellowship got it's name. That year the book sold few copies. But the fellowship now began to grow slowly. The first national publicity A.A. received came from an article in the magazine LIBERTY which brought 800 letters and several hundred orders for Bill W*s book. The article led to a piece in THE SATURDAY EVENING POST published in March 1941 and entitled "Alcoholics Anonymous." It created a sensation, and groups sprang up from Maine to California -- many just based on some desperate person*s reading the book and trying to put its principles into practice. Now translated into 13 languages, the book sold over 700,000 copies in 1985, more than five million in all. And that group Bill started in Brooklyn in 1935 has now grown to approximately 35,000 groups in the United States, and 70,000 worldwide. That was the story that Bill W. told to us each year at A.A. headquarters. On January 24, 1971, at the age of 75, Bill died of emphysema. Two days later, the New York Times published his obituary and put it on page one -- and the world learned his full name: William Griffith Wilson. Epilogue. Last July, I stood on a podium at Montreal's Olympic Stadium and looked out on about 50,000 faces from 54 of our 114 member countries, including four members from Poland, our first representatives from an Iron Curtain country. "My name is Bob P." I said. "I'm an alcoholic. Welcome to the Fiftieth anniversary of Alcoholics Anonymous." A roar came up from all sides, an exuberant cheering sound that went on and on. As I listened to that roar, and to the speakers that followed, I realized that each of us way paying tribute to the most unforgettable character in our changed lives: Bill W. Source: Reader's Digest, April 1986.