Father Ed Dowling

Father Ed meets Bill W. for the first time—early December 1940—at the A.A. clubhouse on West 24th Street. In September 1936, when Lois’ father died, the bank foreclosed on the mortgage on the house he owned at 182 Clinton St. in Brooklyn. But the bank told Lois and Bill Wilson that they could continue living there for twenty dollars a month until the house was sold. In April 1939, that day finally came. The very week the Big Book was published, the bank told Bill and Lois that they had found a buyer for the house, and that they had to leave now. They moved all their belongings out of 182 Clinton St. on April 26, 1939, and for almost two years, they had to move continually from place to place (54 different places according to Lois).

In February 1940, the first ever A.A. clubhouse was set up at 334½ West 24th St. in New York City, and Bill and Lois finally decided to take advantage of that, and on November 4, 1940, moved into one of the two small upstairs bedrooms where they stayed for about a year. Lois’ diary entry for June 11, 1940, described the clubhouse building: “One large room, with fireplace and paneled in knotty pine, and kitchen are downstairs. Upstairs there is a large room with skylights and two small bedrooms and two toilets.” The bedroom was barely big enough for a double bed, but she tore out some of the shelving to give a bit more room. Then she painted the walls white and the trim red, and sewed curtains to put over the window and to cover the fronts of the orange crates which she had converted into dressers.

There was almost no real privacy. The other upstairs bedroom was used by old Tom Mulhall, a former New York fireman living on his fireman’s pension, who had been rescued from the Rockland Asylum to make coffee for the A.A.’s, work in the kitchen, put coal in the furnace, and help lead drunks outside if they got too unruly.

This was where Father Dowling met Bill Wilson for the first time. It is important to note that Dowling had not only read the Big Book before he traveled to New York, but had also visited the highly successful Chicago A.A. group, and begun working with alcoholics himself in St. Louis (where his little A.A. group had already held its first meeting on October 30, 1940).

The date was sometime at the end of 1940. Bill and Lois did not actually move into the A.A. clubhouse until November 4, so the visit had to have taken place after that point. In the earliest account of Dowling’s visit, it was described as a “wild” and “wintry” night where “hail and sleet beat on the tin roof,” and Father Ed’s black hat was described as “plastered with sleet.” It could have been the end of November, but was more likely early December. Father Ed’s visit had to have taken place before December 15, because that was when Bill Wilson went out of town with Jack Alexander to visit the A.A. group in Philadelphia.

Bill W. had been walking the path of disappointment and suffering: It is necessary to remember how rough the preceding year and a half had been for Bill Wilson. When they finally got the Big Book published in April 1939, they had started to settle back into warm fantasies about being able to take it easy now. The book would instantly be a huge publishing success, and they would start raking in unbelievably large sums of money. Everyone knew—or thought they knew—how much money successful popular authors made! Alcoholics Anonymous would rapidly gain tens of thousands of members, they fantasized, and would set up alcoholism treatment centers and clubhouses all over the country. But the reality, sadly, was one disappointment after another.

April 1939 — 4,730 copies of the Big Book were printed—many in early Alcoholics Anonymous thought the book would be an instant success and Bill Wilson and Hank Parkhurst thought it was going to earn them a million dollars. But hardly any copies sold. An editor at the Reader’s Digest had promised them a story about A.A. as soon as the book was published, but he now denied any such agreement. April 26, 1939 — Bill and Lois had to move out of their home at 182 Clinton Street in Brooklyn and were homeless for the next two years. April 29, 1939 — Morgan Ryan (one of the first two Roman Catholics in A.A.) appeared on Gabriel Heatter's radio program. The A.A. group mailed out 20,000 post cards, addressed to all of the physicians in the U.S. east of the Mississippi, expecting thousands of orders for the book. But they only got twelve replies, only two of which were serious orders for the new book .... October 14, 1939 — the review of the Big Book in the Journal of the American Medical Association was very unfavorable—the medical profession looked like it was going to be almost totally against them ....

April, 1940 — Hank Parkhurst, who had been sober for four years, had been Bill Wilson’s closest A.A. associate on the East Coast, in some ways closer than Dr. Bob—but now Hank started drinking again. He wanted to divorce his wife and marry Ruth Hock (Hank and Bill’s secretary). She turned him down, but this made Hank’s drunken rages (and dangerously violent temper) even worse. Hank also never forgave Bill W. for moving the Alcoholic Foundation’s central office from New Jersey to New York City (which Bill had done in March). May/June, 1940 — Hank Parkhurst went to Cleveland and made the totally and ludicrously false claim that Bill W. was getting rich by taking huge sums of money from Rockefeller, from Big Book sales, and from other A.A.-related sources, and was putting the money in his own pocket. Hank teamed up with Henrietta Seiberling in Akron and Clarence Snyder in Cleveland to start an anti-Bill Wilson movement. Clarence kept on attacking Bill for a long time afterward, and claiming that he (not Bill) was the real founder of A.A.

In fact, events were getting ready to change in a much more positive direction .... A.A. was just getting ready to burst forth as a rapidly growing national (and then international) movement, but Bill Wilson did not know any of that on this freezing winter evening in December 1940 when Father Dowling came to visit him.

Bill Wilson had been trying to fight his disappointments by working even harder at spreading the A.A. message. But as Robert Thomsen described the A.A. leader’s private feelings (relying on Bill Wilson’s autobiographical tape recordings): “His depression, his deep dissatisfaction, was beginning to color everything; even his A.A. talks were beginning to take on a flavor of self-pity and self-dramatization .... As he battled these questions … on many nights …. this stock-taking led to a depression which, in its prolonged intensity, was worse than any he had experienced since Towns Hospital. And with the depression there was a sense of guilt because he could feel this way, he who had been given so much, whom others looked up to. This, in time, led to a new and hideous fear. What if he should break, if he, Bill W., should crack up as he had seen other men crack …?”

Hank Parkhurst, who had been one of the key leaders of the new A.A. movement, had gone back to drinking in April, 1940. That meant that it was possible that Bill Wilson could too. How was he going to deal with all the pain and suffering he was sinking into without eventually suffering the same fate as Hank?