Where Bill W. Came From
Born behind the bar in his family's
big red inn—117 years ago this week—Wilson's Vermont youth wasn't
exactly bucolic. His encounters with early adversity show how the child
was father to the man.
The Vermont inn where Bill W. was born
photo via
Alcoholics Anonymous cofounder Bill Wilson was born on
Thanksgiving behind a bar. His father’s family owned an inn, the
sprawling red-gabled Wilson House on the south side of the village green
in East Dorset, Vermont, a small town where quarrying and polishing
local marble was the only industry. (His father, Gilly Wilson, was a
quarryman.) Raised in these humble circumstances, Bill Wilson grew up to
pioneer a movement that has forever enriched our view of addiction.
It’s instructive to study Bill Wilson’s early years, because in ways
that seem more than coincidental they prepared him for the role he would
play in history.
Born in 1895, William Griffith Wilson was a
dyed-in-the-wool Vermont boy. AA is deeply rooted in the rocky soil and
granite traditions of New England, from its grass-roots, town-meeting
democracy as Bill expressed it in the twelve traditions to its farm-boy
practicality to its understanding of the limits of temperance. When Bill
Wilson finally met Dr. Bob Smith, AA’s other cofounder, in a gatehouse
in Akron, Ohio, when Bill was almost 40, one of their bonds was that
they were both Vermont boys—Smith was from St. Johnsbury—and their broad
vowels and dropped consonants sounded like home to each other.
Bill
Wilson’s start in life was not promising. His mother, 25-year-old Emily
Griffith, had a difficult labor, and the baby was finally delivered by
primitive forceps, half-asphyxiated, “cold and discolored and nearly
dead,” his mother later wrote in a letter to her son. “There is evidence
of alcoholism” in the Wilson family, the authors of AA’s official
history,
Pass It On. Even now the
Wilson House,
still run as a hotel, has the extravagant architecture and colors that
somehow reflect the generous, experimental attitude of a drinker on a
good day.
Bill Wilson’s parents abandoned him and his sister, Dorothy, to the care of their stern Griffith grandparents.
By
contrast, the Griffith House across the village green is trim and gray,
and his mother’s family was all hard-driving teachers, lawyers and
judges. “The first indication that the marriage was in some trouble may
have appeared during Emily’s pregnancy,” wrote Robert Thomsen in his
biography of Bill Wilson,
Bill W. Emily
suggested that her husband go out alone, and he began to do that more
and more. By the time Bill was 10, his parents’ marriage had come apart.
They both had other plans—Gilly got a quarryman’s job in the West, and
Emily went to Boston to become an osteopathic physician. Bill Wilson’s
parents abandoned him and his sister, Dorothy, to the care of their
stern Griffith grandparents. Bill moved into the narrow Griffith House, a
house so small that going downstairs, the awkward, lanky boy had to
stoop to keep from bumping his head. At night if he wanted to stretch
out in bed to read, he had to put his feet out the window to accommodate
his height.
Bill W. grew up at a time when the temperance
movement was sweeping New England. Groups like the Washingtonians and
the Women’s Christian Temperance Union were advocating an end to
drinking—a reaction to the previous century, when America had been the
drunkest country in the world. As a boy, Wilson learned, in school and
through observation, that drinkers cannot be legislated into people who
do not drink. Vermont was a dry state, but “going to Cambridge” was the
euphemism for crossing the border into New York on a liquor run. In
temperance clubs, people who had taken the pledge held meetings to help
each other stay away from a drink.
Arriving in adulthood, Bill Wilson was already a complicated, educated man.
Bill’s
gruff, prosperous grandfather tuned out to be an ideal father-surrogate
for the abandoned boy. In mourning for his own son when his grandson
moved in, he was won over by Bill’s determination and charm. He gave the
boy books, and encouraged his musical talent—Bill was an accomplished
fiddler and violinist—and mechanical experiments. He enrolled the boy in
a private school, Burr and Burton, in nearby Manchester, where Bill
became a big man on campus, a promising student, the captain of the
football team and the boyfriend of the local minister’s pretty daughter,
Bertha Bamford. Arriving in adulthood, Bill Wilson was already a
complicated, educated man who knew the forks and was also at home in the
marble quarries of East Dorset.
What happened over the next two
decades—Bertha’s death and Bill Wilson’s first serious depression; his
engagement to Lois Rogers, an older girl who summered in Manchester; his
Wall Street success and severe alcoholism—was certainly not what he
would have wished for. Yet his Vermont roots and education, the
resilience developed in the wake of his parents’ abandonment, his
exposure to both the hardscrabble quarry families and the wealthy summer
people of Manchester, all seem necessary stones in the foundation that
helped him find a way to stop drinking, a way that has become a
worldwide movement with millions of members.
East Dorset hasn’t
changed much since 1895. Winter is coming on, the woodpiles are high,
and fires are lit in the Wilson House. Nights are freezing, and there
will soon be snow on the hillsides of Mount Aeolus above town. Christmas
decorations are going up in front of the Town Office on Mad Tom Road.
The sprawling, red-clapboard Wilson House and the trim, gray Griffith
House still face each other across the green.
Susan Cheever, a regular columnist for The Fix, is the author of many books, including the memoirs Home Before Dark and Note Found in a Bottle, and the biography My Name Is Bill: Bill Wilson—His Life and the Creation of Alcoholics Anonymous. She is a frequent visitor to the Wilson House and East Dorset.
