I WAS THE OLDEST of three children, and my father was an alcoholic. One of the earliest memories that I have is of a bottle sitting on his desk with a skull and crossbones and marked "Poison." At that time, as I remember, he had promised never to take another drink. Of course he did. I can also remember that he was a salesman and a very good one. When he was uptown—we were living in the little town of Moscow—I went up to try to get some money from him to buy groceries. He wouldn't give me any money for the groceries, but he did take me across the street and buy me a bag of candy, which I later took back and traded for a loaf of bread. I was not more than six at that time.
My father died in 1901 when I was eight years old and I was in the second or third grade at school. I immediately quit school and went to work, and from that time until I was high school age there was never a return to school. I always built up in my own mind the great things that I was going to do, and in fact I accomplished about fifty per cent of them and then lost interest. That continued through my entire life. When I was sixteen years old, my mother remarried and I was given the opportunity of going back to school. I

went into the high school grades, but having missed all the intermediate grades, I didn't get along too well, so I developed the habit of going back to school just long enough for the football season and then quitting.
There was always a tremendous drive and ambition to become a great guy, because I think I recognized inwardly that I didn't have any special talents. At a comparatively early age, I can remember being jealous of my brother. He did things much better than I did because he applied himself and learned how to do them, and I never applied myself. Whether I could have done as well as he, I don't know.
I was married at the age of nineteen to a grand girl and had good business prospects. I had bought a piece of ground in Cuyahoga Falls and cut it into lots and had a profit of approximately $40,000 and that was a lot of money in those days. With that profit, I built a number of houses, but then I neglected them. I wouldn't put sufficient time on them. Consequently, my labor bills ran up. I lost money, and then just fooled away a large part of the profit.
When I was eighteen, at the end of high school, the high school team had a banquet at a well-known roadhouse outside of Akron. We boys drove out in somebody's car and went to the bar on the way to the dining room and I, in an effort to impress the other boys that I was city-bred, having lived in Scranton and Cleveland, asked them if they didn't want to drink. They looked at one another queerly and, finally, one of them allowed he'd have a beer and they all followed him, each of them saying he'd have a beer too. I ordered a martini, extra dry. I didn't even know what a martini looked like, but I had heard a man down the

bar order one. That was my first drink. I kept watching the man down the bar to see what he did with a contraption like that, and he just smelled of his drink and set it down again, so I did the same. He took a couple of puffs of a cigarette and I took a couple of puffs of my cigarette. He tossed off half of his martini; I tossed off half of mine and it nearly blew the top of my head off. It irritated my nostrils; I choked, I didn't like it. There was nothing about that drink that I liked. But I watched him, and he tossed off the rest of his, so I tossed off the rest of mine. He ate his olive and I ate mine. I didn't even like the olive. It was repulsive to me from every standpoint. I drank nine martinis in less than an hour.
Twenty-two years later, Doctor Bob told me that what I had done was like turning a switch and setting up a demand for more alcohol in my system. I didn't know that then. I had no more reason to drink those martinis than a jackrabbit. At that particular time, the boys put me on a shutter and took me out to the shed, and I lay in the car while they enjoyed their banquet. That was the first time I ever drank hard liquor. Blackout drinking at once. I had no pleasure out of the drinking at all. All of a sudden I found myself guzzling. Right then I determined that never so long as I lived would I have anything more to do with martinis. They acted on me like the beating of a club.
I think it was probably more than a year before I had anything more to do with liquor. I was opening up these lots that I spoke of. I had a crew of men working there and I wanted them to work Sunday afternoons so that I could sell lots on Sunday. I went over and bought a jug of hard cider and a gallon of

wine that I gave these fellows to drink. When they got through the day's work, part was left which I proceeded to drink. During the day, looking over the contracts and money in my pocket, I found that I had sold six lots that I couldn't even remember, and didn't even know the people I had sold them to. I had to look in the telephone book later to find out who these people were. Another blackout. Wine and hard cider. 
I early discovered that if I drank anything, I was not accountable for what happened. I decided that I couldn't drink. Anyhow, I recognized the fact that I couldn't drink like normal people, but I tried hard and kept on trying for twenty-two years.
I sold three lots to an elderly lady in Cleveland. I came to Cleveland with the deeds to these lots and to pick up my money. She paid me in cash. The next morning I woke up in jail in Cleveland and the jailor had $1,175 of my money in an envelope. I didn't remember anything that had happened. This was six or eight months after the last drinking episode.
Then I got married. (As I've said, I was nineteen). I felt having gotten married, I was an adult and one of the first things I did was to buy two cases of whiskey with no idea of drinking it. (I might say right here that never in my life did I ever intend to get drunk. I never had any desire to get drunk. So I consciously thought). I was a very young married man, having his whiskey in the cupboard over the sink, and when I helped my wife with the dishes at night I would take a cup of tea and spike it with whiskey. I could get through an evening with just a couple of snorts.
This was a regular occurrence for a little while. Eventually, there would be a ball game, or a show, or

some sort of special occasion to celebrate and I would turn up drunk. About that period, too, came increasing procrastination and the avoidance of responsibilities. I would put off doing anything that I could until the next day and, consequently, everything would pile up and then there would be the blackout.
At the end of this selling of lots, just prior to to World War I, I got into the crude rubber business, and six months later there was only one broker and myself left in Akron. So in spite of anything that I might do, I prospered, being one of only two brokers in the rubber center of the world.
I found, however, that when I would leave Akron to go to Chicago, I would get drunk. As long as there was everyday business, I could drink occasionally and didn't always get drunk. I was a periodic. A big event of any kind precipitated heavy drinking. It had long since become a serious problem. I was prone to do everything on a big scale. I can well remember sitting with seven dollors in my pocket, planning on giving my family a hundred or two hundred dollors, when I made it next year. But I didn't do a thing about giving them any part of the seven bucks I had in my pocket.
The rubber prosperity went on for about six years—1916 to 1922. It fell apart in the twenties. Every company in the country, except Firestone, was reorganized at that time. I was always able to skate along the fringe of big money. I made a point of knowing important people. I could work a deal up to where all I had to do was to go ahead with it; all the planning had been done, all the financing had been done, but then I'd say, "Nuts to it!" and walk away. Near success, only near. I figured the only difference

between me and a millionaire was that I hadn't the strength, or that he got the breaks and I didn't.
Akron was really on the boom in those days, 1919-1920; expansion was terrific. I optioned a piece of land just off East Market Street to put up a three-hundred suite apartment. One hundred for unmarried women at one end, one hundred for men at the other, and one hundred for married couples in the middle. In the basement were to be dry-cleaning facilities, a barbershop, a pool room, a grocery shop and everything. I had contracted for half of it, at least verbally, and the contractors were taking half of the second mortgage bond. At that particular stage, I lost interest in it, sold the option for $5,000 and forgot the whole deal. Another time, I had a rubber pool project. My idea was to have all the companies pool their funds and buy rubber when rubber was cheap and then put it in a pool. When rubber reached a certain low point, they would draw on the rubber out of the pool and buy. With the big companies, and with the amount of money we could have gotten and the promises I had, it could have been done. I worked along until I had really big names in rubber on a tentative contract, and then I neglected to go through with it.
To my mind, drinking didn't have anything to do with not going through with things. I don't know whether I drank to cover up being a failure, or whether I drank and then missed the deals. I was able to rationalize it anyway. I can well remember over a long period of years when I thought I was the only person in the world who knew that sooner or later I was going to get drunk. I can remember occasions when friends recommended me for positions or busi-

ness opportunities that I wouldn't take because I felt that at some future date I'd get drunk and they would be hurt.
In the meantime, the domestic situation was not getting along too well. We had two children, a boy and a girl, and when the boy was about twelve, we broke up the marriage. That was at my suggestion. I can remember telling the poor little soul that I could probably quit drinking if I wasn't married to her, and told her that, after all, I didn't like restraint! I didn't like having to come home at a certain time; I didn't like this, I didn't like that, and I think the poor girl acually divorced me to help me stop drinking! Naturally, what little restraint I had exercised before was gone now, and my drinking became worse.
Long since I had come to believe I was insane because I did so many things I didn't want to do. I didn't want to neglect my children. I loved them, I think, as much as any parent. But I did neglect them. I didn't want to get into fights, but I did get into fights. I didn't want to get arrested, but I did get arrested. I didn't want to jeopardize the lives of innocent people by driving an automobile while intoxicated, but I did. I quite naturally came to the conclusion that I must be insane. My big job was to keep other people from finding it out. I can remember well thinking that I would quit drinking, really go to work hard, apply myself eight hours a day, five days a week, make a lot of money, and then I could start drinking again. That was the reverse of my former pattern of fearing to go to work because I might drink! Always at the end of these dreams was drinking. Now I attempted to quit. I think this was about 1927. I was divorced in 1925

threatening me, I made a solemn vow that never so long as I live would I take another drink.
(My mother and father were Catholics and I had been baptized, but at the end of my instructions for Confirmation I had not gone to church, and then when my mother remarried, she married a Protestant and the whole religious angle was forgotten. So I had never had any lasting contact with any kind of religion.)
So I was driving to Cleveland when I made this solemn promise never to drink again. That was at three-thirty in the afternoon. At three-thirty the next morning, I was in Champlain Street Station, in jail for driving while intoxicated and insulting an officer; and the suit of which I was so proud was in such shape that the turnkey had to get me a pair of trousers to go into court in the next morning. I had run into a man I always drank with. Whenever this man and I met—I didn't know his name then nor do I know it now—we would always get drunk. I had run into him, and he looked real prosperous; his face and eyes looked clear and he started to compliment me on my good front and how well I looked, and I said, "I haven't had a drink for nine months." He said, "Well, I haven't had a drink for three months." And we stood there for twenty minutes, telling each other how much better we were, how much better we looked, how much better off we were financially, mentally, physically, morally, and in every way, shape and manner. And then we both realized we should go. We shook hands, and he hung onto my hand for a moment and said, "Tell you what I'll do for old times sake. I'll buy you one drink, and if you suggest a second one, I'll poke

you right in the nose." And I think we calculated, or I did, that there wasn't anybody who knew that I wasn't drinking. I could take one drink and get right back on the wagon. Nobody would know it, so I agreed to have the one drink. We went into a bootleg joint and I don't remember leaving the place. I was picked up at two-thirty that morning with my car smashed up by a street-car because I had run into a big concrete safety zone, and the street-car had run into me, and they took me out through the roof—there's where I lost the suit. I had lost a hundred dollors I had in my pocket, and lost a wristwatch too. I lost the car, of course. But more important, I lost my sobriety. And I continued to drink, on and off then, until every dollor I had in the world was gone again and I was right back living at my sister's, getting my cigaretts by calling her grocer and telling him to put in a couple of cartons with her order, exactly as I had before I started to work at Max's.
In 1932, some friends of mine advised me that I might try Christian Science, which had done a lot for some of their friends. So I started to investigate Science through some friends of mine who were Readers in the church. I accepted their help, and it was helpful. I quit drinking immediately. The circumstances under which I reached these people were very odd because I was led there through things that I said when I couldn't even remember speaking. I told somebody that I was going down to get Christian Science and they took me down, but I don't remember saying that. Yet I wound up at this place. I attended their meetings every Sunday and Wednesday for about nine months. If there was a lecture on the subject within

a hundred miles of Akron, I attended. Then I started to miss meetings because it was raining or snowing or something else. Pretty soon, I wasn't going at all, and was avoiding those people who had been so kind to me. I avoided them rather than explain why they weren't seeing me. My sobriety continued for another six months.
At the end of fifteen months, I tried the beer experiment. After drinking one glass of beer at the end of my work period for about five days, I thought I'd better find out whether I really had the stuff licked. So I didn't have a beer one night, and as I drove home I was breaking my arm patting myself on the back because I had proved I could lick liquor. I had proved that liquor was not my master. I had avoided a drink this time. So having licked it, there was no reason why I shouldn't have a drink, and I stopped in before I got home and had one. Then I got into the habit of having beers, and decided that a drink of whiskey was not any worse; so I would get the one drink of whiskey but, on second thought, I decided that as long as I was only going to have one, I might as well make it a double-header. So I had one double-header every night for about two or three weeks. I didn't drink very long at a time. I think the longest drunk I was ever on was eleven days, but usually only two days with a complete blackout for a day, and then backing off by drinking as long as I could get anything.
This Christian Science experience with a sobriety of fifteen months was in 1932. Then I started drinking again, with possibly a little more restraint, periods a little bit longer than they had been before, but substantially the same pattern. During the latter part of