This newsman covered life from top to bottom; but
he ended up, safely enough, in the middle.
WITH NOTHING but a liberal arts
education, very definitely estranged from my family and already married, soon after
graduation from college I became a bookmaker's clerk on the British racing circuits, far
better off financially than the average professional man. I moved in a gay crowd in the
various "pubs" and sporting clubs. My wife traveled with me, but with a baby coming I
decided to settle in a large city where I got a job with a commission agent which is a
polite term for a hand-book operator. My job was to collect bets and betting-slips in
the business section, a lucrative spot. My boss, in his way, was "big business."
Drinking was all in the day's work.
One evening, the book, after checking up, was very definitely in the red for plenty
through a piece of studied carelessness on my part, and my boss, very shrewd and able,
fired me with a parting statement to the effect that once was enough. With a good stake
I sailed for New York. I knew I was through among the English "bookies."
Tom Sharkey's brawling bar in 14th Street and the famous wine-room at the back were
headquarters for me. I soon ran through my stake. Some college friends got me jobs when
I finally had to go to work,
but I didn't stick to them. I wanted to travel. Making my way to
Pittsburg, I met other former friends and got a job in a large factory where piecemakers
were making good money. My fellow-workers were mostly good Saturday night drinkers and I
was right with them. Young and able to travel with the best of them, I managed to hold
my job and keep my end up in the barrooms.
I quit the factory and got a job on a small newspaper, going from that to a Pittsburgh
daily, long ago defunct. Following a big drunk on that sheet, where I was doing leg-work
and rewrite, a feeling of nostalgia made me buy a ticket for Liverpool and I returned to
Britain.
During my visit there, renewing acquaintance with former friends, I soon spent most of
my money. I wanted to roam again and through relatives got a supercargo job on an
Australian packet which allowed me to visirt my people in Australia where I was born.
But I didn't stay long. I was soon back in Liverpool. Coming out of a pub near the
Cunard pier I saw the Lusitania standing out in the middle of the mersey. She had just
come in and was scheduled to sail into days.
In my mind's eye I saw Broadway again and Tom Sharkey's bar; the roar of the subway was
in my ears. Saying goodbye to my wife and baby, I was treading Manhattan's streets in a
little more than a week. Again I spent my bankroll, by no means as thick as the one I
had when I first saw the skyline of Gotham. I was soon broke, this time without
trainfare to go anywhere. I got my first introduction to "riding the rods and making a
blind."
In my eary twenties the
hardships of hobo life did not discourage me, but I had no wish to become just a tramp.
Forced to detrain from an empty gondola on the other side of Chicago by a terrific
rainstorm which drenched me to the skin, I hit the first factory building I saw for a
job. That job began a series of brief working spells, each one ending in a "drunk" and
the urge to travel. My migrations extended for over a year as far west as Omaha.
Drifting back to Ohio, I landed on a small newspaper and later was impressed into the
direction of boy-welfare work at the local "Y." I stayed sober for four years except for
a one-night carousal in Chicago. I stayed so sober that I used to keep a quart of
medicinal whiskey in my bureau which I used to taper off the occasional newspaper
alcoholics who were sent to see me.
Lots of times, vain-gloriously, I used to take the bottle out, look at it and say, "I've
got you licked."
The war was getting along. Curious about it, feeling I was missing something, absolutely
without any illusions about the aftermath, with no pronounced feeling of patriotism, I
joined up with a Canadian regiment, serving a little over two years. Slight casualties,
complicated however by a long and serious illness, were my only mishaps. Remarkably
enough, I was a very abstemious soldier. My four years of abstinence had something to do
with it, but soldiering is a tough enough game for a sober man, and I had no yen for
full-pack slogging through mud with a cognac or vin rouge hangover.
Discharged in 1919, I really made up for my dry spell. Quebec, Toronto, Buffalo, and
finally Pittsburgh, were the scenes of man-sized drunks until I
had gone through my readjusted discharge pay, a fair sum.
I again became a reporter on a Pittsburgh daily. I applied for a publicity job and got
it. My wife came over from Scotland and we started housekeeping in a large Ohio
city.
The new job lasted five years. Every encouragement was given me with frequent salary
increases, but the sober times between "periods" became shorter. I myself could see
deterioration in my work from being physically and mentally affected by liquor, although
I had not yet reached the point where all I wanted was more to drink. Successive Monday
morning hangovers, which dispite mid-week resolutions to do better, came with unfailing
regularity, eventually caused me to quit my job. Washington, D.C. and news-gathering
agency work followed, along with many parties. I couldn't stand the pace. My drinking
was never the spaced doses of the careful tippler; it was always gluttonous.
Returning to the town I had left three months before, I became editor of a monthly
magazine, soon had additional publicity and advertising accounts and the money rolled
in. The strain of overwork led me to the bottle again. My wife made several attempts to
get me to stop and I had the usual visits from persons who would always ask me "Why?"—as
if I knew! Offered the job of advertising manager for an eastern automotive company, I
move to Philadelphia to begin life anew. In three months John Barleycorn had me kicked
out.
I did six years of newspaper advertising, and trade journal work with many, many drunks
of drab and
dreary hue woven into the pattern of my life. I visited my family
just once in that time. An old avocation, the collecting of first editions, rare books
and Americana, facinated me between times. I had some financial siccess through no
ability of my own and, when jobless and almost wiped out in 1930, I began to trade and
sell my collections; much of the proceeds went to keep my apartment stocked with liquor
and almost every night saw me helpless to bed.
I tried to help myself. I even began to go the rounds of the churches. I listened to
famous ministers—found nothing. I began to know the inside of jails and work-houses. My
family would have nothing to do with me, in fact couldn't because I couldn't spare any
of my money, which I needed for drink, to support them. My last venture, a book shop,
was hastened to closed doors by my steady intoxication. Then I had an idea.
Loading a car with good old books to sell to collectors, librarians, universities and
historical societies, I started out to travel the country. I stayed sober during the
trip except for an occasional bottle of beer because funds barely met expenses. When I
hit Houston, Texas, I found employment in a large bookstore. Need I say that in a very
short time I was walking along a prairie highway with arm extended and thumb pointed? In
the two succeeding years I held ten different jobs ranging from newspaper copy-desk and
rewrite, to traffic director for an oil field equipment company. Always, in between,
there were intervals of being broke, riding freights and hitch-hiking interminable
distances from one big town to another in three states. Now on a new job I was always
thinking
about payday and how much liquor I could buy and the pleasure I
could have.
I knew I was a drunkard. Enduring all hangover hells that every alcoholic experiences, I
made the usual resolutions. My thoughts sometimes turned to the idea that three must be
a remedy. I have stood listening to street-corner preachers tell how they beat the game.
They seemed to be happy in their fashion, they and their little groups of supporters,
but always pride of intellect stopped me from seeking what they evidently had. Sniffing
at emotional religion, I walked away. I was an honest agnostic, but definitely not a
hater of the church or its adherents. What philosophy I had was thoroughly
paganistic—all my life was devoted to a search for pleasure. I wanted to do nothing
except what it pleased me to do when I wanted to do it.
Federal Theatre in Texas gave me an administrative job which I held for a year, only
because I worked hard and productively when I worked, and because my very tolerant chief
ascribed my frequent lapses to a bohemian temperament. When it was closed through
Washington edict I began with Federal Writers in San Antonio. In those days my system
was always to drink up my last pay check and believe that necessity would bring the next
job. A friend who knew I would soon be broke mounted guard over me when I left my job of
writing the histories of Texas cities and put me aboard a bus for the town I had left
almost five years before.
In five years a good many persons had forgotten that I had been somewhat notorious. I
arrived drunk, but I promised my wife I would keep sober, and I
knew I could get work if I did. Of course I didn't keep sober. My
wife and family stood by me for ten weeks and then, quite justifiably, ejected me. I
managed to maintain myself with odd jobs, did ten weeks in a social rescue institution,
and at length wound up in a second-hand bookstore in an adjacent town as manager. While
there I was called to the hospital in my home town to see a former partner who had
insisted that I visit him. I found my friend was there for alcoholism and now he was
insisting that he had found the only cure. I listened to him, rather tolerantly. I
noticed a Bible on his table and it amazed me. I had never known him to be anything but
a good healthy pagan with a propensity for getting into liquor jams and scrapes. As he
talked I gathered vaguely, (because he was a faltering beginner then, just as I am now)
that to be relieved of alcoholism I would have to be different.
Some days later, after he had been discharged, a stranger came into my shop in the
nearby town. He introduced himself and began to tell me about a bunch of some sixty
former drinkers and drunkards who met once a week, and he invited me to go with him to
the next meeting. I thanked him, pleaded business engagements and promised I'd go with
him at some future date.
"Anyhow, I'm on the wagon now," I said. "I'm doing a job I like and it's quiet where I
live, practicallyt no temptations. I don't feel bothered about liquor."
He looked at me quizzically. He knew too well that didn't mean a thing, just as I knew
in my heart that it would be only a question of time—a few days, a week, or even a
month, it was inevitable—till I would be off
on another bender. The time came just a week later. As I look
back on the events of two months, I can clearly see that I had been circling around,
half-afraid of encountering the remedy for my situation, half wanting it, deferring
fulfillment of my promise to get in touch with the doctor I had heard about. An
accident while drunk laid me low for about three weeks. As soon as I could get up
and walk I started to drink again and kept it up until my friend of the hospital,
who, in his first try at the new way of life had stubbed his toe in Chicago but had
come back to the town to take counsel and make a new start, picked me up and got me
into a hospital.
I had been drinking heavily from one state of semicoma to another and it was several
days before I got "defogged," but subconsciously I was in earnest about wanting to
quit liquor forever. It was no momentart emotionalism bornof self-pity in a maudlin
condition. I was seeking something and I was ready to learn. I did not need to be
told that my sfforts were and would be unavailing if I did not get help. The doctor
who came to see me almost at once did not assail me with any new doctrines; he made
sure that I had a need and that I wanted to have that need filled, and little by
little I learned how my need could be met. The story of Alcoholics Anonymous
fascinated me. Singly and in groups of two or three, they came to visit me. Some of
them I had known for years, good two-fisted drinkers who had disappeared from their
former haunts. I had missed them myself from the barrooms of the town.
There were business men, professional men, and factory workers. All sorts were
represented and their
relation of experiences and how they had found the only
remedy, added to their human existence as sober men, laid the foundation of a
very necessary faith. Indeed, I was beginning to see that I would require
implicit faith, like a small child, if I was going to get anywhere. The big
thing was that these men were all sober and evidently had something I didn't
have. Whatever it was, I wanted it.
I left the hospital on a meeting night. I was greeted warmly, honestly, and with
a true ring of sincerity by everyone present. That night I was taken home by a
former alcoholic and his wife. They did not show me to my room and wish me a
good night's rest. Instead, over coffee cups, this man and his wife told me what
had been done for them. They were earnest and obviously trying to help me on the
road I had chosen. They will never know how much their talk with me helped. The
hospitality of their home and their fine fellowship were freely mine.
I had never, since the believing days of childhood, been able to conceive an
authority directing the universe. But I had never been a flippant, wise-cracking
sneerer at the few persons I had met who had impressed me as Christian men and
women, or at any institution whose sincerity of purpose I could see. No
conviction was necessary to establish my status as a miserable failure at
managing my own life. I began to read the Bible daily and to go over a simple
devotional exercise as a way to begin each day. Gradually I began to understand.
I cannot say that my taste for liquor has entirely disappeared. It has been that
way with some, but it has not been with me and may never be. Neither can
I honestly say that I have forgotten the "fleshpots of
Egypt." I haven't. But I can remember the urge of the Prodigal Son to return
to his Father.
Formerly, in the acute mental and physical pain during the remorseful
periods succeeding each drunk, I found my recollection of the misery I had
gone through a bolsterer of resolution and afterward, perhaps, a deterrent
for a time. But in those days I had no one to whom I might take my troubles.
Today I have. Today I have Someone who will always hear me; I have a warm
fellowship among men who understand my problems; I have tasks to do and am
glad to do them, to see others who are alcoholics and to help them in any
way I can to become sober men. I took my last drink in 1937.