Another of the regular attenders at the West Hill meeting was Henrietta Seiberling, daughter-in-law of Frank A. Seiberling, founder and first president of Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company. A graduate of Vassar College, Henrietta was at the time a young housewife with three teenage children, who were also members of the Oxford Group.
As she recalled it (in 1978, the year before her death), a friend named Delphine Weber asked her one night in March or April 1935, “What are we going to do about Bob Smith?”
“What’s wrong with him?” Henrietta asked.
“He’s a terrible drinker,” Delphine replied, noting that he was having problems at the hospital and was practically bankrupt because of his drinking.
“I immediately felt guided that we should have a meeting for Bob Smith, before Bill [Wilson] ever came to Akron,” said Henrietta. She went to fellow Oxford Groupers T. Henry and Clarace Williams and asked whether it would be possible to use their home as a meeting place. They readily agreed.
T. Henry, who was a quite well-to-do inventor responsible for a new process in tire-making, was said to look more like a drunk than most alcoholics, because of his ruddy complexion. He was kidded about this a great deal but took it good-naturedly.
Though T. Henry and Clarace undoubtedly had their own spiritual problems, they were regarded as a saintly couple who freely gave of themselves out of a kind of sustained natural goodness that surfaces for only brief moments in most of us.
Unlike others who shared their memories of the Smiths, Henrietta came close to criticizing Anne, stating that she never shared deeply at meetings and was “very sensitive.” Henrietta told of an incident in which Anne was speaking about a situation and using the third person. “I said, ‘Anne, would you put that in the first person singular?’ She burst into tears. First-person sharing was costly to her pride. But she knew me well enough to know my motive, and she trusted it. You know, we must hold them to the highest.
“Bob was very restrained in his conversation,” said Henrietta. “He was absolutely honest and never gossiped. I hardly know what to say his shortcomings might have been except for drink. He had a strong character—like the Rock of Gibraltar.” In his A.A. days, she said, “He never spoke as a ‘founder.’ He always said, ‘I just work here.’ ”
Having found a place to meet, Henrietta then gathered some Oxford Group members to attend. “I decided that the people who shared in the Oxford Group had never shared very costly things to make Bob lose his pride [through their example] and share what I thought would cost him a great deal,” she said.
“I warned Anne that I was going to have this meeting. I didn’t tell her it was for Bob, but I said, ‘Come prepared to mean business. There is going to be no pussyfooting around.’
“We all shared very deeply our shortcomings and what we had victory over. Then there was a silence, and I waited and thought, ‘Will Bob say anything?’
“Sure enough, in that deep, serious tone of his, he said, ‘Well, you good people have all shared things that I am sure were very costly to you, and I am going to tell you something which may cost me my profession. I am a secret drinker, and I can’t stop.’
“We said, ‘Do you want us to pray for you?’
“Then someone said, ‘Should we get on our knees?’
“And he said, ‘Yes,’ so we did.” (This was the beginning of the Wednesday-night meeting at the home of the Williamses, who, according to Dr. Bob, “allowed us to bang up the plaster and the doorjambs, carting chairs up- and downstairs.” Meetings continued at T. Henry’s until 1954, long after the alcoholics had “spun off.”)
“The next morning,” Henrietta continued, “I, who knew nothing about alcoholism (I thought a person should drink like a gentleman and that’s all), was saying a prayer for Bob.
“I said, ‘God, I don’t know anything about drinking, but I told Bob that I was sure that if he lived this way of life, he could quit drinking. Now I need Your help, God.’ Something said to me—I call it ‘guidance’; it was like a voice in my head— ‘Bob must not touch one drop of alcohol.’
“I knew that wasn’t my thought. So I called Bob and told him I had guidance for him. ‘This is very important,’ I said. He came over at ten in the morning, and I told him that my guidance was that he mustn’t touch one drop of alcohol. He was very disappointed, because he thought guidance would mean seeing somebody or going someplace.
“Then he said, ‘Henrietta, I don’t understand it. Nobody understands it.’ He said, ‘Some doctor has written a book about it, but he doesn’t understand it. I don’t like the stuff. I don’t want to drink.’
“I said, ‘Well, Bob, that is what I have been guided about.’ And that was the beginning of our meetings, long before Bill ever came.”
Later, in 1948, Dr. Bob described what might have been the same conversation with Mrs. Seiberling: “I would go to my good friend Henri and say, ‘Henri, do you think I want to stop drinking liquor?’ She, being a very charitable soul, would say, ‘Yes, Bob, I’m sure you want to stop.’ I would say, ‘Well, I can’t conceive of any living human who really wanted to do something as badly as I think I do, who could be such a total failure. Henri, I think I’m just one of those want-to-want-to guys.’ And she’d say, ‘No, Bob, I think you want to. You just haven’t found a way to work it yet.’ ”
T. Henry Williams thought that Bob’s drinking slowed down a good bit after he came to the Oxford Group—from every night to once every two or three weeks—but that he didn’t quite find an answer until he met Bill.
This impression of an “improved pattern” was probably created by Bob’s desire and ability to hide his drinking, even after he admitted that he had a problem. For, as he said later, “They told me I should go to their meetings regularly, and I did, every week. They said that I should affiliate myself with some church, and we did that. They also said I should cultivate the habit of prayer, and I did that—at least, to a considerable extent for me. But I got tight every night. . . . I couldn’t understand what was wrong.”
Sue remembered sitting on the steps at a few Oxford Group meetings and recalled that her mother seemed to talk more freely about her father’s problem at this time, although no answer had yet been provided.
She also recalled that there had not been much in the way of religious observance in their own home up to that time. “I know we went to Sunday school every Sunday, but they didn’t. Dad made a pledge that he wouldn’t go to church and almost kept it until they started to go to J. C. Wright’s church once in a while, through Oxford Group connections.”
This was the situation on May 11, 1935, the Saturday when Henrietta Seiberling received a telephone call from an absolute stranger.
“It was Bill Wilson, and I’ll never forget what he said,” she recalled. “ ‘I’m from the Oxford Group, and I’m a rum hound from New York.’
“Those were his words. I thought, ‘This is really like manna from heaven.’ I (who was desperate to help Bob in something I didn’t know much about) was ready. ‘You come right out here,’ I said. And my thought was to put these two men together.
“So he came out to my house and stayed for dinner. I told him to come to church with me the next morning and I would get Bob, which I did.”
Active in the Oxford Group, Henrietta Seiberling hoped
that its program would relieve Dr. Bob’s alcoholism.
VI. Two alcoholics meet
Bill had called Henrietta out of his own desperation when, after pacing up and down the lobby of the Mayflower Hotel on South Main Street in downtown Akron, he suddenly realized that he needed to talk to another drunk in order