In 1912, when his two years of internship were completed, the 33-year-old M.D. opened an office in the Second National Bank Building, Akron, where he was to remain until he retired from practice in 1948.
Perhaps as a result of the irregular hours and tense work of a new general practitioner, Dr. Bob developed considerable stomach trouble. “I soon discovered that a couple of drinks would alleviate my gastric distress, at least for a few hours at a time,” he said. It didn’t take him long to return to the old drinking habits.
Almost immediately, he began to “pay very dearly physically,” to know the real horror and suffering of alcoholism. “I was between Scylla and Charybdis now,” he wrote. “If I did not drink, my stomach tortured me, and if I did, my nerves did the same thing.” (Smitty noted, incidentally, that the stomach trouble disappeared after his father stopped drinking—although there was then a bit of insomnia, which led to his reading a lot at night.)
When things got too bad and Bob was unable to function, he put himself into one of the local drying-out spots—not once, but at least a dozen times.
After three years of this nightmare existence, the young doctor ended up in one of the smaller local hospitals, which, like other drying-out places and sanitaria in the vicinity, catered to patients with such socially unacceptable ailments as alcoholism, drug addiction, and mental illness.
The hospital staff did its best, but Bob couldn’t or wouldn’t allow himself to be helped. He persuaded well-meaning friends to smuggle in whiskey by the quart. When that source of supply failed, it wasn’t difficult for a man who knew his way around a hospital to steal medicinal alcohol. He got rapidly worse.
Early in 1914, Judge Smith dispatched a doctor from St. Johnsbury with instructions to bring Bob home. (In a way, St. Johnsbury was always home for Dr. Bob. Although he lived and worked in Akron for the rest of his life, he continued to go back to Vermont every year, drunk or sober.)
Somehow, the Vermont doctor managed to get Bob back to the house on Summer Street where he was born. There, he remained in bed for two months before he dared venture out. He was utterly demoralized. Then, it was two more months before he returned to Akron to resume his practice. “I think I must have been thoroughly scared by what had happened, or by the doctor, or probably both,” Dr. Bob said.
He was still sober at the beginning of the following year. Perhaps he believed he was that way for good, and perhaps Anne Ripley believed this, too. He went to Chicago to marry her. The ceremony took place in the home of her mother, Mrs. Joseph Pierce Ripley, “at half after eight o’clock” (as the wedding invitation read) on January 25, 1915.
Dr. Bob brought his bride back to Akron and a house on a corner at 855 Ardmore Avenue, a tree-lined street in the fashionable west end of town. The $4,000 house was new then, a two-story clapboard structure with large, airy rooms.
The kitchen was modern and fitted with all the latest conveniences, but Smitty remembered it as being long and narrow. “Dad had one particular chair he sat in. He never varied. That was his seat. Every time someone wanted something from the refrigerator, he would have to stand up. But he wouldn’t change.
“Mom was a good cook,” he said, “but she didn’t care for it. She always wanted to dine by candlelight, and Dad wanted to see what he was eating. We practically had a spotlight overhead.
“He was no help around the house—worse than that. Once, Mother prevailed on him to take the wallpaper off the living-room wall. He stuck a garden hose in the window and turned it on. The house was carpeted. Mother almost fainted. And he had the worst mechanical ability in the world. I did all the fixing.”
The first three years of the Smiths’ married life were ideal, free from any of the unhappiness that was to come later. Dr. Bob continued to stay sober, and any lingering doubts Anne might have had were stilled. They were then, as always, an extremely devoted couple. (“Mother was always deeply in love with Dad,” Smitty recalled. “I never heard them have an argument.” Sue concurred, but did admit to overhearing what might be called “discussions.”)
Dr. Bob’s professional life was going smoothly, too; he was developing a reputation as a physician, work he loved. He inspired confidence in his patients. A bit authoritative and difficult to approach, he was sympathetic and understanding once you started talking. And he had a way of looking at you over the top of his glasses. “He was a great one for that,” said Emma K. (close to the Smiths in their final years). “Just how you expect a doctor to be.”
As Dr. Bob’s practice grew, the Smiths made many friends and became respected members of the community. And in 1918, they became parents.
But the year of Smitty’s birth was also the year of a national event that had a very different impact on Dr. Bob’s life. The 18th Amendment was passed—Prohibition.
At the prospect of the whole country’s going dry, “I felt quite safe,” Dr. Bob recalled. A few drinks at that point would make little difference, he thought; if he and his friends managed to lay in a modest supply of liquor while it was still legal, it would soon be gone.
And that would be that, he reasoned. He could come to
Anne Ripley was a Wellesley student when she and Bob met;
during their 17-year courtship, she taught school.
no harm. His thinking, if not quite logical (except by alcoholic logic), was quite typical at that time. Dr. Bob and the rest of the country were soon to learn the results of the Great American Experiment.
Before the amendment went into effect, he was not aware that the government would oblige him by allowing doctors almost unlimited supplies of grain alcohol for “medicinal purposes.” Many times during those “dry” years, Dr. Bob went to the phone book, picked out a name at random, then filled out the prescription that would get him a pint of medicinal alcohol.
Soon, a newly accredited member of American society, the bootlegger, appeared on the scene. Quality was not always his long suit. Yet the family bootlegger was more obliging than a liquor store. He delivered at any hour, day or night, including Sundays and holidays. Sorry, though; no checks or credit.
Dr. Bob started out moderately. Within a relatively short time, he drifted out of control again, but not back into the old pattern, for the progression of his disease was evident.
He soon “developed two distinct phobias,” in his own words: “One was the fear of not sleeping; the other was the fear of running out of liquor. Not being a man of means, I knew that if I did not stay sober enough to earn money, I would run out of liquor.”
This irrefutable logic led him into a squirrel-cage existence — a 17-year “nightmare.” Staying sober to earn money to get drunk . . . getting drunk to go to sleep. Then over again—and again!
Instead of taking the morning drink, which he craved, Dr. Bob turned to what he described as “large doses of sedatives” to quiet the jitters, which distressed him terribly. He contracted what in later years would be called a pill problem, or dual addiction.
Whenever Bob did yield to the craving for the morning drink instead, there was a major disaster. First, he was unfit for work within a few hours. Second, he lost his usual skill in smuggling home enough liquor to put him to sleep. This led to a night of “futile tossing around in bed followed by a morning of unbearable jitters.”
There were also occasional binges. Sometimes, he hid out at the City Club or registered at the Portage Hotel under a fictitious name. After all, who would believe “Robert Smith”? “But my friends usually found me, and I would go home if they promised that I should not be scolded,” he said.
And yet Dr. Bob managed to keep functioning as a physician. “I had sense enough never to go to the hospital if I had been drinking, and very seldom did I receive patients.”