What We Were Like

It was in the spring of 1958, about a year after Madeline and I had joined AA together, that I received a late-night call from Clyde T., asking if I would help him take a sick alcoholic to Cleveland's Rosary Hall the next morning. The place was 140 miles from our town of Deshler, Ohio. Clyde said he had called a nonalcoholic woman named Sister Ignatia to make the arrangements. He had met her on some earlier visit. "You'll like her," he said. "Before she went to Rosary Hall, she worked with Dr. Bob at St. Thomas Hospital in Akron, back in the early days of AA. She was the first person who ever got one of Dr. Bob's sick alcoholics into a hospital."