The AA Grapevine: A Glimpse of History

My first contact with the Grapevine was in July 1961 at a drunk farm in Kent, Connecticut, called High Watch, an AA-oriented, spiritual spot. I had been dumped there a few days before to sober up. After years of daily drinking, I had gotten cirrhosis of the liver. Unable to stop boozing, I had experienced two massive esophageal hemorrhages, each of which put me in the hospital close to dying. On the second of these visits, when my doctor discovered I had smuggled a bottle of vodka into my sickroom and was happily soused, he fired me and sent me to a psychiatrist who practiced in the same suite of offices he did. The shrink's name was Dr. Harry Tiebout, who, with his patient Marty M., the first woman to have sustained sobriety in AA, had brought Alcoholics Anonymous to my town of Greenwich, Connecticut. Dr. Tiebout told me his science could not help my disease and phoned the man who became my first sponsor and took me to my first AA meetings. But I was too sick, too mokus, to stop drinking, so I was packed off to High Watch.