The Home Which Had Sheltered Them

The hardest affiliation to give up is one with people who have been good to you, and Akron's first alcoholics gave one up anyway. Their early meetings were held in the home of T. Henry and Clarace Williams, members of the Oxford Groups, the movement where Bill and Dr. Bob had first found help. Bill W. remembered (A.A. Comes of Age) that T. Henry "was bighearted enough, nevertheless, to let us alcoholics come to his house for meetings" alongside his own friends. The drunks repaid him with "cigarette burns on their carpets." Then the break. It was "not until later, and well after the A.A. book was published," Bill says, that Akron's members withdrew from the Oxford Groups "and finally from the home which had sheltered them so well." There is no bitterness in the telling. Bill counts the Williamses "in the front rank of A.A.'s pioneers." The Long Form later wrote down what Akron had done (Big Book, p. 563): two or three alcoholics may call themselves an A.A. group "provided that, as a group, they have no other affiliation." A group can owe thanks to anyone. It can belong to nobody. Test it tonight: list who has been kind to your group, a landlord, a church, a hospital, and ask whether any of them has quietly become part of it.