Marlene Wagman-Geller

Dec 11, 2024 by Marlene Wagman-Geller

 

“Hearts understand in ways our minds cannot.”—Lois Wilson

 

Stepping Stones (opened 1988)

62 Oak Road, Katonah, New York 10536

 

Visitors migrate to Katonah, New York, for its intriguing name or to scratch a historical itch as the region is dotted with sites ranging from pre-Revolutionary gristmills to Gilded Age mansions. Stepping Stones serves as a shrine to Lois Wilson, the First Lady of Sobriety.

Lois revealed that alcoholism is a cancer that also ravages the addict’s loved ones. The remarkable individual was born in 1891 in Brooklyn Heights, the eldest of six children of Dr. Clark and Matilda Burnham. The family were members of the Swedenborgian faith which counted amongst its followers Helen Keller and Robert Frost. The children attended the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, one of the first American schools to offer kindergarten (German for “Children’s garden”), followed by enrollment in the Quaker Friends School. The Burnhams spent summers in Manchester, Vermont, where the siblings played with Abraham Lincoln’s grandchildren. Robert Todd Lincoln had constructed Hildene, a twenty-four-room mansion, converted to a home museum. In her memoir, Lois Remembers, she described her childhood as “idyllic.”

While summering in Vermont, Lois met a friend of her younger brother, Rogers. Bill Wilson felt that the rich city girl viewed him with condescension. To impress Lois, who spent afternoons sailing on Lake Emerald, Bill outfitted his grandfather’s rickety rowboat with a bed-sheet sail. A gust of wind flung him overboard; caught in the sheet, he looked like a water-borne mummy. Lois rescued Bill—the beginning of a life-long pattern.

Despite their rocky start, romance blossomed, and Lois was thrilled with her twenty-five-dollar amethyst engagement ring. With the outbreak of World War I, Second Lieutenant Wilson, at an army camp in New Bedford, Massachusetts, took his first drink—a Bronx cocktail—which he described as “the elixir of life.” Before the army shipped Bill off to Europe, the couple married in the Swedenborg Church, followed by a reception in the Burnham’s Clinton Street home. In his absence, Lois worried about her husband’s safety and grieved a miscarriage. As an employee of the Young Women’s Christian Association, Lois requested an overseas transfer so she could be near her spouse. The YWCA turned her down, explaining her religion was not Christian.

Bill returned home addicted to alcohol, which alleviated the horrors of war and masked his feelings of inadequacy. To ease his wife’s mounting concern, Bill assured her that “men of genius conceive their best projects when drunk.” Too intoxicated to pick up his diploma, Bill did not graduate from law school. Despite the setback, he obtained a lucrative position on Wall Street. Finding his career soul-sucking, his inebriation escalated. After Lois’s second miscarriage and a hysterectomy, they turned to adoption. Agencies rejected their applications due to Bill’s addiction. Unable to support themselves, they moved in with Lois’s parents.

When Lois returned home from her job as a salesgirl at Macy’s department store, Bill pilfered from her purse to buy booze; when she hid her money, he panhandled. One evening she opened the door to the sound of a lamp crashing as Bill grabbed it to help him stand. She pounded on his chest, screaming, “You don’t even have the decency to die!” Contrite, he wrote in their Bible his pledge to never take another drink. Her unanswered prayers “turned to ashes in my mouth.” Marriage proved the antithesis of idyllic.

Throughout seventeen years of Bill’s alcoholism, Lois’s pleading, prayers, and nagging fell on deaf ears. Salvation arrived with Bill’s epiphany that only a drunk could help another drunk. Along with Ohio surgeon Dr. Bob Smith, Bill founded Alcoholics Anonymous. Sobriety should have meant that Lois finally enjoyed the better not the worse of her wedding vow, but as the wife of Bill Wilson, life was never smooth sailing.

Lois inherited the Clinton Street home that Bill used to host Bowery drunks who she plied with coffee while her husband ran AA meetings that he began with the words, “My name is Bill W. and I’m an alcoholic.” He employed the initial “W” rather than his surname to provide anonymity.

For almost two decades, Lois’s purpose had been to arm-wrestle the devil for her husband’s soul; once he foreswore alcohol, she spiraled into a spiritual vacuum. In frustration, she used her shoe as a projectile with her hubby as its target. (In his drunk days, he had hurled a sewing machine in her direction.) Her salvation arrived with the realization that while her husband could help those locked in the purgatory of addiction, she could bring solace to their loved ones. In 1951, in keeping with AA’s principle of privacy, she founded Al-Anon. Meetings began with her opening gambit, “I am Lois W.”

Fired with purpose and rebuilding their fractured relationship, the Stock Market crash of 1929 resulted in the foreclosure of the only stable home Lois had ever known. They put their furniture into storage and for the next two years were urban nomads. The Wilsons stayed at fifty-one locations. 

A home of their own arrived in 1941, when Helen Griffith, an AA supporter, sold her summer home to the Wilsons for six thousand four hundred dollars with no down payment. Initially, they christened their property “Bil-Los Break,” but they renamed it Stepping Stones after the stones that led from their door and its spiritual connotation.

A reversal of fortune occurred with Bill’s publication of The Big Book, one of the bestsellers of all time. The public feted Bill and Lois as the royal couple of recovery. Author Aldous Huxley stated that Bill was “the greatest social architect of our time.” In keeping with his principle of anonymity, Bill turned down Life magazine’s offer to put him on their cover; he also rejected their offer of appearing with his back to the camera. Whenever he displayed an inflated ego, Lois admonished, “Sweetheart, your halo’s on crooked.” On their 1954 wedding anniversary, Bill wrote on his wife’s card, “Come any peril, we know  that we are  safe in each other’s arms because we are in God’s.”

Although the victor in the battle of the bottle, Bill could not curb his addictive personality. A serial adulterer, after lecturing on the twelve steps, his thirteenth was making the moves on young women in recovery. Emotional as well as physical adultery intruded with Bill’s fifteen-year relationship with actress Helen Wynn. Had bottles not been banned from Stepping Stones, Lois would have smashed one on his head. After putting his wife through twelve steps of hell, Bill refused to terminate his marriage. Other marital crosses were Bill’s experimentation with LSD, which he wanted to distribute at AA meetings. His parting words about the organization he had birthed, “Let go and let God. Alcoholics Anonymous was safe—even from me.” However, Bill was not safe from himself. His final addiction was to nicotine, and Lois hid his cigarettes as assiduously as she had once hidden his bottles. Despite his emphysema, Bill alternated between inhaling from his oxygen machine and inhaling nicotine.

At age ninety-seven, Lois joined her husband in a Vermont cemetery. Her obituary in the Los Angeles Times stated, “She had left no immediate survivors.” But, in a sense, she had left thousands­—those she had helped weather the scourge of addiction.

 

Stepping Stones

Visitor Jean Z. compared touring Stepping Stones to a Christian visiting the Vatican. The 1920 two-story, brown-shingle Dutch-colonial house includes the couple’s bed—the one on which Lois was born—and other furniture from Clinton Street. In the living room is Lois’s piano; another room displays her dressmaker’s dummy and a Wilcox & Gibbs sewing machine. The desk is the one on which she wrote the blueprint for Al-Anon. Nearby is a small, ornate stool, a gift from a British maiden aunt. A vanity table holds a bobby pin and a can of PermaSoft hair spray; on a table is a box of Wash ’n Dri, lighter fuel, and books. There are thousands of artifacts such as a letter from Carl Jung to Bill and a photograph of President Richard Nixon receiving the millionth copy of Alcoholics Anonymous. (The publisher released more than twenty-five million copies.)

In 1950 Bill built a cinder-block studio that he named “The Shack” and Lois called “Wit’s End.” One wall displays the Serenity Prayer in several languages. On his desk, pockmarked with cigarette burns, resides the home’s sacred relic: holy grail: the first edition of Alcoholics Anonymous. The book resulted in tears from Jean Z.’s sponsor, Louise. A tour guide reacted to the emotional response Stepping Stones elicits with the comment, “We always say it’s not a successful tour unless at least one person cries.”

Although the name Bill W. is on the cover of Alcoholics Anonymous, he could not have written it without his semper fidelis steppingstone.

 

A View from Her Window

From her window, Lois saw blue birdhouses, as well as a birdfeeder by her bedroom. In the eight acres roamed wildlife such as rabbits and deer.

 

Nearby Attraction: Sunnyside

The whimsical home museum of Washington Irving is nestled on the banks of the Hudson River. During the tour, his characters—the Headless Horseman, Rip Van Winkle, Diedrich Knickerbocker—accompany visitors.

 

Prev Next