Angus L. is a hard guy to interview. The longtime Seattle Intergroup office manager is so interested in the history of Alcoholics Anonymous in this region that he has trouble focusing on his own story.

Angus is a Canadian by birth who grew up in the remote northern Alberta village of Peace River. "In those days", he remarked, "they didn´t kid around with drunks." With a court order, the name of a chronic drunk could be placed on the Interdict List, or Indian list, as we called it." The list was put up in the post office lobby for all to see, but particularly the bar and tavern owners because the posting was a notice that the drunk was not to be served in or by those establishments. "In small towns in the North at that time, it was too bad when someone became a drunk, but people were accepted just as they were. There was no particular shame attached," he said.

Trained as an architect, Angus spent many years burning his bridges in British Columbia, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Kent, Washington. Sober at last, he worked in Seattle and later in Everett where he was a school architect, until he was laid off in 1982 and found he was too old at 55 to get another job in his field. After a year on the street, the job of Intergroup secretary (the title was changed later to office manager) opened up, and Angus found the niche that lasted 151/2 years, the rest of his working life. He is now 72 and living in contented retirement in Burien where he is developing his interest in painting, while volunteering regularly at Intergroup. He also makes frequent trips to the old sod in Canada to refresh his spirit.

Sobriety was a long time coming for Angus, and he sort of backed into it through concern for a relative who was drinking to excess. It had already been a full week when he got the call for help. At the time, Angus was drinking a gallon of wine a day. "I´d gotten off hard liquor because I was getting stomach problems, but I got a bottle of gin for my friends that week." "When I got home, I thought I´d just open it for a taste. The next thing I knew, I woke up the next day with the bottle empty." Then he got a bottle of wine and found he had no corkscrew. No problem. He smashed the neck of the bottle over the sink. "I remember thinking, ´this isn´t very normal,´ but there was no thought that I was an alcoholic."

Then came the call for help, so he phoned AA. Vern H., who years later he replaced as secretary, answered the phone. "I asked for the address of an AA treatment center in northern Alberta." Vern said, "AA didn´t have treatment centers." "I said, I would like to talk to an AA counselor." "AA didn´t have counselors", Vern told me.

"´Well, what DO you have,?´ I demanded." "We just have meetings, sir" was the answer. That was too much. "I demanded to talk to this man´s supervisor. He said he WAS the supervisor. I slammed the phone down and went back to the Yellow Pages. Little did I realize I would be answering calls like that for over 15 years." Just below the AA listing, he found a listing fora treatment center. The director invited him to attend his weekly lecture the following Saturday.

"That lecture really nailed my relative´s problem," Angus said. "But I started getting angry when he described advanced stage alcoholism. He was getting far too personal in his remarks. But he was persuasive. The following Thursday, I was sitting on a bed in the treatment center with a mild case of the shakes. That was the beginning of sobriety."

At that time, the treatment center was distributing niacin (Vitamin B-3) to its patients, an idea embraced by Bill W. in the 1960s. There was beginning to be resistance to its use because of side effects, but vitamin therapy had been used for some years among the groups in Seattle. Angus said the last reminder of that period is Fremont Fellowship´s World Famous B1 group, where they gave shots on a regular basis in the 1950s.

Angus entered the treatment program on Nov. 11, 1971, which became his sobriety date. "It was an interview I had after that first lecture that really got to me. She asked if I had ever gone out to party and not gotten drunk. I said, "Of course, but it had been 25 years before. That got to me . It was a pivotal event. I was cornered."

Angus´ progress downhill began shortly after he got his architecture degree at the University of Manitoba in 1951. After an apprenticeship in Edmonton, he joined a partnership in Kamloops, B.C. which lasted six years, "till I lost the practice and the partners´ good will. I was drinking heavily, and decided I´d move to the U.S." It was in Los Angeles that things really fell apart. He wiped out his new 64 Mustang three times, once while driving the wrong way on a one way street. Angus became an expert on the court system. Santa Monica was the cheapest, San Diego was next, and Beverly Hills fined the most. ""I never did any jail time, just paid those fines."

Angus became convinced that the Mustang´s steering was the cause of his problems, so he wrote an outraged letter to Ford. He didn´t get a reply. The car was a loaner, and after the third accident, his employer refused to let him use company cars anymore. So he rented one, and on his way home at 5 a.m.,"this telephone pole moved in and the car wrapped around it. Not my fault, of course. The pole was in the wrong place."

He was thrown out and had to walk home covered with scrapes and grass stains. He called the police to report the car stolen, but that didn´t sell too well because they found the keys in the ignition. "The rental agency sued me, so I decided it was time to get out of town." He went back to Canada for a short time. Down and out in Vancouver, he was walking across the Granville Bridge when he decided to kill himself. Looking down, he saw the river was covered with ice, a rare event, so he changed his mind. "When I realized I´d have to land on that hard ice, I gave up the idea and moved to Kent, where life improved for awhile " He found a good job and saved enough to buy a house just before his drinking cost him that job too.

Then came his relative´s call for help, and Angus, quite by accident, was on the road to sobriety. Once involved with AA in Kent, he became active in service work. GSR, DCM, Washington Area Newsletter editor for two years, other activities for eight years until the job at Intergroup opened up a new phase in his life.

AA in this area grew explosively during Angus´ time in the program. He said there were 87 meetings a week in 1972, and in the following 10 years, that figure ballooned to over 1000. He attributes much of that growth to people who came in through the court system, and much of the rest to the growing number of treatment centers. The latter growth was fueled by changes in insurance laws and by improved public funding for treatment programs.

All this growth was accompanied by a big change in the content of meetings, at least among the south end groups where Angus was active. "It was always assumed that you read the Big Book at home or with your sponsor, but the groups studied the 12 and 12 in great detail . The Big Book didn´t come into its own till Joe and Charlie (traveling lecturers from Arkansas) came to town and converted a lot of us to the Big Book. Up till then, I really didn´t know the Big Book very well."

There´s more to this story, particularly Angus´s love of the program´s history. We´ll save that for another time.

Interviewed and written by Dick S.