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Bill F. is acutely aware of the racial divisions in Seattle. But unlike most of us, he´s doing something about it.

Most notably, he co-founded the Cherry Fellowship at 2701 E. Cherry to give the city´s African Americans a meeting place they can call their own and from there, hopefully, branch out to attend meetings in other parts of the city.

Bill sobered up on Nov. 14, 1979 after the usual history of heavy drinking, two DWIs, and three automobile accidents in which, thankfully, no one was hurt. He never did jail time, but his missteps "cost me a lot of money."

When Bill staggered into sobriety and started going to meetings around the city, "I didn´t see very many black people. Me and my sponsor, Rufus D., decided we needed a meeting place in the black community where people could come and talk about recovery."

Two years into his sobriety, the Cherry Fellowship was founded, originally at 701 23rd Ave. A year-and-a-half later, they´d outgrown the place and moved to an address on E. Cherry St. Bill can´t remember the address, but it gave the club its name. There was one more move before they moved to 2701 E. Cherry, which has been the club´s home since 1984.

Among the co-founders, in addition to Bill, were his good buddy Rufus D., Pauline, Barbara P. and Eddie T. "It´s been nearly 30 years. I don´t remember who else," Bill said. Bill is the only founder "still real active." Rufus died on a trip to Africa.

The Cherry Fellowship is one of the most active meeting places in the city. There are, Bill says, about 20 meetings a week, including Narcotics Anonymous "and all those other A-s." They´ve owned the building since 1985. It´s open " 10 to 10. There´s always somebody there."

Though founded specifically to give the city´s African Americans a place where they could feel at home, Bill said the club is "fully integrated. We want to get the best we can from everybody. True, there have been some who say the club should be all black, but we´ve worked through it and it´s not an issue now. Whites have been on our board since the beginning."

Bill himself spends his Wednesdays and most of Monday at the club, and is in and out the rest of the week. "My role right now is president of the board and director of the club. And I help with the meetings."

Born and raised in the deep South - Spartanburg, South Carolina - Bill came to Seattle by way of 21 years in the army. He was 17 when he enlisted in 1948, the year President Harry Truman declared the end to racial segregation in the armed forces.

"It didn´t work very fast," Bill said. "I enlisted in December that year and was assigned to a combat engineering battalion. Four months later, I was in Germany with the army of occupation. It was a segregated outfit-10 white officers and soldiers out of 1000 men.

As time went on, Bill noticed that, "The Times They Were A´ Changin." When he came back to the States, to Ft. Benning , Georgia , in 1951, he noticed that segregation was a little less rigid. A year later, he went back to Germany with a fully integrated engineering outfit.

"One reason it wasn´t as bad was this was a National Guard outfit from the Middle West. We all shared the same barracks and socialized together on the post. Not off post, though."

A surprising observation Bill made was the difference in racial attitudes. "The Germans weren´t near as bigoted. But if the Germans were around Americans too long, they started to pick up the American attitudes. For awhile. I was around the British too. The atmosphere was completely different."

Bill says the army was drawn largely from poor southern whites. "Much of what went on was class distinction, not race. The poor whites were treated a little better than the blacks, but if you were poor and uneducated, you were kept in your place, black or white. It was a matter of degree."

Segregation or not, Bill rose in the ranks to E-6 (staff sergeant) as he made his way through a variety of military assignments in a variety of posts. He was trained in logistics at Ft. Belvoir , Virginia, and sent back to Germany . "I was totally lost, out of my class. I was black, uneducated, from the south-it was three miserable years I suffered through."

It was then he got into heavy drinking. The army made it easy. "Drinks cost about a dime. It was on my second tour that I crossed the line of the ´first drink syndrome,´ you know, where one is never enough. I´d go into the club at 5 o´clock and still be sitting there at 11."

After his second tour in Germany, he came back to Ft. Leonard Wood in Missouri to do supply work. "Blacks were side by side with whites by this time," Bill said. "I was supervising white soldiers. I don´t remember any race-related problems. By and large, desegregation was working."

His next stop was a huge supply depot in Orleans, France, where he says he was "another fish out of the pond. Drinking was getting me in trouble by now. Sad thing is, no one confronted me straight up about what was going on. I think I might have quit."

There was no A.A. either. " I never heard of A.A. while I was in the army."

After his Orleans tour, he finally made it back to the engineers in Ft. Belvoir, where he was a trainer/organizer in the logistics engineer school. As a member of a battalion en route to Viet Nam, he was sent to Ft. Lewis, but when the assignment was cancelled and he wound up in Ft. Carson, Colorado, he decided to retire and moved to Tacoma as a civilian.

Bill got training as a welder here and took a job with Jorgensen Steel that lasted until he was laid off in the recession that struck in the early ´80s. His last job was as a security guar. He´s been retired for the past 16 years.

He found the racial environment here better than "back home." He also liked the different religious atmosphere. "In South Carolina, if you didn´t belong to a church, you had no social life. Here, they leave you alone. And back there you had to know somebody to get put up (get a job.)"

Bill got his first help with alcoholism at the Veterans Administration Hospital at American Lake near Tacoma. After treatment in 1971, he was sober for a few months, but then stayed drunk until he finally quit, with the help of the courts, in 1979. He was required to get treatment, and it was there that "it dawned on me that it´s the first drink that gets you in trouble, not the last one."

A.A. entered his life at this point. Bill called Intergroup, got a 12 Step call and was taken to his first meeting. He met his first sponsor there, who helped him through "a little trouble at the beginning. It was soon all right."

Within two years, he´d co-founded the Cherry Fellowship and has watched it grow to a leading center of Alcoholics Anonymous in this area. However, his hope that African Americans would be encouraged to broaden their meeting attendance into white areas hasn´t materialized. "Black people don´t like to get out of their own area. They´re afraid if they go to a white meeting, someone will say something. If that happens, you need to go to a different meeting. I do. You gotta break the ice."

Besides his A.A. work, Bill has been trying to interest young African Americans in their history, particularly "the groundwork that led up to Martin Luther King, who gets all the credit. We ignore people like Booker T. Washington, for example, and in modern times, the contributions of the likes of Malcolm X and Elijah Mohammed. I know they´re controversial among whites, but it´s important that we know all of our history."

He´s deeply concerned about the young men of his community. "I won´t say the community is out of control. That´s not what it is. Lyndon Johnson was a hell of a good man, but he made life too easy. With food stamps, welfare, all of that-people aren´t responsible for their children. If you get welfare and have children, there should be a price to pay. I don´t want kids to go hungry, but there should be some requirements in exchange for help. The other day, a young man told me he was ´going to see my baby´s mama.´ It´s his baby too. He should be responsible."

So what to do? Bill doesn´t have any answer except education, "but we need more than that. Somebody smarter than me´s gotta come up with the answers."

There´s hope out there, though. Bill cited another young man he knows through A.A. who came into the program nine years ago. "Same background we been talkin´ about. When I first met him, he didn´t have nuthin´. Now he´s married, has a job, three kids and a mortgage. I told him to think about how good life is now. The problems you´re having are just a little bump in the road. Stop worrying. Things will be all right as long as you stay sober."

Bill lives alone. He´s a great reader when he isn´t working for the program. But it´s A.A. that´s the center of his life. "What this program means is it´s an opportunity to change our lives. It´s not expensive. If you´re having trouble, you´re with a lot of other people who have gone through the same things.

"They have recovered. Recovery is possible for everybody, and I´m here to help out any way I can."

Interviewed and written by Dick S.