Women, booze, sobriety, health, his father: that pretty well sums up the life of Bobby D.

Now nearly 30 years sober, Bobby can look back on a life filled with enough emotional highs and lows to stoke a soap opera for a year. He blames his late father for his own checkered career with women. "He was not a good role model," Bobby said. "He played around a lot. He was a 100 per cent asshole."

In part, at least, because of that background, Bobby threaded his way though three marriages and numerous affairs. By his own admission, he was a super stud until age began to slow him down. He´s now 76, and says he´s chasing a lot less than he used to.

Mixed feelings about his father are still very much a part of him. "I recognize I learned a lot of useful stuff from him. He was well-liked, and he was crazy about all little kids except me. I tried and tried to make my peace with him. One night before he died, I stayed up till 4 in the morning trying to get through to him. I never did. Well, maybe it couldn´t be cleared up. I´ve finally decided that that´s just the way it was. But he did give me one clue during that long talk. He told me he was not treated as well by his dad as his two brothers were.

"So there´s lots of baggage there. There always will be. But I´ll tell you this. It was me that was holding his hand when he died. My brother was there too, but he was in the next room. I thought, ´Hey, you owe me this.´"

Bobby said he tried therapy to work through his feelings, but was never able to get these issues resolved. His biggest relief came at one A.A. meeting, where he "really cried" about his father and their relationship.

"I never cried for my mother, and if it weren´t for her and my grandma, I never would have made it to maturity." Besides his rivalrous brother, Bobby has a sister who´s a good friend. He´s on good terms with his brother now too-"if I push it."

"I don´t know why Dad didn´t like me," Bobby said. "I think that´s what got me into drinking and drugging. But I did get his attention when I joined the army." That was in 1946, when he was 18, got his GED and began his drinking life. He was on a troop train to Birmingham, Alabama, when he drank a pint of bourbon and suffered his first blackout. In the process, he vomited all over the train floor and the porter made him clean it up. Incidentally, that´s evidence that blacks were not totally subservient to whites in the segregated South in that era.

Bobby said he didn´t drink much after that until he was 21 and out of the service. He´d "fought the battle of Port Townsend" for most of his one year as a soldier.

He says his drugging didn´t amount to anything serious-"a little weed once in awhile, then mescalin, some LSD. I´d pretty much quit all of that by the time I quit smoking. I was doing four packs a day when I quit."

Somewhere along the line, he learned the printer and lithographer´s trades, which led to a long career with American Can Co., which in those years maintained a huge can manufacturing facility here. "That job ruined my health," Bobby said. He has had squamish cell and prostate cancer, but says he´s in "pretty good shape now" from treatment. "I got the squamish cell from fumes and solvents on the job. There was no protection in those days. We worked in a blue haze for seven hours a day.

"I don´t think I was ever sober on that job. Working the swing shift, I´d get drunk and sleep it off, but I´d still be a little drunk when I came back to work."

Bobby was born in Nebraska, but came here with his family in 1942 when he was 14. His father figured there´d be better jobs here, what with the war and all, but as it turned out, the shipyard where he caught on never did any war work. Bobby did, though. When he was 16, he worked at Sand Point refurbishing PBYs, the navy´s famed amphibious planes. Later, he worked at a Lake Union shipyard wrapping pipes in asbestos. "Luckily, not for long."

Bobby has four children by his first marriage. It was thanks to his 18-year-old daughter by that marriage that he found A.A. He had drunk himself out of the printing trade by that time, and was trying to salvage his second marriage. His daughter gave him some A.A. material.

"I didn´t think I had time to go to meetings, but I took the literature and that got me pointed in the right direction." By happy coincidence, "about that time, I saw an article that mentioned the Ballard Alcohol Referral center, so I headed over there to talk to them about my wife´s drinking problem. The counselor asked if I had a problem, and I explained what I wanted was to do controlled drinking for 30 days. She suggested I go to A.A. A couple of nights later, I went to Fremont Hall and I haven´t had a drink since."

He doesn´t remember being told "90 meetings in 90 days," but that´s what he did, at Fremont, Laurelhurst-Windermere and Last Chance. "I could relate to that last one ´cause I met my wife at the Last Chance Saloon in Idaho," Bobby recalled.

He´s especially grateful to Fremont, which he said at that time was filled with "stable, sober drunks" who said the kind of memorable things that helped him stay sober. Big Pete, for example, told him that "nobody ever came to A.A. because they ate too many string beans." Another oldtimer who´d come to sobriety "without any big deal" helped him legitimize the relative ease with which he found his own sobriety. In other words, you don´t have to have half a dozen false starts.

Like several other oldtimers who´ve been interviewed for this series, Bobby has strong objections to the profanity which characterizes too many meetings these days. "I think I´ve sworn five times in meetings since I got sober. I think profanity is disrespectful of women. The kind of language you hear now, you´d talk that way in a bar, you´d be kicked out.

"For years, I was the language police. When you´ve been sober awhile, you need to clean up your language. But I got tired of telling people ´cause they´d just tell me to fuck off. Lots of times, it´s a woman who´s using every kind of language, especially older women. Sometimes with a little kid with ´em."

Bobby still goes to meetings almost every day, usually where there´s lots of sobriety. He´s been secretary for Last Chance, a "big deal" for him. His home group for 23 years has been Sobriety Study Saturday at 6 p.m. at St. Paul´s Church. Bobby has done some sponsoring, but without much success with newcomers. "I´m too much of a hard ass, I guess. I tell ´em, ´Don´t drink, go to meetings, learn the steps." He does best with members who have some time in.

Bobby has been married three times, but is reluctantly single now. He and his first wife had four children that she raised. In recent years, he´s been trying to rebuild relationships with those children. He raised the two children from his second marriage "after my wife ran off with my favorite bartender.

"What really pains me is my third marriage. It´s been a bitch to get over. I think the stress kicked up my cancer. They say it takes three years to get over a tough breakup. Boy, it´s the most pain I´ve ever been through in my life."

Bobby has "looked and looked" for a religious life, but "I have never found anything like what A.A. does for me. This is where it´s at. Going to meetings is my 12 Step work, showing others how this program can work in spite of me. You can´t hear the great things that are said at meetings unless you go to meetings."

Interviewed by Angus L. and Dick S. Written by Dick S.