Several people have suggested it´s high time I told my own story. Twenty-nine men and women have bared their souls for this series, so I guess they´re right. Here goes.

Unlike most of those I´ve interviewed, my drinking started later in life, when I was 17 and out of high school. It wasn´t that I didn´t want to drink. It was the trendy thing to do in 1943, just as it is now. But I didn´t know how to go about it. California had tough laws on minors buying booze and drinking, and I´d never learned how to get someone else to buy it for me.

I spent that wartime fall of ´43 with my aunt and uncle in Ashland, Oregon. That sleepy village, and its bigger neighbor, Medford, had been transformed overnight into towns swarming with soldiers from the newly constructed Camp White (now a Veterans Administration rehab center for recovering alcoholics). Somehow, I learned that a soldier would be glad to buy a jug for a friendly civilian, and thus I acquired my first bottle of gin. Gin, because whiskey was unobtainable during the war.

My aunt and uncle, like the rest of my family, were good Methodist teetotalers. I´d even starred as John Barleycorn in a WCTU production in Lithia Park when I was seven years old. I sneaked my bottle into my bedroom in their house to try that exotic stuff. Like most things that aren´t good for you, it took some work to overcome the repellent taste. Actually, I never did learn to like gin, but I drank it out of necessity. One more wartime sacrifice.

It wasn´t ´til that New Year´s Eve, though, that I got drunk for the first time. I was back in California waiting to be drafted into the army, and a friend got some champagne to celebrate. From then on, I always drank to get drunk. All that shyness, that difficulty with girls, melted away when I had a snootful.

I still wasn´t much of a drinker when I went into the army. My first taste of whiskey was overseas. Our platoon leader in my infantry rifle company, like all combat officers, got a fifth each month as a combat ration. Because he was a good guy, and wanted us enlisted men to like him, he gathered us around to share his bottle. Again, I hated the taste, but unlike gin, I learned to love it later.

I went on a few heavy drunks in rest areas and in postwar Paris, but my drinking didn´t get serious until I was out of the army and enrolled at UC-Santa Barbara in 1946. Then as now, drinking to excess was the thing to do in college, and whiskey fueled a lot of good times that freshman year. I met my future wife that year, and to my eternal sorrow, taught her both to drink and smoke.

I came north to Stanford the next year to get a degree in journalism. Norie and I were married at the end of my sophomore year and almost immediately started having children. I don´t remember that our drinking was out of hand for those first few years, but after graduation, when I got my first reporting job in the little coastal town of Watsonville, California, all our socializing revolved around drinking. That pattern continued when I changed jobs to the Palo Alto Times. Rather ironic. Palo Alto at that time was dry, and The Times refused to accept liquor advertising of any kind. But we always had booze at staff parties, and Norie and I always got drunk.

I was a high bottom drunk, but Norie´s drinking got rapidly worse. Life became an almost continuous quarrel as we continued to produce children, finally four in all. Amazingly, they´ve all become responsible adults. A couple of them had a drinking problem when they were young, but they have long since recovered. Some had issues they worked through with the help of Alanon and ACOA (Adult Children of Alcoholics).

Looking back, I still don´t understand it all. For several years, she would assault me physically. I used to keep a log-God knows why-of the nature of each fight. There was a code for "beef" and another for "beef with violence." In a rage, I once broke my hand when I smashed it into a wall in lieu of hitting her. That led to an elaborate charade at my office, where typing was as essential as breathing. I told everyone I´d caught it in the garage door. I told that lie so many times I came to believe it. For a month, I, a lowly reporter, had a private secretary to take my copy dictation..

Norie wanted sobriety. She was in AA for a year or so, and our lives were much better. The physical violence ended and never returned. I was never supportive, though. My attitude was "Hey, you have a problem, not me," Then came the party for Pierre Salinger´s senatorial primary victory (I was working for him then), and she got drunk again.

In 1965, we moved to Washington D.C., and for most of the five years we spent there, we were almost totally estranged. I had a job that took me all over the country, so I used that as an escape from the chaos of our marriage. Several times, I invented assignments to get out of town.

I can see now that things were rushing toward disaster when we moved from D.C. to Seattle in 1970. By that time, I was determined to get her to stop drinking. I still didn´t have a problem, in my view, but I decided to set an example. I quit drinking, and she followed suit for a few months. Our meeting was Laurelhurst-Windermere. I still go there on my AA birthday, Aug. 10.

When she started drinking again, I gave her an ultimatum: quit or I´m leaving. By that time, after several months in the program, I had gradually become convinced that I was an alcoholic too. She did quit again for awhile, but then I noticed the old pattern was coming back.

I moved out. Two days later, she sat in the garage in our Volkswagen with the engine running and killed herself.

I still feel responsible.

The next few days are a blur in mymemory. Two of my kids didn´t know. I had to tell them. Norie´s mother, whose husband (Norie´s father) had died a drunk and a suicide 41 years before, had to be told. Then the grim business of funeral arrangements. Through it all, I didn´t drink. I spent a lot of time in meetings. I must say I didn´t find much support there, but the Higher Power must have been around somewhere because I stayed sober.

I have not been a dedicated meeting attender except when I´m in crisis of one kind or another. Norie´s suicide and the events that followed kept me going to meetings regularly for several years, but that gradually dwindled. I got married again in the middle ´70s, and that got me back into regular attendance for awhile. When that marriage ended in a friendly divorce, I didn´t really become active in the program again until the Big C arrived.

I was diagnosed with prostate cancer early in 1992. There´s nothing that quite gets your attention like being told that "Yes, I´m sorry, but the biopsy came back positive."

Well, like every other cancer patient I´ve ever heard of, my first reaction was unbridled terror. My wife-by this time, I´d married for the third time, finally with success-says I spent the first six months in bed with the covers over my head. I´m pretty sure she was exaggerating, but that gives you the idea. However, I did get a great piece of advice from my cancer doctor: "Find serenity." That key word led me back to the program, and I´ve been back ever since. AA plays a big part in my learning to accept my illness, which I´m happy to say is under control.

My big thing has been service work. I led a meeting in the King County Jail for several years, but finally quit because I felt the generation gap was too wide. Nearly all of those guys are not just drunks but drug abusers/addicts too, and I couldn´t relate to that as well as I thought I should.

I do a weekly stint at the Intergroup office answering phones and selling literature. And I write these pieces for the High and Dry. I hope you´re all subscribers. A mere $6 for a year´s subscription. See Jill at Intergroup to sign up.

Through it all, I´ve been looking for God as I understand Him. I´ve been to dozens of churches and two Buddhist temples. Always, I hope that lightning will strike and I will have absolute conviction that the Higher Power is really there. It hasn´t happened that way, and I no longer expect it. It´s enough for me to pray each day for knowledge of His will…and the power to carry that out. To that, I add a mantra of my own invention: "Please help me to free myself from anger, resentment, anxiety, hatred, fear, envy , worry, procrastination, condemnation and irritation."

AA is here for all of us, and thank God for that, whoever you are.

Written by Dick S.