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Don M. drove a beer delivery truck all over Snohomish and King Counties, so his drinking habits were well known in the taverns.

Thirty six years of boozing can take its toll, and many of Don´s friends in the taverns hoped he´d quit drinking long before he did. Sometimes, when he rolled a keg into a bar, a cup of coffee would be waiting for him.

It didn´t make any difference, though, until Mrs. D. told him she was fed up with "me passing out every night and her not being able to understand what I was saying." She was about to try an intervention with him when he finally went into a 30-day treatment program on May 28, 1989. He hasn´t had a drink since.

It was a long and rocky road before he reached that point, though strange to say, he never lost a job over his drinking. He had one DWI four years before finding sobriety, "but I beat the rap. Otherwise, I´d have lost my job, my license and my beer truck driver´s job." The court sent him to Alcohol Awareness School, "but all that did was teach me how much I could drink."

Don´s one of those guys who´s a mine of information about a variety of subjects. He had a long stretch driving that beer truck, but before that he held a dozen jobs. When he was 11 years old, he was the nighttime irrigator on his dad´s 160 acre farm in Colorado. When he turned 13 and big enough to do heavy lifting, someone else got the irrigator´s job and he became an ordinary farm laborer.

His life started in Iowa, where he was born, but the family moved to southeastern New Mexico when he was three, then to the farm in south-central Colorado. "Beautiful country," Don recalled, "but colder than a …….One winter, it got down to 52 below. Antifreeze froze, and the cold broke the thermometer. Ten degrees was shirtsleeve weather for us."

His dad raised potatoes in that arctic climate, and drove a long distance truck for added income. Don went along for the ride. "I got to see a lot of the West hauling produce and cattle."

He learned to drive when he was 10 or 11 years old "´cause I was too small to lift the potato sacks. When I was about 13 and big enough to lift ´em, Dad got another driver and I was just another hand."

There were also trips to the New Mexico desert to gather petrified wood. Their gathering site is now in the Petrified Forest National Park, but in those days it was wide open to collectors. Don said his grandfather built a motel in Carlsbad, New Mexico, out of petrified wood. That´s not all that unusual, actually. A check with Google shows petrified wood motels and gas stations all over New Mexico and Texas.

Just what is petrified wood, anyway? "Well, it´s agatized, is what it is," Don explained, a type of quartz. Over the eons, huge trees fell in what is now desert and gradually, over many thousands of years, were converted from wood to rock. Don has seen tree trunks three feet in diameter. Much heavier than wood, it has to be broken like any other rock to be used as a building material.

His granddad was a friend of Jim White, the discoverer and promoter of the Carlsbad Caverns, and through him Don acquired a huge souvenir stalactite. A rockhound, his grandfather passed his hobby along to Don, but Don has long since given up rocks for woodworking, his current hobby and passion.

When Don was 16, the family moved to Kittitas, where his father farmed and Don learned to drink. In high school, Future Farmers of America was the club for Kittitas boys. A bunch of them went to the Puyallup fair one September. Don was on a judging team for potatoes and livestock. He also downed eight beers in a Puyallup motel that night with his buddies" and spent the rest of the night wrapped around the toilet."

"That was the start of it. I kept on drinking, every weekend and any other time I could get something to drink. Vodka and orange juice was big then, probably ´cause the girls liked that drink too."

Don made it through high school with a diploma in agriculture and immediately joined the army. After basic training, he was sent to Korea as a forklift driver. This was 1955, two years after the end of the war there. "That was one long drunk, for 16 months," he said ruefully. "I´d drink anything I could get my hands on. We had a German (yes, German) beer maker across the fence from our compound. The army brought in Pabst Blue Ribbon at one dollar a case, so we had all the beer we wanted. We low-ranking guys couldn´t´ buy hard liquor, but it was no problem. The non-coms bought us Canadian Club at $1.55 a quart. Everybody was hanging it on. Obviously, there were not a lot of restrictions on being drunk on duty."

Don never heard of an A.A. meeting while he was in Korea.

When he got home, 20 years old, he married a girl from high school and they eventually had three children. Their first year together, he was still in the army, stationed in Los Angeles. Once out of the army, he went to work for his grandfather building a motel in Everett. "I wasn´t going back to farming," Don said. "Too much work."

He had a succession of jobs after that, including one that was so scary he quit drinking for awhile. Working for a Boeing subcontractor in Everett, he ran their salt tank, a huge vat of hot salt used in the manufacturing process. "It was dangerous," Don said. "I quit after a year."

Next, he became a corrections officer at the Monroe Reformatory and stayed until a truck driver told him he was making three times what Don made. Result: he got a job driving truck for a drug distributor.

When the state gave up its monopoly on wine distribution in 1969, Don hooked up with a wine distributor, "and that´s where it really started. I was drinking every day. Car pooling from Everett, we needed a six-pak to get home. One night, I asked the driver how fast he could stop. He slammed on the brakes and turned us over. I went home and got my truck. I pulled him upright and pulled him out, but that episode led to the end of my marriage.

"We tried to bury that story, but my wife heard about it and said ´That´s it.´ She got a divorce, the house and the kids. I got a 20-foot travel trailer."

Living alone is not for Don. He lived by himself in the trailer for four months, then married for the second time and adopted his new wife´s three children. Thirty two years later, they´re still married. She played a major part in his sobriety. "She got tired of me passing out every night," he explained.

Don´s job with the wine distributor ended when the Teamsters went on strike in 1983 and the distributor locked them out. It so happened MGM was shooting location segments of the film "War Games" near Concrete at the time. Don caught on as a driver and drank with the movie stars at premium pay for four months.

From there, he moved on to a job with a beer distributor and stayed until retirement in 1993. He was willing to quit that job when he joined A.A., but his support system saved the day. He did 90 meetings in 90 days, had two sponsors and drove with the Big Book and a meeting schedule under the truck seat.

Before he went into treatment, the taverns where he drank and delivered beer tried to help too. He´d have a cup of coffee waiting for him when he came through the door. They knew he had a big problem.

Once sober, Don became a major contributor to A.A. He started out as coffee maker at his home group, Lake Forest Park, was secretary for six months. Intergroup representative, then zone rep. He was GSR, treasurer of District 16-"probably the worst they ever had"-and District DCM. Finally, the job he liked most, Grapevine representative for the area. "That was almost a daily responsibility, ordering from New York and Intergroup, taking literature displays to conferences. I really felt like I was helping to spread the word."

Don is not as active now as he used to be, but he´s as grateful as ever for this program.

"A.A. means life. If it wasn´t for A.A.,. I´m positive I wouldn´t be here today. It´s been a heck of a ride, and it´s kept me alive."

Interviewed and written by Dick S.