For some, it´s a sudden recognition that "I´m an alcoholic." An epiphany, if you will. For others, like Duane T., it´s a gradual growth in awareness that finally leads to the conclusion that alcohol is THE problem

"When it gradually seeped in to me what the nature of my problem was," Duane recalled, "it was the best news I´d ever had. I was an alcoholic. I had a real honest to God illness. I wasn´t crazy. All those terrible things that kept happening to me had an explanation. It was fabulous news." It took a lot of listening in meetings to reach that point. And identification with other members of the group.

"I got so I could share stories I would never have told a counselor or anyone else," Duane said. "The last few years of my drinking, I had a lot of phobias. Like the terrible beasts hiding in the plumbing. You´re pretty vulnerable when you´re sitting there, you know. You get off the toilet real fast." Telling the story turned out to be a building block in his search for a stable sobriety. A man came up to him after the meeting and said, "Yeah, I know. I had the same fear." "And so," Duane said, "I began to think I was a normal alcoholic."

Other things he learned in meetings helped too. Like the realization that he was meeting people with sober, tranquil lives who had spent years in mental institutions before they found out what their real problem was. And some things just took time to go away. "In those last few years of drinking, I had a lot of nightmares. I´d wake up thinking I´d killed somebody, maybe in a fight or with my car. I´d have to go out to the garage to look in the trunk to see if there was a body. There were lots of broken headlights and lots of dents I couldn´t identify, and that´s why I say there could have been a body there. But fortunately, I never hurt anybody seriously, including myself."

That is, if you don´t count the liver damage, a heart that´s "kinda beat up," and the chronic bronchitis, the latter from many years of four-pack-day smoking. He´s a runner, though, and is hanging in there healthwise.

Duane is a product of a farm in the rolling hills of North Dakota. He had to board in the town of Halliday during the winter to go to school, and among other things, he learned to drink when he was 12 years old. By the next year, he´d had his first blackout, and thinks he´d had hundreds before he was 21.

Question: Did you ever wonder what was happening to you?

Answer: No, I assumed that happened to everybody.

At 17, he joined the navy and spent four years there before enrolling at the University of Utah. "I didn´t like their attitude toward booze, though, and I remembered what an old salt had told me about Seattle: ´Boy, those women in Seattle sure like to drink and mess around.´" So that´s what brought him here in 1955, ready to live life to its fullest. Instead, he got thrown in jail twice in the first 10 days for being drunk in public, and on one of those visits, was introduced to what he calls "a little street justice. I was smarting off to this cop, so he knocked me out with his nightstick and took my money before he threw me in the can." Duane holds no grudge, though. "I had it coming."

Later on, he got another assault charge for slapping some people around at a party in a blackout. He woke up in his business suit on the jail floor when the guard kicked him in the ribs. "Get up. Get your clothes off and get in that line," said the guard. Duane explained that he was a college graduate and didn´t want to, but the guard "persuaded" him, so he got in line and was deloused with everyone else. "I needed a drink pretty bad when I got out of jail that day," he remembers.

Those were among his 15 arrests, including four DWIs and blackouts three or four times a week before he finally and reluctantly had his last drink on Nov. 3, 1969. Somehow, through all that chaos, Duane managed to get a degree from the University of Washington, get married and become a computer salesman for IBM back when most of us had never heard of computers. If he sold one of those monstrous machines a year, he´d had a good year, and he did.

"There were a lot of opportunities to mess around. I was an outside salesman, so I did much of my business in bars."

Question: How did you survive in the notoriously buttoned-down, coat-white shirt and rep tie culture that IBM was so famous for in those days?

Answer: I had this ability to get my boss to evaluate me on my potential rather than my performance. I had to call him from the Tacoma jail at 1 a.m. one time to come bail me out so I could make a sales call. He never said a word to me about it. I think he was too embarrassed."

Duane quit IBM to take a similar job with General Electric. Again, drinking was part of the culture. At sales meetings, his boss would say, "I know you guys are going to have martinis for lunch. Just be sure it´s gin and not vodka. I want your customers to know you´re just drunk and not stupid."

"That´s why I think the devil makes gin. Terrible things happened when I drank gin," Duane recalled.

He lasted five years with GE before he hit bottom. "I´d go for weeks without doing any work, and I got away with it." But his marriage was breaking up, he was soaking up tranquilizers, suffering nightmares, had a racing pulse and high blood pressure. He was also facing a drunk driving trial and an assault trial. Toward the end he was living in a $20-a-week flophouse downtown "´cause it was all I could afford."

Still, it never occurred to him that alcohol could be the problem. "In fact, it seemed like the only friend I had left." But a few months later, after he´d joined the program, he sat down with his boss to tell him what had been going on. "From that day on, he saw me in a negative light. He´d put up with drunken non-performance for several years, and that was just fine, but when he found out I was in recovery, he got real uncomfortable. He was probably thinking the same thing about alcoholics that I used to: that we were mental weaklings, and he didn´t want one hanging around the office. After awhile, I asked him if he´d be more comfortable if I found another job, and he said he would. So I moved on."

Not long before that, a counselor he was seeing repeatedly suggested he try AA. "I was a little insulted that she´d think a classy high bottom guy like me belonged in AA," Duane said. But as life went from bad to worse, he reluctantly accepted her offer to have someone from the Lake Union meeting at the Swedish Club pick him up and give AA a try. There were a few slips after that, but he kept coming back until "it finally dawned on me that there could be life after alcohol. Up till then, I didn´t think I´d ever smile again, ever have sex again, life would be a barren desert."

Now a recovering alcoholic, Duane went job hunting again, this time to the fledgling Boeing Computer Services. When he applied, he felt he had to acknowledge his alcoholism, and that went okay. Then, in filling out the application form, there was a separate form for reporting any arrests. "There was one with the application, but I told him I´d need more. He handed me another one. I was so paralyzed with shame and fear I could not tell him I needed a whole lot more. I just sat there, stammering and stuttering. He looked at me for a long time and finally said, ´Help yourself. Take what you need.´ I did, and I got the job."

Duane stayed with Boeing until 1973, when he joined King County´s pioneering program to help employers deal with employee alcohol abuse. Three years later, he formed his own alcohol counseling service. Still the master salesman, he developed a client list that included such heavyweights as King Broadcasting, PACCAR, Washington Natural Gas and Weyerhaeuser.

Service work became a big part of his life in AA. He was Intergroup chairman one year, but his big interest was the Monroe Reformatory. He started going out there every Sunday as a fledgling AA member, blissfully unaware of the Hospital and Treatment Committee structure. "All I knew was I was the only outsider who showed up every Sunday. The prison wouldn´t let the inmates have a meeting unless an outsider showed up, so I thought I was important. Pretty heady stuff for a new guy, the Lone Ranger helping out all these convicts when the truth of the matter was I was as screwed up as they were.

"One day, during a break, an inmate shook my hand and said ´Keep coming back, Duane. You´re making progress.´ That was worth a million bucks to me. I never saw service work in a sick way again. From that day forward, I understood service work was to help me get better."

That brings us up almost to the present. Duane sold his company and retired two years ago, and is now casting about for the most productive ways to spend his retirement years.

"My work was so fulfilling that retirement´s left a big hole in my life. I haven´t found anything to fill it yet."

Any suggestions, anyone?

Interviewed and written by Dick S.