Erv M., sober since Aug. 6,1948, learned the AA life in hard-drinking construction camps in Anchorage and completed his education in Seattle.

For a number of years, Erv, a master plumber, shuttled between Anchorage and Seattle before he finally put down permanent roots here in 1960. All through that nomadic period of his life, he was learning the program with the help of what then passed for oldtimers a few years made an oldtimer in the 40s and 50s. Like many other men and women who came into the program in its formative years, Erv and his buddies did whatever it took to help a practicing drunk. "That was my main interest, 12 Step work, other than staying sober myself," Erv recalled. "We´d sit up all night with people that needed help. And maybe we did some things that really weren´t too good, but we were trying to help them. Yes, that included giving them booze at times if they had to have it.

"Two or three of us would go on a call and do whatever was necessary. We´d give ´em orange juice, try to nurse ´em back to health, get ´em to meetings. We´d just kinda play it by ear and go by our own experiences. In those days, doctors and hospitals didn´t want anything to do with us, and most of us didn´t have any money to go to one anyway.

"So we´d try to help ´em, treat ´em like we´d treat ourselves. We took a pretty hard line ´cause most of us were construction workers. We had all sweated out these drunks by ourselves in construction camps with plenty of suffering and it seemed like if anybody got babied and came off the junk easy, they never seemed to stay sober. We decided, ´Let ´em come to us sick and sober and ask for help.´ We had great success with everybody that did that."

Erv spoke from his own experience. It was 1948. He and a friend rode the bus into town from their construction camp to pay their income tax, March 15, which was the IRS deadline in those days. "I turned in my income tax, but I didn´t get back to camp for a few days and neither did my friend Rupe. Fact is, he ended up in the hospital. Somehow, he contacted AA, and he gave me a pamphlet that said AA is a way of life. I thought it was the most wonderful thing I´d ever read, and I had it in mind in the next few months while I tried to control my drinking. And I kept observing my friends staying sober. This friend--he turned out to be my sponsor later--talked to me a little, but then he left me alone. I was really interested, but I was also having doubts. Instead of pampering me, which he´d tried with others, he told me where the meeting was. I was kind of hedging, so he said, ´Well, it´s up to you, but there´s one thing to think about. You can´t be much worse off than you are now.´

"He was right, so I hopped the bus into town and went to my first meeting. Everyone was very supportive, and I ended up going away from there with a whole lot of hope."

In those early days in Anchorage, AA´s only outreach was a post office box and tiny ads in the newspaper, and word of mouth. "My sponsor, a gold miner, was something of a barroom brawler, so he was well known. When he got sober, a whole lot of people came to the program to find out how he did it," Erv recalled.

He also did outreach with a tool which has nearly disappeared like the Model T, a typewriter. Letters would come in from remote villages asking for help, "so I´d sit down and rattle off a letter. It seemed like an awesome responsibility. I would advise ´em to get to where there was a group if they possibly could, send ´em some literature and sometimes a Big Book. It never occurred to me to ask the group for financial support. I was so grateful for the help that I got from AA that it was a pleasure to do the same for others. ´Others´ included reaching out to Alaska´s urban native citizens, but none of us made a success of it. I figured they just didn´t identify with us.

"When you can identify, that makes all the difference in the world. They have a successful group of their own in Seldovia (a tiny hamlet between Homer and Anchorage) now. It´s a powerful argument when you see someone else sober up."

Erv was back and forth between Seattle and Anchorage in those days. On one southern tour, he worked on construction of the UW Health Sciences Building. It was St. Patrick´s day and the crew had been working in rain and mud all day. "I was weary and tired, and the foreman called me over to his truck and offered me a drink. Lots of plumbers I´ve worked with were drinkers. Anyway, my ´No Thanks´ was automatic, and I was halfway across the floating bridge before it dawned on me I hadn´t wanted a drink. That made me real happy."

Erv moved to Seattle permanently in 1960, but long before that, he was a major player in AA´s development here. He remembers fondly the camaraderie in the early 50s, when he and other volunteers opened the Big Hall at 915 E. Pine St., AA´s Seattle home for over two decades.

"We had a volunteer effort to fix that hall up," he recalled. "The second floor had been used as an overall factory during the war, so it was a mess. It took a real good volunteer effort, all of us working on weekends, to get it in shape. One of the oldtimers, he set up a kitchen in the basement and fed everybody breakfast and lunch. We had a real good turnout, and we had a lot of fun doing it. We had to nail the floor down, sand it, paint the place, and everyone turned to. We had that hall for many, many years."

There was a meeting every night in the Big Hall, and on Saturdays, a dance. I was involved on Monday nights," Erv said. "As I got older, I tried to cut loose, but we had trouble getting people to take over as secretary. Finally, I just stayed away and moved over to a Thursday study group. I started the Question and Answer meeting there: people put questions in a hat, we´d mix ´em up real good and pull ´em out and discuss ´em. Especially for new people, with something bothering them, it worked well for a long time."

AA has changed over the half century of Erv´s sobriety, and in some ways, he doesn´t think it´s for the better. "Nothing stays the same. I know that. But I used to grumble and growl about the profanity and the attitude of some of the people. Sober alcoholics have to have a little control of meetings, not just let them go to pot. If you conduct the meeting like it should be and a bunch of sober alcoholics hangs in there, everything seems to straighten out pretty well.

"Another thing: it seems like there´s a lot less 12 Step work than there used to be. In the 50s, our whole focus was on the 12th Step, knowing that our recovery depended on trying to help others."

One of those who recovered at the height of Erv´s involvement was his wife, Helen. "That was in 1963. She´d had a couple of years before that, but had to do a little more research, and came back to stay in ´63." Helen was active in the Studio Club, a residence for recovering women that operated through the 50s and 60s.

Looking back on a long and successful life of sobriety, Erv is eternally grateful to AA. "I´m 75 now (in 1995), and before I came to AA, I didn´t think I´d live til I was 30. Just about every phase of my life, AA has had something to do with it. AA is a guide to life."

Interviewed and written by Dick S.