Fremont Hall is 53 years old and still as spry as ever. The battered building at 8916 Aurora Avenue is home to 37 meetings a week, on every day of the week.

But none before noon because most of Fremont´s frequenters don´t get up early. Rather, the meetings are scheduled from noon to midnight. Every day and every night, the old hall is full of street people, recovering and not-recovering alcoholics and drug addicts, and a lot of sober citizens. And cigarette smoke. Fremont, in the old tradition of AA, allows unrestricted smoking. Only the chairs along the north wall are "No Smoking," but the air is nearly as thick there as in the rest of the room. In short, it´s not your average middle class AA center, but over the last half century, it has been the starting place for many thousands of now-sober alcoholics.

The other night, the setting was typical as World Famous B-1 got ready for its 8 p.m. Thursday meeting. (The name stems from the long-ago day when members experimented with Vitamin B-1 as an aid to recovery.) People were wandering around, talking, getting coffee, smoking, a little boy was playing with a balloon, when the chairman suddenly shouted, "World Famous B-1 is now meeting," and they were underway.

It was a similar scene last summer when Angus L., recently retired office manager of Intergroup, was invited to chair the Canal Group, another oldtime Fremont group. "It was riotous. A woman was tossing candy around to everyone at the table. The meeting was followed by a business meeting, which few people usually attend, and there were 20 people there, all paying attention! I said to myself, ´Something good is going on here.´"

That sentiment is echoed by Al S., who runs theThunderbird Treatment Center´s drug and alcohol programs. He spends a lot of time at Fremont even though it´s at the other end of the city. "I admire Fremont for keeping its identity. It´s a safe place for people who would not be accepted most places. It´s warm and dry and off the street, and there´s always coffee. "I see a a lot of relapsing there. But no one puts them down. It just shows it´s not enough to quit drinking and drugging. There´s much work to be done after that. If they go out, they´re accepted back ´cause everyone knows how easily it can happen to them. There are no class levels there. I call it the emergency room of AA."

With so many down and out people involved, how does Fremont stay afloat financially? "You´d be surprised," Al said. "When the basket goes around, Fremonters are generous. People who can least afford it make the biggest contributions. It is in those meetings where they drive up in Saabs that they pass the basket by and drink the coffee."

Fremont originated in the home of a famous AA member, the late Big Pete. When the meeting outgrew his home, he and six other pioneers, Tom T., Bill M., Jerry C., Byron L., Tom P. and Austin M., formed the Wallingford Fremont Group in 1947. After a brief interlude at the Wallingford Commercial Club, they rented the upstairs at 3414 ½ Fremont Avenue, and 13 years later took over the whole building. That was in 1961, and from then on, Fremont was known as the Aurora Fellowship after the consortium which arranged to rent the building.

The late Herb W., described in the 1966 "History of the Washington State AA" as the "guiding light," reported that "all of the old furnishings had been disposed of, so we started out with bare floors, a Group of about six members, faith of God, and the Program-confident that a way would be found to go ahead if the place were needed and if we carried the AA message properly."

According to Angus L., Fremont was a new idea in the AA world, an association-the Aurora Fellowship-formed to provide housing for AA meetings. It was not a club or recreation center such as existed elsewhere in the country as well as in Seattle.

[Oddly, when Fremont was located in Fremont, it was known as the Aurora Fellowship. Since moving to another area, it has become universally known as the Fremont Fellowship.]

Fremont remained in Fremont Fellowship Hall for 44 years, but the funky old Fremont neighborhood was changing and gentrifying, and in 1991 the landlord decided to upgrade the building. Fremont lost its lease and moved out to 212 N. 85th for three years, then on to their current location at 8916 Aurora North. Now there are reports that they´ll be moving again, again thanks to gentrification, perhaps closer to Fremont or Ballard.

[Incidentally, gentrification can take some strange turns. Fremont is now home to a giant statue of Vladimir Ilich Lenin, founding father of Russian communism, as well as a concrete statue of a troll eating a Volkswagen Bug. Neither is related to the Fremont Fellowship.]

Big Pete was the best-known of those early Fremonters. Angus said that "To those of us who sobered up in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was a rite of passage to hear Big Pete´s ´Introduction to AA.´ He would open up the meeting by having someone read ´How It Works,´ then talk for the next hour and a half. He conducted this meeting for over 25 years until his health started giving out and he was in his early 80s. He always talked to a packed house.

"In those days, oldtimers had a custom of never mentioning how long they had been sober, and Pete was no exception. Part of his talk, though, included the fact that he delivered beer to the taverns with a team of horses in his early sobriety, so his sobriety went back a long ways. People would ask him if he was ever tempted to drink the beer. His reply was that if he were driving a ´honey wagon, he wouldn´t drink that product either."

Pete had other interests besides AA. Among little people, he was best known for his role as Santa Claus to North Seattle kids for many years. He remained active in AA until his death in 1985.

The torch has long since passed to a new generation of Fremonters. One of the best known is Iron Mike, who got his nickname from his days as a steelworker. Disarmingly modest, Mike says his role is "to take up space, pontificate a lot, and lead a meeting once in awhile." He sobered up at Old Fremont in 1979 and has been a fixture ever since. Mike, a member of the Prairie Band of the Potawatomi Tribe, said, "Fremont and the oldtimers were instrumental in helping me shut my mouth and get sober. I´d been living under the viaduct when I first got there. For 14 days, I sat and did nothing. Finally, someone said, "Why don´t you sign in? You been here for two weeks." So I did, on Oct. 1, 1979, and that became my life.

"Seven of us would go to the 5 o´clock meeting every day, then go to dinner in Ballard, then come back for the 8 o´clock meeting and after that go to coffee and talk to 1 a.m. The next day, we´d start over, and that´s how I got sober. It became my life, and it still is. I still make six or seven meetings a week." Sometimes, Iron Mike said, "you wonder how in hell anyone gets sober there, but they do, and so they´re doing something right. One big thing is that we feel everyone has a right to be there. A drug is a drug is a drug. I don´t insist that these young people who are coming in now talk about nothing but alcohol. AA is changing."

Mike now works at the Thunderbird Treatment Center as the resident attendant on the graveyard shift. He is contentedly single. "I was married until 21 years ago and now I haven´t had a drink for 21 years. I think there´s a connection."

Researched by Angus L. Written by Dick S.