It was 1:30 the morning of June 12, 1962, that Harriet T. kicked her two sub-teen daughters out of the house.

"I called my father-in-law and told him to come and get ´em, that I didn´t want ´em anymore. I came to at 7:30 and the house seemed awfully funny. The kids weren´t there. Oh, my God, what have I done? All I could remember was my father-in-law standing there looking at me, and saying, ´Ya, now you have what you want.´

"The only thing I could think of was dying. I wanted to take one of my husband´s fishing knives and shove it in and twist, twist, twist. I wanted it to hurt. I wanted to punish myself. But then I thought I didn´t want the kids to see that, so I was going to do it with the car. I hooked a hose up to the exhaust and into the back window. The only reason I can think of that it didn´t happen was that God gave me another blackout. The next thing I knew, I was sitting at the kitchen table with my head in my hands."

At that point, the thought came into her head to call Alcoholics Anonymous. She had dipped her toe in eight years before, but wasn´t ready for the program. She always kept 3 pieces of literature hidden in her lingerie drawer, though: "Letter to a Woman Alcoholic," "The Alcoholic Woman," and "Who, Me?" So she knew a little bit about alcoholism that morning when she called AA. "Boy, I was shaking when I dialed that damn thing, but I did it. Forty five minutes later, Bernice showed up. I found out later she always gave a person 45 minutes on a 12 Step call to clean up and get ready. In those days, the person who came to see you usually became your sponsor. She did, and she still is. She´ll have 47 years in the program in a couple of months."

Harriet never had another drink after that morning. She went to her first meeting that same night, June 12, 1962. Only the fact that she was a "stubborn Norwegian" kept her from the booze for several years. "God, it was terrible. You know the old phrase, ´What the hell? Who cares?´" She was going to five or six meetings a week, but it was still a struggle. It helped that the kids came home a few days after she sobered up.

"I wanted to apologize. I didn´t know what happened. Had I hurt them? The youngest one-she was 11 then-said ´Mom, you were so drunk you couldn´t catch us.´ I tried to explain blackouts. They had them confused with passouts. I told ´em a blackout is temporary alcoholic amnesia from drinking too much Then the 12-year-old said, "How could you be blamed for doing something you didn´t know you were doing?´"But Harriet doesn´t let herself off the hook. "That´s the way kids are. They have us on a pedestal and make excuses for us like crazy."

The girls are Harriet´s stepdaughters by her third husband. When that marriage broke up, the girls opted to stay with her. "I got about 10 feet tall. I told the girls we´d just be three working girls together again. We did fine. I´d have been dead from drinking if it weren´t for my kids."

Harriet got as early a start on her drinking career as I´ve ever heard of. She was three years old when she got high on the foam from her father´s home brew back in Argyle, Minnesota. This was in the days of Prohibition, and her father had a home brew cottage industry. The stock was buried in the yard to hide it from the revenuers, so he was often out in the yard in the wee hours of the morning getting supplies for a customer. Her mother made dandelion wine, and sure enough, when she was five years old, she got into that too, with two little friends. And then she found a bottle under the bleachers at the ball park and drank so much her mother found her in the yard, writhing on the ground. The good woman tied her daughter to a tree to keep her under control, went and got a wash tub and washed off the vomit.

"So I was a falling down drunk before I was seven year old," Harriet mused. The family moved to Seattle when she was seven, just before the stock market crash that set off the Great Depression in 1929. It was here she grew up. Tragedy struck the family when she was 23. Her father was killed in a cave-in of a deep ditch where he was laying pipe. She says she hated God for the next 20 years, until she was able to let it go by working the program.

Harriet attended both Roosevelt and Lincoln high schools, always hanging with the kids who drank. "I was a built-in alky."

When she finished high school, she went to work proofreading the city directory for 15 cents an hour. Then came the war and the chance to go to work for the Army Corps of Engineers for big money, $125 a month. "Let me tell you-Seattle is one heck of a town in wartime-army, navy, coast guard, marines, fly boys-we got ´em all. The doughboys were making $21 a month, so who do you think was buying the booze? Whew, I was out almost every night, and working six of seven days a week. But, oh God, that life escalated the drinking."

Her best wartime job was in a shipyard here, where she worked three years " I was a journeyman electrician." That ended with the end of the war, but the boss wanted to keep her on, as a welder.

"I said, ´No thank you,´ and he said ´You WILL become a welder.´ So I said, ´OK, Mr. Whateverhisnamewas, I´ll become a welder. I´m gonna take one of those long stick things they have, the solder, and I´m gonna come up here with my hot iron and shove it right up your ass.´" She was fired on the spot, and immediately went to work as a nurse´s assistant at Harborview Hospital. Then she did a short stint as office manager of a sheet metal shop before going to work in a bank. That was her longest stretch in one occupation, 17 years. In the meantime, she was married and divorced three times, and credits AA for her not having married a fourth time.

"AA taught me to quit getting married. When I´m me, I´m fun loving, happy go lucky, but as soon as I get married, I´m a hausfrau with no time for anything but putting food on the table and doing the dishes."

Harriet was in her 50s when she made the most important career change of her life. "In 1974, one of my AA babies (that she was sponsoring) told me I ought to be a counselor. I went to see Father Royce at Seattle U, and he gave me a full scholarship. I did that two-year program in a year and four months."

She worked briefly at a new in-patient center in Quilcene, then spent four years in Petersburg, Alaska, as a counselor and, the last two years, as director of the outpatient service there. She came back to Seattle to get married, but changed her mind and instead signed on to a treatment program in Juneau for two years. Then back to Seattle, and in 1982 became resident manager of Residents XII, the inpatient women´s program, in Burien.

"I loved that job. It was like being a house mother to those sick women. When I retired, I kept my toe in the door, and before long, I was Res XII´s weekend manager in Burien. Sundays, I drove ´em to an AA meeting. I got paid to go to an AA meeting!" she laughed. "I taught ´em electric slide dancing (line dancing) too." When the Burien operation closed down, Harriet went on unemployment for the first time in her life. "Boy, you should have seen me skirting jobs ´til I caught on as weekend manager at Res XII again. We moved from Kirkland up to Totem Lake last June. It´s a really nice place, for 25 women." Harriet´s a big Mariners fan. She usually watches the games at home on TV, but "if I was rich enough, I´d have a seat all season right behind first base." The thought made her gasp with pleasure. Earlier in her AA career, Harriet did a lot of 12 Step work. That´s declined over the years with the growth of treatment centers. "Thank God,´" she said. "I wouldn´t have the time. I´m sponsoring 23 women."

Interviewed and written by Dick S.