They wanted each other, but they didn't really know it till they found sobriety.

We're talking about Helena D. and Rich B., two pillars of the hardnosed Solution Group, which Rich helped found 19 years ago to take Alcoholics Anonymous back to its roots.

They were a hard-drinking item back in the middle '80s. Helena was the Pioneer Square bartender where Rich did his drinking when the pressures of his law practice got too much for him. They're married now, but for awhile it looked like they were each going to go their own way. They still have their little disagreements, such as the date that Rich got sober.

"My sobriety date is Feb. 28, 1988," Rich declared. "Actually," his wife injected, "you got sober on a weekday. It was the 29th." Rich didn't argue.

"We drank together for a year before we hooked up," Helena said. "We were strictly party animals. In October of '86, when you took me to Victoria, I was totally hooked on you."

He took her to a treatment center in 1987. "My life was spinning," Helena recalled. "I needed a rest. Besides that, I wanted to find out what the treatment center had done to my mom. She went in there in 1984 and came out sober. I wasn't looking for sobriety. I was just looking for a way to control my drinking.

"That in spite of the fact I'd known I was an alcoholic by the time I was 18 years old. I just didn't want to be goofy like my mom."

Helena grew up in Akron, Ohio, birthplace of A.A. As a matter of fact, she was born in St. Thomas Hospital where Dr. Bob practiced and Sister Ignatia was her aunt's boss. Helena's family knew both of these A.A. icons.

She started drinking at 12, but got her start as a substance abuser dropping acid before that. Her father, a Polish count with a distinguished wartime O.S.S. record, apparently joined his wife in turning a blind eye to their teenage daughter's carryings-on. "He's my claim to fame, though," Helena said. "As his daughter, I'm a Polish countess." ("Don't even TRY to spell it," Rich advised.)

When she was 15, Helena and her drinking pals got fake I.D.s with names they lifted off tombstones. From then on, it was party time all the time. "I drove around the country trying to be a hippy chick. I was good at covering my tracks. I told my parents I was visiting relatives. I lied a lot."

It all came crashing down when she was 19 and had a terrible auto accident. Oddly enough, she was sober when it happened. The accident left her in a coma with multiple fractures. "It's a miracle I survived," Helena said. "The only reason I'm here is to carry the message of recovery to other alcoholics."

When she came to, she spent a year recovering and learning to read again. She decided to go to college at the University of Arizona "so I could get warm." She did well, and was planning to go to the University of Texas to study biochemistry. It never happened, though. She wandered out to Seattle to visit a friend, boozing and drugging all the way, and ran out of money. She never went back to school. Instead, she went to work as a bartender in Pioneer Square and met Rich.

Rich came to Seattle via Livingston, Montana, where he was born, and Spokane, where he grew up. He went to WSU before getting his law degree at Gonzaga and moving on to Seattle in 1970 to join the public defender's office. That lasted three years before he hung out his own shingle in Pioneer Square and has been practicing there ever since.

"My drinking was periodic," Rich said. "Started in college when I was 20. It was intermittent partying and heavy studying, and then the same thing all over again in Seattle. I always showed up for work, but when the pressure got too great, I'd go out and get ripped. Pretty soon, that routine doesn't work. There's no rest, no peace. It takes an emotional toll. You get the idea that this is all there is.

"My whole life was turning gray. I lost interest in people and things. The only fun was when I was drinking. My family saw I was non-productive, and for awhile they didn't know why. But then my brothers confronted me and said I had to go to treatment. It wasn't a formal intervention. I just didn't care, so why not go?"

So he went, not with the intention of getting well, but just because nothing mattered. In 28 days, though, he quit drinking and emerged a dry drunk. "I was dry, not sober," Rich said. But he didn't have anything better to do, so he continued to attend meetings at the treatment center. After three months, the program took hold and he realized he was a sober alcoholic.

"That's the miracle of A.A.," Rich said. "I backed into sobriety. A.A. is there for the finding whether we want to find it or not."

Once he found it, he plunged in head first. Or, as he put it, "we did a lot of compliance stuff. I went to seminars in Sacramento, listened to tapes, read the Big Book. I rounded up eight people to do a book study. Then I started another one. I told someone, 'I'm so busy, you're killin' me.' There was no sympathy. 'Good for you,' I was told."

Helena, meanwhile, was watching this transformation enviously. When she'd emerged from the women's treatment center in 1987, she immediately got back on a heavy diet of gin and drugs. All the crackheads using her apartment resulted in her eviction. She moved in with Rich "and went to lots of meetings, and drank in between. Finally, I realized I had to quit. There was no 'managing' the problem." But that isn't the end. She and Rich got into an argument, so she took a geographical to southwest Oregon to be with her mother and there managed four months' sobriety. When she got back here and moved back in with Rich, there was another misunderstanding. "I thought we were living together. He thought he was just giving me a roof over my head. Then I had a slip, we had a fight and I moved out to Greenlake.

"It took me a couple of years to get sober. While we were living apart, I got a sponsor and started working the steps. He and I were kind of on hold. I was thinking I needed the program more than this relationship, so I turned him over to God to see what would happen."

There was one more disaster. She helped a friend buy some cocaine and wound up smoking it with him. "Till then, I'd always snorted it. I'd kidded myself it wasn't that bad 'cause I didn't smoke it. Smoking gave me a whole different feeling and I ended up drinking that day. A drug is a drug is a drug."

But that was the last time. She contacted her sponsor the next day, Sept. 20, 1989, and has been clean and sober ever since-one day at a time.

Rich, meanwhile, sober for a year and a half, developed a strong feeling, shared with his sponsor, that there was a need for a meeting with answers and no drunkalogues. On Oct. 18, 1988, they started the Solution Group, a closed meeting which focuses entirely on the first 164 pages of the Big Book. Still going strong, it has grown to 200 members. Meetings are on Tuesdays at 8 p.m. at the Ballard 1st Lutheran Church.

The Solution group chairman picks one topic, and everyone is expected to speak to that. The secretary maintains a roster to make sure everyone is called on. It never breaks into smaller groups. "We're sharing the first 164 pages," Rich said, "and everyone should hear."

Solution takes their meeting to other groups within a 50-mile radius of Seattle every month. They answer the phones at Intergroup. Nearly everyone has a sponsor and has worked or is working the steps. Newcomers are encouraged to read "Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers" to get a sense of how A.A. used to be, and how Solution wants it to be now.

"It's an amazingly strong group," Rich said.

Although most newcomers to A.A. are dual abusers, Helena said they are discouraged from talking about anything but alcohol. "Our biggest fear is that someone will come in who is a pure alcoholic and be turned off if he hears talk about other drugs. Someone like that is very rare today, but why risk it?"

Rich said "nobody beats anybody with a club. If they share, they share on what it is they share on. But we're for people who want the A.A. program. I offer to hook them up with other programs like N.A. if that's what they need.

"This may sound militaristic, but it's not. We're a friendly group who want to hear answers and work the steps. We want it to be like A.A. was in the old days. We even have hard coffee cups like Bill and Dr. Bob used. Good for the environment too."

"I love my life today," Helena said. " A.A. has given me the tools to be productive." She's an accountant.

"I'm uniquely able to help teenage alcoholics 'cause I was one," she said. "I have 35 sponsees. And I have this amazing husband," she said, patting his knee affectionately. "He has his life, I have mine, and we have our life together."

Rich says A.A. is a way of life. "It's fellowship, it's principles to live by, it provides a recipe for living life in total peace. It's a path on a spiritual journey that has no limits and has no boundaries. Everything changes if you follow this program."

And give Helena the last word: "Life is no longer just about you. It's about what you can bring to the party. A.A. changes everything. IT'S GOOD STUFF, BOY!"

Interviewed and written by Dick S.