To be a player in Alcoholics Anonymous, you have to enjoy dealing with controversy and the endless disagreements over interpretation of the AA catechism.

One who understood that well, and relished it, was the late Herb W., one of the giants of Alcoholics Anonymous in Seattle in its formative years. Herb had 46 years of sobriety when he died in April 1997.

He was living in Los Angeles, in and out of sobriety, in the40s. Dates, he told me, are pretty hazy, but he finally made the program and picked Feb. 12, 1951 as his sobriety date. "I don´t know just when it was exactly, but that´s close."

"I was a hardnose. I was. I told em, I´m not gonna change my policy cause it´s working. We started with nothing, we´re gonna end up with nothing, but in the meantime, we´re gonna have fun doing it.

"It was around 1958 or ´59. Fremont had been going quite a while when the lady who´d been taking care of the place said she was gonna retire and close up. Well, I resisted, but other people said there wasn´t much else to do--nobody was working, we couldn´t pay the rent. So I said ´I´ll put myself on the hook,´ and signed a year´s lease at $75 a month so we could continue the group.

"I had in mind a place like some we had in L.A. that welcomed everyone. Whether you like it or not, there´s a caste system in AA bad as in India. Some people were not welcome in the nice AA groups. I wanted to get some of them. That was the reason for starting Fremont. So pretty soon every class of alcoholic started coming, and it got the reputation of being a roughhouse joint.

"I paid the rent for more than a year, and that became a bone of contention with Intergroup. I was always in trouble. The chairman of Intergroup at the time said he wasn´t going to let that bunch of bums have a group. I told him we were trying to get some drunks sober. Well, there was all this yakity yak back and forth ´til finally the New York office sent somebody out to investigate. Like a lot of the New York oldtimers, he thought he was Christ´s little brother, but he did a fair job. He said he´d visited Fremont four times and couldn´t see anything wrong with it. ´They don´t have dances, they don´t have card games, they don´t have anything, all they have is AA meetings about three times a day. I can´t see a thing wrong with that.´

"Part of our problem was we had a few rebels. There was one guy we called Big Hal, a longshore boss of some kind. He was about 6 foot 10 and everybody always wanted to whip his ass. He´d go into one of the bars on First Avenue when he was drinking, somebody would challenge him, and he´d end up fighting the whole bar. When he came to AA, he became a purist--every ´i´ dotted and the commas in the right place. He and his clique kept the pot boiling at Fremont. He didn´t like it that I was paying all the bills, buying the coffee, buying the literature and even putting it in the racks. Harold thought his group was not getting the credit due them for being good, sober AA members."

Despite its difficulties, the Fremont group roared on for many years until it finally left its old home in Fremont and moved to 8916 Aurora Ave. N., where it continues to provide round the clock meetings every day for all comers.

Slowed by age and illness, Herb still clearly relished the memories of his time as a major figure in the growth and development of AA in Seattle. As he was helped out the door to his car he parted with:

"I used to rule. Now I drool."

Interviewed and written by Dick S.