It´s a well-known fact that sobriety can unleash potential you never knew you had. That truism was never demonstrated better than in the life and career of Irish Carter of Redmond and Alaska.

He was a broken down drifter and drunk when he began his struggle for sobriety in Salem, Oregon. In a few short years, he was the president of a pipeline company that built oilfield collection systems all over the world.

Irish, whose real first name was Gene, got his monicker in a CCC camp in Idaho. ´I got on the boxing team and that´s what they called me, and it´s stuck. I´ve tried to shake it lots of times, but it just wouldn´t go away."

It was in Salem in 1947, two years before his AA birthday, that Irish first met up with the fellowship. ´I had been in most of the drunk tanks on the west coast. I used to have alcoholic seizures when I would try to come off my drunk, and I had one in Salem. They scraped me off the street and put me in a hospital. While I was in there, a fellow from Alcoholics Anonymous came in and threw his hat down on the bed. ´Hell, you´re not in bad shape,´ he told me. Two years, ago, l was in a padded cell across the street. People don´t know what happens to us alcoholics, do they?´ I asked him where the hell he got off calling me an alcoholic, and he said, ´Why do you think they got you tied in bed?´

He was a kind fellow, took me home with him and I stayed there about a week. He took me to my first meeting, at the public library, and I thought it was great."

But it wasn´t his time yet to stay sober. "That Christmas, l was in Portland and feeling pretty good so I got drunk again and ended up in jail. When I got out, I went back to Alaska, where I´d been working as a plumber for a good share of my life. I went to Sitka, and stayed sober there ´til St. Patrick´s Day in 1949. Then I got drunk again. l was in a hell of a shape ´cause there was nothing in Sitka but drunks. But finally I sat down and wrote a letter to Alcoholics Anonymous in Seattle. The Empire Way group got my letter, and four or five of ´em wrote me little notes, and they all said the same thing: get together with a group. They knew I couldn´t stay sober unless I did.

"Well, l was a long way from anyplace. By the time I got those letters back, I´d walked out a couple of pairs of shoes, but I did stay sober. In July that year, I went to Anchorage and contacted Erv Molsness, another plumber that I knew. [Editor´s note: Erv was the subject of this series in the May 1999 High and Dry.] I didn´t have any trouble from then on.

"In 1953, I started my own business. We had an office here in the Central Building, so I got to know a lot of the people in the program in Seattle. Our head office was in Anchorage´ and over time we got into the pipeline construction business. I had crews in Prudhoe Bay from 1971 ´til I sold my company, National Mechanical Contractors, in 1985. Most people down here only know about the Alaska pipeline, but there are hundreds and hundreds of miles of gathering systems in Prudhoe Bay and the smaller fields on the North Slope. I helped start the first AA group in Prudhoe Bay in 1974.

"I had an office here and then in Redmond. I was doing a lot of work in the Arctic ´til I had a heart attack in Barrow and damn near died. I came back down here for heart surgery, and after that I had to get out of the business. Couldn´t do it anymore.

"But I stay pretty active, go to quite a few meetings. I usually have one or two guys hanging around that I try to help straighten out a little."

Before his retirement, Irish´s pipeline work took him to many of the leading oil producing countries around the world. During his travels, he did his best to stay in touch with the program.

"I was in Iran before the revolution there. I put a little ad in the paper that said, ´If anyone is a friend of Bill W., please call me. I would love to talk to you.´ We ended up with three guys from the military that were training Iranian soldiers, so we had several get-togethers. I found AA most places I went. Denmark, Amsterdam, Paris. There were quite a few guys from the U.S. Embassy. And the same thing in Rome, Italy--pretty well all US. citizens that were working there.

"Muslim countries were easier to work in. Few of those people have a problem with alcohol because of their religion. In Saudi Arabia, there were a couple of guys that worked for us that had been around AA. But I was pretty confident by then anyway.

"Somewhere around 10 years after I got sober, that old desire left me and thank God it´s never come back again."

Many of Irish´s most powerful memories were of his time in Anchorage. Here are two of them:

Native Americans: "There seemed to be a bigger percentage of those people addicted to alcohol than amongst white people, and it seemed to do worse things to them than to us. I don´t know what the answer is. We had a lot of natives in our clubs in Anchorage. They were welcome, and they enjoyed it."

12 Step work: "We had a little club on Fourth Avenue where we used to congregate even when we didn´t have a meeting. We had a telephone and would go out to see people who needed help. All of us were pretty green at it. One night, a woman called and said her husband was having a terrible time. We walked down there and she invited us in. We didn´t know then that men didn´t go when a woman called. She said her husband was in the bedroom. Did you ever hear the slide action of a shotgun when somebody pumps a shell in? If you ever heard it, you never forget it. I heard it. He walked out, drunk, and he´s got his shotgun in his hand.

"´This is a game of checkers and it´s you bastards´ move,´ he said. So we left."

Irish saw a lot of changes in AA over the years. Did he feel it was as effective now as it was in earlier days?

"I do, yes, but some of the changes I didn´t like too much. Like when the courts started sending guys to Alcoholics Anonymous, forced them to go. A lot of them were just doing time at the meeting, stayed outside and smoked pot, then came in to get their slips signed. One night, I cornered a judge I knew and asked him about the situation. He said, ´what the hell are we going to do with these drunks? We can´t put them all in jail. If we send ´em to Alcoholics Anonymous, some get sober and never drink again.´

"Well, I had to change my mind a little then, and I did. I see a lot of them that make it today and I say well, good. If you´ve saved one out of 10, that´s wonderful. I´ll even sign their slips now."

As the interview concluded, Irish thought back over his life of sobriety and expressed gratitude. "It´s been a wonderful life, sober. I´ve always been grateful because this program made a difference in my life that counted."

Interviewed and written by Dick S.