Alanon works!

Strange beginning for an article about A.A. oldtimer Jackie (Jacqueline) F. of Kent. But give credit where credit is due. That´s what Jackie does. Here´s the story:

She´d been trying to quit drinking for two years, when she´d gotten a DWI in North Dakota. When she and her husband Otto and their seven children moved back to Western Washington, the slips kept coming. Fed up, Otto joined Alanon, and one of the things he learned there is that his wife had to find sobriety by herself.

Then, on Feb. 8,1969, Jackie tied one on again. When she ran out of liquor, Otto refused to help her resupply, so she took off on foot on that cold and rainy night to find a bar. She couldn´t drive because the family couldn´t afford the insurance cost for someone convicted of a DWI, as she had been in North Dakota.

"I´d never done anything like that before," she recalled the other day. She found the bar and a bottle of booze before she started walking home. She also found a potential mugger, a man who followed her from the bar. "I was scared to death." But she got away unscathed.

When she got back to her house, she fell off the curb into the mud. Otto refused to give her a hand. "He´d learned in Alanon that it was up to me to deal with my problem. It was then I finally realized that I had an illness, and that Otto was serious when he said I had to quit or else. For two years, I´d heard in A.A. that it was an illness, but I´d always blamed my drinking on everything else: my mother, having all those children, the pressures of running a restaurant while trying to hold things together at home."

So that´s the date that Jackie gained her sobriety and A.A. gained a hardworking volunteer.

Many years later, another family member triggered another vital change in her life. Jackie was a pack-a-day smoker all through the years her children were growing up. Like all children in those days, they had to tolerate it. But three-and-a-half years ago, her granddaughter, who was going to have a baby, told her smoking was not acceptable.

"She told me she couldn´t bring her baby into my house. The whole house smelled of smoke; she had to wash her hair after every time she came to visit. Well, that and some health problems convinced me I´d better quit. It was the hardest thing I ever did. But now my granddaughter and her baby are regular visitors."

Born and raised in Tacoma, Jackie went to an all-girls Catholic high school, St. Leo´s. She remembers her mother as a demanding, dominating woman who was also an alcoholic addicted to prescription drugs. A nurse, she had ready access to tranquilizers, which she gave to Jackie and her brother. When Jackie moved to North Dakota, her mother followed her and shared her Demoral with Jackie.

Despite that history, Jackie´s relationship with her mother mellowed over time. Jackie and Otto built her a little house on their property, and Jackie took care of her for the last 20 years of her life. She died 12 years ago.

Jackie married Otto, her high school sweetheart, when she was 18, and moved with him to the alternately broiling and icy precincts of Bismarck, and later Dickinson, North Dakota, to go into the restaurant business. It was a frantic life. The children arrived a year or a little more apart. She had three in diapers at the same time, but she still helped with cooking and waitressing at the restaurants.

In 1967, the Dickinson restaurant went broke and the family moved back here. "Those were tough times," Jackie said. "The children were teenagers. Otto was working at Boeing when they went on strike. We had all these mouths to feed. The only reason he kept his job was he´d just been made a shop steward. That was God taking care of us, that and a Farmer´s Home loan.

"We were able to build the three-bedroom house in Kent where we still live. We shoehorned everybody in until they started moving out on their own a few years later. The rub was some of them moved back in when they couldn´t make it. But we´ve been by ourselves now for 30 years."

When Jackie decided on sobriety, she joined the Old Kent Group, the only A.A. group in the area at that time, and immediately became an ardent 12-Stepper. "I was 12-Stepping like crazy," she said, "and the first one was my brother. He died sober a year ago. He was sober as long as I was.

"I was the only woman in the group, so whenever a man found a problem woman, he gave me her number. Some of them stayed, and the membership gradually changed. I remember after about seven years, I looked around and there were more women there than men. That was an immense thing for me." Jackie choked up at the memory.

"As more young people and more women came in, the attitude toward other drugs gradually changed too. A lot of the women had trouble with Valium, and I was addicted to prescription drugs too.

"When I came in, you couldn´t say a word about anything but alcohol. Today, we´re very open. Lots of people say they´re both alcoholic and drug addicts. To me, they´re all drugs."

Once sober, there was no holding her back. She made coffee, cleaned ash trays, was secretary of her meeting, then GSR and Intergroup delegate. In1975, she met the late Andy Hollister, whose story was told in these pages back in January 2000. Andy wanted to start a meeting hall for South King County.

"I met Andy at a GSR meeting in 1975. He´d found a building in Renton and a couple of oldtimers put up some money to get it started, but Andy needed someone to do the work. My last child had just left home, so he and I and a couple more volunteers set up Serenity Hall (now located at 12536 Renton Ave. S.). We made it happen that first year." As Andy described it, "Jackie F. volunteered to be housekeeper. That woman was in here at 6 or 7 o´clock in the morning, and she didn´t leave till10 or 11 at night."

That wasn´t all. She and several others saw the need for a meeting for dual abusers where people were free to talk about all kinds of addictions. Jackie described it as a forerunner to Narcotics Anonymous.

In more recent times, Jackie and Otto have developed other ways to help. Both are strongly committed to helping Kent´s homeless men, and Jackie volunteers for the Kent 24-hour help line answering the phone.

The homeless effort serves up to 35 men. Twelve churches rotate sleeping space through the year, and 12 more rotate providing three meals a day. Jackie´s role with three other volunteers is to wash the blankets once a month at a laundromat. "It takes delicacy and tact," she said. "The men don´t want to let go of their blankies. We take ´em anyway. It´s a health issue."

The men are allowed into their shelters at 9 p.m. and must be out by 7:30 the next morning. Their blankets go into storage for the day at a trailer that Otto obtained. They always get the same blanket back.

In A.A., Jackie has learned that the kind of emotional abuse she suffered as a child is not uncommon. She thinks it kept her from growing up even as an adult, while she was mothering all those children.

"As I watched my children mature, I realized I myself was a very young teenager emotionally. Without A.A., I never would have grown up. Thank God for A.A."

Interviewed and written by Dick S.