It was 1975, and Jill B-D, now the buttoned-down office manager of Intergroup, was one of a crowd attending the board meeting of her children´s pre-school.

"A friend and I and our husbands arrived more than a little smashed. We found two other couples in a similar state so all eight of us left and went to a tavern. We never made it. Instead, we wound up at one of the couple´s houses, and I lay down for a little ´nap.´ When I woke up, everyone else was in this huge bathtub, naked, so I joined them, me and some of the leading citizens of Mercer Island."

In a masterpiece of misstatement, Jill remembers her drinking career as "pretty uneventful."

"My children had a series of pets when they were young, most of which would not have been welcome if I´d been sober. Still, I have fond memories of a three-legged toad named Thumper; our terriers Genghis and Grover; , the salamanders Olivia Newt and John; and a cat named Ambush. Orville, the first grade pig, stayed with us on weekends, but Igor, our Nubian goat, was a permanent resident. He loved to climb our cherry tree and bleat at people on the sidewalk and scare the bejesus out of them."

These are "happy recollections that might indicate I had a problem with alcohol." She also supplied some examples of less than happy memories. One was of the Thanksgiving when she dropped the turkey and it "exploded all over the kitchen. I burst into tears and went to bed, leaving Art (her husband) to scrape the turkey off the floor and deal with a house full of guests."

There were other bad times, of course. "Showing up at my daughter´s school conference with a blinding hangover wasn´t a highlight of my life. Nor were the horrible fights Art and I used to have when we´d been drinking."

She had come to her alcoholism gradually. Unlike most young people, her serious drinking began after college. "It was a rite of passage to have a cocktail hour right after work, only mine kept getting longer and longer. It took years to get to middle stage alcoholism, but then I sped it along by marrying another alcoholic."

Through the worst years, though, she worked for Boeing, and wrote a bi-weekly column for the Mercer Island Reporter. That was the medium for this English major´s poetry, much of which is hilariously observant of middle class life. Sadly, sobriety robbed her of her muse. "It was a long time before I could write again," she said. "My humor came out of my pain, and I lost my edge when the pain was gone." Recently, she´s been writing occasional pieces for the Reporter again.

Jill is a third generation alcoholic and AA member. Her grandmother was in AA in the early 50s. Her father joined later, and in 1980 her mother went into treatment. All three died sober.

"By the time I was in my middle 30s, I knew I was an alcoholic, but I wasn´t ready to do anything about it. My real concern was Art´s drinking, so I went to Alanon. I asked the ladies who brought me home if I should quit to support Art. They just looked at each other. For them, it was a non-issue-one polite drink at Christmas was their style."

But looking back now, Jill says it was then that she began to focus on what alcohol was doing to her life. Surrounded by alcoholics, recovering and otherwise, made her think. Nothing happened, though, until she invited a friend for dinner. From then on, she sees her life as a series of small miracles.

"One evening when I´d invited a friend to dinner, the kids were racing through the house, so I headed upstairs to shoo them outside. Halfway up, I couldn´t remember where I was going. I went back downstairs and told my friend I´d just had a blackout.. She asked me what I thought I should do, and I said I was thinking about quitting drinking. I told her my mother had gone to treatment and it had worked.

"My friend grabbed the phone book and found the listing for Alcenas in Kirkland. That was April 6, 1981, my sobriety date. I went there willingly the next day, but first I had to make sure I couldn´t be talked out of it. I told my doctor and the girls´ school officials first, made sure I could afford it and got someone to comb Erica´s hair. When I´d gotten rid of every objection Art could make, only then did I tell him my plans.

"In the first few days of treatment, I was able to say ´I´m Jill and I´m an alcoholic.´ A feeling just washed over me-´Oh, God, that´s the answer.´ From that minute on, my disease really had my attention. I met people in there who were recycling for the second or third time, and what they all had in common was they had not gone to AA when they went home. (I went to three or four a week when I finished treatment.) There was woman in there whose life was always somebody else´s fault. She taught me, without knowing it, that I had to take responsibility for my own stuff.

"When I got out after 28 days, I tap danced off to AA on Mercer Island, and for the first time in my life I followed directions. They made me the coffee maker that first night, and I got involved in service early on. I began volunteering at Intergroup that first year, and in May 1983, when the administrative assistant quit, I was in the right place at the right time. Dean, the office manager, asked me to apply, I did and he hired me. Boy, was I green. Even though I´d been Intergroup rep for a year, I still didn´t understand the difference between Intergroup and General Service. (Editor´s note: few do.)

"Dean got brain cancer and had to retire, and Angus L. came on board in October ´83 as office manager. From that time on, I´ve felt like a student in the best school in the world. I learned so much from Angus. He taught me to be accepting of other people, the amazing group of people we have in this program. The volunteers teach me a lot too.

"Angus and I became good friends and were very comfortable working together for 18 years. The same is true with Larry now that Angus has retired and Larry has taken my old spot as administrative assistant."

Though chained to her desk eight hours a day, Jill has her finger on the AA pulse in the greater Seattle area. (Intergroup serves an area from Federal Way to Edmonds.) She talks to the volunteers who work in the office. On the phone, she picks brains to get a sense of the atmosphere in the endless variety of meetings which characterize this program. "That´s so I can hook up a newcomer with a group that will work for him," she said.

Jill was eight years sober when her sobriety underwent its first real test. Her daughter Erica was injured severely when she hit a chuckhole on her bicycle. The child lost three front teeth and suffered a concussion as well as road burns and scrapes.

"From the minute I got to the hospital," Jill said, "I was filled with such gratitude-that she was not hurt worse, for the neighbor who saw the accident, for the fire department responding to quickly. I realized the program was working in my life." The girl made a full recovery.

Her daughters, now grown women with children of their own, were 9 and 12 respectively when Jill joined AA. A few years later, they played a pivotal role in their father´s finding sobriety. As Jill tells it:

"I was at the office when the phone rang. Art was taking Megan to a party in Bellevue. Two blocks from our house, she made an excuse to get out of the car and call me. I got grandma to come and take her to the party. My mom just told Art that she would take Megan, and told him to drive home carefully.

"Erica, who was about 13 then, was home folding laundry when she found Art´s vodka stash. When he came in, she was sitting at the kitchen table with two vodka glasses. ´Hi, Dad, let´s have a drink,´ she says. He told her she was too young, and Erica said, ´It makes as much sense for me as for you, Dad.´

"I came home, determined he would be on the front porch if he didn´t go to treatment, but he just said, ´Don´t say anything. I´m going.´

"That was in 1985, and since then, recovery has been as much a part of our lives as drinking had been before."

Jill is now confronting another major issue in her life, her weight. "My weight problem started about the same time that alcohol became an issue, in my middle or late twenties," Jill said. "I´ve struggled ever since, and never accepted it. I conquered my addiction to amphetamines in the Sixties, tranquilizers in the Seventies, booze in the Eighties and cigarettes in the Nineties. Now, on my doctor´s advice, I´m going to address my 30-year struggle with weight with gastric bypass surgery on April 22."

This surgical procedure reduces the size of the stomach to half a cup, and has been remarkably successful for many people, most notably Al Roker, weatherman for the Today Show. Jill is undergoing a series of tests in preparation for the surgery.

"It´s not something I like to talk about, but the fellowship needs to know what´s going on," she said.

She looks on the upcoming surgery as one more opportunity to demonstrate "the incredible acceptance and gratitude I feel for this fellowship and this program. I find myself seeing the good that comes out of everything, and of how much God works in our lives."

Interviewed and written by Dick S.