It was the gift that kept on giving.

Chances are Joe B. is no longer grateful, but at the time it was manna from heaven. Fifteen bottles of Scotch, that is, bought by his then-mother-in-law moments after she stepped off the plane from England. She had flown in to see her first grandchild, but she had to go to the liquor store first.

"She stayed three months and we got on famously," Joe recalled. "When she left, I was in the habit-drinking to midnight even though she was gone."

Joe, who sobered up on Aug. 16, 1996, spent a lot of years before that date demonstrating a nearly incredible capacity for alcohol. At one point in his life, he was spending time at his brother´s house, drinking from 2 in the afternoon till 2 in the morning. "My brother would be sick and hung over the next day, and I felt fine. I never believed I was an alcoholic."

That high level of tolerance served him well as a municipal employee. He´s worked there for 20 years, the first 10 as a heavy duty drinker. "I was drinking a gallon wine a day (red wine was my favorite). I know now that I was alcoholic, but always a functioning alcoholic. I never drank during the day, never had a bottle stashed in my desk or my coat, and I never had hangovers." He´s held a variety of assignments. Twenty years in the bureaucracy and he´s still content! "I like my job. I don´t hate coming to work at all."

Joe never got a college degree, but he could have if the hippie culture hadn´t taken him over. Born and raised in Bremerton, he earned an academic scholarship in high school and chose the very prestigious University of Chicago. "I was an 18-year-old kid who´d never been out of Bremerton, and here I was in the heart of South Chicago. I lasted two years as a liberal arts student, but it was the height of the hippie era. I dropped out of school to join in, and before long I was messed up on drugs-psychedelics, mescaline, marijuana. But before long, I realized that drugs were doing me in. I quit on my own and never used again. I was terrified at what was happening to me. I was having flashbacks a month after taking LSD. It was really bad, really disorienting."

The drinking was quite another matter, though. He´d been drunk a few times by the time he was 15, "but I thought I was drinking normally. Alcohol was never really a problem for me in high school." After he quit drugs, he was drinking two beers a day and working as a clerk in a hospital business office. He stayed in Chicago for two years after leaving college, then came to Seattle and became a cab driver. That job lasted four years, during which time he met his wife, an Englishwoman, and fathered two children.

The family moved to Bremerton when Joe´s dad gave him a site to build a house, and that´s what he did-designed and built his own house while commuting to his cabbie job in Seattle. His drinking was escalating, but he was also functional enough to attend drafting classes at Seattle Community College and work as a draftsman.

In 1986, his marriage ended. His wife took the children, a girl and a boy aged 6 and 4, and returned to England. "There they remain to this day," Joe said. "It was very difficult. I have deep regrets about the whole thing, mostly because of the children. I see my daughter once in a while. She´s come over here as a visitor, and I paid her tuition for a teaching credential in England a few years ago. I hear from my son now and then, but I´m closer to my daughter." It´s plainly a situation which still carries pain.

Maybe he wasn´t meant to be married. There was a period before his marriage when, unemployed, he holed up in his apartment. "I went for four months without talking to anyone," Joe said. "I mailed in the rent. I was depressed and suicidal, but you know, there are people who need people and people who don´t need people. I thought I was one of the latter. But I learned differently after I got sober. Do you remember Barbra Streisand´s old hit, ´People´? That really struck a chord with me."

Here are the opening lyrics, from Streisand´s 1968 hit movie, "Funny Girl."

People-people who need people
Are the luckiest people in the world
We´re children, needing other children
And yet letting our grown-up pride
Hide all the need inside
Acting more like children
Than children.

"I spent the time reading and writing, and sleeping 18 hours a day."

He was able to stop drinking whenever he wanted to read a book. He calls it "spontaneous inhibition." But as he looks back he knows that by the time he went to work for the city, he was a full blown alcoholic. "I never drank at work, but I´d be drunk from the night before. I was physically dependent on liquor. When I didn´t have a drink for four or five hours, I´d go into withdrawal. Acute anxiety attacks, fear and panic, even a psychotic episode. There was three months of that, till one morning it occurred to me that I couldn´t do that anymore.

"I couldn´t bear the idea that I had to stop drinking, but I knew things had to change. I called EAP (Employee Assistance Program) and said ´I want to talk about my alcoholism.´ Twenty minutes into the interview, the counselor told me I needed to go to Group Health Detox. We were up at the Group Health EAP office in Northgate, and Detox is in the Group Health Hospital on Capitol Hill. It was a long drive, so I bought a half gallon of wine to sustain myself on the trip. I drank most of it in the parking lot. I didn´t feel particularly drunk when I walked into the emergency room and told ´em my problem. They told me I needed to go to Group Health Detox in Bellevue. I wanted to drive myself, but they put me in a cab and I spent five days in Detox." He counts his second day in Detox as his sobriety date.

"The outpatient program required us to go to three A.A. meetings a week or get kicked out. That was a Tuesday. I called Intergroup and they referred me to the Wedgewood Tuesday night men´s group. I told a bit of my story that night, including the fact that I was drinking a gallon of wine a day. After the meeting, a member came up to me and said ´You´re in the right place.´"

For the next two months, Joe did three meetings a week, attended outpatient classes three nights, worked full time and went to A.A. meetings on weekends. One of them was Northgate on Saturday night, which became his home group.

Joe has been in service almost from the beginning. In his second or third month, he recalls, he decided to go to the business meeting. The secretary needed a coffee maker, and for the next seven months, that was Joe´s job. He held they key, literally. He had the only key because he had to be there first, so it was a built-in responsibility. After a year´s sobriety, he was asked to chair the First Step group. "I thought it was because I was such an interesting person. I found out later the oldtimers just wanted to be sure I´d keep showing up to make the coffee. I did that for five years."

From there, it was GSR for his home group, two years as zone rep for Zone16, two years as the group´s representative to Intergroup, DCM for two years, Grapevine literature chairman and a stint on the Intergroup office committee. Capped by his election in December to a two-year term as vice chairman of the Intergroup board. Whew!

Joe was asked about the perennial question of drugs other than alcohol. He says his personal preference is to focus on A.A.´s singleness of purpose, but never objects if talk of other drugs comes up in meetings. "Such talk is not uncommon," he observed.

Always a bachelor since his divorce, Joe has another love besides A.A. "I play a lot of poker, mostly at the Muckleshoot Casino. Texas Hold ´Em is my game." Make any money? "Well, no, but all of us have good jobs. We can afford to lose. In my early sobriety, I played a lot more-won a leather jacket for 400 hours in the casino in three months. It´s not like that anymore. I can say no anytime.

"I like horseracing too. If I was going to Emerald Downs tomorrow, I´d spend four hours tonight studying the Daily Racing Form. We can bet on 30 or 40 races a day all over the country through simulcasting.Some people might regard me as a compulsive gambler."

Joe is an atheist who doesn´t like atheists. "I went to some of their meetings early on when I was terribly conflicted about God. They were exactly like me and I didn´t like ´em, so I stopped going.

"Now I´m in contact with something bigger than me in the world. My Higher Power is a group of people coming together trying to do their best. That´s my Higher Power."

Interviewed and written by Dick S.