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You have to quit drinking early in life to get in a half century of sobriety.

Joe M. has done it, and he carries the years lightly. He was 30 when he finally got sick and tired enough to stop the cycle of quitting-and-drunk-again, quitting-and-drunk again. That was Sept. 9, 1959, when a majority of the people in A.A. today were not yet born.

Joe had two major boosts along the way, both from women who helped to change his life. The first was a lady he knew while teaching at a local college. She had been taking courses from Fr. James Royce in the Alcohol Studies Program at Seattle University. Learning about the 12 Steps, she advised Joe that he was on his way either to insanity or death.

"She told me I was an alcoholic, but I wasn´t interested. I just wanted another drink. I´d been going out with this girl, and that time, I passed out in front of her house. She found me the next morning. And of course, I drank my way out of that relationship."

His other great feminine support was Peggy, who became his wife. Mutual support, actually. They met in A.A. and were married in 1960. Peggy was a teacher, as was Joe. "I´d been sober only a few months when we married," Joe said. "We had a supportive sobriety. I don´t think we would have made it without each other." Peggy died last year of cancer.

Joe got through college at St. Martin´s in Lacey in 3 ½ years, which prompted me to suggest he must have been a high bottom drunk. "No way!" said Joe. "I got thrown out of some bad joints."

Joe came to this area from Wenatchee, where his father ran a grocery store. He started drinking when he was a boarding student at St. Martin´s High School, and he still remembers the time he got drunk on fortified wine and orange pop. "Every time I think about it, my gorge rises," he said.

His drinking progressed as he progressed from high school to St. Martin´s College. "´After a night out with the guys back from World War II, I´d try to sleep without the bed spinning out of control. But it never interfered with school. Like I said, I graduated in 3 ½ years.

After St. Martin´s, Joe moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin to work in a brewery and get his master´s in English at Marquette University. "That brewery job was wonderful for an alcoholic," Joe said. "They served beer in the lunchroom, and we had beer breaks during the day. I never had a hangover ´cause I was always loaded."

But again, he defied the odds and got his degree, and without any help from the G.I Bill which put so many young men through college in that era. Joe´s army service came after he´s finished college.

With his two degrees in hand, he was a hot property for the army when he joined up. The army sent him to Washington, D.C. to Army Language School, where he became a translator in Vietnamese. Someone in the army must have been taking a long look into the future. This was 1951, more than a decade before this country´s disastrous adventure into the Vietnam War.

How did he like the nation´s capital? |"Hot and humid in the summer, damp and cold in the winter. No place for a guy from here."

So he got out of there as fast as he could and got a job as a technical writer for Boeing. It wasn´t a good fit, "terrible, in fact. Engineers are a tough audience, very picky. I had no technical knowledge, but I learned to appreciate what they were doing. We were doing tooling coordination, where I learned that a tool is not just a monkey wrench. These were gigs and molds, tools used to shape metals. We had to be highly accurate. I learned a lot, but it wasn´t for me."

Fortuitously, a friend who was running a night school needed a composition teacher, and Joe jumped into the career that lasted him a lifetime, with a break here and there.

"I was there for three years, but I was having trouble showing up for morning classes and getting my papers graded on time. The dean raised hell. When you show up drunk in that small world, the word gets around."

It got to the point that Joe quit his job to go and find sobriety, back home in Wenatchee. This was in 1957. He started going to A.A., but he also kept getting drunk between meetings. He was living at home with his parents and making an effort to help out in the family grocery store.

That help was limited. "I kept getting blackouts and horrible hangover. I told my mom one morning I wasn´t feeling well and couldn´t get up. The room stunk of wine. She knew I was lying. In her dismay, she told me that ´You´re a good man but you have a terrible thirst.´"

Unlike so many alcoholics, Joe does not come from a family of drunks. He developed the illness all by himself.

While he was in Wenatchee, he called his school here in Seattle and resigned. Things went from bad to worse. He never got a DUI, "but I should have. I was always near a car when I got arrested. One time, I´d knocked over a light standard, backed up and drove off with the windshield smashed. I kept hearing these sirens behind me and finally figured out they were meant for me.

"The cop said ´Get out of the car, you SOB.´ I refused, but a cop friend of mine who was there urged me not to get in any more trouble, so I finally got out and was taken to jail as a drunk. I got a break ´cause I was a local boy."

He had other bouts of car vs. alcohol, once when he passed out trying to change a flat tire.

Wenatchee wasn´t working for him, so he came back to this side of the mountains and began attending meetings in what later became the Northgate group. It was there he met Peggy, and found a tenuous sobriety.

"We met, she got drunk, I got upset, and I said ´How´d you like to see me drunk?´ So I showed her, had a four-day drunk , and that was my last one."

He and Peggy went to meetings together, "but separately. It was better that way."

Their long and happy marriage produced three children. One of his sons and two granddaughters are currently living with him. He loves the challenge.

One of their favorite places was the late lamented A.A, hall at 915 East Pine Street. "Anybody who was anybody in A.A. in Seattle would end up there on Thursday and Friday nights," Joe recalled. "There were four tables of study groups. We used Table Mate as our guide." And Friday night, Intergroup sponsored a big meeting there.(Editor´s note: Table Mate, a guide to the study of the 12 Steps, was never official A.A. literature, but was widely used in the Northwest in the ´40s, ´50s and ´60s. Some groups still use it.)

With sobriety, Joe went back to teaching, first in a high school and then to his old college job, where he stayed ´til he retired in 1994. In 1965, he took time out for a Ph.D. at the University of Colorado. Medieval English literature is his specialty, particularly Chaucer, but Beowulf is included too.

Joe found a lot of acceptance in the A.A. program. He was his group´s Intergroup delegate when he had his last drunk. He told the group what had happened, and offered to resign. "They told me they would ask for it when they wanted it," Joe said gratefully.

In other service work, he´s been an active !2 Stepper. That tailed off "when the treatment centers started taking over." He´s been GSR, and a phone answerer at Intergroup. "It´s almost like a superstitious belief," Joe said. "If some asks me to do something in A.A., I do it."

So what does this program mean today to this 50-year veteran?

"It´s certainly my way of life," he said. "If it weren´t for A.A., I wouldn´t be here. I wouldn´t have had a family, I wouldn´t have my grandchildren. Everything I have I owe to A.A. Sobriety has given me the ability to live right now, in the present. Every day, I get up and look at life through s-t-colored glasses. But I clean the glasses, get among friends and go to A.A. It´s a wonderful life."

Interviewed and written by Dick S.