Federal evaluators who are always looking for evidence that their programs are working will be pleased—maybe—to find that one of them worked in a way they never planned.

Unanticipated consequences, like they say. Back in 1978, Kathy L. was working for Seattle Head Start, the early childhood development program. Head Start put on a workshop on alcoholism for parents, and as a staff member, Kathy had to attend.

"The speaker made me uncomfortable with my own drinking," Kathy recalled. "Later, when he learned how I drank, he told me I had a problem. I told him I could quit any time I wanted to. No problem.

"Not long after that, I was out drinking with friends. I´d always prided myself on not driving drunk. My definition of ´drunk´ was whether I could stand or not. Well, that night I was driving home from South Park to the North End when I realized I couldn´t remember leaving the bar. Apparently, I had a problem with alcohol. As I wandered up the highway on the wrong side of the road, a cop pulled me over.

"´You don´t understand, officer. I´m an alcoholic,´I said." This was her first time to say the words. "Lady, I believe you," the cop replied. He was a dangerously merciful man, though. He let her back behind the wheel to drive to her niece´s house, honking his horn when she crossed the center line.

Kathy decided that was the end. For nine days, she sweated out the booze on a friend´s couch. She´d been kicked out of her own place for not paying the rent. She was still doing speed, though, when she called the alcoholism consultant she´d met through Head Start and told him she wanted to try A.A. He told her she must go to the Fremont Fellowship. "You won´t make it any other way. You won´t relate anywhere else." "He knew if I walked into a room where ladies were sitting around knitting, I´d never make it." So off she went to Old Fremont, when it was in Fremont. She was afraid to walk up the long stairway to the Hoot Owl meeting until she heard laughter. "I hadn´t heard laughter for a long time." She got a cup of coffee, but was shaking so bad she spilled it. Someone refilled it halfway with no comment except "God loves you and I do too."

Kathy´s sobriety date is Aug. 2, 1978, so she´s just celebrated 27 years. She got off all drugs shortly after she joined A.A., but she still welcomes discussions in A.A. meetings that include drugs other than alcohol.

At first, from day 1 in sobriety, Kathy was going to three meetings every day, sometimes as many as six. Why so dedicated? "My life was falling apart. I´d lost my job, my two kids were with their dad in Pennsylvania and he wouldn´t let them come back. I had to give up my car ´cause I couldn´t afford gas. I was sleeping on friends´ couches. But I didn´t let anyone know that life was other than wonderful, and it was as long as I was with A.A. people.

Then Kathy´s friend Astri came back from her trip to Missouri. Astri T. was her dear friend and favorite drinking companion from junior high who was featured in these pages last month.

"It was a shock to find her in A.A.," Astri, who participated in this interview, said. "I wanted her to come out to the bars with me and protect me like she used to."

Kathy agreed to go to a bar if Astri would go to a meeting with her. So Kathy went but she stuck to coffee only. That´s how it began for Astri, but she kept up her drinking and hostility to A.A. for a year before she finally committed to the program on Aug. 18, 1979. During that year, Kathy got her to a lot of meetings and to the A.A. dances in the Big Hall. "I knew she´d like the program if I could keep her coming long enough," Kathy said.

When she was still pretty new to the program, Kathy needed all the support she could get. Her ex-husband refused to send her children back from Pennsylvania when he found she was in A.A. Two friends died unexpectedly, and then both her parents died of cancer. With the help of the program, she got through that period in her life, and got her children back when her ex-husband remarried. "His new wife didn´t want ´em."

They are now adults, doing okay.

Kathy was originally from Idaho, where her father was a hardrock miner. When she was 15,she and her mother came to Seattle after her mother´s marriage broke up. "Mother knew I was a fish," (meaning she loved to swim) so she found a place near Green Lake, where Kathy swam day and night, literally. She quickly learned to drink to excess—"I always drank to get drunk"—but she also was a member of the Green Lake swim team.

Her second summer at the lake, she met her lifelong friend Astri, and they became core members of a roistering, brawling gang of teenage girls who called themselves the Green Lake Broads. Here´s their fight song, sung to the tune of Ta Ra Ra Boom De Ay:

We are the Green Lake Broads. We are a bunch of clods We wear our hair down straight We really should lose weight We park on deserted roads We have no moral codes Bring out a keg of beer The Green Lake Broads are here.

With that as their guideline, these teenagers hustled drinks from older boys who could buy liquor. Kathy sometimes swam in the lake when she was drunk. "Oh, hell yes. That´s how I broke my nose. I dived off the lifeguard tower and swam into a pipe. I might have drowned if I´d been sober. I would have been knocked out. As it was, I had a broken nose and two black eyes."

Some of the lifeguards were party animals too, "and that was even cooler ´cause they were older guys.

"If you weren´t in the drinking crowd, you were kind of a nerd, and I didn´t want to be a nerd anymore. I wanted to be cool." She enrolled at Lincoln High School in the fall of 1965, "drinking as often as I could, as much as I could. I could always find someone to buy my booze. I specialized in older boyfriends who could get beer."

Kathy discovered speed when she got a job in a nursing home at 17, where some of the patients were getting it on prescription for weight control. She was soon stealing their pills to feed her habit, but she couldn´t get enough there so she began buying it off the street—"little tiny pills with an ´x´ on ´em that we called criss-cross."

She quit school when she was 18—she finished many years later—to take a trip to Portland with a boyfriend. It was there she added marijuana to her repertoire of drugs. "It was just endless partying. I even tried LSD one time. It was the worst trip I ever had."

She got married and had her children before she kicked her husband out after 4 1/2 years. She began using heroin, and that led to a romance with a cop on the vice squad who kept part of what he seized in drug busts, so Kathy was well supplied while the affair lasted.

Then she got her Head Start job and tried to clean up her act until another staff member got her back into speed. That went on ´til she went to that fateful alcohol education meeting and joined this fellowship.

Kathy was working at an answering service when her health collapsed. Doctors discovered she was suffering from congestive heart failure, but not until her weight had ballooned from water retention. At one point, 87 pounds of fluid was drained from her system. She had other conditions too, all of them enhanced by a two-and-a-half pack a day cigarette habit. She finally quit seven weeks ago, and says her health is "fair. I´m working on it every day."

As an old druggie herself, Kathy says she has no problem with drugs other than alcohol coming up at meetings. "I´ve never been to a meeting where you can´t talk about it. I always do. It´s important for people to know you can´t do one without getting hooked on the others. If no one had told me, I´d probably still be using speed."

Over the years, Kathy helped start several meetings, including Lake City Young People, which she says proudly she named. "Back then, 28 was considered young."

Kathy says regretfully that A.A. seems to have changed over the years. "It´s not as personal as it used to be. There´s less 12 Step work now, and we don´t see many drunks at meetings like we used to." Astri added that in her opinion, there´s been too much tendency to get away from talking about the program and too much navel gazing.

But they both believe A.A. is still strong. It is their lifeline every day. "Twenty years from now," Kathy said, "they´ll be saying that A.A. isn´t like it was in the old days, but it will be stronger than ever.

"It´s my lifeline. I wouldn´t be here without it."

Interviewed and written by Dick S.