If Ken H.´s DUI lawyer had been as forgiving as his employer Mountain Bell was for two decades, he might still be a dangerous drunk. Fortunately for him and the citizens of Boise, Idaho, his lawyer pointed him to sobriety and A.A.

Ken had been transferred from Denver to Boise after management finally got fed up with his escapades. "It was a ´Get rid of this guy deal,´" Ken said. By now, a lifetime of heavy drinking was escalating by leaps and bounds, and culminated in a DUI in 1976. A drinking buddy referred him to a good DUI lawyer, "and that sucker tells me I´m gonna go to Alcoholics Anonymous. He said it would make me look good to the judge. I didn´t know he was in the program himself."

The lawyer gave him a slip for signing at meetings, but it didn´t slow him down. "I was hiding my booze in the furnace filter so Norma (his long-suffering wife) wouldn´t find it. Once a month, I´d find an excuse for a trip to Salt Lake City and fill my suitcase with bootleg Mormon gin."

He got two more DUIs in the next year. Norma packed up their two daughters and left without telling him. "She figured I had to work it out. I was rattling around the empty house not knowing what to do. My lawyer told me, ´Ken, you´re a phoney bastard. You can´t or won´t stop drinking. Go to treatment.´ I said I couldn´t ´cause they´d fire me. ´Don´t you think they know what´s going on already?´´´ the lawyer demanded.

That last DUI was a doozy. Despite his drinking, Ken had continued to hold responsible jobs with Mountain Bell, one of them supervision of the motor pool. One wintry day in February 1977, he thought he saw a chance to make some points with his suspicious boss, a vice president and pillar of the Mormon Church.

"I was in the office that Saturday when the Ford agency called to say the boss´s new car was ready. Hot damn! I called him and said I´d bring it out to his house. I had to stop off for a double manhattan to get over my drunk from the night before. Well, five miles out of Boise, I had a blackout and spun out on the freeway. I didn´t have a seat belt on. I was thrown out face down in the mud with not a scratch. This one really got written up in the paper ´cause it blocked the freeway."

With that kind of publicity, Mountain Bell´s brass could no longer ignore 25 years of destructive drinking. Ken was called on the carpet the next morning and handed a letter which said if he ever drank again, he would be fired.

"I signed and was demoted one level. Then I walked out and got drunk. Piss on ´em! About 9 o´clock that night, a friend found me blitzed in the bar. ´Ken,´ he said, ´you´re washed up. I´ve seen guys like you before, and you´re too far gone. You´re not gonna make it back, and you´re gonna lose your job, your family, everything.´" The friend took him home, where Norma, who had come back home, refused to speak to him.

Ken went to work two more days, "shaking like hell," and then headed for his favorite bar. "I was drinking doubles when I looked at myself in the mirror and the absolute truth hit me. THIS IS THE END. I said to myself, ´You´re a damn fool. You don´t belong here or anywhere that booze is served.

"I´d run up a $20 tab, and I walked out without paying. That was my moment of truth. I went home and called a guy I knew who had 10 years in the program and told him that something weird had just happened.

"´Well, good,´ says he. ´Maybe we´re gonna get somewhere now. For a start, you and I are going to every meeting in Boise and tell ´em what happened.´ There were 15 meetings, but we did it in 10 days. I didn´t drink, or want to, but I was still shaking real bad, and couldn´t sleep. I went to a detox doctor and got some B-1 shots, and then the lawyer who´d started me toward sobriety over a year earlier told me we had to go back to court and settle the DUI.

"Usually, the third DUI means a prison sentence, but Norma went with me and told the judge what was happening. The judge asked me if I believed in God. I said yes, and that A.A. and God could keep me sober. The judge gave me three years probation on condition I attend 365 A.A. meetings in the next 365 days, then come back and report. He also told me I could drive only to and from work and to go to A.A., could not be anywhere that liquor was served, and to tell my employer what was going on."

So Ken admitted to his boss, who didn´t like him, that he was trying to turn his life around. All the boss said was, "Make damn sure you do it." Under the boss´s constant scrutiny, Ken slowly mended his ways, but it was too late. A new boss told him he could never recover his reputation in Mountain Bell and recommended early retirement. Ken took it, and left the company in 1979 after 25 checkered years.

It´s a wonder he lasted that long. From what he says, it was a corporate culture which was almost unbelievably tolerant of alcohol abuse. After his young daughter´s tragic death in Denver, described in last month´s article, Ken stayed white knuckle sober for a year before he went to a party and felt that just one drink wouldn´t hurt. He was taken suddenly drunk, and on the way home hit nine parked cars. He got off with a ticket for reckless driving. Soon after, he was carrying half pints in his coat pocket.

He was working in Wyoming not long after when he lost control in the snow and wrecked the company car. The cop sent a letter to Mountain Bell´s general manager saying that the arresting officer had smelled liquor on Ken´s breath. Ken was called in and told, "Don´t let it happen again."

Despite his growing problem, Ken was a talented, hard-working guy who impressed management so much he was transferred to AT&T headquarters in New York on temporary assignment. Roaming the country for Ma Bell gave him more than enough opportunities to prove he was an alcoholic. He was in a luxury hotel in San Francisco on one trip when he climbed into the shower, drunk. "The water got hotter and hotter and I couldn´t figure out how to turn it off. I had to dive through the glass shower door and cut the hell out of my shoulder. I was bleeding all over the place. I called the desk clerk to raise hell ´cause they hadn´t supplied enough towels for a serious accident. It´s a wonder I didn´t bleed to death. I was supposed to be hooking up computers for a bank, but I called the guy and said I had to get back to New York. I took a cab to the airport and walked into our house in New Jersey with my pants caked with blood."

"What happened?" Norma asked.

"I slipped in the bathroom."

"Where?"

"San Francisco."

Ken got himself sewed up and made it to the office, where he got a call from the car rental agency wanting to know what had happened to the car he had rented in San Francisco. "We never did find it. The boss finally told ´em to stop bugging me. ´To hell with ´em if they can´t find their own car,´" he declaimed.

During his three-year stint in New York, Ken led the life of a New Jersey commuter, with modifications. "I only got stabbed in the subway once," he said. "Another time, I fell on the Port Authority escalator in the bus terminal and broke my nose. I had stopped riding the train ´cause my mouth was getting me into trouble in the club car. I´d been ´escorted´ off the train a couple of times." On the bus, he learned from a colleague to carry two briefcases, one for his booze.

Ken was a self-taught technical manager, so it was decided that he should have an engineer with him on assignments. The two of them were in Atlanta at Coca Cola headquarters promoting a gadget that could count precisely how many bottles were left in a vending machine. Bell, the developer, expected it to be a big winner.

"We did our thing. It went great ´til a Coke guy asked if we´d talked to the Teamsters. Their contract required consultation. We said, ´We´re the technical people. The Teamsters are your problem.´ At a saloon afterward, my friend said, ´You know, we blew it. How we gonna explain?´" When we got back to New York, I couldn´t think of a good lie, so I told the boss the company had spent $300,000 for nothing ´cause we didn´t talk to the Teamsters. ´Well,´ he says, ´we´re not going to win every one of ´em.´"

The corporate culture continued to protect him for many years when he transferred back to Denver and until his life spun completely out of control in Boise. Newly sober and newly retired in the Idaho city, Ken held several jobs before becoming an intake counselor at an alcohol treatment center. The center folded, so Ken and some friends hocked their houses to fund their own clinic. Business boomed so well they attracted a buyer and were bought out. Ken was on the street until a friend offered him a job as operations manager of a new clinic in Port Hueneme, California, near Oxnard.

"That was 1988. The day it was to open, everybody but me was fired and I was told to sell all the equipment. Well, Norma said she liked California, so we bought a condo and settled in. Then another family member developed alcohol trouble in Seattle. We started coming up here a lot and in 1997 moved here." His previous experience with this city was a blackout in the Space Needle in 1962.

Let´s end this on a happy note. Ken´s relationship with his teenage daughters was nearly destroyed by all that had happened. Thirty days into sobriety, he sat down with them and told them he would repair their relationship one day at a time for the rest of his life. It has worked.

As soon as he got here, Ken signed up to answer phones at Intergroup. He makes one or two meetings a week and continues to make amends, "but there´s no way I could make amends to everyone. There are years and dozens to cover. But I did make amends to Norma´s dad, a teetotalling Methodist.

"´Okay,´ he said. ´Let´s go feed the cows.´"

Interviewed and written by Dick S.