Alcoholics Anonymous tells us to expect miracles, and that´s what it took for Laurel M. and Mary M. to celebrate their 52nd wedding anniversary last Jan. 1.

Mary thought repeatedly of divorcing her drunken, raging husband in the first 16 years of their marriage. "In the latter part of his drinking, he was drinking Old Silver Satin-67 cents a bottle at the 7-11. It just did something to him. His eyes would cross and he´d become a raving maniac. Boy, the kids would scatter. "

At one point, living in Alaska, Laurel took a geographical cure to California after burning all his bridges in Ketchikan. Surprise! It didn´t help. He wound up in the Santa Barbara drunk tank on two successive weekends, wondering what he was doing with all those broken down, hopeless drunks. So he came back to his home town of Seattle and resumed his career as a painter. Things only went from bad to worse. Mary and the children had by this time rejoined him in Seattle. "One time, his boss called and said, ´You´d better come and get your husband. He´s passed out in this lady´s basement.´"

Basements were a favorite of Laurel´s. That´s where he went to guzzle Silver Satin, and when company came, he´d announce he was going down to work on the furnace. "He´d bang on our old furnace a couple of times so we could hear it upstairs, and people never realized what was going on," Mary said.

And then there were the Scouts, and a near-death experience. Both Mary and Laurel were active in Scouting. One weekend, Laurel drove Mary and a group of Girl Scouts to their cabin on the Tolt river near Carnation. Laurel dropped them off. "Then I went home and drank the whole weekend," Laurel said, "and went back up there Sunday afternoon to pick ´em up. I was drunk as the Lord; Mary was after me all the way back-´Get on your own side of the road. You´re going in the ditch,´ but God was with us. We got everybody home safe and sound.

"Then we´re driving home when I blacked out at 45th and Wallingford and drove under a parked truck. Pretty near tore Mary´s head off. It tore the top of the station wagon off, but Mary was the only one hurt. She had to have seven stitches in her scalp. Our daughter was in the back seat, and she wasn´t hurt either. I got off with a $25 fine."

Mary: "My head hit the rearview mirror, but I don´t remember how I got down low enough."

Question: "What did the girls think of their ride home?"

Mary: "Never heard. I don´t think they realized what was going on."

Laurel: "Many of their fathers were in the same situation I was, a drunk."

Mary: "I was afraid he was going to die. We could never talk. There´d be a big donnybrook and he´d go out the door, saying ´You´ll never see me again.´ I was afraid he would commit suicide. I was a door slammer. He´d take off and I´d slam the door, and if it didn´t slam just right, I´d slam it again. Our doors wouldn´t shut right for a long time."

Mary was doing all she could to make things different. Her family doctor didn´t think Laurel had a problem, just an upset stomach, so he wrote a prescription for tranquilizers-for Mary. So she went to her minister for help, and he told her he would pray for her.

"Well, that was real nice, but we needed more than prayer. I´d been praying all the time and nothing was getting any better. I always figured that God was busy out there making the seasons change." Her next stop was at an alcoholic referral center, where the director told her she should go to Alanon.

´"Good,´ I thought. They´re going to tell me four or five things to do to get Laurel off the couch and get him sober, though I didn´t think he´d ever really quit. I was hoping he could learn to be a social drinker again. So I went to my first meeting that night, and I came away thinking, ´Boy, I wish I could laugh about my situation like these women do.´ I wanted them to tell me what to do, and of course they didn´t, but I kept coming back because I didn´t have anywhere else to go.

"That was my first group, the old Northeasters, and I felt real comfortable there. I liked what those women said. They made me feel welcome and let me cry a little bit. So I started bringing home AA pamphlets and left them around where Laurel could see them. He never said boo."

But life went on. One day in 1965, his painting crew at the University of Washington was celebrating a crew member´s birthday. Laurel took his swig as the bottle went around, then passed it to Eddie V. "I don´t drink anymore," Eddie said. "I´ve been sober for 7 ½ years." That didn´t stop Laurel, but it planted the seed. Six months later, he took the step that changed his and Mary´s lives forever. "When I went on my last drunk that November, I remembered what Eddie had said. I called him and he came right over. Went without his dinner that night to come talk to a sick alky. He took me to my first meeting, the old Counterbalance group, and became my first sponsor.

"Going into the DTs that day was the clincher for me. I was a plea bargainer. Every time I got into a jackpot, I´d say ´Please, God, get me out of this and I´ll never drink again as long as I live.´ And I´d be drunk before the sun went down. But this last drunk, as I´m coming out of it, I got this big octopus wrapped around me. I was trying to get his tentacles off me, and yelling at Mary for help. She was scared to death. I´m crying crocodile tears-´God, please help me, please help me.´ But the miracle happened. Mary got me to a doctor and got some Vitamin B shots into me. Eddie took me to my first meeting that night, and I haven´t had a drink since."

That was Nov. 11, 1965. But like they say, it ain´t over till it´s over. Laurel´s life immediately became Alcoholics Anonymous. He went to a meeting every day for three years. But Mary had a tremendous resentment toward him and toward AA. He´d finally sobered up, and he was spending all his time with those guys, who she thought sat around and ran down their wives. "Here I was, this crusader, and he didn´t give a damn. I figured he was lying his head off like he did to us. I wanted to go in there and tell them exactly what he was doing. But my sponsor said ´Mary, leave him to AA. They´ll straighten him out.´"

"I was taut as a fiddle string," Laurel said. "I was trying to get back in the good graces of my family and trying to be a good AA member and a decent guy for a change. But it seemed like everything happened on Friday nights, including my home meeting. So a few of us got our heads together and went to see the pastor of St. Stephens Episcopal Church. He kinda raised his eyebrows ´cause in those days-this was 1967-AA and Alanon were like secret societies. But he agreed to give us a four-month trial, and we´ve been there ever since on Tuesday nights. We celebrated the 34th anniversary of the Laurelhurst/Windermere meeting on April 3. We´ve outlasted five pastors now."

Laurel was now free on Friday nights for family activities, but Mary was still mad. She didn´t go to the Alanon meeting at Laurelhurst for four years, but finally made the switch as she worked her program and her anger dissolved. "We learned to compliment each other, something we hadn´t done for years," Mary said. "It made a big difference."

As life at home became better, Laurel started a meeting at Virginia Mason, and Mary followed shortly after with an Alanon meeting there. He was active in others over the years: the county jail, the navy brig, the Salvation Army, state prison at Monroe, Lutheran Compass Center. Then they discovered retreats. Laurel went to his first one a year into sobriety, at the Palisades Retreat House at Dash Point. No TV, no radio, just quiet and peace. The next year, they began going to couples´ retreats, and for the past 26 years have gone together spring and fall. Though Catholic-based, everyone is welcome regardless of religion, or "if they have none at all." Mary and Laurel served as co-captains for the retreat for 11 years.

AA international conventions are a big part of their lives too. AA and Alanon meet at the same time. They´ve made friends from all over the world, and haven´t missed a convention since their first one in Denver in 1975. Both contributed to the 1990 convention in Seattle. Mary was a greeter and hostess. Laurel chaired one of the marathons at the Crown Plaza Hotel, a huge thrill for him.

Mary doesn´t think she had much to do with Laurel´s sobriety, but Laurel does. "It was nice to have somebody working with me toward the same objective. The years of drinking separated us, and it took a healing process to bring us back together again. Thank God for Alanon and thank God for AA."

Interviewed and written by Dick S.