Outspoken, funny, bawdy, tough: These are some of the words that come to mind with Mary B., one of this area´s longest-sober and best-known members of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Mary, who´s now 89 years old, has been sober since Washington´s birthday in 1952, but serenity and a love for AA came a long time after that. (More about that in the next article.) She sat for an interview recently, accompanied by her close friend, Sam G., and Angus L. They occasionally prodded her memory, but most of the time, nearly a half century of AA history rolled off her tongue without a pause. (Note: Mary suffered some health problems after this was written, but is now-February 2002-back home.)

Mary was born into a religious family in Baltimore in 1912. "My grandfather was a faith healer. We were a happy family," she said of her parents and three brothers. "We had prayer meetings at the house." But Mary liked the high life of Prohibition-era Baltimore. She first learned to drink at home when she was 14, stealing her father´s kümmel and homemade wine. "But that wasn´t alcoholism ´cause I didn´t drink that much. I didn´t start heavy drinking till I was 18. Whiskey was my drink.

"I started runnin´ with bootleggers. Mostly, I did it for the drinks. I didn´t get paid. Just went along so I could drink." From there, at 21, she went into business on her own-running what she calls a red light house with six girls. "They didn´t have the brains to come in out of a storm. You had to pick your men up off the street, so I went out hustling and brought ´em in. There was this one guy, he insisted on having me, and I wasn´t having any of it. I hated men. (More about that in the next article.) He kept insisting, so I shot him in the goddamn leg. I got out of it ´cause he said he was cleaning his gun and it went off. He was a married man, you see."

Question: So you did him a favor, eh?

Mary: "Yes, but I quit the red light business. It was getting too heavy. After that, I started workin´ night clubs. Singing and dancing and bartending. I did a lot of dancing, tap and modernistic shakeups. Stuff like that. And I made up parodies of popular songs."

Mary was invited to sing one of her songs, but declined. "I can´t sing, period. Ever try to sing with no voice?" Respiratory problems in recent years have affected her voice. She quit the nightclub life at 21when she married a merchant seaman from Renton. "He was another drunk, and we staggered across the country on the train." What did she think of coming to the Wild West?

"Well, I liked it. It was my dream as a kid to be a big man out west. But I was disappointed not to see no cowboys or Indians. I had some trouble with place names, too. ´Butt,´ Montana, got everybody on the train laughing at me. And that´s where I got to tell all my damn dirty jokes, that I´m still telling in AA today. Suggestive, not dirty. I used to pay two bucks for them jokes in the joints where I worked. "

Mary´s career as a night club entertainer came to an abrupt halt when she got to Renton with her new husband. He owned a farm, and that´s where she lived and worked for many years. "We stayed married for 17 years. By that time, I was five years sober, and he was coming home from trips with broken glasses and black eyes, so I divorced him."

She liked farming, though, and learned a lot. "I´d never seen chickens run around. When a rooster´d get off and shake after he´d treaded a hen, I thought he had St. Vitus dance. But he was just pleased that he got a piece, one happy chick."

The newly minted farmer raised 500 chickens and a huge garden. "I liked corn. (I liked it in the liquid form too.) We had eight rows of corn 150 feet long, and there was only two of us to eat it so I give it to everybody." She stayed on the farm until 1989, when she moved to her present apartment in Skyway. Meanwhile, she had cared for her mother for 20 years and a neighbor until he died at the age of 95. "He taught me a lot about farmin´."

It was Mary´s then-husband who got her into AA and eventual sobriety, even though he didn´t make it. He went to sea while she farmed, and on one trip was thrown in jail in Scotland. The ship´s captain, a member of AA, bailed him out, locked him in a cabin and gave him the Big Book to read.

"So he come home and says, ´Honey, I found a way we can stay sober.´ We got drunk as hell to celebrate, but the next day, he called AA and two men came over. That´s how I got into AA. My first meeting was in the bartenders´ union hall. A bunch of men followed me into the meeting. They thought there was gonna be a party. As soon as they started talkin´ about AA, they got up and walked out.

"I didn´t figure I was an alcoholic even though I was told I was. I got thrown in jail so many times, I can´t tell you. Just for the night. Someone always bailed me out. I hated the program, (more about that in the next article) but I done everything I could to stay sober. Right from the beginning, I started sponsoring people. I had to do something or I´d have gone nuts. There was only six or seven meetings, but I got in seven a week. There were nine older men in my group. I was only 39, and I thought ´Boy, why stop drinkin? They´re old enough to die anyway.´" Two of the nine "had the program. I could tell from the look in their eyes and the way they talked that I wanted what they had. So I kept comin´ around even though I hated the program and the whole damn world.

Mary stuck with it to become an outstanding 12-Stepper and sponsor. "I made a lot of calls. No way could I count the calls I made. It isn´t a thousand, it´s thousands. I went all the time. I went on Skid Row, I went all over. There wasn´t enough men to take the calls, so I did it-took my gardener along so I wouldn´t get hit over the head. One of the men I sponsored is still alive today. He has 41 years."

She was among the first to go to the prisons-Walla Walla, McNeil Island. She is now in her 49th year of monthly visits to Monroe Penitentiary. The grateful inmates "make me lamps and all kinds of stuff. I had to stop going for almost a year because of my health, but they got me a wheel chair, and now I´ve been back for four months."

For many years, Mary allowed recovering drunks to live with her. "I took everybody and his brother in. I wanta tell you, in all that time with all those people, the only thing I ever lost was one towel." But she no longer works the program in that way. "I can´t take care of myself. How am I gonna take care of somebody else?" Sam G. brought her to the interview, and takes her to her meetings each week.

(Mary has much more to tell us, so read the following article.) Interviewed and written by Dick S.

Interviewed by Angus L. and Dick S. Written by Dick S.