Like many of the old timers in Alcoholics Anonymous, Maxine H. of Bellevue joyously pays her dues to the program day in and day out.

Maxine´s AA birthday is May 11, 1961, and today she isn´t sure how many women she is sponsoring--"20 or 25. I don´t keep count." Over a career in sobriety that reaches back to the Kennedy administration, there have been hundreds. "That´s what it´s all about, carrying the message," she says.

"When I was five years sober, Vern H. was the secretary of Intergroup. I got to know him through 12 Step work and came to realize he needed help. He was there all by himself. For several years, I went in every Wednesday. I finally got well enough acquainted with the mechanics of the office that Vern could take a vacation while I took over for a week. Vern was the only paid staff, minimal salary. I addressed envelopes for the High & Dry--they were addressed by hand in those days. Vern did the production all by himself--wrote it and mimeographed it. I did the collation and stapling and other scut work.

"The advantage to me doing this as long as I did was I saw Vern interact with people on the phone and when they came into the office, and learned a great deal about using the steps and the traditions in daily life."

Maxine was living in Riverside, California, when she sobered up in an early day treatment center in the San Fernando Valley. "My life was terrible. It was run by alcohol, constantly preoccupied with getting liquor and hiding it. I was a hidden housewife type of drinker, and it was affecting my husband and two children.

"Then one day I saw an article in the Los Angeles Times about a woman who was just my age who had taken her little Cub Scout, who happened to be the age of one of my kids, to a bowling party about 10 o´clock one Saturday morning. She let her little Cub Scout out of the car, and as she left the parking lot, she backed over somebody else´s little Cub Scout and killed him. That story haunted me ´cause it could have been me. It could have been me! I had many times taken kids to movies, driving when I had no business behind the wheel. I was terrified, so I went to a doctor who sent me to that treatment center. I never had another drink. Whatever they told me to do, I did it."

Four years later, a business opportunity for her husband brought the family to Bellevue, and she has been in this area ever since.

Her first experience with the program demonstrated a certain toughness of character which has served her well in the succeeding years. "When I got here in 1965, the groups were small and there were very few women. I met a woman at the second meeting I attended who heard me say I´d just moved up from California. I had sense enough to introduce myself at every meeting, not as a newcomer to AA but as a newcomer to Washington.

"She told me about the Thursday night Mercer Island group, thought I´d like it. She was going to meet me there the first night, but when I arrived, there were 17 or 18 fellows in the room and no other women. I made sure it was a mixed meeting, and went in and sat down. When the secretary opened the meeting, he said ´My name is____and I´m an alcoholic and I resent women in Alcoholics Anonymous.´

"That was a real test for me. In the olden days, I´d have turned on my heel and used some colorful epithets on my way out. But I didn´t. I stayed. I guess he hated his mother or something. Or it was just his way of expressing himself. I said to myself, ´Well, that´s his problem, not mine. I have a right to be here.´ I did a little growing up that night. I stayed, and everyone else at the meeting was very cordial. No one criticized the secretary, but I think they were trying to compensate for what they considered a rude statement. Over time, he mellowed somewhat, and we became friends."

She stuck it out, and this became her home meeting. She was elected alternate secretary, a job which at that time involved fielding requests for 12 Step calls. "Intergroup would call me with Mercer Island 12 Step requests and I´d line up someone to go out. That´s how we handled it in those days (around 1969)."

Things were somewhat different in Seattle from her experience in Southern California. "When people introduced themselves at meetings, I was used to saying ´Hi.´ That wasn´t done here. When I´d say ´Hi,´ everybody wondered why I was talking to myself. I told ´em that was something we had always done down south. Everyone thought it was a good idea, and that´s how the custom started up here.

"After five or six years up here, I thought it would be a good idea to have an Eastside discussion group for women, so another woman and I got one going. It was a novelty, and everyone liked it."

So Maxine has done a lot of things in and for AA in her 38 years in the program, but the longest stint has been her 12 Step work.

"AA is the very first thing in my life, my first priority, and I can express that best by reaching out to women who are still suffering. My sponsor told me, back when I was new, that if she ever saw me at a meeting where there was a new woman and I didn´t give her my name and telephone number, she would no longer sponsor me. She felt that strongly about it, and she was right.

"I get calls from people I meet at meetings, quite a few of them from Residence XII (a treatment center for women). Then there are some I´ve never met who took my name off the list at meetings."

Maxine believes the program is as strong as it ever was, despite the changes. "We didn´t have all the diversity at meetings that there is now--meetings for gays and for dual addictions, for example. Nobody ever talked about a pill problem, or if they did, it was frowned on. That´s all out in the open now. I know there are members who don´t want any drug but alcohol discussed at meetings, but I think that´s a very narrow-minded attitude. An alcoholic is a drug addict. I don´t go to meetings where there´s objection to discussion of dual addiction.

"I think I had a little more broad-minded education than some when I became involved in treatment centers after I left Intergroup. The Seattle Treatment Center at Fifth and Marion downtown was the first hospital-based treatment center in the state. There were halfway houses, and Schadel´s (an old line in-patient program) had a detoxification center, but none of those was hospital-based.

"There was no place to take someone who had to have hospitalization. Overlake wouldn´t take them at all, and Harborview´s emergency room was the best we could do there. We had 21 beds at Fifth and Marion. There´s a big bank building there now. There were lots of AA volunteers who would come and sit and talk to the patients."

Maxine, a registered nurse, eventually hired on as staff and followed the program as it moved to Providence Hospital and then to the old Seattle General Hospital. Its direct descendent, she said, is the county´s NERF program in the north end.

There were AA meetings on the premises, and eventually volunteers took the patients to outside meetings, "so they got a good start in AA." She stayed with the program for five years. "I still run into people all the time who come up too me and say, ´You probably don´t remember me, but I was in the Care Unit,´ or ´I met you at detox.´

"It´s just like a gift to see that wonderful, smiling, healthy face on someone who had such a rugged start."

Interviewed and written by Dick S.