Paul P. was fed up with the way his life was going, but it took the barroom brawl to end all barroom brawls to bring him to Alcoholics Anonymous.

"I was playing liar's poker with five dollar bills," Paul explained. "I was winning big when I caught the other guys cheating. I followed 'em out of the bar and chased 'em to downtown Renton. There was a huge fight that I didn't win. Two of 'em held me while the third one beat me. When I showed up for my first A.A. meeting, I was missing a piece of my ear and my scalp was all torn up."

Paul was already thinking about quitting. "My life had gone awry. I was drinking after work every night and getting home at 3 a.m. That was so my four kids couldn't see me drunk. I never drank on weekends, but nothing else was right. Needless to say, my drinking took a toll on my marriage.

"I wanted to be a good father and a good husband. These things were getting farther and farther away, and I was really depressed. I decided that if A.A. didn't work, I was gonna kill myself."

Paul joined A.A. on Feb. 15 or 15th. He's not quite sure, 1963, but it didn't save the marriage. After four years of sobriety, his wife told him, "You used to be a drunken S.O.B. Now, you're a sober S.O.B." So she took the kids and fled to a secret location in California. He didn't see any of them for the next six years. He only found them when, acting on a tip, he examined Los Angeles vital statistics for his married daughter's name and address. He didn't find her, but he found his ex-wife's divorce from her third husband (Paul was her second), with an address in the San Fernando Valley.

When he went out there, he was confronted by row after row of identical apartments. Nothing if not persistent, he started driving through parking lots 'til he recognized his son. The boy was terrified. Their mother had told the children that Paul was going to kidnap them if he ever found them. Paul finally persuaded the boy that was not going to happen, and through him, Paul was able to see all five of his missing children. It was a short term reconciliation, though. When he came down the next year, his oldest daughter told him to "Go home. No one wants to see you." According to Paul, the girl said their mother gave them a bad time for seeing him a year earlier and they didn't want to go through that pain again.

"I told her I knew where her mom worked and I was gonna break every window in the place if she kept getting in my way with the kids." As Paul told this story, he was wearing a T-shirt which said "MY ANGER MANAGEMENT CLASS PISSES ME OFF."

The threat worked, but he didn't see the kids again for two or three years. Gradually, they thawed and he thawed, and they began visiting him here. "Eight years ago, their mom died, so I have a relationship with all of them now."

Meanwhile, Paul married again for the second time; he and his wife produced four more children. He has fathered a grand total of 10. The second marriage ended too, after 22 years. He is now peacefully married for the third time. "I've never had it so good." Between them, he said proudly, they have 31 grandchildren, and he has another four great-grandchildren.

But back to the story of Paul's finding sobriety. After his disastrous brawl, he picked up the phone and called A.A., and went to his first meeting that night. He's never had a slip since, so he ranks among the oldest of this area's old timers, with 43 years of sobriety. It was the late Mary Ball. who answered that A.A. phone. She got him a 12 Step call that same night, and his visitors explained the program to him. "Well," said Paul, "suppose I am an alcoholic, what do I do?" "You quit drinking," was the reply. "For how long?" asked a shocked Paul. "You don't understand," came the answer. "You never drink again."

"And then they talked about the God thing. I didn't want any part of that. My parents forced me to go to church 'til I was 10 years old and got big enough to say no. It didn't have anything for me."

So where does he stand on that issue now?

"I don't pull back, but I don't believe either. If there is a God, he's helped me by giving me a brain to use. But I don't pray for nothin'."

Well, does it bother him to join in reciting the Serenity Prayer at the end of a meeting?

"I love it. The Serenity Prayer gives us a way to live. What I do is put an extra "O" in the word God and it becomes the most sensible thing there is."

Once sober, Paul made it through some hard times without a slip. For awhile, his marriage seemed to be getting better, but as noted earlier, it didn't work out that way. Six months into sobriety, he lost his job as a frozen food salesman. Desperate to avoid drawing unemployment, he went to Alaska to work in the woods. Then his beloved father was murdered while changing a tire on the highway. The murderer has never been caught.

"I never would have thought I could make it through that," he said, but he did. As time went on, he became a major contributor to A.A. in the Renton area. With several others, he started the Benson Hill group, which now meets twice a week at 10:30 a.m. He was an Intergroup delegate, GSR and district committeeman, up to his ears in A.A. politics. Like many others in those days, he made many pilgrimages to the prisons in Walla Walla, McNeil Island and Monroe.

It was through A.A. that he found a job in a Seattle metal fabricating shop which lasted until his health forced his retirement at the age of 59. A bad heart exacerbated the stress of managing 75 men. "The doctor said if I didn't leave that job, I was gonna die. The moment I told the boss I was leaving, my chest pains went away."

Paul was born near the village of Clayton in rural Illinois. The family migrated to Washington in 1943 when his father was hired as one of the early employees of the Hanford A-bomb project. Paul graduated from Richland High School and had a brief career as a semi-pro boxer. "I took a licking that severed a nerve in my face, so I quit."

He and his buddies learned to drink in high school, which gave him a head start on alcoholism when he joined the navy. "That's when my drinking really took off." He was stationed on Whidbey Island for two years crewing crash boats before he shipped out to the Pacific on an attack transport. By then, he was drinking anything he could lay hands on. "I liked rum and coke, but before payday, I was drinking rotgut wine." And the grain alcohol that their boat's compass floated in. "We had a five gallon can on board to keep the float full, and never used more than a quart legitimately. The container had a skull and crossbones on it, but I drank it anyway and went blind. (Only briefly, fortunately.)

"In the Navy in those days, you could drink as much as you liked as long as you could answer muster in the morning. I did a lot of bar brawling. I didn't think I picked on 'em. People would pick on me. I beat the crap out of a lot of guys."

The day before his ship was to leave San Pedro for the Pacific, Paul came on board drunk and realized there wouldn't be enough illicit booze on board to last for the whole cruise. His solution? He and two other sailors stole the ship's launch and went AWOL to get supplies.

He wound up in the navy brig, but got off easy "'cause I had a good lawyer." His two buddies got two months of hard labor painting the ship's stacks.

On board ship, when the illicit booze ran out, Paul made do with the benzedrine from nose inhalers that he laced his coffee with, and shaving lotion with which he improved his grapefruit juice.

All of that is long behind him now. Paul says he's at peace with himself. "With A.A., I found what I was looking for all those years. I may not be as active as I once was, but few days go by that I don't think about Alcoholics Anonymous. A.A. is home to me."

Interviewed and written by Dick S.