Sam G. is not your garden variety sober alcoholic. For one thing, he´s a Mexican-American who learned to speak Spanish from his German teacher at Toppenish High School. For another, his wife of 43 years, Lily, played a crucial role in his survival and his sobriety, and he gives her full credit.

Sam grew up in the farm country around Yakima. He never had a drink till he was 17. "It was like heaven. Like magic. I could talk to girls." He graduated in a blackout and woke up with vomit all over his new blue suede shoes. The family was distraught. He was their first high school graduate. Sam promised "never again," and was drunk two weeks later. In 1956, he moved to Puget Sound and a job with Boeing, but drove home to Toppenish every weekend to get drunk with the boys.

Lily was a naïve young woman in 1958 when she married Sam, who appeared for the wedding bearing the scrapes and bruises of an accident the week before in which he was thrown from his overturned car. "She didn´t understand alcoholism," Sam said the other day. "Three years after we got married, I was drafted into the army. What an adventure! During basic training at Ft. Ord, I got drunk and went into instant blackouts. Then I found cheap beer at Ft. Sam Houston in a little place they called the PX. Lily just thought that was the way I was.

"My permanent post was the Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland. I sent Lily home and headed for the PX. I pulled eight hours of duty, no weekends, and could drink all I wanted with Lily gone. Then here she comes back. We moved off the post, and that cut into my drinking. I was in the Medical Corps there, and I got addicted to liquid codeine. Officers could get it without any signout. We enlisted men got all we wanted too. Half codeine and half orange juice. My colonel, who was a doctor, drank it straight.

Lily asked me why I had all those little bottles of white liquid."

Codeine gave him terrible headaches, but what broke the habit for him was a court-martial that jeopardized his military career. "Besides, alcohol was so much easier to get." Nothing slowed his drinking. At a party one night, Sam fell into a snowy ditch and thought he´d freeze to death before he staggered home. Lily wrapped him in blankets till he passed out. "When I came to, I couldn´t move. She´d tied my wrists and ankles to the bed and left me there all night. That was the first time she fought back."

Discharged in 1961, he returned to his old job at Boeing (or as he and other oldtimers call it, "Boeing´s") and continued his drinking career. He fell in another ditch one night and arrived home soaking wet.

"You never learn, do you?" said the long-suffering Lily. "You´re addicted to ditches."

He proceeded to prove how right she was when he made page 1 of the Renton newspaper in 1966. After drinking all night, he crossed the center line in his car and ran up a guy wire on a telephone pole. The guy wire held. Sam´s car turned upside down and hung in space, leaning against the pole. Sam fell out and, of course, fell into another ditch. That time, "there were two shiny shoes" waiting for him at the top of the ditch, belonging to the Renton policeman who took him to jail.

The judge who heard his drunk driving case was well prepared with a clipping from the newspaper and a series of photographs from several angles of the extraordinary accident. Before suspending his license for a year and sending him to driving school, the judge asked him if he liked flying upside down.

Suspension in hand, Sam drove home and then signed up for the driving school. "There were 30 of us in that class, and never a mention of alcohol. It was all about defensive driving. It helped, though. I drove for that whole year without an accident."

There were no scales left on Lily´s eyes by this time. After several of his three-day binges, she told Sam he should call AA. He thinks she got the idea from the classic movie, "Days of Wine and Roses." He made the call, and was taken to his first meeting, at Old Renton, in the summer of 1966. He was an instant convert. "I liked their welcoming and their sincerity. I liked the sharing. Those guys must have been reading my mail. They were nothing like what I thought an alcoholic was-a derelict pissing in his pants.

"I came home and told Lily I was an alcoholic. ´Big deal,´ she says. "I wanted to belong, but I started talking, talking, talking, and I forgot to listen. I wanted to tell everybody what the problem was. I never took time to read the Big Book. And then I got depressed. When I asked Lily for some money, her heart fell into her feet ´cause she knew I was back on beer.

"I said I was never going to an AA meeting again. One of the guys called me and I hung up on him. When I saw a plug for AA on television, I called and the lady who answered told me I´d be welcomed back. I hung up and told Lily the lady said if I´d started drinking again, I could not go back to AA. Lily´s face fell.

"I started riding around in my car by myself. I was having suicidal dreams. I went from a happy-go-lucky drunk to a sad drunk. I was missing a lot of work by that time and Lily refused to call in excuses for me. I didn´t know it, but she was going to Al Anon. I could feel her drifting away from me.

"I cried all one Sunday afternoon, and that night I went back to the Renton group. That was Jan. 30, 1968. I told one of the guys, ´Hey, I´m back,´ and he said ´Where else was there to go, Sam?´" He hasn´t had a drink since that night.

In 1973, while he was working on the flight line on the new Boeing 747, he lost his job in the massive Boeing layoffs of that era. He quickly found a new job driving the detox wagon for King County for a little while, then went to Renton Vocational-Technical College (now Renton Technical College) and retrained as an appliance repairman. That led to a job with Washington Natural Gas, where he recently retired after 29 years as a customer service technician. "I´m still getting used to retirement," Sam said. Lily hasn´t had to face that problem yet. "She´s doing great," Sam said. "She´s a supervisor in an assisted living complex in Renton."

Why did she stick with him through all their troubles?

"She loved me. She told me, ´I´ll always love you.´ She was not convinced I was an alcoholic at first, but she started going to the picnics with me. Mary B., who had become a close family friend, helped her to realize the problem."

Sam goes to meetings twice a day, seven days a week. With the decline in requests for 12 Step calls, Sam says meetings are now his principal 12 Step work. He´s sponsored five people over the years who had long sobriety. "I don´t have much luck with newcomers." But not because his views are set in concrete. People with dual addiction "have now infiltrated AA almost entirely," and unlike some oldtimers, he welcomes them.

"It´s just a different drug as far as I´m concerned. Mary B. says they should mention alcohol first to give it respect, and that´s a good idea." One of the big changes he´s especially appreciative of is the near-universality of non-smoking meetings today. "When I came in, I think I inhaled more smoke than many smokers. I remember once at St. Elizabeth´s Church we opened a window and so much smoke poured out someone called the fire department. The Benson Hill group was required as part of their rent to wash the windows twice a year."

Sam and Lily have been married 43 years now and have four grown children. Their youngest daughter is a junior at University of Washington, following in the footsteps of her two older sisters.

"All the kids are still in the state and visit often. My sobriety gives me a chance to enjoy them," he said.

Interviewed and written by Dick S.