March 8, 2009

It’s Just Nostalgia

Whiskey Bill

Now, there’s a name you’ll probably remember. Sounds like a real rip-roaring kind of guy doesn’t he? Maybe the kind of guy who could out drink everybody in the bar and still go home sober? That was Whiskey Bill. Only the legend was bigger then the name.

I first met Whiskey Bill about 25 years ago. My brother Leland and I had just moved into a 3000 square ft commercial building on the main street of Orting, WA. Twenty five years ago when you opened a store front in Orting everybody in town knew your business, even if you didn’t. It was our goal to produce the best genealogy magazine going and it wasn’t long before the town historian showed up. Alice was a pleasant woman, daughter of the publisher of the small town newspaper 40 years before. She had gone to high school in Orting and knew everybody. In a town of a thousand people, everybody isn’t that difficult to know. About 4 years previously she had completed a history of the town and had self published. So when these two guys with history on their minds show up, there she was. Well, we soon learned that when one got Alice, he got Bill too. He’d always answer to “Whiskey Bill” but whiskey wasn’t a part of him any more. About 20 years previously he’d hit bottom, the place where there is only one way to look, and that’s up.

Now during the time I knew Whiskey Bill he wasn’t married. Oh, he’d been married a couple of times, but he wasn’t going to get back into that again! No, Bill had two ex-wives and he was going to keep it that way. Actually, Whiskey Bill still loved both women and he’d worked out a relationship with both of them that seemed to work. He’d accepted Alice’s (his second wife) children as his own and was grandpa to a passel of kids. I’m not exactly positive, but it’s possible that the first time I ever met him he was carrying one of his granddaughters with him. From birth he was her official baby sitter it seemed, and you seldom saw Bill without her.

Bill had become a changed man. Back when he was broke and jobless, homeless and destitute, when he was flat on his back, looking up, he’d discovered AA. Now Whiskey Bill was not a religious man, but he was very spiritual. He didn’t belong to any church as
such, but he was a tireless crusader for God. Wherever he went he packed a little 40 page pocket sized book called “The Tablemate” with him. He was a tireless crusader for “The Tablemate.” Using it, following the precepts laid down there had changed his life and he gave thousands of them away, helping other alcoholics find sobriety. In fact Bill told me one day that “The Tablemate” really works best when guys steal them. Apparently that’s how he got his first one.

The history of The Tablemate is somewhat shrouded in legend, but the story goes that back in the early years of AA some of the guys back in Cleveland took “The Big Book” and condensed it town to this little 40 page pocket book. They packed it all inside. It’s all there: the twelve steps, the twelve traditions, all the basics that help you get sober and stay that way. Then back during WW II a sailor getting ready to ship out, dropped into an AA meeting in Seattle and shared his Tablemate with the guys there and they started publishing it. When Bill came to me the Pioneer Press in Seattle had closed. They had been printing it all these years and now they didn’t have a supplier. Bill showed it to me and said: “If you print it, we’ll buy it.”

Bill hasn’t been by to pick up any books for about 3 years now, but nearly every week when somebody drops in, or call in, to pick up a bundle of Tablemates, I always remember the drunk that was saved by grace, studying “The Tablemate.”