run on a pretty small shoestring. In other words, I could carry lines of thousands of shares of it myself.
“And sure enough, in the spring of 1929, there was a hell of a crack in the market, and boy, I let that thing down five points, and I got thousands of shares of it into my friends’ hands and meanwhile pegged the price and protected myself. So I thought, ‘Well, you put your friends in on the dip instead of selling it to them on the bulges, and that gives them a wonderful break, and meanwhile they’re protected. I’m not trying to trade on them and make money that way. And we’ve got a long, full operation, good enough for quite a while yet.’ ”
He even persuaded his mother to buy 900 shares, advising her, in January 1929, not to sell at less than $60 per share. He then decided that he was prepared for a possible drop in the market. It was also in 1929 that he broke with his friend and benefactor Frank Shaw. Bill Wilson was going to be a lone wolf on Wall Street, and a powerful one at that.
Few margin traders were ready for the cataclysm that hit the market that October. Even Bill had prepared only for a squall. What impended was a hurricane. When the first wave of selling sent prices plunging, his Penick and Ford shares dropped from 55 to 42, a loss of $13 per share. With the help of friends,
Bill bought heavily in an attempt to shore up the price. The stock rallied, climbed to 52, and then made a sickening dive to 32 in a single day, wiping out the friends who had trusted his judgment — and Bill himself. He was broke.
“The minute my money went, the confidence in me was suddenly zero,” he recalled.
A friend named Dick Johnson offered him a job with his firm, Greenshields and Co., a brokerage firm in Montreal. In December, he and Lois moved to Montreal. Upon their arrival, about Christmastime, they moved into a dingy apartment. Within weeks, Bill was back into the market, again trading in Penick and Ford, which in the spring of 1930 actually climbed back to $55 a share.
It seemed that Bill was going to make a fast comeback. “I felt like Napoleon returning from Elba,” he said. “No St. Helena for me!” They soon found much better lodgings in Glen Eagles, an expensive new apartment house overlooking the St. Lawrence River. They had a wonderful time in Montreal, playing golf and dining at the Club House. By fall, Johnson had dismissed him. His Waterloo was, as always, booze.
In the last months of 1930, Bill caught what he called “occasional glimpses of the downslope leading to the valley of the shadow. But,” he said, “I could still turn and look the other way, even though I had been deeply shocked by the calamity of the 1929 crash and now the dismissal by my good friend Dick Johnson.” Again, he wrote a promise to his wife in the family Bible: “Finally and for a lifetime, thank God for your love.” The promise was dated September 3, 1930. Like those that had preceded it, it was not kept. That was the last of the Bible promises.
While Bill stayed on in Montreal to clean up details, Lois went back to Brooklyn, because her mother had fallen ill. “Even at the very end with much to do, I still couldn’t keep sober,” Bill said. “I remember getting very drunk, falling into an argument with a hotel detective.” He was thrown in jail, but released the next morning by a lenient judge. Drunk by noon, he met another alcoholic, an individual of the “tinhorn confidence man” variety. This companion was still with him when he finally woke up in Vermont, at the Burnham Emerald Lake camp. It took almost every cent Bill still possessed to send the man back to Montreal.
When Lois arrived in Vermont from Brooklyn, they discussed what they should do next. “By this time, I really began to appreciate her intense devotion, courage, and still high confidence in me,” Bill said. “After a season of no alcohol, we advanced again upon New York to recoup our fortunes.” It was after the Montreal disaster that Bill, for the first time, tried hard to stop drinking because he really wanted to stop. He did not yet realize that he was in the grip of an obsession, that he had lost the power of choice where drink was concerned, and that all his personal efforts to control or stop his drinking would come to nothing.
Back in Brooklyn, the Wilsons were taken in by Lois’s parents. While Bill must have been in some disgrace by this time, they apparently treated him with kindness and concern. “They were truly a marvelous couple,” he said of the Burnhams. Of Lois’s mother, he said, “Her capacity for the kind of love that demands no reward for nearly everything and everybody was quite beyond belief and understanding.” Bill remembered his father-in-law as “an exceedingly handsome individual, dressed immaculately and as courtly in his speech and manner as anyone I ever knew.” Underneath Dr. Burnham’s politeness, Bill said, there was an extreme aggressiveness and a terrific domination that affected the whole family life, without his in the least intending it or anyone’s realizing what was going on.
An indication of how totally out of control Bill’s drinking had now become was his behavior at the time of his mother-in-law’s death. Following an arduous course of radium treatments for bone cancer, she died on Christmas Day, 1930. Bill was drunk when she died; he had been drunk for days before; he stayed drunk for days after.
These words were written by Lois in a moment of despair:
“What is one to think or do after so many failures? Is my theory of the importance of love and faith nothing but bunk? Is it best to recognize life as it seems — a series of failures — and that my husband is a weak, spineless creature who is never going to get over his drinking?
“If I should lose my love and faith, what then? As I see it now, there is nothing but emptiness, bickering, taunts, and selfishness, each of us trying to get as much out of the other as possible in order to forget our lost ideals.
“I love my husband more than words can tell, and I know he loves me. He is a splendid, fine man — in fact, an unusual man with qualities that could make him reach the top. His personality is endearing; everybody loves him; and he is a born leader. Most kindly and bighearted, he would give away his last penny. He is honest almost to a fault. . . .
“The morning after he has been drunk, he is so penitent, self-derogatory, and sweet that it takes the wind out of my sails, and I cannot upbraid him.
“He continually asks for my help, and we have been trying together almost daily for five years to find an answer to his drinking problem, but it is worse now than ever. If we go away on a trip, he says he does not miss alcohol and goes without it a month or more at a time; but the minute we get back to the city, the very first day, in spite of all kinds of plans and protestations, he is at it again, sometimes coming home early and sometimes at five o’clock in the morning. . . .
“I hate even to think of it, but if I went away for a short time and did not come back until he had behaved himself for a week at least, and then, if things did not continue as they should, stayed away longer, would that help? Would it finally arouse his interest?
“In writing this down, I can see that . . . the problem is not about my life, of course, for probably the suffering is doing me good, but about his — the frightful harm this resolving and breaking down, resolving and breaking down again, must be doing to him. How can he ever accomplish anything with this frightful handicap? I worry more about the moral effect on him than I do the physical, although goodness knows the terrible stuff he drinks is enough to burn him up completely. . . .
“We understand each other as well as is possible for radically different temperaments. I admit I cannot understand the craving for liquor, for it has no appeal for me, although several times I have made myself drunk in order to try and find that appeal.
“I believe that people are good if you give them half a chance and that good is more powerful than evil. The world seems to me excruciatingly, almost painfully beautiful at times, and the goodness and kindness of people often exceed that which even I expect. Francis Bacon said that the human mind is easily fooled; that we believe what we want to believe and recognize only those facts which conform to that belief. Am I doing that identical thing? Are people bad, is love futile, and Bill doomed to worse than mediocrity? Am I a fool not to recognize it and grasp what pleasure and comfort I can?”
Bill, for his part, wrote Lois “thousands of letters. He would write to me over and over again how he never would take another drink.’’
Humiliated