Dr. Bob and the Birth of Alcoholics Anonymous
Near Akron, Ohio
At eight fifty-five Ardmore Avenue in Akron's west side, there is a modest white house that the National Park Service has designated a National Historic Landmark. To look at it, you would not guess its significance. But this was the home of Doctor Robert Holbrook Smith, and it is where Alcoholics Anonymous began.
Doctor Bob Smith was a physician and a surgeon, a Dartmouth graduate who had become a highly skilled doctor. He had also been unable to stop drinking for more than seventeen years. He had tried hospitals, sanitariums, and willpower. Nothing worked.
In May of nineteen thirty-five, a New York stockbroker named Bill Wilson arrived in Akron on a failed business trip. Wilson was himself a recovering alcoholic and had recently found sobriety through a religious group. Stranded in Akron, afraid of drinking, he asked around for another alcoholic he could talk to. The connection led him to Doctor Bob.
The two men talked for hours. They talked about what drinking felt like from the inside, the obsession and the inability to stop, in terms that neither had heard from a doctor or a minister before. Something shifted. Doctor Bob took his last drink on June tenth, nineteen thirty-five. That date is recognized as the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Wilson and Smith immediately went to work with other alcoholics at Akron City Hospital. One patient achieved sobriety. These three men formed the nucleus of the first Alcoholics Anonymous group. Smith went on to personally help more than five thousand alcoholics before his death in nineteen fifty.
The house at Ardmore Avenue remained Smith's home until he died. It opened as a museum in the nineteen eighties and still receives thousands of visitors each year from around the world. The organization that grew from those conversations now counts over two million members in one hundred eighty countries.
