“Welcome home,” the man says as I walk through the doors of the 1915 house in an attractive residential neighborhood of Akron, Ohio. This could sound insincere, coming from a stranger in a house you’ve never seen. But the greeting couldn’t be more heartfelt for all the folks who visit the former home of Dr. Bob, AA co-founder.
Dr. Bob’s Home officially became a National Historic Landmark in 1985, 35 years after his death. The National Park Service recognizes this house as the birthplace of AA. Akron is where Bob Smith and Bill Wilson met. And Dr. Bob’s home is where AAs held their meetings from 1935 until 1939 when the 80 or so attendees had to find a larger place to accommodate them.
While Dr. Bob’s home is the crown jewel of Akron’s AA pilgrimage trail, this Ohio city has about a dozen places of historical significance to recovery. Thousands of people come to Akron annually to experience firsthand where AA began, especially for the annual Founder’s Day celebration in June. “Some people actually cry when they come here,” volunteer Orville D. told me as he showed me Dr. Bob’s basement, filled with automotive memorabilia. “It’s very profound for them. I mean, this is kind of why they’re alive.”
Why Akron?
When I told people I was going to visit Akron, one person said it was a cool city, and about ten others asked, “Why?!”
Volunteer Jim D. addressed this as he toured me through the living area of Dr. Bob’s home, explaining how Bob and Anne moved to Ohio so Bob could take a job as a surgeon at Akron City Hospital. “And I know what you’re thinking is why in God’s name would somebody want to move to Akron, Ohio, right? I see it in your eyes. In 1915, Akron was a boomtown. Henry Ford was 150 miles up the pike, kicking out cars. Akron was the rubber capital of the world.”
Dr. Bob’s Home
Dr. Bob’s Home consists of the Smith residence plus two adjacent buildings, which house the library, gift shop, and additional displays. The day I visited, at least three volunteers were in the house, welcoming people, giving informal tours, and answering questions.
“This is your house as much as it is ours,” said volunteer Jim D. “You can go upstairs and take a nap in one of those beds if you want to. We’re a very tactile type of house.”
The Smiths lived here from 1915 until they died in 1949 and 1950. Over the next 35 years, the house had 12 different owners, including a motorcycle gang and an Akron University fraternity. “They were particularly destructive little buggers,” Jim D. said.
In 1984, historic-minded people established a not-for-profit foundation and collected enough donations to buy Dr. Bob’s home. Volunteers recreated the interior to look like 1935, based on photographs and memories. The two Smith children, Sue and Robert (known as Smitty), were instrumental. Sue had stored some of her parents’ furniture. Thanks to her, we can see chairs the original AAs sat on, lamps by which they read spiritual books, and end tables where they perched their coffee cups.
Getting a feel for Dr. Bob’s family
I toured the house from top to bottom. The basement reveals that Dr. Bob was a real car nut, an early adopter of the newfangled automobile. Big Book readers might remember the basement as the site where Dr. Bob laid in a huge supply of beer, thinking it couldn’t possibly get him as drunk as hard liquor. Wrong. Also, the coal chute where he hid many bottles.
Orville D. loves how the house humanizes Dr. Bob as a dad and a husband. And he calls Bob’s wife Anne a star. A 1903 Wellesley graduate, she devoured spiritual books alongside Bob and stuck with him through all those years of alcohol and sedative use. “I mean, what a couple. They were really a power couple,” he said. Both were active in the Oxford Group, a spiritual organization that brought the AA cofounders together, from which they heavily borrowed when devising the 12 steps.
A hostel for alcoholics
Upstairs, Orville D. shows me the bedrooms, the mere thought of which has long incited guilt in me. As somebody who is fanatical about my space, I don’t even like having house guests. But Smitty regularly got kicked out of his bedroom so some poor soul could detox. Often for extended periods. Orville D. reinforced my feelings when he told me about one drunk named Eddie chasing Anne around the house with a butcher knife. Eddie disappeared from the Smiths’ lives for years, only to resurface at Dr. Bob’s funeral, where he told Smitty he’d been sober for a few years. “The moral of that one, I guess, is you don’t know if it’s going to work or not.” Orville D. lived this principle of carrying the message in uncertain territory. He recently retired from working in a jail where he ran AA groups for prisoners for 12 years. He has no idea how many remained sober.
Alcoholism comes with many horrors, of course. But the amenity that gave me the heaves was Dr. Bob’s detox concoction, the ingredients laid out on a nightstand. A quote from Smitty is printed beside them. “I can see Doc now with the tomatoes, sauerkraut, a can of Karo syrup and a big spoon. The men got to where it almost gagged them, taking it straight.”
As a writer, the artifact that gave me the most vivid picture of the home was the ancient manual typewriter in the dining room. Three-fifths of the stories in the first edition of the Big Book are from people around Akron and Cleveland. Sue typed their stories for practice in her typing course! This girl’s childhood was dominated by alcoholism. She was adopted at age five, raised by an alcoholic father, then, when he finally got sober, she lived with a parade of drunks and had to listen to their gritty stories. And type them! Dr. Bob obviously did an immeasurable service to the world. But his family also helped—and paid a price. “She had problems throughout her life,” Orville D. said of Sue as we stood in her old bedroom.
The AA Pilgrimage Trail
As Ubers were scarce during my visit, I felt like a real spiritual pilgrim as I walked between some of the top sites relating to AA history, clocking 20 to 30 thousand steps a day.
You can tour some of Akron’s historic AA sites and get a good feel for them. Others are now private residences that you can only glimpse from outside. Some have to do with Bill W. and Dr. Bob’s initial meeting—such as the Mayflower Hotel, where Bill was staying when he made the historic phone call that led to his meeting with Dr. Bob. The Mayflower Hotel is now a senior living apartment complex, so only the real AA geeks will go gawk at its exterior.
Since my time and shoe tread were limited, I focused on the places where I could go inside and have the most meaningful experiences. Or that I just happened to pass by, such as the Portage Country Club (swanky!), where Bill W. stayed for two weeks before moving in with Dr. Bob and Anne.
Sieberling Gatehouse
When Bill W. was five months sober, his work brought him to Akron. But his business venture was a bust. He wanted to drink. So he did what successful AA members still do today: he started calling people. He had a list of Oxford Group members in the Akron area. Nobody was home except Henrietta Sieberling, the last person on the list.
Henrietta was part of the Oxford Group’s alcoholic squad. While not an alky herself, she was devoted to helping troubled drinkers. She was friends with Dr. Bob and knew of his (mostly) secret drinking. When she answered the call from Bill W., she thought, hmm, maybe these guys could help each other. So she pressured them to meet at the gatehouse of her family estate.
Now, one of the reasons it’s so fun to visit this AA site is that Sieberling—a beautiful young smartie who graduated from Vassar at 15!—married into a fortune. Her in-laws’ rubber baron estate, Stan Hywet, is one of Akron’s major tourist attractions. People come to tour the manor house and extensive gardens. Many AAs drop by to visit the gatehouse (at six bucks, much cheaper than the full tour).
The gatehouse is a homey spot with a warm energy. The only other people there were two women from Omaha whom I’d met at another site on the AA pilgrimage trail. We read the info on Henrietta, piecing her story together out loud and discussing her motivations for getting involved with a bunch of drunks. We sat down for a chat at her kitchen table, then stood in the library where Dr. Bob and Bill W. first met. As the story goes, Dr. Bob showed up to humor Henrietta and said he’d only stay for 15 minutes. Instead, well, millions of lives around the world have been changed for going on a century now.
I sat in the library for a while after the other two women left, taking in the vibes of being alone in this extremely special house, listening to a recording of Henrietta’s voice talking about recovery. While there, I was inspired to send photos of the gatehouse to a sober friend. He texted me back, saying it was the perfect day to receive such pics because it was his 41st soberversary! I had no idea. What synchronicity. This made me feel even more in tune with recovery’s spiritual and sometimes mystical aspects.
As it turns out, we can thank Henrietta for this. Both Dr. Bob and Bill W. resisted incorporating a religious dimension into AA, afraid it would turn alcoholics away. But Henrietta insisted, saying, “Well, we’re not out to please the alcoholics. They have been pleasing themselves all these years. We are out to please God. And if you don’t talk about what God does and your faith and guidance, then it might as well be the Rotary Club or something like that. Because God is your only source of Power.”
1st meeting
The longest-running AA meeting is one of Akron’s treasures and has a very special claim to fame. When the original meeting got too big for Dr. Bob’s house, it moved to King School. Later, the meeting moved to its current King Community Learning Center home. It’s an open meeting, so anybody interested in AA can attend Wednesday nights from eight to nine.
The stage is impressive, with a podium, balloons, an American flag, and large color portraits of Dr. Bob and Anne, all framed by dark blue curtains. The back of the room, alongside the literature, features historic artifacts like Dr. Bob’s Bible, framed handwritten notes from Dr. Bob and Bill W., and a brick from the original King School.
Gravesite
On my last afternoon in Akron, I walked through Mt. Peace Cemetery, winding between graves until I found the Smiths. As a cemetery aficionado, I love unusual markers. I was hoping for a giant Big Book carved out of stone or some such. But the Smiths weren’t showy people. They have a perfectly normal gray granite stone with their names and dates (Bob, 1879 -1950, and Anne, 1881-1949). A matching gray planter on the side is engraved with “Honesty Purity Unselfishness Love”—the Four Absolutes from the Oxford Group. The whole setup is clean and simple, and the plants in the planter are well-tended.
Nobody else was around. I sat on the grass by their marker for a while and contemplated sobriety. Outsiders sometimes think AA is something people need only while in the grip of DTs. Visiting Akron made me think more about AA’s ties to the Oxford Group, those spiritually inclined intellectuals who liked to read ponderous tomes and made it their Christian mission to do good in the world. And I thought about the truth of something Orville D. told me. “AA isn’t treatment,” he said. “It’s like a club to belong to if you’re interested in a spiritual way of life.”
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