MY FATHER TOLD ME the same story many times when I was growing up. My grandfather Mike sat him down at the kitchen table of their modest home in a hard-drinking steel town in western Pennsylvania. I don’t know how old my dad was at the time—maybe a navy recruit on leave during the last days of World War II or a theater student attending college on the GI Bill. He may even have been a disk jockey by then. Mike was not much of a talker, but he was determined to make an impression on his son. His father was an alcoholic who died young, leaving Mike to raise two brothers and a sister. All three were heavy drinkers.
So was Mike. He put a bottle of Kessler’s whiskey on the table and poured two large drinks. Raising his glass, he looked my dad in the eye.
“You drink too much,” he said.
Mike was right about my dad, and if he had lived long enough, he would have seen right through me. When he died, my dad and I got drunk on shots and beers in a dark neighborhood bar around the corner from the funeral home.
So my grandfather never knew that he had started something. My father continued to drink, often having his first martini of the day at 10 a.m. following his radio show. But he was haunted by what alcoholism had done to his family, and the stories he told me were warnings. I wasn’t completely surprised when he finally quit drinking.
That decision changed his life. He was not a bad man, but he was a selfish one. Then he joined Alcoholics Anonymous and started to repair the damage that he had done to his wife and children. He tried to help others. He was like Scrooge on Christmas morning. In his own words, he took his head out of his ass.
I watched his progress without understanding it because I was struggling with my own alcoholism. Then I quit drinking, too.
And it all began with a story. Mike introduced my father to the family ghosts, and he passed them along to me. Later I told our story so often that my sons begged for mercy.
But stories can inspire as well as warn.
From the time of Handsome Lake and the Washingtonians, sober drunks have shared their stories with people like my dad and me. They have shown us that we are not alone and introduced us to a worldwide community of people who are living happily without drugs or alcohol. They have told us how their lives were saved.
Today, we number in the millions, and our story grows louder with every retelling.