Chemical Health Stories: Issues / Information / Self-Assessment / Support and Counseling

Click on the links below for downloadable PDFs of these personal stories:

"Too Young Not to Quit!" (44KB) has been made available from the Texas State Bar Journal.

"The Long & Winding Road" (52KB) has been made available from the Texas State Bar Journal

"Breaking the Cycle" (40KB) has been made available from the Texas State Bar Journal

"The Solution Became the Problem" (60KB) has been made available from the Texas State Bar Journal

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One Lawyer’s Story of Recovery from Alcoholism

How did you first get help for your drinking?

I went through LCL, actually through the portion that deals with stress and depression; that’s how I won my initial contract. I guess over the months and years I became familiar, especially, about the first three Steps of the AA program and the first three Steps were helpful for me working through stressful and depressing circumstances and situations. So that’s kind of how I came into that. In AA, we use the "Big Book." My book is pretty beat up and it’s pretty full of stuff and the "Twelve by Twelve," and I assume you’re probably familiar with these. I don’t do much; I don’t do anything in AA without relying on this "Big Book." If I’m asked to give a talk, I go to use this. That’s the whole basis for the program. That’s somewhat reflected in some of the comments that I usually make in my talks to AA. I do a certain amount of talking to AA people. I gave a Sunday night talk about two or three weeks ago out in Woodbury and I just made up my mind, I take no responsibility for it. My first sponsor pounded it into my head back in 1980, and Pat Butler also did: "never say no if anybody asks you to do anything in AA," so that’s the rule I follow. So anytime I’m asked to talk or meet with people, I do it, because AA has saved my life. I was in a pretty bad situation.

What was it like before?

I grew up in a family of mother, father, grandmother, three siblings, and myself. But my mother and her sister married two men from Notre Dame: my father and my uncle. They made a commitment to each other that if anything happened to one family, the other would take care of all the children. This was at their wedding, when there were no children. As it turned out, they passed away and the mother passed away in 1936. They lived in Boston and the father wasn’t able to handle it, so they started coming to live with us. So these are cousins that I didn’t know. One day I had a bed to myself, and the next day I have two other guys in the bed that I never saw. It’s kind of an interesting situation. So we really grew up as ten kids, my mother, my dad, and my grandmother, all in the same house.

Well, I don’t want to say I was a late bloomer in coming to drinking, but I think I had my first drink when I was in graduate school; I think I was 23 or 24 years old. I can remember four of us had finished our senior year and went on to graduate school at Notre Dame. We decided to take a little trip during the summertime, so we drove down through the South and we were headed for California by way of Tennessee and through Texas and down into Mexico and back up. Well, I remember I had had a drink before then, but I remember as I relate sometimes in my talk, the four of us got into a, I won’t call it a tavern, I would call it a house in Mexico, and I know I had a lot to drink. I still remember that night. That was one of the first drinks that I ever had, and it was the first time that I had too much. I know I had more than I should have had, and I know that we got out of there—whether we got out of there with our virginity intact is one issue, but we got out of there without being arrested, anyway. We came back into the United States and went on out to California. So as I say, I was a late starter drinking. I didn’t do any experimenting in high school or college; I just didn’t have any interest in it. We had alcohol in our house at home, but it was used very, very moderately, and only on special occasions. I don’t remember it ever being served to the kids until they were into college. So I’m not one of those that started nipping in grade school with the altar boy wine and all that sort of thing. I didn’t have that kind of experience. But I found in those early days that alcohol did funny things to me. It made me feel good in ways that I had not experienced before, sometimes I liked it, and at other times, I didn’t. But one thing led to another" I was married in 1954, after graduate school, and then I came to St. Paul for a job. I came to work in the Ramsey County Juvenile Court. I drank very moderately with various friends; not very much at all. But as the years progressed, the drinking seemed to progress. When I came here to St. Paul, it was as a probation officer in Ramsey County Juvenile Court. I was there for three years. I had a Master’s Degree in Criminology and Correction from Notre Dame, so when I came up here and applied for a job, they hired me right off the bat. They didn’t have anybody with Master’s Degrees. So I was a probation officer for three years. About the second year of being a probation officer, I started going to night law school. I never had any intention of practicing law, but I simply wanted the Law Degree as an extra degree, along with my Master’s Degree, and I figured that would give me good job protection in my life. So I came here and started law school while I was working as a probation officer in juvenile court. I stayed working in the juvenile court for another couple of years and then I was appointed superintendent of the Juvenile Detention Center, which was a maximum-security correctional institution. I was involved in the design and layout and the staffing of that institution. It was operated by Ramsey County District Judges. So it was in the course of that, and with running the detention home, and going to school four nights a week—a tremendous amount of pressure—that I found that a couple of drinks at the end of the day helped relieve the pressure and sure would help me sleep. I never had any particular interest to drink during the day, and in fact, had an absolute personal rule about it, especially when I was in institutional work, that there was no time to be drinking during the day.

It was interesting, it was back in those early days that knew Pat Butler. Pat Butler was one of the citizen advisory committee members of the Detentions and Corrections Authority, which operated the detention home, Boy’s __________ Town, and the Workhouse, and Pat was one of our citizen advisory committee members. That was how I first met him. At any rate, I continued on in my career in corrections, and at the same time going to law school. I never had any intention of practicing law, I simply wanted the law degree as a buffer because I knew that the higher I got on the ladder of administration in the field of corrections, the more political the jobs got. So I wanted to have an additional degree to protect myself, and I had started to raise a family, so that’s why I had the combination of the two degrees. I had a good working situation, but things were going poorly at home. My young wife had some substantial problems, and I would find myself with five children and my wife would be absent from the home. She would simply go out for a loaf of bread and be gone for three or four days and I would never know where she was. That’s pretty disconcerting when you’re trying to raise young kids and go to law school and run a correctional institution and a home, all at the same time. So, all of that put together put a lot of pressure"I ended up with a lot of pressure on myself, and I found that alcohol relieved that. A couple of good belts of scotch eased that pressure. I did some drinking, but it was essentially social drinking at that time. I don’t recall, but there may have been times when I drank too much in isolated instances, but basically, I was not a solitary drinker. I’ve never been one to sit and drink by myself.

So by the time I earned my law degree, I had five children, I had a wife who would frequently disappear from the house and be gone and I would never know where she was. That created, obviously, some stress and pressure within the family. I ultimately went through a divorce. I got my Law Degree in 1962 and my then boss through Ramsey County got very, very nervous. He had a Bachelor’s Degree with some graduate school, and he had somebody working for him with a Master’s Degree who now had a Law Degree, and no matter how much I would say to him, I could not convince him I wasn’t interested in his job. It was a political appointment and I was not interested in that. But he put the screws on me considerably, and between that and the situation at home, it was just too much for me, so I said "The heck with it" and talked to some people on my citizen’s advisory committee. One in particular suggested that the best thing I could do is get out of there. I had an opportunity to go to Honolulu as the first chief probation officer for the new state of Hawaii in 1963. But I had five children who were in school here in St. Paul, so I didn’t take that job. This member of my advisory committee said to me, "Jim, we have a law office downtown and you have your degree, why don’t you come down and practice with us for awhile until it works out." Well, I did that in 1963 and have been practicing ever since.

The office that I went into was a very fine law office in St. Paul that had a lot of trial work and had good business. We had seven or eight lawyers in the office and everybody worked well together; we had good careers. I got right into the trial; I loved the trial. I don’t know whether it was the action or the adrenalin or what, so I got into a lot of trial work. About 1965 or 1966 I was trying a case in the District Court of Ramsey County and went down in the courtroom right in front of the jury with a heart attack and ended up in St. Paul Ramsey Hospital. The first few days that I was there I was in intensive care; the second day I was there I was served with a summons and complaint for a divorce. In those days, the wife’s attorney could get a restraining order so that you couldn’t even go home, and that was what I was served. So I went from the hospital to the University Club and lived at the University Club for about five years. I really got into drinking then. I couldn’t work for about six or eight weeks, and sitting around in my room by myself was not very comfortable, to say the least, and I got into some heavy drinking at the University Club. So most of my drinking was with other attorneys, some of whom are in the LCL, a group of us together, which makes it nice.

I went back to work as an attorney and continued to drink. After four or five years, I left the firm that I was in and started a firm in 1970 with a classmate. We had a fine, thriving practice downtown. The two of us also had memberships in the four major clubs in town: the Minnesota Club, the St. Paul Athletic Club, the University Club, and the Pool & Yacht Club, so we never lacked for a place to go to have a drink at lunch or afterwards. I did some traveling, went to Europe for our office for some clients; it was a good experience. My partner, however, died in 1975 very suddenly. Since then I’ve been in solo practice. I share offices with other people, but I have not been in any kind of a partnership with others. And I’ve practiced since then, except for the times that I’ve retired.

My drinking continued until, I think, from about 1973/1974 until about 1980, when it got increasingly worse, I would miss time from work, and files would slide. As I look back, I was not very proud of some of the work I did, or of myself during those times. But in 1980, I attended a family party in a northern suburb of Chicago, in Evanston, Illinois. My mother had died in the spring of 1980. My mother and I had been very close, and her death hit me very hard. We traditionally had a family reunion on Labor Day weekend because that’s the weekend my folks were married, so in 1980 we had one of those parties with the ten kids, and now everybody is married and they come back and bring their spouses and kids, so we had quite a party. I remember having a drink standing in the backyard of my brother’s house on the 2nd of September of 1980, and that’s the last thing I remember until I woke up in my apartment in Roseville on September 18th. So I had a 16-day hiatus that I couldn’t remember, and I still can’t remember after twenty-three years of sobriety. So I woke up in my apartment. I had that last drink on the 2nd of September. I woke up in my apartment in Roseville on September 18th with a fractured skull, three broken ribs, and a couple of bad gashes on my leg, and I had no idea what happened. I have no idea where I was. Some of the charge cards, the Master Card, American Express Card slips that I had in my pocket were from all over the United States. Here I am, twenty-three years after that last drink, and I still cannot reconstruct where I was, but I know that I was all over this country. How, I have no idea. Where I was, I have no idea. How I got back to my apartment, I have no idea. How I got all those injuries, I have no idea. How I lived through them, I have no idea.

When I woke up, saw all the blood, and felt the terrible pain, all I could do was crawl over to the telephone and ask the operator for a police ambulance. They took me to the old Miller Hospital, and I was there for sixteen or seventeen days. I said to the doctor, who was one of my drinking buddies at the University Club, "I can’t go home," when he was ready to release me from the hospital, "I’ve got to go someplace to learn how to live without drinking." Now, my doctor, my drinking buddy, didn’t like to hear that, and I didn’t know anything about anyplace other than Hazelden, which I had heard about from Pat Butler. I used to have lunch with Pat from time to time and I knew that he was very active with Hazelden and the thought that I had was, "Well, maybe I could go to Hazelden." Well, the doctor wouldn’t let me because of the fractured skull. He wanted me close to town so he could watch my skull, and I had a blood clot on the brain that they were trying to dissolve, and he wasn’t really thinking that I needed any help. After all, he was my drinking buddy and he was surviving fine, and he thought I was surviving fine except for a couple of these bad bouts. But I said to him "I have to go to learn how to live without drinking." So I asked him to find out where in town I could go, so I was taken by ambulance to St. Joe’s Hospital where I went for treatment for twenty-eight days. I couldn’t even go on my own; they sent me in an ambulance because of the fracture and broken ribs, and so forth.

The first four or five days I was in treatment, they kept me in bed and the physician came to see me each day. I went through the St. Joe’s recovery program for twenty-eight days and life has been straight up since then. The first thing I had pounded into me was to keep my mouth shut and listen. The second thing was that when I got out of there I needed to find an AA group that I could be comfortable with, but primarily that I could stay sober with. The third thing I needed to do was read that "Big Book" until I was blue in the face. You can take one look at my book and it looks pretty beat up. I found there was an AA group in the Roseville Fire Station. My apartment was in Roseville, so I went there. I came out of treatment on a Sunday night and I went to my first meeting on Wednesday night at Roseville, and I was a member there for nineteen years until that group disbanded. Now I’ve been going here in town.

One of the other things I learned in treatment was to get a sponsor. So the first night I was there, I didn’t know anybody and they didn’t know me, but I heard a fellow talk and I thought, "Well, I’ll try," and so I asked him afterwards. I told him I was just out of treatment and I had told the group that I had just come out of treatment. So I asked this fellow to be my sponsor and he said "I’ll be your sponsor on one condition"" Now, he was five years sober, and I thought that anybody who could be five years sober, it was just miraculous. So Ray said, "I’ll be your sponsor on one condition." I said, "What’s that Ray?" He said, "You’ve got to do everything I tell you. Don’t ask me why I’m telling you to do it, just do it." Now, for a guy who has been practicing law, and on his own, who was superintendent or a warden of correctional institutions, for somebody to say I’ve got to do whatever he says without any question, was pretty hard to swallow. But that went down and stayed down, and I followed that rule. The first Saturday night (this was Wednesday night and I came out of treatment on Sunday), and that Saturday morning he called me and said, "Be down outside your apartment building at the north end in twenty minutes." I said, "Why?" He said, "Just be there." So in twenty minutes, I was down there and he picked me up. I got in the car and said "Where are we going?" He said, "Shut up and ride," and I did. He started talking about the program and he’s driving north, and before I know it, we’re up at Hazelden for the open luncheon. So that was my first post-treatment experience with Hazelden. Many of the words that I had heard from Pat Butler in earlier times sort of came back, ringing in my ears. At any rate, my sponsor Ray and I followed that program almost every Saturday for two years. We talked about nothing but the "Big Book" and 12 x 12 during that drive.

Through the grapevine, I learned that Pat Butler had a lunch downtown at the St. Paul Athletic Club every Monday and anybody who was in the program was welcome there. I found where this lunch was one Monday after getting out of treatment and I walked in, and there were an awful lot of familiar faces around that dining room table. Pat just looked at me and he said, "Jim, we’ve been waiting a long time for you." They were the most welcoming group of guys that I’ve ever known, and it was after that" I had had a lot of contact, but it was very superficial contact with Pat during the years that he was on our advisory committee. But now that I was in the program and having contact with him again, I was really welcome. We had that lunch every Monday, and anybody in recovery was welcome at that table. You bought your own lunch. Pat had the room, but it was live open table for anybody in the program, and I met many of my old friends there. Of course, Pat had stories about Hazelden, and Pat never talked about it; we had to pry it out of him. He had been, I think, the second alcoholic treated at Hazelden, and he funded it to get it started. Of course, the history of Hazelden is such that Pat has really funded them substantially and everybody who has any contact with Hazelden knows that. So the times with Pat, the lunches, went on for a number of years until Pat passed away. They were great, great experiences. I mean, the "Big Book" was coming alive as we’d sit around this lunch table and talk about it. I mean, it really came alive. So I got AA philosophy, I got it down deep in my gut, and that’s where I needed to get it to stay sober. Despite all the suggestions that somebody had made prior to me stopping drinking, I never paid much attention to it, but I tell you, anybody that made any suggestions after I got sober that told me how to stay sober, it was wonderful. The times with Pat Butler were just marvelous.

So about 1980, I think it was in September I came out of treatment. I think I went to my first LCL meeting in November, right around Thanksgiving time, and I’ve been going ever since. I have very close friends in LCL; people you know (he names people), just a wonderful, wonderful bunch of lawyers. I’ve never felt alone in my sobriety and trying to stay sober, after being involved in LCL and Pat Butler’s lunch group. One of the things they did was keep me busy with AA stuff. We need somebody to talk to somebody over here at this church" Well, sure, I could talk to them, but I don’t know anything about them. Pat Butler used to say, "Just go over there and stand up and tell them what happened." So it’s been a great experience. I have enjoyed LCL very much, and I will continue to participate with them. I’m thinking about 1983 they gave me "Man of the Year Award" or something like that and I belong to the International Lawyer’s AA. Anybody who asks me to talk about AA, I talk. I met people at the International AA Conference here in 1990, and when we were in Ireland later that summer, people I met here asked me to give a talk in Ireland, so I gave three talks over there. I’ve given talks all over the country. I talked two days in Las Vegas a year ago; first time, I was ever in Las Vegas.

(Names a person) and I were in law school together. We used to upset the dean of the law school from time to time because (person) was a Minneapolis police officer, and we were in the same class. Now, here’s (name) in his uniform, and me as a superintendent of a correctional institution, and from time to time a district squad from St. Paul Police would come into the dean’s office to get me out of class because of an emergency in the institution, and they’d take me out of the class. I remember they walked into the classroom one night and asked where I was. The whole class just stopped! The professor almost dropped dead. They would come and get me because there was an emergency at the institution. I remember one night they came and got me and I had to go to the hospital to sign a permit for a youngster who needed emergency surgery. I was legally the person in charge of that child, so I had to sign the consents. (Name) and I were in school at the same time, he’d show up in his uniform, and everybody knew I was superintendent of the correctional institution, and between the two of us, we had a great time. The poor dean, he’d get upset sometimes, but he did graduate both of us.

I’ll bet you have seen a lot of people come into LCL over the years. Do you have any observations on that for any lawyers that may be coming in, or younger lawyers? Advice, insights, thoughts?

I think the thing that we need to do, we in LCL, when we hear of a lawyer in the community who has gone into treatment, or is in inpatient or outpatient treatment, we need to get him into LCL and welcome him and invite him in. In the old days, I don’t think I was out of treatment a week or ten days, and somebody said "Come on, I want you to go along with me to LCL." So is that like AA" Well, sort of like that, but it’s different. So I think we need, and I’m not saying we don’t, all I’m saying is I guess I don’t know what we’re doing. I don’t think we’re going to do it on a structured, formal basis, but we can do it informally. I think on a formal basis, the more we can give talks in the law schools, Hamline University, Mitchell, pretty soon we’re going to have St. Thomas, we’re going to have talks in there; there are guys who really need help. I think we need to be able to get to the young lawyers coming out of school, as well as the lawyers who are in the field practicing. There are so many solo practitioners, and those are the ones who get into trouble. I meet solo practitioners all the time and I look to see what’s going on as I get to know them, and I know some of them are in trouble with alcohol. But as lawyers, we want to cover that up. We think it’s expected—we used to think; I don’t know that we do anymore, but it was expected of lawyers to drink after work. I think we need to reach out more than just having an AA meeting. I’m not sure just how to do that, but I know they have an AA meeting in the courthouse in St. Paul and Minneapolis, and there are fellows who are good lawyers who are in the program. It’s a program of attraction and we have to keep it that way. We can’t require people to come into it, obviously, but we who are in the program need to reach out and talk to lawyers, be willing to talk to civic groups, be willing to talk to law groups. Some of us have been very active in the Minnesota Bar Association. There are some of us, that anybody in the upper echelons of the Bar Association that knows us, knows we’re in recovery.

When I talk to groups about alcohol, I talk to them about the importance of recovery and the Twelve Steps and the "Big Book"—the whole damn thing is in this "Big Book." Anybody whose "Big Book" doesn’t look beat up isn’t using it. You’ve got to use it. There are basic rules: you don’t drink, you go to meetings, you get a sponsor, and then you stick with that sponsor.