Hello, my name is Doug and I’m alcoholic. As of today, June 6, 2026, I have been sober for exactly 32 years, one day at a time.
I took that first step on June 6. 1994, in a gathering of fellow travelers, in the basement of a Lutheran Church in Arlington, Virginia at my first meeting with Alcoholics Anonymous. It was my first serious attempt to quit drinking after taking my first drink, a glass of moonshine, in 1962, at a motel on Virginia Rte. 8 just south of Floyd when I was 15 years old.
The glass contained shine from Cleophus Sowers , a premier moonshiner in the county and well known in Southwestern Virginia. That point of history was unknown at the time to a 15-year-old boy who needed the drink to calm down to deal with the attentions of a 27-year-old teaching assistant to wanted to teach him about what women can do to please boys.
That drink was the first many others providig my her in what would about a six-month affair during my freshman year in high school. It was a memorable education and I often had drinks during the day to boost my courage when it came to dealing with girls.
I graduated from Floyd County High School at age 17 and went to work immediately at The Roanoke Times on Campbell Avenue in the Star City. The reporters would often drop by the bar of the Ponce de Leon Hotel across the street to unwind. As a reporter for the paper, I was never carded and drank beer with the crew and enjoyed the company of Piedmont Airline Stewardesses who would stay at the hotel when overnighting.
I was also invited to join a “private club” outside of Radford where we could store booze and enjoy mixed drinks before Virginia’s “liquor by the drink law” was passed and I had my first “purchased mix drink,” Johnny Walker scotch and soda. That lifestyle continued when I accepted a reporting job offer in the St. Louis area at The Telegraph in Alton, just up the river on the Ilinois side of the Mississippi River.
By that time, I was 21, had a Playboy Club membership, a charge card with the 905 Liquor Store chain and could visit the Budweiser Brewery in St. Louis and drink a lot of free beer.
Midol, I discovered, was good for hangovers.
In 1981, wife Amy and I moved to the National Capital Region of Washington, DC, where the government and politics thrived on the cocktail party circuit and Alcoholics Anonymous had chapters in both the Pentagon and the Old Executive Office Building for the White House.
I spent a lot of time on airplanes, often on international flights and found that drinking was the best way to pass the time. I remember a non-stopflight from Hong Kong to Washington where we had enough time to drink, sleep, wake up with hangover, have breakfast, then lunch with drinks and arrived buzzed when the plane landed in Los Angeles.
By then, my drinking was out of control and several people, including my wife Amy, had asked me to stop. Finally, a night out at a Capitol Hill ended with me waking up in an airport hotel on the other side of the country with no idea how in the hell it happened.
I didn’t have a ticket but had used my Amex card to check into the hotel. A call to Amy brought cries “are you all right and where are you?”
I caught a non-stop flight to Washington Dulles, where Amy was waiting for me and said; “I’ve got someplace for you to go.” It was the church near our condo where an AA meeting was about to start.
That night, I met the man who would become my sponsor and started working on the first of the programs’ steps towards sobriety. That was on June 6, 1994, the 50th anniversary and it became my D-Day.
For several years, I would tell the AA meeting on my anniversary of sobriety the story of my mysterious trip to San Francisco. A charge for a flight there never appeared on my Amex bill. I never knew how I got there but a fellow traveler at one the nights I told the story asked me: “Were friends telling you it was time to get sober?:
“Yes,” I said, “but I wasn’t listening to them.”
“Then maybe you had an intervention someone who wanted to find a way to make you listen,” he said.
I hadn’t thought about that. One of the people I drank with was a lobbyist with a pharmaceutical firm. He was retried and living in Hilton Head, but we had kept in touch, so I called him.
“Tell me more about June 6, 1994,” I said.
He chuckled and replied: “So, I guess Amy finally told you about it.”
No she hadn’t.
“Amy was about two or three weeks away from leaving you and wanted to see if we could set up an intervention,” he said. “My boss was drinking too much and our company had helped him, so we set it up an intervention. We always ended the evenings with shots. We made sure you drank enough tequila until you passed out. Then we hauled you out to National Airport, where our company jet took you and us to San Fransisco.”
“And I never woke up?”
“You tried but we would give you more tequila and that would put you back under,” he said. “Once we got there, we literally carried you to the hotel and explained to the clerk what we were doing. She understood, checked you in, and we left you there.”
It worked. When I tried to get information from the hotel, they played dumb and gave me a timetable with flights back to Washington. I drank coffee on the flight then and haven’t touched a drink since.
It was my wife’s love and the support of incredible friends who saved my life on that time in 1994. Amy reminds me daily that I continue to remain sober.
A bronze AA chip with XXXII in Roman numerals reminds me of what the organization, my friends and my loving wife did for me 32 years ago an I thank each of them, one day at a time.
1 thought on “Thirty two years, one day at a time”
Doug, congrats on your sobriety. I battled living with an alcoholic wife for 23 years. She was not an alcoholic when I married her in 1966 but she got hooked after we moved to Florida. We were living next door to an elderly couple for a year or two in around 1970 and they were serious alcoholics. They were retired and my wife was just being a mother and housekeeper at the time and they got her hooked on booze. Not blaming them but sure blame ex for getting hooked. I told her many times that if she had not quit by the time my youngest son turned 18 that I was going to divorce her. Of course she thought that would not happen. I filed for divorce in January 1990 and Son Bruce was 18 on February 7th. Do not get me wrong, I am not a teetotaler but enjoy a beer on an average of one a week or so and that is usually split with my present wife who like your Amy is an angel. I married Sylvia on Jan. 1st of 1993 and we have had a great 33 years together. My ex finally drank herself to death in 2018 in a nursing home. I went from living paycheck to paycheck because of her drinking to now having an estate of over a million. Sylvia, my present wife was working when we married but I asked her to stop working a year or two after we married as her salary at an accounting firm was actually costing us more than helping as I was working a regular job at a consulting engineering firm and had my own side business and was making over $100,000 a year between the two incomes and her job only kicked us into higher tax brackets and between the gas to get to work and other expenses, it was hurting us more than helping. She has a masters degree in European history by could never get a job teaching as she had planned. You will notice this is being typed at 3:30 AM and I still wake up early every morning from all the years of working at this time on my business and then doing my 8 hours at my regular job. Tell Amy I am proud of her sticking with you all these years. I ran out of patience with my ex and just could not take it anymore. Anyway that is my story, and I am not proud of throwing her on her own but I had to have my own life back. I am about to turn 82 years old next month, in reasonably good health, happy, still married to my angel asleep in the bedroom right now. I still do some engineering but mostly just day trade stocks. I have a quarter of a million in my stock portfolio and usually make around $40,000 a year in the market especially now that we have a businessman for a president and knows how to grow an economy. My stock portfolio has grown $57,000 since his inauguration this time after 4 years of almost stagnant grown with the old demented politician running the country for 4 years. I cringe whenever I read your post tearing Trump down and wonder how you could have reached such a bad level of TDS. Anyway let me say I am proud of your recovery and hope you never fall off the wagon again. One more thing, my oldest son Joe just turned 63 on June 16th and is retired and just bought a Harley and loves it but first he was a fireman and I worried about that, he is now retired and I worry a lot about him on that Harley. Keep up your good life in FLoyd and if ever you make it across the Georgia line into the sunshine state, stop by The Villages. I would love to show you around. You would change your opinion of the friendliest neighborhood in the country if you saw it. The population is about 150,000 in the winter now and is huge. Yes it is about 70% conservative Republican but I have many friends here who are liberal democrats and we just do not talk politics lol. When you get healthy, take a vacation here and stop in and say hi.
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