Serenity Granted

January 1929

Bill Wilson, a 33-year-old stockbroker living in New York City, was en route to his hometown of East Dorset, Vermont. The train, which was traveling to nearby Manchester, required an overnight stopover in Albany, New York, where Wilson would meet his childhood friend Ebby Thacher, brother to the sitting mayor of Albany. Whenever Wilson was in the Albany area, it was his tradition to telephone Thacher and meet up for some drinks. A friend catching up with a friend: a normal occurrence for normal people. Except that normal people can take a drink—for alcoholics, the drinks take them.

Thacher and Wilson, two raging alcoholics, took off into the night. Wilson would eventually be brought back to his hotel room, unconscious. Thacher, never a quitter in those days, stayed up all night partying with fellow revelers, a few of whom were into this new craze called “aviation.” At some point in the wee hours, Thacher decreed that trains were a waste of time when there were perfectly good airplanes available. After some coaxing of a local pilot, Thacher marched upstairs and dragged Wilson out of bed. As the sun rose, the three set off for the freshly built airfield in Manchester. They called ahead to let folks know they were coming, and word got out. The townspeople, most of them thrilled to witness their first-ever airplane landing, rallied to the scene, literally striking up the band to welcome the plane’s arrival.

The plane safely touched down, but the ride did nothing to sober Wilson and Thacher. The aircraft doors opened, the crowd roared, the band played—and the pair promptly stumbled out and fell flat on their faces. The crowd was stunned as the two men drunkenly lay on the tarmac.

Later, when the haze finally cleared for Wilson, he said the shame, horror and embarrassment he felt was crippling. A humiliation like this, in front of his hardworking, temperate New England neighbors, would be enough for anyone to quit drinking for good.

Wilson headed straight back to the bar.

May 2025

The smiles and handshakes melted into hugs. It was a crisp spring afternoon at a packed Ekwanok Country Club, a classic of American golf architecture nestled at the base of the cascading trees of the Green Mountains in Manchester, Vermont. And while it still has plenty of teeth, on this day it felt like everyone won. Ekwanok isn’t the type of place that opens its exclusive doors for many charity events, but exceptions are made for local celebrities. The sixth annual Wilson House Cup, a fundraiser for the world-renowned recovery center just a few miles down the road in East Dorset, was a success. 

Birthplace of Bill Wilson, the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, the house is still doing his life’s work.

Wilson was born in 1895, in an area behind the bar of his family’s hotel in East Dorset. The Wilson family was originally in the mining business, but eventually moved into hotel ownership and opened the Wilson House Inn. When Wilson was 11, his parents divorced. His father moved to British Columbia, and his mother left for Boston (where she would study osteopathic medicine and become one of the first women to receive a degree from Harvard University). Wilson, devastated, stayed with his younger sister, Dorothy, in East Dorset, where they were raised by their maternal grandparents.

Wilson went to high school at the Burr and Burton Academy in Manchester. He showed his potential early, becoming class president, captain of the baseball team and first violin in the school orchestra. He also met and befriended Thacher. The Thacher family was part of the Northeast’s upper crust that summered in Manchester; Ebby’s father was a founding member of Ekwanok and the club’s second president. In a region where residents take great care to preserve their past, the Thacher family summer home remains at the corner of Main Street and Taconic Road, footsteps from the entrance to Ekwanok. (It’s easy to miss the club’s low-key signage, and locals often tell visitors that once they’ve found the Thacher home, they’ve arrived.)

Wilson’s family was in high regard over in East Dorset, but the Thachers were Manchester elite. Wilson’s eyes were opened and his ambition fired as Ebby introduced him to wealthy enclaves like Ekwanok. But Wilson suffered another catastrophic loss when the young woman he was hoping to someday marry died unexpectedly. He spiraled and nearly failed out of school.

After serving in World War I, Wilson began at Norwich University in Northfield, Vermont. Eventually, he married Lois Burnham—whose father was another original Ekwanok member—and moved to her native New York City to embark on a promising career as a stockbroker. Somewhere along the way, the drinking he had begun during the war worsened. In the months following Wilson’s Manchester flight of embarrassment with Thacher, the stock market would crash, and Wilson began his ugly descent to rock bottom.

By 1934, Wilson was deep in the throes of his alcoholism, having already spent time at one treatment facility in New York. He and Lois, low on money, had been forced to live with her parents. That year, Wilson received a visit from his old drinking buddy Thacher. But this would be different from their previous blowouts: Thacher had reached his own low point and had since gone sober. He was there with a message of hope: Wilson could do it too. It was a conversation that changed both of their lives and, eventually, would change the lives of millions.

Wilson embarked on his own road to recovery, and he struggled through the first few months of sobriety. He was desperate to find a more structured path to get—and, more importantly, remain—sober. He began to believe that the key was the continuous act of service. One alcoholic helping another. One meeting at a time. It seemed simple but not easy. A more difficult path than today’s “there’s an app for that” climate.

In 1935, on a business trip to Ohio, Wilson met fellow Vermonter and alcoholic Dr. Robert Smith. The collaboration led to them publishing the Alcoholics Anonymous book in 1939, which featured their 12-step recovery model. (In keeping with AA’s parlance of anonymity, the two men would become known within the community as Dr. Bob and Bill W.) Alcoholics Anonymous, led by Wilson, went on to revolutionize the study of and treatment for addiction. Shortly after the book’s publication, a prayer was brought to Wilson’s attention, and it was soon distributed on wallet-size cards among AA’s members. The Serenity Prayer would become a worldwide anthem of recovery: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”

By the time of Wilson’s death in 1971, Alcoholics Anonymous had already helped untold millions. In 1990, Life named Wilson one of the 100 most important Americans of the 20th century. In 1999, Time named him one of the 100 most influential people of the century. Alcoholics Anonymous has been printed more than 40 million times and translated into more than 70 different languages. In 2012, the Library of Congress named it to its list of 88 “Books That Shaped America.” The Wilson House remains a committed recovery center and has become something of a Mecca for those whose lives have been changed by AA, hosting thousands of tourists annually.

Some of the most fortunate visitors also include a round at Ekwanok on their itineraries. Wilson had a lifelong affinity for the club, and it is now forever entwined with his story and the AA mission. He never forgot those early rounds with Thacher, writing later in life that “it was fun to carom around the exclusive course which had inspired such awe in me as a lad.”

In fact, it was Ekwanok that provided the stage for some of Wilson’s worst moments. Golf is healing to the soul for so many, but it can be maddening to the mind. It can also enable the delusional to indulge. By 1929, Wilson was deeply enthralled with the game. He later wrote in Alcoholics Anonymous, “I contracted golf fever. We went at once to the country [Manchester], my wife to applaud while I started out to overtake Walter Hagen. Liquor caught up with me much faster than I came up behind Walter.” Wilson used the game as his latest excuse to drink and cope, especially through the excruciating hangovers. “I began to be jittery in the morning,” he continued. “Golf permitted drinking every day and every night.”

In those dark times, it seemed to many that Wilson would never reach the heights he’d dreamed about as a schoolboy walking through Manchester. Primarily a summer town for the wealthy, it is packed with classic New England cottages and bungalows. Its identity as a coveted place to spend July Fourth through Labor Day stretches to the post–Civil War era, when luminaries like Ulysses S. Grant and President Lincoln’s son Robert Todd Lincoln began fleeing north. Moneyed New Yorkers and Bostonians, many with roots stretching back to families who crossed on the Mayflower, staked their claims along the area’s charming waterfronts and rolling valleys.

James L. Taylor founded Ekwanok in 1899, with Robert Todd Lincoln serving as the first club president, elected in 1904. Golf was fast gaining popularity in the U.S., and Willie Dunn Jr., whose father finished in the top 10 of three Open Championships in Scotland, had moved to the States to design courses throughout the Northeast. He was so busy that he brought his nephew, John Duncan Dunn, to help with the business. John Duncan befriended an up-and-coming player named Walter J. Travis, and Ekwanok tapped the eager duo to build its course.

The result is what Ran Morrissett of Golf Club Atlas called “the first 18-hole golf course in the United States that stood favorable comparison with some of the famous courses in the United Kingdom.” Travis—a golf renaissance man who would go on to win the 1904 British Amateur and three U.S. Amateurs (in an era when it had major-like prestige and attracted many of the world’s best players), launch the seminal The American Golfer magazine and design, remodel or consult on more than 80 courses, including the original design of the Garden City Golf Club in New York—allowed his creative brain to flourish at Ekwanok. As Morrissett notes, the course has a unique “T” routing, “with six holes making the stem and the balance of the holes beautifully laid across more rugged New England terrain.”

In an era when architects would often spend just a few days laying out tee boxes and greens before moving on to the next job, Travis made Ekwanok his spiritual home, returning often during construction and over the following years to tinker with his infamous pitched greens. The course almost immediately received wide acclaim as one of the nation’s best—the USGA held the 1914 U.S. Amateur there, and Francis Ouimet, fresh off his landscape-shifting victory at the 1913 U.S. Open, took the title.

Today, Ekwanok remains a fixture in course rankings and one of the most treasured layouts in the country for architecture aficionados. It’s also still a private haven for high society. Past members include multiple British prime ministers, a U.S. secretary of state and a seemingly unending list of industry titans. Bartlett Arkell, longtime president of the Beech-Nut food packaging company, was a member at Ekwanok and Augusta National, where he financed 40% of the first ANGC clubhouse and funded the winner’s purse for the first nine Masters tournaments. He also had something special for Ekwanok: Arkell was a passionate art collector, and he gifted Norman Rockwell’s famed caddie painting, On the Tee, to the club. A reproduction still hangs in the clubhouse; whether the original was sold or stored elsewhere for safekeeping, that story remains with the members.Yet despite all the heavyweight names who have graced Ekwanok’s fairways over the decades, an unlikely friendship the club’s founders never could have anticipated may end up creating the most lasting impact. The local from down the street in East Dorset and the son of a leading Manchester family, working through highs and lows on and off the course, eventually helping millions to find their long-sought serenity.