The Pioneers of Family Recovery

Her father was the town drunk. At least that is how her mother often described him. And he carried his alcoholism from South Dakota to Long Beach, where he moved in the 1920s, drinking 39-cent muscatel until he saw bugs crawling out of the woodwork.

When his only child was a teenager, she said she would rather run away from home than risk the shame of him showing up drunk at her wedding.

But by the time Beverly Lewis was ready to get married and become Beverly O’Neill less than five years later, her father, Clarence, had gotten sober and was able to walk his daughter down the aisle.

Clarence Lewis owed that proud day in no small part to his wife, Flossie, who started what is believed to be the first formal group for families of alcoholics--the forerunner of Al-Anon--and was fast becoming a legend in Long Beach for her work with alcoholics.

And Beverly O’Neill, who had grown up shuttered behind the shame of her father’s drinking, had a multitude of new friends, many of them from Alcoholics Anonymous.

She would later become mayor of Long Beach.

“My mom and I had been such recluses all our lives--not talking to anybody about [her father’s drinking], not inviting anyone to the house,” O’Neill said. “There were just the two of us.

“Then, when I got married, one estimate was that there were 800 people there. We didn’t know that many people our whole lives. But all the AAs came, and they all cried.”

Flossie Lewis and Beverly O’Neill, as they blazed important trails in Long Beach, came to view their bout with alcoholism as a blessing.

“Who would have thought that out of the heck of a life we had that something good could come of it?” Flossie Lewis once told a group of friends.

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Lewis was a country girl from South Dakota with red hair, freckles and an infectious sense of humor. She never outgrew her folksy ways, even into her 80s. She once described how she would listen to songs with lyrics like, “I’ll be glad when you’re dead, you rascal you,” and think dark thoughts about her husband. But then she would quickly add: “I’m so glad my prayers weren’t answered. I’m so thankful that I married an alcoholic because I found myself.”

O’Neill said, “I’m glad I went through it, that I know what I know.”

But she adds: “I wouldn’t want to do it again.”

The emergence of the two women as important figures in Long Beach parallels the explosive growth of self-help programs in the 1950s and ‘60s built around the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous and the belief that alcoholics and their families could help themselves recover by sharing their experiences, strength and hope.

Alcoholics Anonymous was founded in 1935, but Flossie Lewis found little support for family members of alcoholics when she needed it in the 1940s. So she took things into her own hands, helping organize other wives of alcoholics. It was to prove historic.

“The first family group is thought to have formed in Long Beach,” says the Al-Anon history, “First Steps,” referring to the pioneering group Flossie Lewis organized. Others were getting underway in several other cities.

Today Al-Anon has 31,527 groups registered in the United States and Canada with more than 600,000 members.

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Lewis, a teetotaler all her life, was also called the “mother of AA” in Long Beach because she started the city’s first 24-hour hotline for alcoholics in 1948 and ran it for five years out of her living room with the help of her husband, who had his last drink in 1947.

These were the days before the widespread availability of recovery houses, so she set up cots in her garage for drunks to sleep off benders. She also filled garages with free clothes for down and out alcoholics.

In the early years, Beverly was often at her side. Later, her constant companion was Beverly’s daughter, Teresa O’Neill.

When she rode with her grandmother, Teresa would sit on piles of giveaway clothes stacked so high she couldn’t see the seat or floorboard below her.

“I remember once driving past this man who needed pants,” said Teresa, now a 39-year-old Los Angeles television scriptwriter. “She stopped the car and got out. Here was my grandmother out on the street measuring some strange man’s inseam. Every day was a miracle. That is what she would always say.”

When she accompanied her grandmother to AA meetings, Teresa O’Neill said, “I have never seen so many people drink so much coffee, smoke so many cigarettes and eat so many doughnuts.”

Then, in a description that would seem to fit her own family, she added: “These were people grateful to be alive. They hit bottom and came back.”

Elsa M., a plucky 76-year-old Cerritos woman who has been active in Al-Anon for nearly 50 years said: “Flossie loved alcoholics. I mean she loved alcoholics. She would do anything for them. She believed in them. She knew they were sick and could get better.”

The alcoholics never forgot.

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When Flossie Lewis died in 1989 at the age of 87, hundreds showed up to mourn her.

“Men from all over Southern California came to the funeral,” said Anna Lee Jewell, 84, who lives in Leisure World and knew the Lewis family from their days at Long Beach’s First Baptist Church. “They all had so much respect for her because of the help she gave so many alcoholics.”

The deepest loss was felt by her daughter.

“There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about her,” said O’Neill. Inspiration she drew from her mother helped her make groundbreaking achievements in academics and politics. “I miss her so much.”

As a teenager, O’Neill helped her mother operate the 24-hour hotline and distribute clothes. She sang “The Lord’s Prayer” at AA’s International Convention in Long Beach a decade later.

These days O’Neill is more likely to be found presiding over a City Council meeting or leading a delegation of city leaders to Sacramento or Washington. She turns up at the White House and spoke at the 1996 Democratic National Convention.

As she goes about the city, O’Neill’s life as mayor and as the daughter of Flossie Lewis frequently intersect. Earlier this year, the Long Beach City Council imposed a moratorium on the expansion of downtown social service agencies, including sober living houses like the one that bears her mother’s name.

O’Neill’s support of the moratorium generated some rumblings in the recovery community.

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At the same time, she is known in some circles more as “Flossie’s daughter” than as the mayor. After recently seeing a group of young people wearing T-shirts from a sober living house at a street fair, O’Neill said she told them she was the mayor.

She got little response.

“But then I said my mother was Flossie Lewis,” she said. “Oh, God, they just loved it.”

But she still finds it difficult to talk about her early years.

“There are things I don’t talk about,” she said. “There was constant turmoil, constant tension, embarrassment.”

She paused before adding, “Fear.”

Once her father got sober, she said, the family’s life turned around. O’Neill said her father lived the last 18 1/2 years of his life sober. He lived what she called “a saintly life” after he stopped drinking and died “a saintly man” in 1965. She remembers that as the family’s circle of friends grew, her mother and father would host huge potlucks at their downtown Long Beach home, affairs that would draw as many as 300 people.

“It was wonderful, it really was, to have such a change in your life,” O’Neill said. “The camaraderie, the AA, the meetings, the picnics, the gatherings in our backyard.”

The years she spent helping her mother with the hotline and handing out clothes were among the most satisfying of her life, O’Neill said.

“I learned more about life in those five years than I have in all the time since,” she said. “It’s made me not be afraid of being in any situation.”

For all that she learned, O’Neill is well aware that she is one of the lucky children of alcoholics who was able to prosper.

Alcoholism is considered a family disease because although it is the alcoholic who gets drunk, his or her family often wakes up with an emotional hangover and feels the same sense of guilt, shame and remorse.

As a result, experts say, many spouses and children of alcoholics develop crippling mental or emotional problems that may lead to multiple divorces, prison or to their becoming alcoholics or drug addicts themselves.

“Very often children of alcoholics can be high achievers just because by default they are forced to take on roles beyond their age,” said Andrew C. Phillips, director of the New York-based Children of Alcoholics Foundation. “But many cannot cope. Unfortunately, these kids can have trouble the rest of their lives.”

Phillips said there are about 7 million children of alcoholics in the United States who are 18 or younger. Just how many of them will manage to lead successful lives is uncertain, but some mental health professionals say as few as one in four overcome problems related to parental alcoholism.

“I found an out through education and my mother’s encouragement,” O’Neill said.

She rose through the ranks from music instructor to dean of students to president of Long Beach City College. One of her most memorable achievements was starting what was in 1968 a pioneering continuing education center at the college for women reentering the work force.

The man she married that day her father walked her down the aisle was William O’Neill, now retired after 32 years as a professor at USC’s school of education. Sweethearts from their days as students at Long Beach’s Polytechnic High School, they have been married 44 years.

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Watching her mother taught O’Neill that “one person can make a difference,” as she put it--a lesson that helped her decide to run for mayor in 1994.

As mayor, her political philosophy seems to be rooted in her life experience. She is known around Long Beach City Hall as a consensus-builder, a team player and someone proud of her ability to turn lemons into lemonade. Those are similar to the characteristics often cited for the success of AA and Al-Anon.

O’Neill recently was keynote speaker at the 20th anniversary fund-raiser for the Memorial West Alumni Club for alcoholics and their families.

Shedding the formal style she adopts for political meetings, she spoke emotionally about her life, saying she was happy to be among friends. When she finished her talk, many in the big meeting hall were in tears.

Joan Pizzato, one of those present that evening, said afterward of O’Neill: “The hotter the fire, the better the steel. She is one of us because she is the child of an alcoholic.”