Last call from Columbus

At about 8 o’clock on the morning of April 9, Columbus Abrams called me as he has every year since we met at an AA meeting at Baptist Hospital nearly 40 years ago.

Columbus died this week at age 73, and I have lost a friend and literally thousands will not be getting his birthday calls at least not by phone.

Near the end, Columbus was calling about 5,000 recovering people on their “birthdays” every year in four states and a foreign country or two. That’s an average of a dozen or more calls a day (higher on New Year’s day when all those resolutions are in play).

And it was not just a hello and goodbye. He personally bought about 36,000 minutes of time annually on his telephone service.

Columbus and I met in the late spring of 1979 at a 12 Step meeting at Baptist Hospital in Little Rock. He was a patient in the hospital’s alcoholic ward, and I was living at home and going to meetings every day around the city and trying to do what my sponsor said.

Both of us had tried and failed to get sober before, but on the second go-around it stuck. Columbus had his last drink three days before I did, on April 6, 1979.

Over the years we saw each other at meetings and both of us served on boards—Columbus at Serenity Park and I at Wolfe Street where we had the high privilege of serving with and learning from the late Joe McQuany.

Lunch at Joe’s

In the days before McQuany and others founded Wolfe Street, Columbus and I would attend his Wednesday lunches and Monday night step meetings at 2500 Roosevelt road.

Columbus and I only saw each other once or twice a year, but we shared a common deep faith in God and were committed to following a program of recovery calling for us to help others and keep our own side of the street clean.

A week after I got his birthday call a few years ago, I called him back and asked him if I could chat with him about his telephone ministry. A few days later, on a gorgeous spring morning, we were drinking coffee at his kitchen table and swapping stories. He also showed me the computer where he maintains his lists of names and records of his calls.

Columbus launched his birthday ministry in 1991 with a list of members and birthdates of the “Last Chance” recovery group in Little Rock. As time passed, he added other rosters and also names he would get from referrals.

He started making calls every day at 7 a.m. and usually finished by mid morning.

If the person he is calling answers the phone, and he doesn’t know him or her, he opens with, “I’m a friend of Bill W’s [short for the late co-founder of the most successful program of recovery of all time, Bill Wilson], and I’m just calling to wish you a happy birthday.” He used a variation on this if a spouse or other family member answers.

Sometimes there was no answer or bad news when Columbus called. Sometimes the person he was trying to reach had had a relapse or some other health or family problem and was unable or unwilling to talk or had moved on.

Conversely, it was not uncommon for people, confused about their birthdates or simply impatient, to call him, sometimes with a touch of irritation, and say, “why haven’t you called?”

Some have been known to take calls on cell phones during important board meetings or social gatherings.

Liz, an 88-year-old recovering alcoholic in Niagara Falls, had been a favorite of Columbus’s over the years. Another old-timer, 93 year-old Minnie O. from Spartansburg, South Carolina, died a few years ago with 55 years of sobriety.

“She was an inspiration,” Columbus said, “and always seemed happy to hear from me. She was still attending meetings up until her death.”

That was not the case with another call. The previous week he had talked to a woman who had five years of sobriety but was having a bit of a struggle and questioning her program.

Columbus’s call helped.

“I was looking for a sign,” the women said, “and you’re it.”

Providing connections

The important need that Columbus filled was providing people he called with another connection, another relationship.

John Baker, a recovering alcoholic and founder of the Celebrate Recovery program at Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church, has said that recovery is based on “relationships.”

John Townsend, a clinical psychologist, divinity school graduate and author, recently expanded on Baker’s statement, saying that, “ in recovery everything begins and ends with relationships. People keep coming back because they connect. They don’t know this at first. All they know is that they’re screwed up and in pain.”

Connection, Townsend said, “comes before change.” And connection, he added, “doesn’t mean giving a lot of advice, a tactic which usually benefits the giver of advice more than the receiver.”

Instead, he said, “listen until they stop talking, and when they do, look them in the eye and say, ‘tell me more.’”

I asked Columbus during our last visit who on the call list had the most sobriety?

Columbus was not sure, but there was a man from Dumas, Arkansas, he said, who had died within the past couple of years whose sobriety date was 1947.

“He probably had at least 60 years when he died,” Columbus said. “He was a friend of Joe McQuany’s in the early days.”

McQuany, who died about ten years ago with nearly 50 years of sobriety, was a world famous authority on alcoholism and the 12-Steps, author of the Recovery Dynamics curriculum and several other books as well as the founder of Serenity Park.

McQuany, who was black, was instrumental in helping to integrate Arkansas’s all white 12-Step meetings in the sixties.

Columbus recalls with a laugh that someone had suggested early in his recovery that he ask McQuany to be his sponsor, an idea he rejected thinking, “they’re just tying to push me off on another black guy.”

Color no barrier

Today, Columbus says, “I don’t see color anymore.”

Columbus, who’s mother and father were educators, grew up in a solid home, attended the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, was drafted in the army in 1967 and served two years, most of it in Germany. A few years ago he retired from his supervisor’s job at Dassault Falcon Jet and prior to that worked for Reynolds Aluminum, Levi Strauss and Kraft Paper Company.

Columbus first realized he had to do something about his alcohol problem in 1973. “My health was fading and the job was about to go,” he says, adding that over the next six years, while he slipped in and out of sobriety, his wife, Virginia, threatened divorce.

What finally did him in was a wrecked car and a DWI in January 1979 followed by Virginia’s third trip to the divorce lawyer. It was the beginning of the end. Columbus who had his first drink when he was 19, a can of Colt 45 at a baseball game, had his last when he was 34 and on his way to Baptist Hospital.

Columbus is justifiably proud of his parents, both schoolteachers, his wife, Virginia, also a schoolteacher, and, yep, his three children, two girls and a boy, who are also schoolteachers. And, get this, they married schoolteachers.

When last we talked, Columbus was going to four or five 12-step meetings a week. He figured he actually needs only two, but he isn’t sure which two so he goes to twice that many just to be sure.

“Sometimes people ask me how come I go to so many meetings when I have so much sobriety,” Columbus said. “I laugh and say, “you took a bath yesterday, didn’t you? Why not take one today?”

It’s also a way, Columbus reminds us, to avoid that stinkin’ thinkin’ that develops with neglect of our programs of recovery.

Farewell, Columbus. See you later. Save me a seat.