SYBIL CORWIN AA SPEAKER FROM PASADENA, CA @ AN AA CONVENTION, FEBRUARY 15, 1980

Sybil C. was the first woman to enter A.A. west of the Mississippi. Her date of sobriety was March 21, 1941. Her name at the time was Sybil Maxwell, though she later opened her talks by saying, “My name is Sybil Doris Adams Stratton Hart Maxwell Willis C., and I’m an alcoholic.” She was born Sybil Doris Adams on May 20, 1908, in the small oil town of Simians, Texas. Her parents were poor but hardworking and she had a brother Herman, ten years her senior. Herman was called “Tex.” Sybil adored her big brother. She remembered that when she was five and he fifteen, he would hold her and rock her to sleep. Sybil felt like a misfit in Los Angeles.She and her husband hitchhiked out of town to find grape picking jobs. They thought getting away from their city friends would help them quit drinking, but she soon was drunk again. During one of her drunks she heard music. At first she thought she was hallucinating, but she followed the sound and wandered into a tent where a revival meeting was in progress. The preacher asked for anyone to come forward who wanted to be saved. “Well, that was me,” Sybil told A.A. members. “I went all the way down while the people were singing. It was so terrible! I was so ashamed, I couldn’t bring myself to tell anyone about it until I got into Alcoholics Anonymous eleven years later.” She left her sailor husband and hitchhiked back to Los Angeles to her mother’s house. Her brother, Tex, now had a speakeasy on skid row, and to make money to take to her mother to support the child, she went into the bootlegging business with him. Eventually the speakeasy was raided and they were out of business. Then she went to work in a taxi-dance hall. Little is known of her second husband, but she met her third husband, Dick Maxwell, while working in the taxi-dance hall. One night a rich, handsome stranger walked in and bought dance tickets with Sybil for the whole night. During intermission he bought several pitchers of beer (the girls got a dollar for every pitcher their partner bought), and she told him her sad story. He offered to marry her and adopt her child if she would promise not to drink any more. Now she had a wonderful husband, a home, a housekeeper, and a car. But she couldn’t stop drinking. In 1939, while visiting her mother, she read the Liberty magazine article called “Alcoholics and God.” Eighteen months later God gave her another chance, when she read the Saturday Evening Post’s March 1, 1941 issue which contained the famous Jack Alexander article about A.A.. She wrote to New York and received a reply from Ruth Hock, then Bill Wilson’s secretary, who told her that there were no women members in California, but that Marty Mann was sober in New York. Ruth referred her to the small group of men then in the area. On Friday, March 23, Sybil’s nonalcoholic husband, Dick Maxwell, drove her to the meeting. They found ten or twelve men seated around a table and three or four women seated against the wall. When the chairman began the meeting he announced “As is our custom before the regular meeting starts, we have to ask the women to leave.” Sybil left with the other women but her husband stayed and the members assumed he was the alcoholic. When he rejoined Sybil he said “They don’t know you’re alive. They just went on and on bragging about their drinking until I was about to walk out, when they jumped up and said the Lord’s Prayer, and here I am.” Sybil headed for the nearest bar and got drunk. When she returned the following week, Frank R. brought in a large carton full of letters bundled into bunches of twenty to fifty. He explained that they were all inquiries and calls for help from people in southern California. “Here they are! Here they are! If any of you jokers have been sober over fifteen minutes, come on up here and get these letters. We’ve got to get as many of these drunks as we can in here by next Friday, or they may die.” The last bundle was of letters from women. Frank said: “Sybil Maxwell, come on up. I am going to put you in charge of all the women.” Sybil liked the idea of “being in charge” but replied, “I can’t, sir. You said I have to make all those calls by next Friday, or somebody might die. Well, I’ll be drunk by next Friday unless you have some magic that will change everything so I can stay sober.” Frank explained that everything she needed to know was in the Big Book. “And it says right in here that when all other measures fail, working with another alcoholic will save the day. It worked, and she never had another drink. When Bill and Lois Wilson made their first visit to Los Angeles in 1943, Sybil was one of the delegation of local A.A.’s who met them at the Town House hotel. Later she met Marty Mann. Sybil died April 30th, 1998.