Where do you start with the cornucopia of stories that make up Mike R.´s life? Do you start with the dangerous, out of control juvenile who segued into a dangerous, out-of-control felon? Do you start with the boundless devotion of his mother through all his vicissitudes? How about the psychic experience which finally led him to sobriety when he was 35? Or the enormous amount of service work for A.A. which followed his discovery of sobriety?

Best to start at the beginning, back in Ada, Minnesota, where he had his first drink at the age of 14. By the next year, he had a car and was driving drunk around his little town of 1600. He made his first trip to juvenile court when he was 16, after a drunken brawl at a dance. Three months later, somebody saw him dumping a sackful of beer cans in a ditch. For violating his probation, he was sent to reform school in Red Wing. That was in May 1957, and he was 16 years old.

Back to Ada and his mother after his release, Mike resumed his runaround/drinking lifestyle. He met a girl in nearby Hillsboro, North Dakota, who happened to be the police chief´s daughter. They were out parking one night when the police chief came by, yanked him out of the car and threw him into the local jail. "They put me in a straightjacket and ´cuffed me to the bars after I tore up the toilet in the cell." Sitting next to the prosecutor in court the next day, still wearing his straightjacket, Mike kicked the lawyer in the head, "and the next thing I knew, I was on my way to a padded cell."

The brawling youth-he was now 17-stayed there two weeks, until his Minnesota probation officer took him back to reform school. Then, the state sent to him a vocational school. Boys in the school were not prisoners. Mike lived at the YMCA and got his first DWI when he tried to outrun the cops. He got hung by his handcuffs from the cell bars after tearing up his cell.

His mother bailed him out and took him back to Ada, where he got his second DWI (he got 11 before he quit drinking) and his faithful mother paid his $100 fine. At that point, Mike decided to take a geographical, and fled to a fleabag hotel in Palo Alto, California, and promptly got arrested for peeing on the sidewalk. After a 30-day stint in jail, he was back in Ada for more drinking and carousing before he tore up another jail cell and was charged with a felony for the first time. That earned him a trip to the state prison at St. Cloud, Minnesota, where he made license plates for 20 months.

Out again and back in Ada, it was the same-old-same-old. "I was out drinking with my buddies, and dragged a guy out of his car and damn near killed him with a hammer." Mike figured he was in for some really hard time at St. Cloud again, so he dreamed up the idea of substituting a mental hospital for his confinement. The court agreed, and thus began a seven-year stretch in the state hospital for the criminally insane in St. Peter, Minnesota. He was 21 years old.

"You think ´One Flew Over the Cuckoo´s Nest´ was bad? It was a country club. I helped with over 1000 shock treatments." He also learned the mortician´s trade, and handled 18 suicides in his time there, interspersed with several stays in a padded cell "when I´d lose my cool."

But his time in the hospital was not all bad. He learned the foundry trade, a skill that kept him employed for 35 years after his release. Mike had his first brush with A.A. in the hospital, taking other residents to meetings. "It was not for me, though." Toward the end of his time there, he was paroled to the outside to work in a foundry and look for a place to live. Instead, he got drunk with the foreman´s son, who got a DWI. Mike was jailed for having an open container in the car.

"All I could think about was my release from that place had gone to hell. I caught a bus to Omaha, then Denver and finally ended up in San Francisco. That was the hippie era, so I told the cab driver to take me to Haight-Asbury. I played hippie during the day and was a gigolo at the go-go joints at night.

"That´s how I met my first wife, a topless dancer from Stanwood, Washington. We moved up there at the end of July ´69 and I went job hunting in Everett. It was hopeless. I didn´t think I had any skills. I was driving around one day when I saw a sign at a foundry that said they needed a molder. Bingo! That was me. I spent the next 35 years in foundries ´til I retired two years ago."

His marriage went south that fall. He soon picked up two more DWIs. Afraid he´d be taken back to the insane asylum, he fled to New York, but only made it to Dayton, Ohio, where he got another assault charge. Once again, his mother came to the rescue, paid his fine and got him off with a 90-day jail sentence.

The odyssey continued. Detroit and a new girl friend were the next chapter, followed predictably by the usual breakup, felony assault charge, "two or three" more DWIs and a fine paid by his mother, this time a whopping $1000. The upside of all of this was he managed to wangle a discharge from the mental hospital and "at last, I was a free man."

In 1974, Mike was back in Minnesota and married for the second time. Again, it was chaos ´til he fled back to Everett by himself and got another foundry job. His wife and her three children joined him there, with the predictable result. Mike decided on another geographical cure to visit his long-suffering mother, but only made it to Spokane.

"I was in a blackout when I called my mother from Spokane. Many years later, she told me that after that call, she got down on her knees and offered me to God. Then she went soundly to sleep instead of staying awake all night worrying as she´d always done before. I have not had a drink since that phone call.

"There was some kind of psychic communication between us that night, and from then on, life got better. I went back to Seattle not long after, and saw this commercial called ´Dial a Bottle.´" (Angus L., who participated in this interview, said Dial a Bottle was a sobriety promotion put together by three treatment centers.) Mike called the number on the screen and shouted, "Jesus Christ, I can´t stop drinking." Within 10 minutes, he had a call from an A.A. 12 Stepper who took him to the Benson Hill meeting that very night. (Angus: "Dial a Bottle was supposed to get referrals to treatment centers, but some A.A. members infiltrated and took callers to A.A.")

Mike went to a meeting every night for the first three weeks at Serenity Hall. With less than two years of sobriety, he was chairing the hall, and continued to do so for five years.

He has just had his 28th birthday. His sobriety date is June 22, 1976.

He almost saved his marriage, too. His wife had gone back to Minnesota. He got her to come back here, and they stayed together for 14 years. He´s single now. There was one terrible time during the marriage that makes him deeply ashamed. "I beat up my 12-year-old stepson-told him if he ever drank I´d kill him." Time has healed the wound, though. He and his stepson, now 34, are good friends. And he doesn´t drink.

Almost from the day he quit drinking, Mike has been a hard-working contributor to A.A.. In 1986, he sold the idea of a satellite literature store for the south end, and managed it for nine years. (Angus: "It´s the only satellite store in all of A.A.. I´m pissed at New York, which has never given us any recognition." Angus was Seattle Intergroup office manager at that time.)

Mike helped organize Miracle Hall in 1980, became chairman , treasurer, zone representative and office committee member for the next 19 years. He has held a dizzying variety of service jobs for Seattle Intergroup too, and did the research that resulted in Intergroup´s moving its office from Queen Anne Hill to Sodo. Then there was the controversial-and successful-effort to realign the program´s district and zone boundary lines. Only a true lover of bureaucratic complexity could follow that one, so we´ll let it go at that. Mike also was an active sponsor for other recovering alcoholics.

This all went on while Mike was working full time and helping to raise his stepchildren. "You were a busy boy," Angus remarked. "Yep," said Mike, and I had a new house too that I painted myself." Three times during his working career, he was named the state´s best foundry molder. He used that skill to cast birthday coins for Miracle Hall, some of which are on display at the Intergroup office.

Now he´s the semi-official photographer of A.A. activities. He learned that skill in prison from a sympathetic guard.

I asked Mike if he is still a volcano waiting to explode.

"No, I don´t think so. I´m at peace right now. I´ve waited years for this. There are no issues on the table."

As for Mike and his mother, "It´s payback time now. She suffered a stroke back in Minnesota five years ago. Until then, she´d worked full time even though she was 89 years old."

Mike brought her to live with him here. "I get to give back for all the years she supported me. She still holds up her end. She´s in a wheelchair and uses a walker, but she does the dishes and cleans the house. And she´s learned to like crab. After her first crab feast, she asked me when I was going to bring those frog legs home again."

Interviewed by Angus L. and Dick S. Written by Dick S.