Stereotypes sometimes have the whiff of truth. Take, for example, the stereotype that the Irish drink more, and to more excess, than a lot of other folks.

Then listen to Pat P.'s story of her childhood in an Irish neighborhood in Manhattan:

"It was a slummy tenement neighborhood, just a bit south of Harlem," Pat said. "I was born and raised there in a walkup we called a railroad flat. It was like the shotgun houses in Louisiana. You walked through one room to get to the next one.

"I went to Good Council Grammar School and Holy Cross High School. We only talked to Irish Catholics, even though there were Italians nearby (but I dated Italian boys later. They seemed like a lot more fun.)"

Pat's father was a violent drunk who was also a loving and supportive father when he was sober. At neighborhood parties, little Pat would wander through the crowd sipping from the adults' glasses. She's not sure how old she was, "but I was about four inches higher than the coffee table, so I must have been four or five." Hard liquor. "I'd get drunk and everyone thought it was cute. After awhile, I'd go to sleep in the corner like a good little child."

"There was zero awareness of alcohol problems in our all-Irish community. That's no longer true. I have several relatives in the program, and the Irish dominate A.A. in the Irish areas of New York. But back then, almost everybody had a drinking problem. I didn't think of it that way, but I wanted to grow up to be an alcoholic because that's what my role models were.

"I remember coming home in our car one night when I was about nine years old. I was in the back seat. Dad was singing and happy; my mother was crying. 'Don't grow up like him,' she told me, but he was the happy one and the one I wanted to be like."

It was a riotous household when he was in his cups. Her mother would complain about his drinking, one word would lead to another, and then the furniture would fly. And there were occasions when Pat had to wear long socks to school to hide the bruises on her legs. "I couldn't let the nuns see what was going on," she said.

Pat partied her way through high school. She got a false I.D. when she was 14 to ease her drinking till she reached the legal New York drinking age of 18. (Legal age there is now 21.) Then she discovered amphetamines and barbiturates, "and man, that was my express train to A.A. even though I didn't know it yet.

"I could control my drinking with the drugs. My dad said to slow down with my drinking. 'Your mom is getting on my case.' I couldn't get up in the morning to go to school till I took some speed."

With the help of the drugs, she made it through hgh school, but the drinking got so bad she began to think she might have a problem. She left home when she turned 18, and shortly thereafter was pregnant and then married. "They'd of killed you back then if you didn't get married," Pat said. "The guy I married didn't complain about my drinking because he drank more.

But she was starting to worry about her drinking. "We bought a house on Long Island, and that was going to be my ticket to sobriety" as a responsible suburban housewife. While we waited for the house to close, I drank around the clock.

"Four years later, we had a second child. The baby had seizures in the hospital nursery. I promised God I would never drink again if I could bring that baby home. God answered my prayer, so on the way home from the hospital, I bought a bottle of rye to celebrate."

(Good God, what happened to those children? you're asking. Well, they turned out fine. Her oldest, a son, is an electrical contractor in Lake Stevens and her second child, a daughter, is a lawyer practicing in Seattle.)

"I should have lost those children," Pat said. "I was drinking day and night, and my husband was worse." But then she had the good luck to smash her car into a brick wall. To avoid any drunk driving problems with the police, she reported the car stolen, then called her dad for help.

"He'd been sober for two years by that time," Pat said, and the help he offered was to tell her to try Alcoholics Anonymous. "It took me a week to get to that first meeting, and when I showed up, I was loaded with barbiturates that I'd washed down with Lavoris. They told me to dump all my pills, so I did. Then I drank all the booze in the house to celebrate my last drink, and that's what it was, on October 21, 1967."

Cutting off the booze triggered the DTs, though, "the most frightening thing that ever happened to me. I couldn't get the voices to stop, those scary voices that seemed to come out of the background. I cut all the plugs off the electric cords to try to shut them up. Dad tried to get me into treatment, but they wouldn't take a cute little thing like me. So I went through the DTs by myself.

"The children were in the house with me all the time, four and 10 months. I remember my son saying 'The baby's crying,' and I'd tell him to give her a bottle.

"The DTs lasted maybe three days. Then I was able to start going to meetings, and sometimes my husband came too. I took the children too, which has made me very kind to anyone who brings their children to meetings. I know how tough it is to find child care."

Newly sober, Pat began studying to become a Licensed Professional Nurse, all the while enduring an increasingly abusive marriage. Even though she sometimes showed up at meetings with a black eye, she stayed with her husband till she obtained her degree. Then, she took her children and fled across the country to a job at Whidbey General Hospital in Coupeville in 1971.

Sobriety liberated Pat's energies. Working full time and raising two children, she earned her RN degree and then a bachelor's degree through telecommunication courses. From there, she went on to an alcohol counseling degree from Seattle University and worked as a counselor for King County Detox. And that's not all. She's now care coordinator for people with catastrophic illnesses at Kindred Hospital in Northgate.

She and her present husband, who she met in A.A., live in Edmonds in a house she built 30 years ago.

Somehow, Pat found time for A.A. service work, starting at the bottom and working her way through all the jobs until she wound up as Intergroup chairman in 1983-84. She remembers fondly opening the Friday night meeting at the old Big Hall, a tradition for the chair back then.

"Basically, I've done everything I wanted to," Pat said. "A.A. has been my bridge to a better life than I ever dreamed I'd have. In my family as I was growing up, there were no second chances. If you messed up, that was it.

"But A.A., and especially Steve, (her husband of 23 years) encouraged me when I wanted to go for a master's degree. I was raising a family and working full time, but Steve said, 'Of course you can do it.'. It was very tough, but I did it. I was studying on line, so I could have put off finishing forever. There were no deadlines. But A.A. taught me the value of self-discipline.

"It also gave me a life, literally. Without this program, I'd have long since been dead. A.A. has given me the friends I have today. When I was drinking, it was "What can I take from you?' Now, it's "What can I give?' I've learned how to be a friend."

Interviewed and written by Dick S.