In the family room, Father Martin sits in what must be his favorite chair. He's watching Fox News. I'm probably a McCain man, he says. Mae sits behind him on the couch and consults the man's biography, One Step Closer: The Life and Work of Father Joseph C. Martin. She knows their narrative by heart but the dates get fuzzy. In fact, it was 1958 when Father Martin was admitted to a treatment center. Ordained a decade earlier, he had discovered his taste for alcohol that same year during a Thanksgiving dinner with fellow priests.
"There are people who have to acquire a taste for gin, but I didn't - I loved it immediately. I had two or three doubles that day," he said in his biography. His drinking escalated. "It never occurred to me that perhaps there was something odd about a priest walking toward a garbage dump in the middle of the afternoon carrying two suitcases filled with clanking bottles."
It occurred to his superiors, who noticed Father Martin's careless teaching habits and troubling behavior. In 1956, he was admitted to a psychiatric ward of a California hospital. No one suspected alcoholism, so when Father Martin left the hospital appearing healthier and happy, he also returned to his double martinis and drinking shots of vodka from bottles he kept in his bathroom. By 1958, Joe Martin could no longer keep his drinking and behavior under control, much less a secret. The Archdiocese of Baltimore ordered him into treatment at Guest House, a Michigan treatment center for clergy.
There, he was exposed to the tenants of Bill Wilson's Alcoholics Anonymous program. Wilson, a Wall Street businessman ruined by drink, had developed a 12-step, faith-based program that treated alcoholism as a disease and stressed staying sober and helping others achieve sobriety. Father Martin saved his notes from the lectures and conversations during his time at Guest House. He also got sober.
In the 1960s, Father Martin distilled Wilson's 12 steps into literally a blackboard talk. He made the rounds of AA meetings with his direct, self-referencing lectures on addiction. The U.S. armed services, which had begun mandatory addiction training for servicemen, used Martin's 90-minute Chalk Talk on Alcohol, as did private businesses and rehab centers. Poorly lit and single-angled, the training films featured one bespectacled priest and one chalk board. "No singing or dancing," as the host says. (The films have gained a new audience on YouTube.)
