The Alamo in San Antonio
When Sgt. Bill arrived in San Antonio, Texas, in 1953, he was given the title of "psychiatric social worker" to enable him to work full time with alcoholics at Lackland Air Force Base. He teamed up with a young psychiatrist, Dr. Louis Jolyon "Jolly" West, to set up an alcoholism treatment program at the base hospital (the largest Air Force hospital in the world) which achieved an astounding fifty percent success rate in rehabilitating alcoholics and returning them to active duty.
Dr. Louis Jolyon "Jolly" West (c. 1960)
In 1956 he co-authored with Dr. West a detailed account of the way in which a combination of good A.A. (and attendance at civilian A.A. meetings off base) with good psychiatric principles could take hopeless alcoholics and turn their lives around. It was titled "An Approach to Alcoholism in the Military Service," and appeared first in the American Journal of Psychiatry. Marty Mann then began reprinting the article and distributing it all over the United States through the National Council on Alcoholism.
The River Walk along the San Antonio river
as it winds its way through the city
Dr. West eventually went to UCLA in Los Angeles, California, where he became Professor and Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences; Psychiatrist-in-Chief at the UCLA Hospital and Clinics; and Director of the Neuropsychiatric Institute at the UCLA Center for the Health Sciences.
Louis Jolyon "Jolly" West, M.D.
Portrait of him hanging at UCLA in honor
of his contributions to the university
Jolly West's portrait still hangs at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). He is regarded as the man who singlehandedly took their fledgling psychiatric program and turned it into one of the world's leading psychiatric centers. In spite of his enormous administrative and teaching responsibilities there, his colleagues marveled that he still took the time to see individual patients on a regular basis. Sgt. Bill says, simply, "Dr. West wasn't just a skull jockey. He was a warm, caring human being."
