My mom was a treasure and very tolerant of my dad's fight with the bottle during the depression. He'd come home many nights in his usual stupor, we kids would help undress him and put him to bed while mother lectured him. I am certain he did not hear a word of it as he would arise early the next morning for breakfast, never remembering much of the events the night before.

He looked around for his bottle, never finding it. We poured it into the open flame of the fire for the thrill of the swoosh and tossed the glass into the garbage.

Although mom lectured, it was never profane. Mostly educational on the dangers of alcohol. As a certified member of the WCTU (Women's Christian Temperance Union) mom strictly forbid herself from even a sip of the cursed fluid. She was influenced by the Reverend Clarence True Wilson, himself a tireless advocate of abstinence. Her devotion may have started there. It was he who married mom and dad in 1904.

Dad was an anomaly. His own father and mother owned the Temperance Hotel in Severn Bridge, Ontario when they were not running the general store where dad worked. Good sense stopped with them, I think, or maybe the lack of work in the depression had been a factor in dad's drinking. Whatever reason, mom remained steadfast, though loving and praying for her husband each Sunday at the Mallory Avenue Baptist church.

Mom's praying must have helped. A doctor visited us one day when dad was a little under the weather. Dad only had a cold but when examined he told dad, one more drink and he'd be a goner. I was 18 at the time and mad as hell that the doctor did not tell him that sooner. None of mom's educational coaxing had done the trick.

Then I figured it out. Dad was so clean inside, from all the booze, that he never got sick. He never needed a doctor...until then. Dad was clean and sober for the next 27 years, much to mom's delight.

Clarence Wilson would have been proud. He might have said "never underestimate the power of prayer."