Meet the Mooneys
Text Published in "GOOD HOUSEKEEPING" MAGAZINE August 1994
There would be no Willingway Hospital, a 40-bed facility specializing in treating alcoholism and drug addiction located on 11 acres in Statesboro, GA, if it weren't for Dot and John Mooney. The institution, ranked among the 20 most frequently recommended treatment facilities in the country, has a success rate among its more than 11,000 patients that led one expert in the field to call it, "The Betty Ford Center of the South." What makes Willingway really remarkable, however, is how-- and why--it started...
Dot Riggs grew up on a farm in Statesboro during the Depression. At 17, she went to Savannah to study nursing but, homesick, left without graduating. She got a job in Statesboro as a practical nurse--and began to party. "I hated the taste of liquor, but loved its effect." she says.
Tall, good-looking John Mooney, M.D., the son of a local doctor and recently divorced, partied with her. John was just back from service in World War II. Thirteen years older than Dot, he had started drinking in medical school. Dot was frequently hung over after a date with John, but a particular morning stands out in her memory. She had awakened to find herself on the Mooney lawn with a dog licking her face and the milkman grinning down at her. John was nearby, still asleep. "I was embarrassed to death" Dot says, "but when John woke, he just laughed and hugged me. 'Don't worry so much, honey,' he said."
John Mooney never worried--it was part of his charm--but Dot was concerned. "I loved John, but we both knew we were bad for each other," she says. Still, when he proposed, Dot married him despite her doubts. Three months later, she was pregnant--and still drinking. When her blood pressure went sky-high, she had to be hospitalized, and labor was induced. The baby, a son they named Al, was born premature, but healthy. But the minute Dot got out of the hospital, she resumed drinking. However, in the ensuing five years, the Mooneys had two more sons, Jimmy and Bobby.
By now, Dot was aware that she and John were in deep trouble, but John refused to face the facts--even after the night when, drinking and taking amphetamines, he overdosed and went into a convulsion. He had to be rushed to the hospital to dry out--the first of several such trips. Dot covered for him, telling friends and patients he was "away at a medical conference." Starting at cocktail time, Dot herself would drink until the wee hours. She might also add mood-enhancing drugs which, thanks to John, she had easy access to. One night, between midnight and dawn, she gave herself 15 two-cc shots of Demerol. The dose could have killed her--but it still didn't give her the high, or the peace, she was seeking.
The pressure kept building. John was blacking out regularly. His practice was in a shambles; there were days when they didn't have enough money to buy milk. Dot pleaded with him to get things under control. "I thought about leaving him," she says. "One night, I put the boys in the car, drove them to my mother's house, and bedded them down. But a half hour later, thinking about what John would do without us, I woke up the boys and we drove back."
In one desperate attempt to get off alcohol and drugs, Dot left the boys with friends while she and John, armed with supplies of orange juice, syringes, glucose, and insulin to handle withdrawal symptoms, holed up for a couple of weeks in a motel in Asheville, N.C. John said later, "There were times when I was in shock, times when Dot was, times when we both were. I don't know any reason for our not dying in that room, other than that a loving God had some plans for us."
Finally, Dot called an ambulance from Statesboro to come pick them up and take them home to the hospital. But as soon as they arrived there, John ordered Demoral for himself and Dot. In no time at all, they were back on the merry-go-round of drugs and alcohol again. Dot's worst fears were realized the day John was arrested for having written himself narcotics prescriptions. He was sentenced to six months in the federal facility at Lexington KY. John told the 11-year-old Al that he would have to be the man of the house until he returned. So Al made sure that his younger brothers were up in time to go to school, that they dressed, ate, did chores and homework, and got to bed at a reasonable hour. The boy also had to watch over his mother. Often, Al, who could barely see over the car's dashboard, had to act a pilot for his confused and drug-dazed mother as she drove around the town she'd lived in all her life.
Meantime, in jail in Kentucky, John had a visitor from Alcoholics Anonymous. "If I could only find out what's causing me to get drunk, I believe I could straighten out," John said to him. The visitor looked him straight in the eye. "Did it ever occur to you, John, that the only thing causing you to get drunk is the whiskey?" he responded. The simple words seemed like a revelation. All his life, John had blamed his substance abuse on various things--stress, overwork, his first wife's nagging. Now, for the first time, he accepted that he, not external events, was responsible for his problem. Having accepted that, he felt sure he could control his addictions and give them up.
When his six-month jail term was over, he phoned Dot to say that he was coming home, and that he'd finally licked his drinking and drug problem. Though skeptical, Dot made up her mind to support him and not drink in his presence. The day he was due to arrive, she had a bottle of beer and swore to herself it would be her last. She and the kids piled into the car and drove to Savannah airport to meet John. But when his plane came in, he wasn't on it. There wasn't a clue to what had gone wrong--though Dot thought she could guess. She was mistaken.
What had really happened was that at the airport in Atlanta, John had suddenly lost all faith in himself and his confident intention to have a new alcohol and drug-free life. Instead of getting on the plane for home, he rented a room in a motel where, overwhelmed by depression, he fell on his knees and cried, "God help me!" And then something happened... Despite his addictions, John Mooney was a deeply religious man. The family attended the Methodist church every Sunday, and at home prayers were said daily at dinner and at bedtime. Further, John taught Sunday School and was considered a Bible scholar of the community.
Now, in his time of need, he felt that his cry to God had been answered; he had, he said, "a deep spiritual experience." Suddenly his despair seemed to lift and he was filled with exultation and joy. It was the feeling he'd been looking for all the years--and never found- in a bottle. From that moment in November 1959, he no longer craved alcohol or drugs. The next day, he flew home. His first night back, John gathered his boys around him and told them things were going to be different from now on. The next morning, the entire family went to church and reaffirmed their new life--though Dot was still not convinced she could, or needed to, give up drinking.
Then came a shattering blow: John was summoned before the state medical board and told that his license to practice medicine had been revoked for the next six months. But with his new strength, he found he was able to look for the good in even the worst calamity. He decided to use the time to reinforce his recovery and to learn more about addiction and how it could be controlled. He began making the rounds of AA meetings all over the country. Dot, reluctant at first, then more enthusiastic, went with him. The meetings were pivotal in helping her finally stop her own drinking.
The year 1969 was a turning point for the Mooneys. After 12 years of marriage, they had their fourth child, Carol Lind. They were both alcohol and drug-free, and John, back in medical practice, began getting referrals from other doctors to treat their alcoholic patients. He converted two rooms in his office into makeshift detox (detoxification) rooms. But as more and more patients arrived, he had to take them home to the Mooneys' rambling, white brick house on Lee Street. There, he set up three beds under the crystal chandelier in the dining room, the boys surrendered their bedrooms and moved into the garden shed, and Carol Lind shared a walk-in closet with an alcoholic teenager.
It was not easy going. At first, the Mooneys charged nothing for the recovery program, letting John's general medical practice foot the bill. Then they set a modest charge of five dollars a day. Later this had to be raised. Word spread about the house on Lee Street where "they take you in and love you like one of the family." Soon, there simply wasn't enough space for all who wanted treatment. With a low- interest loan from the Small Business Administration, the Mooneys began building a hospital on 11 nearby acres of tranquil, tree shaded land. Dot named it "Willingway," derived from the old saying "Where there's a will, there's a way."
John became totally absorbed in Willingway. Dot, a nurse and counselor at the hospital, was also raising their family and running their home, mostly on her own. One night, as she lay awake, she remembered how, when he'd been drinking, she had always said, "Everything would be all right if you would just come home and go to sleep." Now he was doing that, and she was angry and filled with pain. A drink would have helped, she thought. But she couldn't have one. It was late, but John was still up, going over his books. Desperate, Dot climbed on his lap, "I can't go on like this, John," she said, 'I'm afraid I'm going to start drinking again if things don't change. I need your support. I need you to spend more time with me. I love you, John." He threw his arms around her. "I need you, too," he said. They just sat there, hugging and rocking, for a long time. "That was the last time I was tempted to take a drink," Dot recalls.
Determined to spend more time with Dot, John gave up his outside medical practice and kept more regular hours at Willingway. It would have been the happiest time of their lives, except for the undeniable evidence that their kids were in trouble--failing at school, at work and in their relationships. Reluctantly, Dot and John realized that the addictions that nearly destroyed them were now threatening three of their four children.
John believed--and new medical research supports him--that his children had inherited a vulnerability to alcohol and drugs. Jimmy was the first to start drinking (and the last to get sober), then Bobby, then Carol Lind. In each case, Dot says, she and John were slow to catch on because each child was very clever at hiding his or her habit. Since both parents were recovering, they knew their children had to experience some type of crisis, they had to hit bottom, to bring about a desire for recovery. Dot and John felt powerless to help their own children.
Bobby says he began abusing drugs and alcohol at age 12 and continued all through school. He married early, left home to go to college in Rochester, N.Y., separated from his wife, came back to Statesboro, where, struggling to hide his drinking and drugging, he went to work at Willingway. Talking to addicts in detox, he soon realized that many sounded just like him. But he saw that within a few weeks, these same people looked and sounded better, while he was just the same. "I hated my life," he says; at 24, he began to think of suicide. One night, he, like his father, had an unexplainable experience. Driving across a bridge, he suddenly slammed on the brakes. Behind him, drivers sat on their horns, but Bobby just put his head down on the steering wheel and sat there for a long time, shaking. When he finally restarted the car, he felt certain he'd never use alcohol or drugs again--and he never has in the 15 years since. He decided to attend medical school, and, after graduating from the Mercer University School of Medicine in Macon, GA, he is now completing his residency at East Tennessee State University, after which he intends to work at Willingway.
Jimmy, the Mooney's middle son, also dropped out of college and has an early, broken marriage behind him. He, too, went to work at Willingway, carefully hiding his habits, but running outside every chance he had to smoke pot. He hit bottom during a biking trip with friends to Daytona Beach. Along the way, the group stopped several times to drink and do dope. Jimmy's memory of the trip is driving his motorcycle 90 miles an hour, in traffic, while he was completely stoned. He came home in one piece but utterly sick of his life, which seemed like one long hangover. The trip had been his "miracle"; he was finally ready to give up his addictions. He returned to college and today is Willingway's business director.
Carol Lind, the baby of the family, was given her first drink by Jimmy, the brother she idolized. She was just 12. Her first experience with drugs happened at school when a classmate offered her some pills; she swallowed them without even knowing what they were. She married at 16 to get away from home but soon divorced and began mainlining drugs. After a stay at a treatment center in New Jersey, she returned to Statesboro but almost immediately began drinking and drugging again. Finally, Dot put her foot down. "You can come home for a meal," she said, "but you can't stay here unless you quit."
So Carol Lind left, moving into a tent by the railroad tracks that she shared with a boyfriend. The two collected soda cans to get money to feed their habits. Often, Carol Lind would wind up in the emergency room. There seemed to be no hope. But something turned her around too, "I'd been on a drunk, no different from any of the others," she says. "But when I woke the next morning, I felt different. I felt a burning desire to be sober. I do believe it was a gift from God. I've never taken a drink or a drug since." Carol Lind today is enrolled in law school and, upon graduation, plans to help women in recovery fight for their legal rights.
Al is the only Mooney child who never became addicted. He had a few drinks at college, decided he didn't like alcohol, and had never been tempted since. But after being critically injured in an auto accident during his first year at the Medical School of Emory University in Georgia, he too felt that God had spared him for a purpose. Al hadn't intended to work with alcoholics; his ambition was to be a surgeon. But, in assisting in the operating room during his training, he saw that too often the root cause of the gunshot and knife wounds, or other forms of family violence that brought patients to the hospital was really substance abuse. So Al, too, came home to Willingway, where he is now filling his father's place as medical director (John died in 1983 at age 73).
Dot, still active at 70, is the hospital's head women's counselor and its guiding spirit. The facility seems far removed from its humble start in the Mooney home. Yet on entering its detox unit today, one can still see the same crystal chandelier that once hung in the family house on Lee Street. "I'll never change that," Dot vows. "John put it there. He wanted patients to feel they were part of a family. And to me it symbolizes hope."
Written by Joy Darlington