*Note: end of this quote ought to have read "...sense of exclusion at boarding school."
Bill W. and Mr Wilson
The Legend and Life of A.A.'s Cofounder
Matthew J. Raphael
Bill's First Drink
pgs 34,35
"In the first biography of Bill Will Wilson there is a certain ambiguity about [Wilson's] initiation. Robert Thomsen devotes most of a chapter to Wilson's first encounter with a barroom. This occurred during his early adolescence, in the company of Mark Whalon, a boon companion who was ten years older than Bill. Mark, a college boy given to cracker-barrel philosophizing, evinced the sophistication, intellectual and otherwise, to which Bill aspired. The friends often rode along together in Mark's delivery wagon, spelling each other in deep conversation. Mark was especially talkative about the rigid class structure of their home town, a topic in which Bill took keeen interest because of his own sense of exclusion at boarding school.
One lazy summer Saturday, late in the afternoon, on the way home from making a delivery in Denby, Vermont, Mark suggested that they stop off at a wayside inn to have a drink..."
DavidK