the principal source for their ideas.
There Were Those Who Gave Bill the Twelve Step Ideas Way Back in 1934
There were at least three people who gave Bill Wilson all the precepts of the Twelve Steps, long before A.A. was founded, and at least six months before Bill met Dr. Bob in May of 1935. See Bill W., Bill W.: My First 40 Years (Center City, MN: Hazelden, 2000), 126-69; Bill Pittman and Dick B., compilers and editors, Courage to Change: The Christian Roots of the Twelve-Step Movement (Center City, MN: Hazelden, 1994), 22-23; ‘Pass It On’: The Story of Bill Wilson and How the A.A. Message Reached the World (NY: Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc., 1984), 111-16.
The first was Bill’s friend Ebby Thacher. See Lois Remembers: Memoirs of the co-founder of Al-Anon and wife of the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous (NY: Al-Anon Family Group Headquarters, Inc., 1987), 87-88.
Next came Ebby’s Oxford Group friend F. Shepard Cornell. See Courage to Change, 22-23; “Pass It On,”116; Francis Hartigan, Bill W.: A Biography of Alcoholics Anonymous Cofounder Bill Wilson (NY: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 59.
And finally, Rowland Hazard, who had dramatically conveyed the ideas to Shep Cornell and to Ebby, and then directly to Bill. For the most part, these were the little group of “teachers” from whom Bill learned his ideas at their Stewart’s Cafeteria meetings. See Robert Thomsen, Bill W. (NY: Harper & Row Publishers, Perennial Books, 1975), 226-32; Dick B. The Oxford Group & Alcoholics Anonymous, New Rev. ed. (Kihei, HI: Paradise Research Publications, Inc., 1998), 128-30. And