By Trevor Stokes, TimesDaily.com

Huston Clemons celebrates two birthdays each year.

One dates back to 1934 during the hardscrabble Depression years, but the other, which he will celebrate Saturday, dates back to 1982 - the year Clemons became sober.

"Most of his friends are deceased because of alcoholism," said Peggy Stults, Clemons' daughter. "He wouldn't be here if he didn't stop. We didn't think he would make it at first."

Alcoholism, its causes and deterrents, has created a small industry of researchers who would like to find out what kept Clemons sober for 25 years, as many of his friends drank themselves to death.

Researchers have only a few traits that can predict long-term sobriety, according to Henry Kranzler, professor of psychiatry at the University of Connecticut Health Center.

Patients who do better in treatment are typically married, sane and self-motivated, Kranzler wrote in an e-mail response. Clemons had all three, although his wife, Bess, married him four years after he became sober.

Clemons, whose father was a bootlegger, started drinking at 17, the same age he started working as a plumber.

Drinking rarely affected his professional life until 1968, when he got his plumbing license and became his own boss.

For the next 14 years, Huston dropped in and out of treatments that included Antibuse, a deterrent that makes alcohol poison, and weeklong cold turkey sessions spent in isolated "rubber rooms," where he suffered from the shakes and hallucinations.

That contrasted with his three-week long binges that included irregular meals, interrupted sleep and lots of drinking.

"I drank a little bit of everything that had alcohol," Clemons said, including rubbing alcohol, Listerine and cake flavoring.

More often, Clemons depended on two bootleggers who delivered booze door to door; one ran a tab, the other accepted only cash.

"Anything to change the way you feel, as long as you stay drunk, you don't get hung over," Clemons said in explaining why he stayed drunk.

One drunken night, friends took Clemons to Eliza Coffee Memorial Hospital, but he refused to stay and took a cab to his bootlegger for two pints of whiskey.

But in 1982, Bess took him to treatment that lasted 28 days. He entered a 12-step program shortly afterwards. "You got to want to do it for yourself," said Clemons, who pursued the 12-step program to maintain his sobriety.

"You never say you're going to quit forever; just say you're going to quit for today."

When he returned home, he cleaned up the 15 pints, two liter and two fifth bottles and a garbage can full of beer cans from his last three-week binge.

Treating alcoholism has a lackluster track record. A 2001 study showed that two-thirds of alcoholics undergoing treatment relapsed within a year, with most relapses in the first three months.

In a forthcoming paper, Kranzler's group showed that patients' responses to alcoholism treatment may be genetic. Kranzler said the research, to be published in "Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research" in November, still requires replication.

Statistics on maintaining long-term sobriety are hard to come by. "There's a lot of people who are sober who don't go to meetings anymore," said Jay from the Sheffield chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous. In the spirit of AA, Jay requested anonymity.

In the four-county Shoals region, 18 AA groups conduct a combined 127 meetings each week from 7 a.m. to the 10 p.m. candlelight meeting. Jay, who attends the hour-long meetings five times a week, said, "Without this program, I probably wouldn't be alive today or I'd be locked up."

"There's a lot of people who go to meetings 10, 15, 30 years; for whatever reasons, they don't find it necessary to go to meetings anymore."

But there still remains more than 19 million people in the United States classified as alcohol abusers, according to 2001 data from the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions.

But Clemons can count himself out of that pool of people.

More than 9,000 days after his last drink, Clemons is still sober.

"It don't bother me a bit being around people who drink," he said. Now, he even has liquor at his house.

Since his "fifth birthday," his family gathers annually to celebrate by reading poems, giving plaques and writing songs.

This year, his daughter, Stults, plans to sing "From the Bottle to the Bible," a song she co-wrote. Last spring, she saw her father at church with his head down reading a Bible and flashed backed to a time when he would slouch his head looking at a bottle of booze.

The celebration will take place Saturday at the Zip City Community Center.

"If it wasn't for the treatment, he wouldn't be there," Stults said.

Photo Huston Clemons and his daughter (by Jim Hannon/TimesDaily.com).

TimesDaily.com October 27. 2007

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NOTE by AddictionInfo editor: The 12-Step approach of AA does not work for most people, and there are multiple alternatives - see these articles, among many others on this site:

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AA Is Not The Only Way