Sally, who is the principal writer, wanted to write a quick and easy story. Forget all that documentation. Her co-author David, however, had heavy-duty reinforcements for his belief in documented research. Marty’s story would not have been written without David’s expertise in research. Not only is he a trained scientist, he is also an experienced genealogist. In addition, two major historians of the alcoholism movement, Ernie Kurtz and Bill White, pointed out that since our book would be the first biography of such an important figure, we owed future researchers a good record on which to build.

A major reason that Marty’s biography did not appear before, is because Marty’s records and the people she knew were scattered across the country, and no one was apparently able to devote the research time and effort needed. We are very grateful that retirement gave us the leisure, the energy, and the modest funds to accomplish the task.

As it turned out, we were barely in time. Many important contacts had died since Marty’s own death in 1980. And within the first year of our starting the research, eleven additional key people died, including Marty’s last remaining sibling, her much younger brother, Bill. His reminiscences were invaluable.

The bulk of the research took place over four months in the spring and summer of 1998. It involved two round trips of the country by car, and one by plane. These were supplemented by many more months of e-mail, snail mail, and telephoning after we returned home.

The research consisted of four primary sources. Details are in the book's back matter.

• Marty’s own writings
• Audio tapes of Marty’s talks
• Interviews of persons who had known Marty in some capacity
• Writings of others about Marty

We learned early on that Marty had willed her archives to Syracuse University. Then, through a chance conversation in the national offices of the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence (NCADD, the organization Marty founded), we discovered there were additional records in a second repository up the Hudson River in New York. This latter archive has now been moved to Brown University in Rhode Island.

We supplemented these two archives with a wide variety of written records by her and others in private and public holdings. People were enormously generous in sharing their materials, actually trusting us to borrow many, many documents and return them at a much later date after we returned home. Probably the single most important collection in this respect were the journals of Felicia Gizycka Magruder, Marty’s extremely close friend.

AA people kept asking us if we’d come across Felicia. Our early research showed that she’d died a few years after Marty. So we crossed Felicia off our list of interview possibilities. Then, when the book was almost finished, Sally discovered by accident that Felicia was still alive and living in Wyoming. She immediately flew there, only to find that Felicia, in her nineties, was no longer capable of responding in an interview. However, this grand old lady had an amazing personal archive of personal journals spanning her whole long life in and out of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Audio tapes of Marty’s talks were another matter. Thousands of tapes were made during her 36-year intensive public-speaking career. Most of these disappeared into untraceable private holdings. We were very fortunate to locate over 50. Since the book was published, we’ve acquired a few more.

Locating interview prospects was an exercise in faith. It started with LeClair Bissell, MD, a now-retired treatment pioneer in the alcoholism field. Through her vast network of friends and colleagues, she opened many doors to key people we’d never heard of. They in turn introduced us to still others. Conducting the more than 100 interviews all over the country was one of our great joys.