Phil Parker, the son of a Baptist preacher, said he had never tasted liquor until his Harvard graduate school classmates lured him into a smoky cocktail lounge for the first time.
This night in the bar was like no other time in my life, he wrote years later. Not only was I completely at ease, but I actually loved all the strangers around me and they loved me in return, I thought, all because of this magic potion, alcohol.
After that, he wrote, he lived only to drink. He graduated, but was fired from one teaching job after another, wound up in an asylum and finally landed homeless on the then-squalid Bowery in Manhattan in the mid-1960s. There, he met a social worker, a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, who told him how she had sobered up.
I had been preached to, analyzed, cursed, and counseled, Mr. Parker wrote, but no one had ever said, I identify with whats going on with you. It happened to me, and this is what I did about it. She got me to my first A.A. meeting that same evening.
In 1974, just a few years after he stopped drinking, Mr. Parker founded a supported work program that over the next several decades would help countless other homeless alcoholics. And as the derelict population became disproportionately young and black, Mr. Parker, who was black, became a social worker himself, supervising the program at the citys Third Street Mens Shelter just off the Bowery.
He was later elevated to a managerial role, developing alcohol and drug abuse services for New York Citys Department of Social Services.
He died of cancer on June 15 at Bellevue Hospital Center in Manhattan. He was 86 and had been sober for nearly 48 years. His death was confirmed by a friend, John Silverman.The website of his support programs alumni association said of Mr. Parker, His concept of rehabilitation was group therapy combined with supervised work assignment in phases of increasing responsibility, underlined by 12-step principles of recovery from alcoholism and other addictions.
Lilliam Barrios-Paoli, the citys former commissioner of human resources, said the program had an enormous impact and was instrumental in changing many mens lives and giving them a second chance.
Phil Edwin Parker was born in Philadelphia on June 4, 1930, the son of the Rev. William McKinley Parker, a minister and school principal, and the former Belva Bacon, a teacher, and was raised in South Carolina. He is survived by a brother, Francis.
Mr. Parker graduated from Morehouse College in Atlanta with a Bachelor of Science degree and received a masters from Harvard. He became a teacher, but was dogged by his drinking, in public places and in class. Mr. Parker even retreated to a dry county in Tennessee, but his alcoholism ended his teaching career.
In an unattributed essay titled He Lived Only to Drink, which Mr. Silverman said Mr. Parker had written for the Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book, Mr. Parker recalled that he had become suicidal and was committed to a mental ward. But, he wrote, I do not believe the doctors knew much more about alcoholism than I did.
He moved to New York City to write a novel, but never did. Instead, he sold his blood and prostituted himself to buy alcohol.
I was frightened, arrogant, enraged and resentful of man, God and the universe, he wrote. There was nothing else to live for, but I was too frightened to die until the social worker, Helen Ware, intervened. Even then, he was skeptical.
The spiritual demons of withdrawal descended on me, he wrote. I was black, and these people were white. What did they know about suffering? What could they tell me? I was black and bright, and the world had consistently rejected me for it.
He said he learned, however, that alcoholism was an equal opportunity illness, that he was not unique, that he needed help and that he had to demolish the wall of distrust he had built around himself. Only then, he wrote, could he grow in sobriety one day at a time and bring the message of hope as it was brought to me.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/29/nyregion/phil-parker-who-helped-homeless-alcoholics-dies-at-86.html