On a cold night in November 1940 in New York, a meeting took place between two men. It would wind up affecting U.S. history and changing the lives of millions of people, most of them alcoholics. The meeting was between Bill Wilson, who a few years earlier had founded a group called Alcoholics Anonymous, and a Jesuit priest named Father Ed Dowling. Wilson’s cause of helping drunks get sober was the result of a religious experience that freed him of his addiction to booze.