Whiskey's children

Whiskey's Children opens in St. Louis in 1934. That was when Jack Erdmann, the son of a Jazz musician and an ex-chorus dancer, first became aware of his father's drinking, of the destruction it wrought. Jack's own descent into the hellish world of alcohol abuse began when he was an eight-year-old altar boy, dipping into the communion wine.

He drank his way through the loneliness and fear of adolescence and a successful stint in the Air Force before alcohol began to take its cruel toll: A marriage built on alcoholic dependency that ended in violence; the loss of a once-promising career; the price it exacted on his own deeply wounded children; the dizzying slide into a life of hallucinations, paranoia, suicidal longings, incarcerations and institutionalizations.

Jack Erdmann's road to salvation was a long and harrowing one. But it led to a reincarnation of sorts: the chance to live again, to build a new life out of the bitter ashes of pain and defeat - a life based on kindness, unselfishness, empathy and, above all, honesty. After a lifetime of alcoholism, Jack Erdmann began the path to sobriety and rejoined the human race.