Barbara Schilling Oldham

Diagnoses

Personal

Vocation

Notable

Family

American activist, the daughter of an early suffragette. When she joined AA in 7/13/1943, there were no more than ten women in the whole of AA's Los Angeles County. At one meeting she was turned away as it was all-male. In response, she started her own AA group that was not gender-biased. Oldham was the first to initiate "team speaking" with Chuck Chamberlain, and the first woman to take AA meetings into women's prisons, starting with Tehachapi Prison in the late '40s. She initiated the first alcoholic women's rehab house in California, now known as The Villa. The house originally had space for a dozen women. Politically, she was active in the early Los Angeles County Steering Committee which became known as Central Offices. Oldham had been born in a family with an aristocratic genealogy, the 7th of 12 kids. She grew up in Long Beach, married in 1930 and divorced in 1938. She lived with her parents along with her one daughter, Barbara, up to 1942 when they moved to Melrose, CA to work in a wartime aircraft factory. She came to terms with her drinking problem and faced it directly in 1943. Later she did social work at the Los Angeles County Hospital. She made a second marriage in 1947 that lasted the rest of her life. After a proud 30 years sobriety, Oldham died in 1973.