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By Steve Blow, reprinted by permission of the Dallas Morning News

Careers take some unusual turns. Jim Graham's detoured through a bottle.

And he couldn't be happier.

Many of you know Jim - or at least recognize his name. He has been active in Dallas civic affairs for the last 20 years. He's a former City Council candidate and longtime member of the Dallas Park Board. He led the bid to bring World Cup soccer games here in '94 and founded the "Send a Kid to Camp" program. Professionally, he's an independent oil producer, owner of Palo Petroleum Inc. And now at 55, Jim wears a new hat - chairman of the board of Schick Shadel Hospital.

You might recognize that name, too. Schick Shadel is an alcohol rehab facility in Seattle. It used to advertise heavily on TV with a familiar slogan - "Give us 10 days, and we'll give you back your life." Jim is one of those who got his life back.

He knows exactly when - Jan. 29, 2001. The date of his last drink. It's a little harder to say when life got away from him. "A friend of mine says there's a thin line between a happy-go-lucky young partier and a pathetic old drunk. The problem is that we don't know we have crossed that line." For most of his life, he kept his drinking under some control. But then, 12 years ago, he wrecked his motorcycle one night on a mountain road in Colorado. He was drunk, of course. "I thought I had died. When I woke up, all I could see was a bright white light," he said. But then he noticed that the bright light was accompanied by a familiar sound - the loping idle of his still-running Harley. "I was staring into the headlight!" Jim laughed.

He can laugh now, but the accident left him with terrible back pain, and his drinking soon consumed him. "I drank every day until the pain went away," he said. "I'd wake up every morning and swear I wasn't going to drink that day. But just like a magnet, the addiction gets you." Jim made some half-hearted attempts at sobriety. He didn't like Alcoholics Anonymous. "I'm not a one-day-at-a-time kind of guy," he said. The "touchy-feely" counseling of residential treatment centers was a turnoff. "If I've got a problem, I want to whip it and get on down the road," he said. That's why the Schick Shadel approach appealed to him - one 10-day stay, followed by two two-day follow-ups.

The method is aversion therapy. If you ever ate a particular food, got sick and never wanted to see that food again, that's aversion therapy, Jim said. Patients take a medicine that causes them to throw up when they drink. And then they drink. It's ugly. But they keep forcing themselves to drink. And they keep getting sick. After a few days, the craving for alcohol is gone. "It's unbelievable, the freedom you feel," Jim said. "I don't call myself a 'recovering alcoholic.' I'm a 'former alcoholic.'"

The career twist came when Jim called to schedule his follow-up visits. "They said, 'You better come quick. This place is about to close.'" Absentee owners cared nothing about the hospital and were ready to shut it down. Jim jumped into action. Soon he had 10 other former patients lined up to buy it. "Now the inmates are running the asylum," he joked. Jim said aversion therapy "fell out of vogue" in the 1980s. He's sure its future is bright, however. "Whatever way a person gets to sobriety, we're for," he said. "We just feel like our way is a lot shorter and simpler."

Dallas is now the corporate headquarters of Schick Shadel (www.schickshadel.com), and Jim hopes to open a branch hospital here within three years. If he had his way, he'd give up looking for oil and just help others lose alcohol. "This is much more gratifying," he said.