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Source: Arbutus O – Phoenix AFG Recording 1968 – Date Unknown.mp3 File: arbutus-o-phoenix-afg-recording-1968-date-unknown.mp3 Duration: 00:54:16
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My name is Arbutus O.. Hi Arbutus. Of myself, I am powerless. I am powerless over alcohol. I am powerless over people. I'm powerless over things, and almost all circumstances. This is something that I must admit and accept every day of my life. A life that is unmanageable without the daily practice of the principles of the Al-Anon Family Group Program. A program that was given to us by a bunch of ex-drunks who found sobriety, and who learned that the only way they can keep the things that are good and beautiful is to give them away. And when they looked around to find a group of people who needed this program even more than does the alcoholic, and I'll repeat that, even more than does the alcoholic, they found us, the spouses of the South. This is a name that was given to us by a fine friend of Al-Anon who lives in the state of North Carolina, and I just love it. You can't take yourself very seriously or feel sorry for yourself when you know that you're the spouse of a South. I want to begin this morning by thanking the committee for inviting me here, and I want to thank you for the delightful breakfast. I didn't have breakfast. It'd be too big a shock to my stomach, but I am grateful. And I wish for just a moment that you would think with me about the countless thousands of our people who this Sunday morning cannot eat breakfast. It's not because they do not have breakfast, though some of them may not, but it's because they're too sick to eat. They're sick from endless cigarettes and countless cups of coffee and the vigil of Saturday night, the vigil that you and I are so familiar with, because the man they loved, or it might be their beautiful wife, chose last night to go on another binge. I read very recently that only 2% of the people who need the Al-Anon family group program ever heard of us, and this surprised and shocked me.
Actually, I guess I thought I'd told more than 2% of the people about it myself. I think this is why I am so proud of Al-Anon. You see, we are a little different from our AA guest this morning. In order for an alcoholic to be a member of AA, he must quit. But we don't quit. I guess we don't know how. We don't quit hoping. We don't quit helping the alcoholic, even though our methods may sometimes be a little drastic. And we don't quit loving the alcoholic. There are no quitters in the Al-Anon family group. I don't know what becomes of them. God help them, but they never make it here. I'm grateful, too, for the fact that you opened this meeting. It is in open meetings that we are able to reach the people who need us most. And I hope to do two things this morning. I hope to comfort the disturbed, and I hope to disturb the comfortable. It has been my great privilege and joy to talk to many people in many places. And always when I talk to a group such as we have here this morning, I am again aware of one thing. Every one of you are here for exactly the same reason that I'm here. You were driven here under the cruel lash of alcoholism because you had nowhere else to go. Alcoholism is not new. It's as old as time. Alcoholism is a complex disease that prompts the unthinking to make jokes about the drunk. But it can leave families homeless and penniless. Alcoholism is a public cancer that can turn a man or a woman against themselves.
Alcoholism is a blight on the history of mankind. The Bible warns against it, Shakespeare diagnosed it, and Tennessee Williams built a prize-winning play around it. But no one, as far as I have been able to learn, seemed to be able to do anything about alcoholism in the past generations. The priests and the ministers were baffled at their inability to cope with this insidious habit, this dreadful malady that turned otherwise honorable men and women away from everything that was good and decent.
[00:05:12]
They preached to the alcoholic, they prayed over him, they forced him to sign pledges, and when these things failed, they damned his soul to hell. The men of science in other generations tried to find a cure for alcoholism. They wanted to find a pill or a vaccine that would stop compulsive drinking. And, failing to do this, they said to the medical students before our time, don't waste your time on these worthless people. They're hopeless. So, neither preachment worked, and there was no cure, and there was only one other thing that they knew to do with the alcoholic. He must be punished.
So they locked you up in jail. The more you drank, the longer you stayed in jail. And the longer you stayed in jail, the drunker you got when you were finally released. It became a vicious circle, and I'm sure that we'll never know how many sick alcoholics died in the jails across our country at the hands of sadistic jailers. They tried to change the body chemistry of sick people with punishment, and society allowed this to happen. Nay, we insisted on it to our everlasting shame. Neither punishment nor preachment could solve the problem of alcoholism, and there was no treatment.
But there was one group of people who never quite gave up on the alcoholic. These were the families of the alcoholics, the people who love you. We took jobs to feed the children that you were too sick to be responsible for. We doctored your hangovers. We picked up your hot checks. We bailed you out of jail. We pled with judges. We said, John's a good man when he's sober. And to complete the paradox, we gave you hell every time you got drunk. And society was puzzled that we continued to love and care for the alcoholic.
There was one group of people who thought that we were endowed with some special quality that made us better than other people, and they gave us nice, shiny halos to wear, and we wore them quite willingly. I put mine on every morning when I put on my lipstick. It was called self-righteousness. You can find these halos discarded now in almost any all-known family group you care to attend. We don't wear them anymore. We don't need them, and we did not find them very comfortable.
And there was another group of people who thought we were plain fools to live under such circumstances. My mother came in this group. She used to say, God looks after fools and drunks, and that takes care of Arbutus and Bill. And Mother was right. God did look after us. And society was puzzled by one other very significant fact. Many very brilliant people were alcoholic, and it was these brilliant, talented ones who held the attention of an indifferent society until help came along for the rest of us. Did you ever stop to think about that?
Alexander the Great was an alcoholic. He had conquered the whole known civilized world when he was 33 years old, and he wept because there was no more worlds to conquer. But he could not control his desire to drink, and he died in an alcoholic convulsion prematurely. Stephen Foster was an alcoholic. The sweet singer of songs who gave the world its most beautiful folk music was a compulsive drinker. It seemed to come on him like a sickness, his wife once said, and so it does.
And when they found Stephen Foster sickened to death on the New York Bowery, he had in his pocket 38 cents, one cent for each year of a misspent life and the lyrics to another song. Stephen Foster loved his wife, his genie with the light brown hair, but the love of his wife could not stop his drinking and he died drunk. Robert Louis Stevenson was an alcoholic. He could weave the magic of children's stories, and he all but destroyed himself with the magic that he found in a bottle. It could have been a fist of gin or a quart of vodka.
[00:10:15]
And he explains the personality change of the alcoholic very dramatically in the story Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. And I watched this personality change right in my own living room. You saw it too. You saw the bottle change the man you love or your beautiful wife into a babbling idiot, into a degenerated animal, into a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Now history has little to say about the families of these men and others like them, but I think that I know the loneliness that Jeannie knew when she waited for her talented husband to come home from another binge.
And I think I know the homesickness that Fanny Stevenson knew when she left her home in California to go to a South Sea island with her husband in hopes that he might regain his health. Robert Louis Stevenson had a dual problem. He was also tubercular. And I think I know the joy that they knew when he did regain his health. And I think I know the serenity that they both knew when he found sobriety.
Now in our generation it is not necessary for an alcoholic to die in drunken ignorance as did Steven Foster. It is no longer necessary to go to a South Sea island to find sobriety. It's as near to you as your nearest clubhouse. And for these things I am grateful. Now in this generation much is being done about the disease of alcoholism. And strangely enough it is from these same people that our help is coming.
It is no longer impossible for an alcoholic to get in a hospital for treatment. The medical profession goes on record as saying alcoholism is a treatable illness and you can get an alcoholic into a hospital on this very basis. The law enforcement agencies no longer send alcoholics to jail. They send them to AA for treatment in lots of the areas. And we have wonderful programs in our penal institutions around the country under the auspices of AA for those people.
Magazines and newspapers are writing articles about alcoholism. Everywhere you turn there's something about alcoholism. But we're not getting the job done. Now don't misunderstand me. I am grateful to our friends in the profession who want to help and who are doing these things. But I say to you this morning that they don't know all there is to know about alcoholism. At this moment, however, I am looking at a room full of experts. You are the people who know about alcoholism because you have lived with it. There is very little about alcoholism that you do not know.
You know the drinking pattern of the alcoholic. You know the behavior. You know the terror of convulsions, DTs. You know about the alibi system. You know about slips in AA. There's very little that you do not know about alcoholism. So in my opinion, this is a job for you to do. A job for you and for me. Alcoholism has invaded all of our homes. And if we have visitors this morning, and I sincerely hope we do, I would not like you to think that we over-exaggerate the seriousness of this problem because as God is my witness, we do not. We cannot.
And I know what you see in this room because I can see it too. You see a room full of well-dressed people who are apparently well-fed and happy, but it was not always this way. Some of the alcoholics are sober and some are not. Some of us have suffered serious financial damage as a result of alcoholism. Financial Damage as a Result of Alcoholism.
[00:15:01]
Some of us have suffered physical abuse at the hands of the alcoholic. And all of us have suffered serious emotional damage as a result of alcoholism. In this room we have one thing in common, the disease of alcoholism. And I would not like you to be discouraged when you think of the tremendous responsibility that faces you because you need no special training. You simply need a compassionate heart and the willingness to share.
I learned this many years ago. I'm what is known in the Al-Anon family groups as a long-timer. I came into this thing, this outfit, before we had an outfit. We used to come to the clubhouses and we had very little except the dubious permission to meet there while the AAs had a meeting in another part of the building. We didn't have any literature. We didn't have books written especially for us. And it was out of these very early get-togethers that the Al-Anon family groups evolved.
I sometimes say that Al-Anon is a kissin' cousin to invention because both were born of necessity. And the dear people who founded this life-changing program of AA knew that in time the families would become aware of this necessity so they made provisions for us when they wrote the big AA book. Now, I don't know how many of you in this room have read the chapter in the big AA book entitled, To the Family Afterwards.
If you have not read this, I suggest that you do so. If you have not read it recently, may I suggest that you review it because there is a paragraph in this chapter that will give you purpose for living, that will give you reason for being. And if your copy of the big AA book is the same that is in my home, you will find this paragraph on page 137. If your copy of the big book is different from ours, read the whole chapter.
It will be good spiritual exercise. And this is what the paragraph says. The past is the principal asset of the alcoholic family and frequently it is almost the only one. This painful past can be of infinite value to families still struggling with their problem. We feel that each family which has been relieved owes something to those who have not, and when the occasion requires each member of it, should be only too willing to bring former mistakes, no matter how grievous, out of their hiding places, showing others how we were given help is the only thing that makes our life worthwhile.
Cling to the thought that in God's hands your dark past is the greatest possession you have, the key to life and happiness for others. With it, you can avert death and misery for them. End of paragraph. Now, can you sit comfortably in your seats and feel that there is any question about what your responsibility is to the families of alcoholics? Does this leave any question in your mind about what you can do to show the gratitude for the sobriety in your home and for the good things that sobriety has brought to you?
It doesn't leave any questions in my mind, and it has long since dispelled all the doubt. I think it is regrettable that we no longer use this in our Al-Anon family group meetings. In our zealousness to make of Al-Anon a separate entity, as it should be, we have condensed this paragraph, and now we simply say, we share our experience, strength, and hope, one with the other, in love. And I feel sure that that's what I was invited here to do, to share with you my experience, strength, and hope in love.
I attended my first AA meeting in Amarillo, Texas, in 1948. I did not want to go to this meeting. I didn't know much about alcoholics in those days. I had read the big book, and I found Bill on every page.
[00:20:03]
But I could see no constructive purpose to be served in associating ourselves with a group of people who, by their own admission, had ruined everything they had ever tried to do. They had lost their health. They had lost their families. They had failed in business. Some of them had done terrible things and had been in jail. And I didn't want to associate with this kind of people. I was having quite enough trouble.
Our dear friend Elsa from the West Coast described me when she didn't even know me. She said some of the people come to her group just two jumps ahead of a fit, and that was a perfect description of me. This was an open meeting. We met in a rather large room. There was just about as many people there as we have here this morning. And after we were seated in the meeting, a very lovely lady that I later learned was a member of AA leaned across Marguerite, the little lady who had taken me to the meeting, and she whispered to me.
She said, how long has it been since you had a drink, honey? So you see, I wasn't in such a great shape. I was not embarrassed by the lady's question. I intended to answer. I hesitated a moment to remember when I'd had a drink. I'm not a teetotaler. But Marguerite was terribly embarrassed. She said, Mrs. O. is not an alcoholic. Mrs. O. is not an alcoholic, but she is familiar with the disease of alcoholism.
I had known about AA at this time for a little while. My husband learned about AA in 1945, and I'd like to be able to stand here this morning and tell you that he hasn't had a drink since, but this isn't true. My Bill was in AA for six years before he found sobriety. I grew up in a home with two men, both of whom was my father. My father was a two-fisted construction man who worked hard and played hard and drank hard.
He was a gray-eyed Irishman who taught me to sing Irish folk songs and to love poetry, who had the patience to teach me to work my geometry problems with a framing square, but on Saturday night he turned into a devil. My father loved to make things for my mother. He was a wonderful craftsman, and I have seen him literally work for months, building for my mother a lovely table or a china closet. He would select the wood carefully and design it beautifully.
He would sand and polish and fit it carefully together until it was truly a work of art, and then he would smash it in a drunken fury. Alcoholism turned my lovely mother into an old, ugly, hateful woman. She hated my father. She still hates him, even though he's been dead for three years. My father… When I had learned in Al-Anon to ask the God of my understanding for special favors, and I learned this eventually, I used to close every day of my life with one prayer.
God, don't let my dad die drunk. My dad was one of these people who never found this program, and he wanted to. He used to come to Texas, and he'd stay with us, and he'd go to AA meetings, and he used to ask us a question that we were never able to answer. He would say to us, how do you get the want to? Maybe you can answer dad's question. How do you get the want to? When my father died three years ago, he died of throat cancer.
He did not die drunk. The minister that conducted my father's funeral
[00:25:01]
used, at his funeral service, the poem Thanatopsis. Now, for those of you who are familiar with the works of William Cullen Brant, you will remember the closing lines of this very beautiful poem. So live that when thy summons come, thy go not like a quarry slave at night, scourged in his dungeon, but sustained and soothed by an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave like one who wraps the draperies of his couch about him and lies down to pleasant dreams.
I do not tell you these things about my father that you may weep for him. My father's all right. He doesn't have to drink anymore. I tell you these things that you may know that I have always loved an alcoholic. And because I love the alcoholic, I want to restore his family because I know that of all the things the alcoholic loves, he loves his family most. Even when he tears us down over and over and over again, he loves his family most.
I was not concerned with drinking when Bill and I were married. I drank with him. And we had a lot of fun. It seemed to be awfully important in my generation to have fun. I heard an aged woman say one time from the podium that she had so much fun it almost killed her. But I drank with Bill, and we enjoyed it. We worked with a group of people, and we were all about the same age. And the company that we worked for sent us all over the United States.
So we got drunk in Saratoga, Kalamazoo, Chicago, St. Louis, San Antonio, and Phoenix, Arizona. We've been pretty drunk here, too. But it was all good fun. Everybody had a ball. But then in 1940, two things happened to make Bill and me grow up. We became parents, and the world became involved in the war. I no longer drank with Bill. Suddenly things became too serious. We had our second child the next year, and Bill was not there when Nancy was born.
Nancy came on Wednesday, and she didn't see her father till Sunday. And when Bill came to the hospital with the usual paraphernalia that you men bring to your wives when we have new babies, he caused a great deal of confusion in the hospital. He wanted to teach the Catholic nun who was in charge of the maternity ward at the Good Samaritan Hospital in Cincinnati, Ohio, if you please, the Texas stomp.
And the good sister didn't want to dance. And when he left the hospital that afternoon, he sat down on the streetcar track in full view of my window, forced the motorman to stop so he could tell him about our new baby girl. You see, Bill was still having fun with his drinking. Our only son was born the next year, and this time the trip to the delivery room was a little bit different. Something went wrong, seriously wrong, and they needed Bill.
And they couldn't find Bill. Now had I been able to talk to them or had they asked me, I could have told them that Bill was in the bar. But you see, I didn't know which one. Now my Head A.A. friends tell me that there is no loneliness in the world as great as that of the alcoholic who has run out of time. But I think I know about loneliness. The loneliness of an alcoholic's wife when she goes to a delivery room with the full knowledge that a compulsion to drink is depriving her of her husband's devotion.
The lonely task of keeping the spirit of Christmas alive for small children whose father has forgotten what day it is. And the crawling fingers of loneliness that you feel when you wait by the hospital bed of an injured child and you hear her cry for her daddy. I want my daddy. And you can't find your daddy. This, I believe, is loneliness. Mrs. O. is not an alcoholic, but she is familiar with the disease of alcoholism.
Our fourth child, another little girl, was born in 1943. Another little girl was born in 1943, and by this time the drinking had progressed, and Bill had started having personality clashes with the people that he worked for, and he changed jobs often.
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One of these jobs took us down to Knoxville, Tennessee, right in the big middle of the war. It was extremely hard to find houses then, but we did find a lovely home of a retired couple who were spending their winters in Florida, and we liked it there. Now this job that Bill had was with Holland Furnace Company. He worked on commission, and it was not unusual for him to make $500 or $600 a week, and we were evicted from this furnished house that rented for $50 a month for non-payment of rent.
We couldn't find another house in Knoxville. That was just at the time that they put this atomic energy plant there, and we had to go up into Kentucky 70 miles away in order to find a garage apartment, and I was expecting our fourth child any minute. And when I got settled in this mean little apartment, I checked in with the local hospital, and I learned that it was for the exclusive use of the coal mining people who lived in that area, and that I was not eligible to go there to be delivered of my child.
And about the time that I got this wonderful bit of information, they carried Bill home. Now they'd carried him home before, but this time his leg was broken. So we put a cast, or had it done, on this broken leg, and we started again to Cincinnati, Ohio. My mother lived there, and I had to have help. We had to go on a Greyhound bus, and because Bill was not able with this kind of salary to afford a car.
We got in the back seat of this Greyhound bus. Peggy was three, and Nancy was two, and Luke couldn't walk. This was our frail little child that the doctor told us I couldn't keep. They told me he would never walk. Alcoholics are sensitive people. I've watched Bill stand by this child's crib for long moments, this golden-haired little boy of ours who couldn't kick and go get drunk. Mrs. O. is not an alcoholic, but she is familiar with the disease of alcoholism. I, to this day, do not know who is most relieved to reach Cincinnati, Ohio, me or that bus driver.
I went to Mother reluctantly. In fact, she didn't even know I was expecting another baby. My early motherhood was an extreme embarrassment to my mother. She's only 12 years older than my Bill, and she hated him with a passion. Now that he's in AA, she thinks she hatched him. But we got to Cincinnati, and because I had mismanaged so dreadfully, I couldn't find a room in a hospital. It seemed that you had to be on a waiting list and know some people.
So our fourth child was born in the charity ward of the Good Samaritan Hospital, and it was during this period that I became familiar with eviction notice after eviction notice. And every time that one of these notices was served on me, I saw the look of pity and disgust on the faces of those who served them. And it was, too, in this period that I became familiar with welfare agencies. And I don't know whether this has too much of a significance to you wonderful people out here in Arizona or not, but I might remind you that I'm a hillbilly, and we don't like to be beholden.
But you'll go to a welfare agency for food for your children and for treatment for your young son, just as I did. And again, I saw the look of pity and disgust on the social worker's face when she wrote on my application blank, Husband is a drunkard, as if I couldn't read.
[00:35:06]
Mrs. O. is not an alcoholic, but she is familiar with the disease of alcoholism, and I would like you to know that when I came to the state of Texas 25 years ago, I had never heard this term in reference to my young husband's drinking. I had never heard it referred to as an illness. My husband lost his left arm and his left eye as a result of drinking before he was 27 years old, and no one ever suggested that he might have a drinking problem.
My Bill lost the confidence of his friends and the respect of his family because of drinking, and he could not stop. He almost died as a result of drinking, and he could not stop, and I watched this happen, and I could do nothing to help him. And at this point, I would like to say something directly to you alcoholics who are in this room. I have heard you stand behind podiums like this across this country and have the unmitigated gall and the asinine arrogance to say a non-alcoholic doesn't know what they're talking about, and I want you to know that I know what I'm talking about, and I wish to God I didn't.
I've had my own father beat me black and blue, killing spiders that only he could see, and he loved me dearly. I was his firstborn. I've held an alcoholic in my arms through the long nights when he was in convulsion, not knowing whether he would live till morning. I've seen the sanity leave his eye until I couldn't tell which eye was the artificial one. Scared to death that he had died, and scared to death that he had lived because he'd have no reason left.
And I've worked with alcoholic women until my hair and my clothes reaped with the odor of peraldehyde, and I go on record as saying there is nothing with the nauseous odor of peraldehyde. And I've gone home to send my own children to school, grateful in the knowledge that, but for the grace of God, somebody might be walking me up and down and feeding me black coffee. I know what I'm talking about. And I want you to know that we wanted to help you, but you wouldn't let us.
It was like you put us on the other side of a thick glass wall, and we could see you, and we could hear you, but we couldn't get through to you. It was like, well, I think those of you who are parents can understand this feeling. I know the physical anguish that you must endure, and I know the mental torture, but I want you to know it don't hold a light to this tremendous feeling of inadequacy that those of us who love you feel and must endure, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after miserable year.
And because of this inadequacy, it takes away our very reason for being. It leaves us empty. It makes us nothing. It makes of our lives a hell on earth. It's a feeling that you have when you tend a sick child, and the child is burning up with fever, and it cries, and you want to help the baby, but you can't, because the child can't tell you where it hurts. And the alcoholic couldn't tell us where they hurt, and we couldn't help them.
Did you ever tend an injured animal, a dog perhaps with a broken leg, and it bites you? This is what you did to us. So the next time that you're tempted to say you don't know what you're talking about, will you please remember that most of us would go through hell barefoot for you, that we didn't help you because you wouldn't let us. Because of this dreadful, unholy compulsion that immobilized and demoralized my husband, we started what I like to call a new kind of education.
And in the pursuit of this education, we learned many things,
[00:40:05]
and we met many people. I learned to have faith in God. I learned to trust people, and to have confidence in my husband's sobriety. And this is extremely important, have confidence in your husband's sobriety. The first of these people that we met, of course, were the members of AA. And I shall never forget the first AA member that I ever talked to. He came to my house in the middle of the afternoon, and he described to me what I referred to then as this rehabilitation program for the alcoholics.
And I was interested and excited about the things he had to say. And after about two and a half hours, I said to him, what do you have in this rehabilitation program of yours for the wives and the children of the alcoholics? And I don't think anyone had ever asked him this question before, because he couldn't answer it. He said, we don't have anything for the wives and the children, Mrs. O.. You do not have a problem.
I thought he was wrong. I still think he was wrong. And that's one of the very reasons that I'm here this afternoon, because it was on that cold November afternoon that I made a promise to myself that someday, somehow, I would find a way to help the families of the alcoholics. Of course, I didn't put it in just those words, because I didn't know those words then. But I felt that somehow, somebody would tell Bill and me how to get off of this endless treadmill of broken promises and startings over again, that I would do anything anybody ever asked me to do, and I've tried to do that, as some of you know.
And it was then that I met another group of people. And this was a very special group of non-alcoholics, Bill Wilson calls them. People who had been most dreadfully affected by the devastating disease of alcoholism. People who found it vitally necessary to live the recovery steps of the AA program to restore their sanity and to preserve their stability. These people entertained the same fears as does the alcoholic.
These people cultivated the same self-pity as does the alcoholic. These people developed the same personality traits and defects as does the alcoholic. There was only one difference. They did not have the allergy to alcohol, and this was their most revolting development of all, because this meant that we could not find escape in a bottle. This meant that we had to take our punishment standing up, cold, sober, and there's not an alcoholic in the room who could have done it.
Some of these people seem to have been born with an understanding heart. And the rest of these people seem to have developed this understanding because they had lived with serious illness and sometimes with tragedy. And I seem to know these people and to be drawn to them. Then I met another group of people who had a similar experience. They had lived with serious illness and sometimes with tragedy.
And I seem to know these people and to be drawn to them. They could make my life just a little bit better each day because they were there. They could give me courage to face life one day at a time. And when I came to these people, I was absolutely destitute. I had no faith in God. Oh, I believed there was a God. I used to say I was agnostic, but that was before I learned the meaning of the word. And I thought there was a supreme being, if you please, who created the universe.
And I thought that he made the seasons to change and he turned the nights into days and he hung up the stars to make it pretty for us at night. And I thought he put people here. But then he let us go to hell backwards. I did not feel that he could take the time to be interested in the trivial things that were bugging me. I thought when he gave me a brain that I was on my own and I should be willing and able to use this intellect that I felt was God-given to take care of my incidental problems.
I know now, of course, that I tried to pray. And I know now, too, that he heard me when all I could say was, Oh, God. I think God listens very carefully for the prayers of the beginners and for the prayers of the alcoholics. I think he knows that we do not have the words. I think he knows that we do not have the words that prayers are made of. And I think he knows that we do not have the courage to speak aloud.
[00:45:00]
So he listened very carefully. And God knew why I couldn't trust people. People had not dealt kindly with me. This was largely my own fault, but I did not know this then. I could not even trust myself. I was not responsible for the things that I did. And I was not responsible for the things that I said. And my four lovely children were more afraid of me than they were of Bill when he was drunk. And with good reason.
I punished them unmercifully if they spilled a glass of milk on a white tablecloth, and I insisted on the white tablecloth. Now, I'm sure a psychologist could make much of this, but I'm sure I didn't understand it. It did not make sense to me that you would try to prove to your own children that you were an aristocrat, but I did it. They were afraid to bring home a green card if they made C, because I would not tolerate failure.
Failure had been bred out of me. Back in the hills, we don't fail. Now, we may get an equalizer, but we win. And my Bill was ashamed of me. Now, I want to say loud and clear, and with emphasis, I did not come here to get my husband sober. I came here to try to find the disintegrated pieces of a personality that was me. And if you'll remember, back in the late 40s and the early 50s, there was much being said and much being written about mental health.
And this is what I thought Al-Anon was. I thought this was group therapy, and I was frightened about my own emotional stability. I never was honest enough to say my sanity. But I was concerned about my emotional stability. So I came to your meeting, and I listened with tongue-in-cheek, I'm afraid, when you spoke of prayer and meditation, because I didn't believe you. I thought, oh, wouldn't they like people to think they're all that good?
But you told me that if I would put the principles of this 12-step program to work on my life, that it would change. And that's just exactly what I did. I started with Step 1 and worked right down through Step 12. How else can you do it? And my life did begin to change. Now, I will not stand here and say to you that overnight I became a wise and wonderful person. This is not the truth, obviously. But I will tell you that my life did change.
The first thing I noticed was that my children could relax around me. They finally became so relaxed that they thanked me. And then a little later, I was aware of the fact that, once again, Bill was proud of me. And this was tremendously important to me. I think it is important to all of us who love alcoholics, this need for approval is a sickness within itself. And, of course, the approval we want most of all is the approval of the alcoholic whom we love.
And we don't get it very often. And I think I know the basic reason for this need for approval. You see, the alcoholic, or the rummy, as our good friend from Florida calls them, is the lowest man on the totem pole as far as our culture is concerned. He's way down here on the bottom. And then you reject us. So this need for approval is tremendous in those of us who love alcoholics. But even greater than the knowledge that Bill, once again, is proud of me and that my children could relax with me, I became aware of the fact that I belonged to something.
And you see, I had never belonged to anything in my life. I grew up in construction camps around this country. And the first thing that my father would do when we'd move into one of these new camps was to build a fence around our place. Now, this fence was not to keep the Martin children in. It was to keep other people out.
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And this makes for a very lonely childhood. I had never belonged to a community because we didn't live there long enough. I had never belonged to a school because I didn't go to one more than one semester until I was high school age. I had never belonged to a church because you don't go to church when you don't believe in God. But now I belong to the most wonderful thing in the world, the all-known family group.
And I made friends, at first just in my own little group. And then, as your chairman told you, they gave me the tremendous privilege of being delegate to the whole state of Tennessee. And that's a pretty good-sized piece of real estate. And then I made friends all over the state. And I went to New York and I met Lois and Bill. And then I realized that I had friends all over the world. And some of you told me that you liked me.
And then I could belong to the human race. Now, I'd like to say to you that the all-known family group has given me everything that I have that I want to keep. And I'd like you to know that it's taken away from me many of the things that I do not want to keep. It gave me more than I expected. It gave me more than I asked for. It really gave me more than I ever dreamed of. It gave me the ability to rear four well-adjusted children, all of whom are married now, and I have six grandchildren.
And I sometimes forget to tell this when I talk. This frail little boy of ours who was not supposed to walk weighed into the Navy at 189 pounds. He's got his discharge now. He works for a small electronics company in Austin, Texas. He has a beautiful home and a lovely wife. Everything's fine with the O'Neills. This is the best time of our life. And all of this is because I put the principle of a simple program that I did not think would work for me to work.
I used your program to prove you wrong, and I proved you right. And I would use these next couple of minutes to say this to you. Just as they said to me in that very early group, this does not come for free. You have to give it away. And I've made a king-size effort to do just that. And I said at the very beginning of my talk that there's countless thousands who never heard of us. Right here in this beautiful city of yours, there are hundreds of alcoholics who will die never knowing that they're alcoholic if we fail to carry this message that only we can carry, the message that can change the tyranny of alcoholism into hope.
There's hundreds of women right here in this lovely city who will not have the courage to face life another day with an alcoholic, and they'll break up their homes if we fail to carry this message. There are frightened children in this town, children who are afraid for their daddy to come home, or it could be their mother, children who will grow up with deformed personalities if we fail to carry this message.
And if we fail to reach these people, God have mercy on them, and God have mercy on us.