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Source: Bob S. (Smitty) – OAR 2002 – Date Unknown.mp3 File: bob-s-smitty-oar-2002-date-unknown.mp3 Duration: 00:45:53
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My name is Bob S., and I'm an enthusiastic member of Al-Anon. My home group is the anchor group in Gainesville, Texas, and I've been going down this journey with you people since April of 1979. By the reason I got here, I think it's the reason a lot of you Al-Anons got here, I love an alcoholic. My wife Betty, who died three years ago, was a member of Alcoholics Anonymous and sobered 19 years when she died.
And believe you me, for those 19 years, I am truly grateful. And I know that there are some of you who understand that. I don't think you're an Al-Anon just because you're associated with somebody in the AA program. I think it requires some work on your part. I think that, personally, I need to live the steps, I need to abide by the traditions, I think I need to attend the meetings regularly, and I think I need to have a sponsor.
And I do these things. My first sponsor was a woman. When I came into the Al-Anon program, I looked around, and the only guy was about the age of my son, and I thought, well, we didn't have too much going. So I picked out a lady who was even older than I. And a tough old gal. She's the first delegate from the state of Texas, you know. And she's been my service sponsor ever since. Now, I know we don't encourage sponsors of the opposite sex, but you can tell by looking at me that it's not really a great big problem.
Now, don't misunderstand me. I still love to look at you beautiful ladies. I just can't remember why. I hope we have a happy time tonight. You know, these are very, very happy programs. Serious programs, but happy programs. Although I've only been a member of Al-Anon for 22 years, I have been in the service end of it. My sponsor, I'd like to be able to tell you that I jumped right into service, but that's not the way it happened.
My sponsor goaded me into it. She said, if you don't go, you don't grow. So I've been the DR. I've been the GR. I served three years with the West Texas Assembly. And several years ago, when our headquarters was still in New York, I got a call from the central office asking me if I'd consider myself to be a candidate for trustee-at-large for all of Al-Anon. And I seemed to have the educational qualifications for which they searched and the business experience, and I prayed about it, and I talked to my group about it.
And I called them back and said, yes, please consider me to be a candidate for trustee-at-large for all of Al-Anon. And guess what? I didn't get it. Oh, no, we hate rejection. And, of course, my first reaction was, if they didn't want me, why did they bother me? But the point is, my program came to my rescue like it always will when I let it, and it said, hey, whoever got that job was better qualified than you, was capable of doing more of the things that needed to be done than you were, and maybe my Heavenly Father has something else that he wants me to do.
Free. I'm totally free of that, and that's the way the program works for me when I let it. And I do try to let it most of the time. Although I've only been a member of Al-Anon 22 years, I am somewhat of an anachronism. I'm the only person still living what was present when the two co-founders of Alcoholics Anonymous met for the very first time, Mother's Day, Akron, Ohio, in 1935. My dad's Dr. Bob and my mom's Ann, and I rode out with my parents to meet with Bill for that very first meeting.
And if I may, I'd like to take you back in my memory of some of those times. My dad had come home the Saturday before Mother's Day with a potted plant, set it down, he was potted, went upstairs and passed out. Well, Henrietta Seiberling was a friend of my mom's, and she called mom up and said, Ann, there's a man out here that thinks he can help Bob. Bring him right on out. Well, mom had to explain to Henrietta that Bob was in no shape to talk to anybody, but she said, I'll get him out there the next day.
Well, he had a terrible hangover. He said one of the worst he's ever had in his life. And as we rode along, my dad, mom, and I, he said, okay, 15 minutes of this bird is all I want.
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But it wasn't 15 minutes, folks. He and Bill went off in a room by themselves, and they talked many hours. And as a result of that meeting and at my mom's invitation, Bill came and he lived at our home all that summer. And this is the time and place that Alcoholics Anonymous was started. It was in the middle of the last Great Depression. We lived in a one-industry town, Akron, Ohio. They made tires, Goodyear, Goodrich, General, Firestone, Miller, Cyberling.
But when people stopped buying automobiles, they didn't need tires, so the town just went flat on its face economically. There were strong men on the street corner selling apples for five cents apiece to support the family. The rubber factories were down to two days a week. And people still had a job. But maybe this was also providentially arranged because people had more time for each other. They weren't as hurried and harried as perhaps we are now.
And it was essential, I think, that these programs to get started, that people have time to communicate with each other, put in their own input, feed the material in that was going through their mind. So, again, I think our Heavenly Father arranged that it be happened at that particular time. I want to tell you about my dad. I think you'll love the guy. Dr. Bob was a tall, thin Vermonter, and he had icy blue eyes that kind of could look right through you.
He was a graduate of Dartmouth, one of the fine Ivy League colleges back in the East. At that time it was kind of the drinker's Ivy League college. He seemed to fit right in there. But he went out and he worked in industry a couple of years, and then he went back to St. Johnsbury, Vermont, and prevailed upon his dad, who was a district judge there, to allow him to come out to Chicago and go to medical school.
Well, he busted out of one of them because his alcoholism was progressive, like it always is, but somehow managed to graduate from the second one, obtained a coveted internship there at City Hospital in Akron, and it was coveted because they had some advanced equipment. And he moved to Akron, Ohio, and married my mom after a whirlwind courtship of only 17 years. Dr. Bob thought things over very carefully.
He had a great sense of humor. When I brought my bride to be home before we were married so that folks could kind of look her over, you know, she was tall and slender, and Dad looked at her and he got me aside and said, she's built for speed and lighthouse keeping. And I want to tell you his sex and hygiene lecture to me as a teenager. He got me up in the bathroom one day and closed the door, and I thought, oh, I'm going to find out all about it now.
He said to me, flies spread disease. Keep yours buttoned. You know, the pictures of him always looked so stern that I want to tell you, he wasn't that kind of a guy at all. He loved jokes. The elevator girls and the nurses and the interns all saved their jokes for him. And he was just a darn good sport. One time he wanted to go back to Vermont and then into Canada with a high school buddy of mine, and he had himself an old car that wouldn't hardly run, and I had a Model A Ford Roadster that I just bought for $12.50.
And the reason it was so cheap, it didn't have a top. He said, do you think that thing will go to Vermont and then up into Canada? And I said, yeah, I think it will, Dad. But he said, it doesn't have a top. What are we going to do when it rains? He said, we're going to get wet. You know, Bill was also a delightful guy. You know, they lived there all that summer. Bill discovered that my sister had a violin, so he got it out.
And he explained to me that he had spent a year of his life learning to play this violin. And, folks, he was no hyphus. I thought to myself, I never did say that, Bill. That's a wasted year. But Lois said he was better on the bass violin. But anyway, these two men couldn't have raised 50 bucks between them. That's how broke they were. But they both had open spiritual minds,
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and they had the desire to be of service to another human being, those two things. So you see, it really started from absolutely nothing. And I think perhaps that there might be someone here in this room who right now their life is starting from absolutely nothing. And also I think that it has been a series of nudging miracles that God has allowed to happen to keep it from going off track, self-destructing, and doing things like that.
So I want to talk to you about starting from nothing. I want to talk to you about miracles, and I'd like to talk to you about recovery. Well, Dr. Bob and Bill decided what they needed was another alcoholic. So they found a young guy by the name of Eddie R. who had just been thrown out of his house for nonpayment of rent, along with his cute little blonde wife and two stair-step kids. So they moved the whole family into our house, took Eddie upstairs and locked him in the upstairs where he'd be available, as they got this knowledge.
Hey, you've got to remember, nothing's written. They're just trying to stay a page ahead of Eddie. But Eddie was an agile young guy, and we had downspouts, and Eddie would open the window and slide down the downspouts and escape. And they had to postpone Eddie's recovery long enough to recapture him. Rather inauspicious start, don't you think, for great movements? One time Eddie got as far away as Cleveland, Ohio, 35 miles, and called him up on the phone, collect, to let them know that he was going to commit suicide, but that he would give them time to drive up and witness the event.
Well, when Eddie got back to the house and began getting sobered up, he had some other little problems that hadn't surfaced immediately, and he began beating up on this little woman to whom he was married, and then he began chasing my mom around the house with a butcher knife. So we held a group conscience meeting. And it was decided the only thing to do with Eddie was for his little wife to take him back to Ann Arbor, Michigan, and recommit him in a mental institution, and of course this was done.
And Bill and Dad were crestfallen. Here's their first attempt to sober up another alcoholic together. Total failure. But I want to tell you folks something. At Eddie's funeral 15 years later, a guy walked up to me and he said, Do you know me? And I looked at him and I said, Yeah, I know you. You're Eddie. And he said, That's right, and I want you to know I'm a member of the Youngstown, Ohio, AA group, and I've been sober one year.
So we don't know the result of that 12-step call. It's to take the hand that reaches out for help. That's our part. I think the results depend upon the will of our Heavenly Father and perhaps the zeal of the person receiving the message. But our part is to take that hand that reaches out for help, and we don't have to be fully qualified to go. We go with what we have at the time. I want to talk to you about somebody nobody knows anything about, and that's my mom.
I think maybe my mom wanted it that way. Remember, she's the lady that invited Bill to come and live with us, not come over and have soup next Tuesday, but to live with us. And I think that's a little minor miracle. Now, remember, Bill lived in New York City and we lived in Akron, Ohio, and I'll tell you another part of the miracle, Bill said, Okay. Mom was a graduate of Wellesley, one of the fine women's colleges back in the East, and she went there on a scholarship.
And her great-uncle was the president of the Santa Fe Railroad. And in those days, the president of the railroad had his own opulent club car that could tie onto trains wherever trains went. And he liked my mom, and he used to take her with him on some of these trips. So she got to see the jaunty, opulent side of life. And Mom was a schoolteacher. She led a very sheltered and protective life, very easily shocked until AA.
But now this is the lady that never lost faith in these guys. And we began taking alcoholics into our home because hospital beds were very expensive in those days. A double was $16. I think they're up a little now, but nobody had any money. So they decided to move the wet alcoholics into our home. Now, Dr. Bob, being the only medical man associated with this, A doctor, Bob, being the only medical man associated with the fledgling movement, would
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take a new guy upstairs and say, now I'm going to give you this shot of whiskey, but I want you to take this medicine first, and it was Peraldehyde. I know that some of you have smelled Peraldehyde, it's a very pungent sedative. And of course, when my sister and I were high school kids, when we opened the door and smelled Peraldehyde, we knew we'd lost our bed. But anyway, he knocked them out from 24 to 36 hours, he really gave them a jolt.
And then when the guy came to, he and Bill developed a standard diet, you know, to settle the nerves and get the mind to going. And I'll tell you what it was, it was canned tomatoes, sauerkraut, yeah, Bill had an ulcer and he thought sauerkraut cured everything, and k-ro syrup. I think you'll agree the early alcoholics were a hardy group. Well that summer, my mom wrote to Lois, and Lois came down and stayed with us as long as she could.
But then she had to get back to New York City, you've got to remember Lois was the only one that had a job. But it started a friendship that lasted, of course, until Lois' passing away in 1988. But I want to tell you about the recovery. Now, I had been raised in a home for the first 17 years with active alcoholism. Were any of you here raised in an alcoholic home, huh? Raise your hand. Okay, let me touch on that just a minute.
I think we get to adulthood with some scars. I firmly believe that. But I think that for me personally that I must keep in mind that I am not a victim, I'm a survivor. If I allow myself to adopt a victim mindset, which says, okay, everything, all the screw-ups I did, all the bad things I did, all the things I was supposed to do and didn't do, they're not my fault, I'm a victim. And that works, works beautifully.
But there's a price right up front that you have to pay for that. In order to keep that victim mindset going, you have to have an increasing resentment against some people, places, or things, to keep feeding that. And we all know that the one thing that will totally destroy us is resentment. I can only speak for myself, but personally I do not intend to remain forever frozen in the role of an injured adolescent.
And our programs show us how to grow up. Well I want you to know when we start taking these wet alcoholics in their home, boy, it was exciting. You know, and we were both teenagers, and you know how teenagers love excitement. And man, there was something going on every minute, as you can imagine. And another thing that made it so much fun, we'd see them come in with the blank eyes, and then you'd begin to see a little twinkle in their eye, and pretty soon you got a viable human being on your hands, and that was fun, and they weren't just overnight guests.
Church 2 went on and started AA in Detroit State almost a year. So you see, it was, but this was recovery. This was recovery. How did they do it? Where did they get the ideas? Well, Mom and Dad in Akron had belonged to an organization called the Oxford Group in Bill in New York City. And the Oxford Group was started by a Lutheran minister by the name of Frank Buckman, and the basic principles of it was back-to-first-century spirituality.
They had a lot of things that have been woven into our programs. I think you'll recognize them. Absolute honesty, absolute unselfishness, absolute love, and absolute spirituality. And these things had been woven into our program. They were absolutely, they were really, really absolute, absolute. One of the reasons that we had to break away from them was, you know, when an alcoholic gets here, I don't think they're absolutely absolute about anything.
And another thing, the Oxford Group catered to the upper middle class, and the early alcoholics were not upper middle class. And the Oxford Group wanted publicity. The alcoholics had already had all the publicity they wanted. And also they had a form of a fifth step. They would take a new guy upstairs in the bedroom of T. Henry Williams' house where they held a meeting, and bore in on him until he confessed what his problems were.
Well also, so again it was inevitable that we part because, you see, this was open confession and it was not acceptable to people of the Catholic faith. And I don't know whether you folks realize it or not, but there are Catholics that drink
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too much. But all the while this was going on, my mom was the one that was cooking the food. Mom was the one that was making the beds. Mom was the one that was cleaning the message. Mom was the one that was on the telephone answering calls, you know, people requesting help. And Mom was the one that made everybody that stayed there have a quiet time in the morning that they might feel God. And if I may, I'd like to excerpt a letter for you.
Now this letter was written to Bill by Henrietta Dodson, the wife of A.A. No. 3, the southern gentleman, the attorney, the man on the bed. This is his wife writing to Bill Wilson. On Friday, June 28, 1935, I met Ann S.. I met Dr. Bob on Thursday evening in the hospital. On Thursday evening when I went to the hospital to see my husband, Dr. Bob was there and he said, the little woman would like you to come over to the house.
I told him I couldn't go that night but would go the next night. On Friday night when I went to the house on Ardmore Avenue, and that was our home address, I met the most thoughtful, understanding person I've ever known. After talking with her for a while, I addressed her as Mrs. S. and she said, Ann, to you, my dear, she wanted to remove all the barriers. And I skipped down here. Ann taught me to surrender myself to God and ask him if he had a plan for me to reveal it to me.
Ann taught me to have a quiet time in the morning that I might feel near to God and receive strength for the day. She taught me to surrender my husband to God and not to try and tell him how to stay sober as I had tried that and failed. Ann taught me to love everyone. She said, ask yourself what is wrong with me today if I don't love you. She said, the love of God is triangular. It must flow from God through me, through you, and back to God.
She taught me I should never criticize the remarks of persons leading meetings as we do not know God's plan. Only what that person says will meet the need of someone in the group. In the early part of 1936, Ann organized a woman's group for wives of alcoholics, whereby in her loving way she tried to teach us patience, love, and unselfishness. And I skip to the end now. When I met and talked with this intelligent, deeply spiritual woman, I was completely sold on AA, Henrietta Dotson.
So you see, Mom realized right from the word go that it was an illness that affected the whole family. Lois, I recognized it also. She decided to write to all the known AA groups to see if there was any interest in a program like this, so she contacted all the known AA groups at the time, and to her surprise there were around 60 groups already doing it. Different thinking had formed their own family organizations.
So the need has been there right from the very word go. Mom died in 1949, and, of course, my dad was very seriously ill. I want to tell you a little bit more about Mom. Mom attended the early meetings, and they were all open meetings, and she always wore the same old black dress. And when Dad finally got on his feet a little bit, she got three new dresses, and someone said, ìAnne, are you going to wear one of your new dresses to the meeting tonight?î She said, ìNo, Iím going to wear the old black dress.
Thereíll be somebody come through that door that canít afford a new dress.î Mom took up smoking when she was 50. I said, ìMom, youíre not going to start smoking now, are you?î She said, ìIf you wait until youíre 50, I wonít say anything.î But since times were so tough, as an economy measure Mom decided that she would start rolling her own cigarettes, so she bought a Target machine. I donít know if any of you have ever seen a Target machine.
I see one lady did. It was a little deal. You put the paper down in kind of a trough, and then you sprinkled the tobacco in it, and then you took the lever and rolled it over and back, and you had a cigarette. Well, my sister and I had been swiping Momís cigarettes, and we really thought that this was a little bit beneath our dignity, so we offered to roll her some. But instead of tobacco, we used the shavings out of the pencil sharpener.
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And she lit the first one. Of course, the fire didnít go out. And after two or three of these, she said, ìYou know, these arenít nearly as good as those lucky strikes.î And that was the last of the Target machine. Mom died in ë49, and my dad was terminally ill with cancer, and Betty and I, my wife and I attended the first international in Cleveland in 1950. And this is the one where A. A. Adopted the Twelve Traditions, and thank God for those twelve traditions.
Thatís a glue that holds us together in both programs, I think, and I was so glad to read them tonight. Thatís a glue that holds us together. See, Bill had gone around the country stomping for the traditions, and groups were then like they are now. They said, ìBill, go on back to New York and run that like you want to. Weíll run this here like we want to. We donít need the traditions here in Texas.
We love each other.î But six guys got up and each of them read two of the traditions and they adopted them unanimously. Thank goodness for that. Betty and I attended the second international, and that was in St. Louis in 1955. Bill invited my sister and her husband, my wife and I, to attend the second one. And this is the one where Bill turned A.A. over to the A.A.s. So this is the one where the structure was in place where Founders could turn it over to the other people and they could carry on.
And it was the same way with our Al-Anon program. The structure is there. And this is also the one where the spiritual leaders got up and gave a talk, Dr. Sam Shoemaker from New York and Father Ed Dowling from St. Louis, clergy who had loved A.A. when A.A. wasnít cool, got up and gave a talk. And that was recorded. Itís in the book A.A. Comes of Age, the chapter on religion looks at A.A. if any of you are interested.
Iíve got to tell you this. My wife and I were party animals. So we loved to dance and we loved to drink and we loved to party. And I sure wasnít telling anybody my father was Dr. Bob S.. But once in a while someone would find out about it and ask us to come to a meeting. And we would go and enjoy the meeting. And as we drove away, weíd say, ìOh, good for them. They needed that.î And all the while alcoholism was working in our own home.
Betty had poured her dad into a dry-out place in Denver in 1944 and he and another guy started A.A. in New Mexico. So if there was ever two human beings that should have recognized alcoholism, it was my wife and me. But we didnít. I guess we thought we were different. Itís kind of tough to admit youíre that dumb. But anyhow, it got worse like it always did. I think alcoholism is in maybe three sections, fun, fun and problems, problems.
And we were well into the problem part. And it got so bad at our house that my mother-in-law, Bettyís mother, said, ìTell her you want a divorce. Thatíll shock her.î And I said, ìIt did, and it didnít shock her near as much as I thought it ought to.î Really, I was pretty disappointed in the results. But what I didnít recognize was that alcoholism had become the number one priority in her life and the family had moved down the line.
Itís just the nature of the disease. Well we worried about it and fretted about it. We didnít immediately jump into A.A. We began trying to adjust things. Maybe some of you have done that. And I like to tell this little story, if I may, about two hunters that loved to hunt moose way up in the wilds of Alaska. And they hired an aviation company to fly them into a lake and leave them and then pick them up a week later.
So the little plane came in and landed on the water and one of the hunters said, ìOh, weíve had a wonderful hunt. Weíve got three moose.î The pilot said, ìThree moose, you two guys and me in this little airplane?î One of the hunters said, ìOh, donít worry about it. A man came in with a plane just exactly like yours last year and we had three moose.î And what he did was he taxied up the river and got a longer run for his takeoff and he didnít have any trouble getting in the air.
…run for his takeoff, and he didn't have any trouble getting in the air. Well, the pilot thought, well, I've got to try this.
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So he did the same thing, and sure enough, the little plane soars right into the air, and they start back to civilization, but it's so overloaded that the little engine is overworked, and it gets hot, and then it loses power, and then way out in the middle of nothing, it crashes. And one of the hunters drags his buddy out from under the airplane, busts him off, and his buddy said, oh, where in the world are we?
The other one said, you know, I think we're within a hundred yards of where we crashed last year. And that's the way our life was going, trying the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Well, when it finally got bad enough, Betty went to AA. And she did it just hanging on by her fingernails. She said, I don't recommend that you do it that way, but I'll tell you one thing, you sure won't forget it.
And she took off with her program, and she was running off and leaving me. It really was a program of attraction for me. She was learning new stuff. She was running off and leaving me, and I decided I didn't want to be left behind. It was great stuff that she was practicing. So someone said to me, well, why don't you go to Al-Anon? And I thought, well, I don't mind joining the auxiliary. So I got in my car, and I drove 40 miles over to Gainesville, Texas, and I walk into my first Al-Anon meeting.
And I look around, and I'm the only guy. Room full of women. Well, I got mixed emotions immediately about Al-Anon. I like to describe mixed emotions this way. It's kind of like the feeling you get when your teenage daughter comes in at 4 in the morning with a Gideon Bible under her arm. But I stayed. And, oh, I really laid a trip on those gals. You know, the rock they've been holding the family together.
Bloody but unbowed. And they listened very patiently. And I do think we'd need to listen to those stories once. And I left there knowing I'd made a wonderful impression on those ladies. But, you know, these things are revealed to us as we can handle them. I talked to Anne a couple years later, and she said, oh, yeah, Bob, I remember that first meeting. Said, after you left, we held a meeting. And we said, there's one that's not going to make it.
And none of them would volunteer to sponsor me either. But anyhow, this was the start of my recovery. Where did they get the ideas for recovery? They got it from the Oxford group. They got it from God's big book. You know, God has his own big book. And they used the 13th Corinthians, the Sermon on the Mount. And as you all know, the book of James, which is faith without works, is dead. Now, when I came into the Al-Anon program, it was already well in order, well in shape.
The things were in place. And so I started down the path of my recovery. And we had a lot of anger on both ways that we had to work through. I didn't realize how much anger we had built up. But this was something else that we had to work through. Sometimes it was a matter of just walking off and leaving the others rather than starting a big fight. Sometimes Betty would get on a dry drunk. Sometimes Bob would get on a dry dry.
And if it happened at the same time, there's long periods of silence, you know. Ask your father to pass the salt. But the point is that the programs kept bringing us back and bringing us back. I had to learn to peel away the past, and the past dies hard and dries slowly. I also had to learn that everything that I have gained I can lose almost instantly. I have to constantly keep working at it. And one of the most profound statements I've ever heard anybody make was a lady AA from Albuquerque.
And she said, she was an alcoholic, she said, the person I was will drink again. And I thought, wow, how true of us in Al-Anon. The person I was will get sick again.
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So constantly I have to work at it. And constantly it's kind of scary at times. You're up on the cutting edge. But, oh, the rewards are so great, you know. Rather than just having come through the gates of hell, just plop down the first shack at the side of the road saying, I got here, didn't I? Too tired or whatever to even look further. But if we keep working, there's grander vistas, there's brighter colors.
And it's a never-ending process. It's a learning process. And so, so terribly well-rewarding. I'll tell you some things that I've learned, and it's just been a beautiful thing to me. I had to learn to love. You know, love is a learned phenomenon. My folks gave me all the love that any kid would ever want, but I had barriers. I let them come so close, and that was it. I had to learn to let down the barriers.
Because once I do that, I can receive love. And I can't give away something that I don't have. So I have to learn to receive it first. I have to learn to receive the love first. You gave me too much, and you're so proud of your honesty. That's cash register honesty. And then there's what I call resume honesty. You know, you basically tell the truth, but you touch it up a little bit because you want people to like you.
And then there's absolute honesty. And that's the honesty when I can show you me, warts and all, and you show you you, warts and all. We can have an instant, intimate relationship. And I know of no other programs in the world that we can do this. And what that does for me, it dispels loneliness. It dispels loneliness. I no longer am a lonely person, and I think most people go through this life lonely.
And the freedom, I've had to learn the freedom. You know, I think when I got here, at least, I had a freedom. You remember the old country and western song, Me and Bobby McGee? You know, freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose. Nothing ain't worth nothing but it's free. That's kind of where we are when we get here. Then as we begin to work the program, and we decide that we're going to work the program and we're going to turn our will over to life and care of God, then we have another freedom.
We've got a freedom of choice for the first time with me. Freedom of choice. I'm no longer shackled to the alcoholic, and I assume the alcoholic is no longer shackled to the bottom. So we have a beautiful, beautiful sense of freedom. Then I have learned about God. I was raised in the Episcopalian church. That's Catholic light. You know, all the pageantry without the guilt, yeah. But it was kind of used to control my deportment.
The God that was presented to me was one circulating around there, and if I screwed up, he was going to get me. If I screwed up, he was up there waiting for me to screw up. Well, that isn't the type of a God that you can really cotton to, do you think? And as I got older, I discarded that one. I was a bomber pilot in World War II, a bomber pilot and flight commander, and I flew 45 missions out of Africa in the old four-engine B-24.
And our losses were very heavy. My whole crew was killed. And we carried a ten-man crew. What happened was the squadron CO said, Bob, one of the pilots in your squadron is having trouble riding with him. He said, I'll take your crew out. And they went out, and they never came back. So I had another relationship with God. I call it a 9-1-1 relationship. I made deals with God. Have you ever done that?
I made deals with God. Okay. That isn't a very good deal either. That doesn't work. But now, through this program, I have learned about a loving God, that we're all God's kids. All God's kids. God doesn't have any grandkids. We're all God's kids. Wants us to do better. Loves us just like we are. And a God that I can talk to. I pray to my God every morning, and I ask him for things, usually for other people.
I thank him every night. I talk to him as I go through the day. God, did you see that SOB cut us off? I want to close. I want to talk to you a little bit about miracles. I always talk to you about starting from nothing.
[00:40:01]
But miracles. Have you ever thought of the miracles that God has allowed to happen that these programs could be like they are? Money. In the early days of Alcoholics Anonymous, nobody had any money. And Dad and Bill were human beings, and they thought, boy, wouldn't this be great if we had some dough. We could start treatment centers, and I'm sure my father could see himself in his white medical coat, greeting the patients and maybe Bill on the streets, flagging them in, you know.
So, they went to New York City to meet with people with very, very deep pockets, and Mr. Rockefeller and his group listened very carefully and said, no, money will ruin it. That's a miracle, folks. Now, think what would have happened, in your mind's eye, if Mr. Rockefeller and his group had dumped a million bucks on a hundred broke alcoholics. Laughter It's just pretty horrible to even think about it.
I bet we wouldn't be sitting here tonight. Miracle. Anonymity. In the early days of these programs, there were people with huge egos. Laughter Now, I know we don't have that anymore. But you can't be Mrs. Alanon or Mr. AA if nobody knows what your name is. Also, what that has done, it doesn't make any difference if you've been here 40 days or 40 years. We're all exactly the same. And isn't that the way it should be?
Miracle. God, as we understood him, was incorporated in the steps to quiet a loudmouth agnostic by the name of Jimmy B. And Jimmy said, this God stuff will ruin it. They said, it'll run them out the door faster than we can drag them in. So to quiet Jimmy down, they put God, as we understood him, in our steps. And what that has allowed, folks, that has allowed these programs to be completely acceptable to the Eastern religions, people all over the world who have an entirely different concept of a higher priority.
So perhaps you and I do. Miracle. And I can tell you so many more. Fortunately for you, I won't do it. Let me close my remarks. I want to tell you a couple of things. Betty and I, we were going along together. Our programs were parallel. We had a wonderful life. I quit drinking. You know, I got silly one night and she said, that bothers me. I said, okay, I quit. So I don't drink anymore because I wanted her to enjoy her program to the fullest.
And I wanted us to be going along together. I don't say that's the way you handle it. I just tell you what I did. But anyway, we got a phone call one day. Our oldest son, Scott, had just killed himself. Scott was a guy who had a master's degree cum laude from the University of Texas. He was a member of MENSA. You know the people with the IQ, genius IQ. Very successful financially. He had a wife and three kids.
Went to work one day and something happened at the job. He didn't have a problem with drugs or booze. Went out in his car and pulled out his gun and blew his brains out. What a terrible thing. You know, no parent wants to outlive their children. This was a terrible blow to us. But what I wanted to tell you was the programs and the people in it held us in their arms and propped us up until we could stand alone together.
Six months later, my wife, Betty, was diagnosed with lung cancer, terminal lung cancer. And I dragged her around the country trying to do everything for her. And finally she said to me, Bob, I know what you've been trying to do. I'm not afraid to die. I release you. Will you release me? And I said, okay, Betty, I'll do that. And so she died with hospice and home in bed without pain, still loving me and I loved her.
And again the programs held us in their arms and propped me up until I could stand alone again. If you're new here and your life is a pit and you think you're just starting from nothing, so do these programs. If you're new here and you think you're in bad need of a miracle, these programs are miracles and the people in them are miracles. Talk to us. You don't bother us.
[00:45:09]
darkest Africans and started hospitals and did that the rest of his life. Dr. Schweitzer said, I know not what your destiny may be, but this one thing I do know, that those among you who will find true happiness are those who have sought and found how to serve. So talk to us. You don't bother us. You strengthen us, believe it or not, and we want you to hang around and stay because I think you've still got your miracle coming, and don't you quit before your miracle.
Thank you.