My name is Andy Johnson, and I am a member of the Sonneville, Massachusetts group of Alcoholics Anonymous. Sonneville is a small suburb outside of Boston, the home of John P. Squires and Company, which is famous for its sugar-cured ham. When I approached Alcoholics Anonymous, I wasn't sugar-cured, but I was well-preserved in alcohol because I had been drunk for 23 years. Time doesn't permit me to go into my case history or a blow-by-blow description of the things that happened to me because I drank too much, too often. If the power of example could stop anyone from drinking, it should have stopped me, because my dad was killed in a drunken brawl, and my mother worked in the laundry all day, and she became tubercular, and my sister and I were brought up by the state of Massachusetts, as state was. And I know all the misery and all the agony and all the heartache and all the heartbreak that a child of a drunk goes through, and that should have been a lesson to me. And I hated food, and I hated everybody connected with it, and I was determined, whatever else I did in my life, that I would never drink. Fortunately for me, in my adolescent years, some persons who had an organization similar to the Salvation Army, Volunteers of America, they took me into their home, and everything that was decent or honorable or upright that I learned, I learned from those good people. And I wasn't of their faith. Never once in all those years did they try to persuade me to do anything different than what I wanted to do. They had influence, and they secured for me a fine position, and I traveled the state of New York, with the exception of New York City and Long Island, to the Hood Rubber Company, one of the largest independent rubber companies at that time in the world. And I was very successful, so much so that they made me sales manager of the New England District. They allowed me to hold some of the larger accounts that I had in New York State, because I had done so well there. And on my 29th birthday, on the 30th day of September in 1925, they threw a party for this bright young fellow who was going to be successful, and that night…