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Source: DICOBE-00286 – Ebby T – BILLS SPONSOR – 1958-09-14.mp3 File: dicobe-00286-ebby-t-bills-sponsor-1958-09-14.mp3 Duration: 00:50:56
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I'm going to introduce, you could stand here for a long, long time. I've been fortunate in knowing Ebby for 17 years. That's the length of time I know Bill too. I met Ebby 17 years ago. Bill met him almost 24 years ago. Take, call it what you will, grace of God. But it was not for the man that you're about to hear, you wouldn't be having this meeting tonight, because he's the first guy that brought the message to our boy Bill. If you've read the book Alcoholics Anonymous, and I know that most of you have, in there you'll hear in Bill's story, always referring to my friend.
And then in the later book, describing Alcoholics Anonymous and other stories that just came out some short time ago, the name Ebby comes out. But always in the first book you'll hear him referred to as my friend. Should you hear a lot of us at different times and in different parts of the country, quoting how Bill came in, how the organization or the fellowship started, there's only one man in the world tonight who knows exactly how it started.
Because he was sober and Bill was drunk. So I give you my friend and your friend, our founder, Ebby. Thank you, Dick. As Dick told you, my name is Ebby and I'm an alcoholic. I want to just kind of start this off. When Dick asked me over here, I was very glad to come, because I wanted to meet some of you Memphis people. But I had an idea. I was one of two or three speakers and I didn't know I was going to hold this thing down for 40 or 45 minutes.
Back home in Dallas, I'm known as the world's shortest speaker. They used me back there on the Beverly Close for the 10-minute and 15-minute spot. I don't know how I'm going to go about holding down for 45 minutes, but I'll do the best I can. In fact, I've been living in Texas for five years now. Maybe I've gotten enough of that Texas braggadocio somewhere in my system. Maybe I'll absorb some of it so I can pull some of that out of the hat.
There's a story I heard a year or two after I got into Allison. Well, let's take a walk, shan't we? An opium indulgent man let me tell it. He was a Texas rancher. He drove over to his nearest neighbor. It was about 15 miles. He said, what do you say we go to town and make a day of it? I said, all right. And they got in the car and they started out. As soon as they got out of sight of the ranch house, they opened up and searched the boardroom.
Had a good long pull on the bottle and the first guy said, you know, they shipped 2,000 bowls from Fort Worth the day before yesterday. Nothing was said. They drove on a while and came to a gate and they had to open that. They had another pull up the bottle and the second guy said, you know, I shipped 2,500 bowls from my sighting four or five days ago. They drove along just before they got to the main state highway. They stopped for a third good hooker and the first rancher said again, you know, I think we're the two biggest bullshippers in Texas.
And I hope I've acquired a little of that so I can spread it out tonight. I know that Dick and Jim Drake and some of the other boys wanted me to tell you some of the beginnings of AA as I experienced them. And, you know, I think that I appreciate the things that Dick has said and other people have said about me. Well, I sometimes think of March Keith's claim to fame as an exhibit A in the antique division of alcoholics and barnabas.
That's about it. Well, I got to go back to some of my beginnings.
[00:05:04]
I started drinking when I was in school. I come from northern New York, my native town. Went to a private school there. I started drinking last year. I came to hold it under control pretty well. And I did get off on a wild party one night. It was a military school and we had a competitive drill. And after the drill we all went out and had a summer so I didn't get drunk. And we got in a mess and the principal of the school heard about it.
But nothing was said. But I wasn't very well that spring and they took me out of school before school was over. And that summer the principal wrote to my father and he always called me Ed. He didn't call me a beaner, Ed. He said, I don't think we can do anything more for Ed. Which meant that he was just selling me from the school. So that fall my father said, you're going to work in the foundry. My father happened to be in the iron foundry business.
So I went to work that fall. And I confined my drinking to Saturday nights. And actually I had to get up at 6 o'clock to get down. I worked as a motorist helper. Which is fairly rugged work, as you may know. And I did that for a year. And I confined most of my drinking to Saturday nights except around Christmas time when all the dances were going on. And I really stepped out. I remember I tried to go to work drinking and dancing and getting down to work at 7 o'clock in the morning when I was young.
And you shake it off and work it off by night. And I managed to get away with it for a while. But as I look back and remember those times, I wasn't a very successful drinker from the start. There were times, too, when I'd take some of the older guys around on me home. There were times I'd be climbing a chandelier after three or four drinks and I never knew what was going to happen. The fact of the matter is when I was about 15 years old, I remember putting a lot of thought into this business of drinking because it was in my family.
My brothers drank pretty heavily. My father did. And I kind of figured that if they drank that way, it wasn't any good for them and it was no good for me either because I was just about the same temperament as they were. But it was that first drink that I ever took on my own when I walked into the bar of the hotel tonight in Albany and ordered a glass of beer all by myself and I was a big shot. And I still say that was the best glass of beer I ever tasted.
Sometimes I can almost taste it again. Somehow that just gave me the same glow and that beer was a lot stronger in those days and it was real beer. That was about 1914, I think. 1914, yes, it was 1914. And I know that I said to myself, this is for me. And soon after that, when I started drinking, I kept it down pretty well at two or three drinks. I used to go out of an evening that spring. And this friend of mine, I went to school, he called me up and asked me if I had my lessons done.
I said, sure, I used to just go out because the family was sitting in the room. And I said, sure, Andy, I'll go out and have a jug of milk with you. I've got time. And we were far from a jug of milk. But I managed to get home by 11 o'clock so there was nobody knowing about it. I went on with the effect and the taste of alcohol that was fascinating to me from the beginning. And later on I read a book called The Common Sense of Drinking from which a lot of A.A. was taken by Dick Peabody.
He's now dead, but he was one of the first of the lay therapists that had a tremendous following of alcoholics. A lot of other books had been written by a lot of his pupils. The Last Crutch is one of them by Dutch Chambers and I can name a half of those and I can't think of one now. But he said in that book that the difference between an alcoholic and a heavy drinker was that the heavy drinker might drink just as much on a given night as the alcoholic.
But the next day was another day to him and he went to work and the first thing in the awakening in the morning was the office. And the first thought that the alcoholic had was of the night before and where could he get the next drink to bring that party back again. And that always appealed to me because that's the way I was. I'd forget business and want to get somewhere I could get with the gang again.
[00:10:05]
And he said the effect of alcohol on people of your type is too fascinating, you can't handle it. But I knew then that a couple of the drinking in my family I figured out that I better lay sick and stay away from it, but I never did once I had that drink. As time went on I, of course, got into a lot more trouble and the family business broke up. It was one of those things to do that had been running since 1852 and it broke up in 1922.
And I was more or less on the loose and going from one job to another and getting in more trouble all the time. My drunkenness was increasing. I didn't get overseas in World War I when I was in the outfit that was stationed around right in my hometown of Albany. And in the state armory there I got to be a second lieutenant in this outfit and we always had a jug in the office quarters because it was a bucket in one of the corners right near the armory.
And I always somehow managed to get a barrel of whiskey and we could get it because those were the days of prescriptions. The doctor would issue you a prescription during Prohibition and you'd go in and get this pint of whiskey. But we got it all we wanted. We got that gallon jug filled repeatedly. And there was a pretty two-fisted drinking crowd and they were all older than I was. And finally we got into a jam one night.
We got in a taxi wreck and I just got superficial cuts in my both wrists and in my face. But I was kind of a bloody mess. I was just bleeding a lot. And my father came in. I was sitting on the bed and he says, You get out of that National Guard tomorrow morning until you leave my house. Well, I didn't feel like leaving this house that night. So late that afternoon I walked up and told the captain I was going to resign, request to be put on the reserve.
So that ended my National Guard career and that saved the drinking. But things got worse and my father and mother died in 27, my father in 29. And I was kicking around then pretty bad. I inherited some money from my father. I should have had cents enough to take care of it. But I didn't. I lost half of it overnight in a stock market crash and the rest I just put down the drain over a period of a year, a year and a half.
And we used to summer in Vermont. And it was there that I met Bill Wilson. But it was longer ago than 24 years ago. I first knew Bill about 1910. I went to school with him in 1912, which has taken us back quite a few years. And as I get back, we went to summers in Manchester, Vermont. Well, after my father died, the house was vacant up there. We bought a house after all the years that father had spent money at the hotel for all of us.
He bought a house in 1923 and in 1929 he died and the house was empty. All my other brothers were married. Father died without a will, so they just divided up the furniture and left it down for me. And I had one room tarnished in that house and the rest was bare. And I was living there all alone, drinking heavily all the time. Got a reason and we jumped now. We're going to get up to the summer of 1934, which is 24 years ago.
And I'd been on the toils of the law twice that summer. I'd gotten drunk and gotten arrested for being drunk and disorderly. Fine, five dollars or something like that. And it seems that in Vermont at that time, I don't know whether the law is still on the statute books or not, but if you got arrested three times in any one given year for drunkenness, it meant six months in the Windsor State Prison.
Well, I was getting drunk that long. One time I got drunk. And I still don't know exactly how it happened, but I was in my own house and finally somebody got out a wire for me. I still don't see yet what I was doing as I was on my own property. But one of the boys, a boy that was constable at the time, was a guy that I'd gone to school with in 1912, the same year that I went to school with him. I went to school with him in 1912, the same year that I went to school with Bill Wilson.
[00:15:01]
I forgot to say that I went to a private school in Albany, but this one year I went up there in Vermont in 1912, in the fall of 1912, to go to that school for one year and then back to my other. And this other boy, John Jackson, he was constable. And I walked uptown the next day, well, I went up and sat on the store, the steps of the hardware store, the top of the corner of it. And then John drove up and said, sorry, he says, everybody, I got a warrant for you, got to take you down to Bennington, which is a county seating.
He took me down and saw the judge. And the judge says, be back Monday. He said, we'll see what we can do about you. Well, I've gotten ahead of my story, because before that, I'd say late in July or the first part of August, two men came to see me, two fellas that I had drunk with often. And one of them happened to be the son of this judge. His name is Steven Graves, and he's now living in Paris, France.
And the other one is Shep Cornell, and I don't know just where he is. I think he's somewhere in Ohio. And I had a hangover, of course, and these two guys wanted around. I was out in the back somewhere in the kitchen, I guess. I remember they came up the back steps. I mean, they didn't know exactly how to begin on me, because they remembered me and I was having a lot of fun with me drinking. And I saw they had something on their mind, so I said, well, what do you got on your mind?
What's cooking? And they said, well, we kind of come to see you, because we're trying to get some idea into your head about something. I said, you mean about my drinking? And they said, yeah, you're not getting anywhere. I understand you're enrolling all over town. And we just sort of, well, we just sort of, we got linked up with a group called the Oxford Group. And we think that you could get help if you'd join up with us.
And they said, do you ever think of letting God run your life instead of every patcher trying to run it all the time? And they really talked sense to the way I figured it, and it seemed to me that they were just telling me things that I had been taught in my childhood about the right way of living. And I said, well, gee, if these two guys have got something out of this, maybe there's hope for me, because I've just about given up hope.
And I tell you, I was willing to quit drinking when I didn't know how. Excuse me. I didn't know how to do it. So I listened to them, and they left me a book by one of these men in the Oxford Group. I don't recall the name of that book now. But in it, I could see myself staring out of those pages. Now, the Oxford Group, let me explain, was not concentrated on alcohol, alcoholism. It was a spiritual group.
It was founded by a minister from Pennsylvania named Frank Bookman, B-U-C-H-M-A-N. It got its name, Oxford Group, because Bookman got a lot of people interested, and they, in turn, went abroad, and they went to England and Oxford University, and they got a lot of people interested over there. And from there, they went to South Africa. And they got up quite a big meeting down there. I don't know if it was Cape Town or one of those cities.
And the reporters referred to them as the Group from Oxford, and that damn name stuck, and it had no more to do with the group or its foundings than anything in the world. But just like those things happen, that's the name that stuck with it. And it was called the Oxford Group. They were really trying to find something. It was that time in 1929 when the crash had come, and Wall Street and the nation was kind of a low point economically.
A lot of people were hopping out of windows in New York, and that's no joke, because there were a lot of them hit those manholes head-on from the 30th floor. And a lot of people were drinking terribly, and they wanted to find something. And this Oxford Group, a lot of people came around to it. And, of course, a good many of them happened to be alcoholics. And don't ever let yourself think that nobody but an alcoholic can help an alcoholic, because there were a lot of men in this group who were very understanding and had a damn good knowledge of the thinkings of an alcoholic's mind.
And I sometimes think that our minds are no different than anybody else in this world. We just give in to things that other people do not. Anyway, that idea appealed to me.
[00:20:02]
I read the book, and I filled it up for a few days, and I started to paint the house. But I had a ladder that was too short, and I couldn't get up to all these places. And I made a deal with a boss painter, and he sent around one of his men with some equipment, and the two of us finished the house. I didn't touch a drop all that time, but the minute that job was over, I went right back to bottling, because I had nothing more to interest me.
It was a lead time. And it was then, on that ninth, after the thing in the house that I had picked up and taken to this county judge, there's one thing that sticks in my mind, and it always will. I know it was at that time. You may not get what I mean by it, but as we drove home that afternoon, Mr. Constable John Jackson left me off at the house that I was living in. And he said, well, I'll be around to get you Monday.
This was Friday. And he said, remember the judge says be sober. I said, yep, I'll be sober. So I went in the house, and I remembered that down cellar, I had about a half a dozen bottles of ale, and I know that they're going to be nice and cool. And there's one thing I like in this world, it's Valentine's Ale, and that was it. So I went down cellar, and I said to myself, I can't possibly get drunk between now and Monday on six bottles of ale, and I know that nobody in town is going to sell me anymore after they've heard that I, you know what a small Vermont community is, everybody from ten miles up and down the valley knows all about anything like that.
And I knew that none of, I mean, the bootleggers wouldn't sell me anything. And I got down, and I reached one of those bottles, and uh-uh. That ain't cricket. All right, the judge said, you'd get there sober, would you? You'd be there sober. No, that isn't, that's cheating, that's somehow. And I walked back upstairs, and that damn devil's hopped on my shoulder, get up, go on down there and take it.
I couldn't take that damn ale. I said, no, that's not, that's not the spirit of the thing. It might be, technically I might be all right, I'd get there sober. I said, technically, that's not exactly what he meant. He didn't say don't take a drink, but that's exactly what he meant. So I took them and put them in a basket and carried them over to my next door neighbor, and I said, here, they're yours.
And that minute I had a victory, I know that. And I had something that was just like a weight being lifted from my shoulders. And I've often thought about it, in later years when I started drinking again, why I couldn't recapture that feeling that I had then. But perhaps that's the, the pink cloud, and later on you, you get a more mature, if I may use the word, outlook. I don't think you, if you have a slip, you can never go back again.
Well, as it turned out, I went down there Monday, and there had been a third man come to see me, too. His name was Roland Hazard. And he was a pretty swell gent, too. I never knew him, I never met him before. These other two guys I had. And he was there Monday when I was brought before the judge. The judge started to give me a little lecture, and he said, Hazard, will you take this man and release this juror?
So I was released in my own recognizance, and the charges were dropped. And this guy took me, and he took me back home and left me there. And a few days later I closed the house up, went down and stayed with him. We lived about 15 miles below, south of the town. And then we went on down to New York. And I stayed with Chuck Cornell, one of his other chaps, who had come to see me. I stayed there about a month, I guess.
And during that time we made trips back to Vermont, Hazard and I, and two weeks after I was connected with a foxtrot group, which is a much looser membership than Alcoholics Anonymous, I really think, they got me out speaking. The first weekend that I went out speaking, we went up through Vermont. I spoke in a junior college, two churches, a town meeting hall, and someplace else all in two nights. Two afternoons and two nights.
And I still don't know what I talked about. I just felt good about the whole thing, and really figured that these guys must have something,
[00:25:03]
that there must be a higher power, because they were the ones that originated the phrase believe in a higher God or a higher power, as you understand it. And while I was doing this and going back to New York, I heard about Bill. I hadn't seen Bill, I don't believe, for over a year, although Bill, you see, was born and raised in a town six miles north of this town of Manchester, Vermont, where I used to summer.
I also spent quite a few winters there. And I heard that Bill was in pretty tough shape, drinking bad, and I had been downtown in Wall Street and seen some of my old friends, one of whom I had Bill's sister-in-law, and he said he was in tough shape, and he said, why don't you give him a ring or telephone? And I said, well, I will, but I want to think this thing out a little, and get myself a pretty good story, a pretty good text to give to him.
And I can truthfully say now that I believe that if I went over there, that Bill would either go for it lock, stock, and barrel, or he would have none of it. He wouldn't just play around with it for a little while. I thought that if he put his teeth into it once, he'd stick to it. In fact, I thought I knew him pretty well. I'd been going to school with him and seen him over the years. So I called him up one night, and I didn't get Bill, but I got Lois, his wife, and told her what had happened to me, and it was much to try to show me something.
Well, I'd only been sober myself then about five, possibly six or seven weeks, but I think sometimes the initial effect that we get from a thing is we're more powerful then than we are later on. We get stale. Well, anyway, Lois said, well, I'll come over to dinner one night, and then she mentioned a date. I said, fine. So that night, I went over that half-past five, I guess, in the evening, and I rang the bell at 182 Clinton Street.
The only person home was an old colored man named Green, who I'd known for years. He'd been with the family, and Lois' family and others, and he said, they're both out, both Mrs. Wilson and Mr. Wilson are out, but come on in. So pretty soon, Bill appeared, and he'd been drinking, but he wasn't too bad, and he said hello, and he said that and the other thing, and he's kind of hedging around, and he made an excuse to go out and get some ice cream, something else to supper, and I said, I know what he's going after, and I said, I've done it so many times myself.
So then Lois came in, and there was another girl invited. There was a girl invited because she lived upstairs and had made the place into some apartments. So we all sat down at dinner, and Bill's got a little garbled in the book about the dinner at the kitchen table, but it don't make any difference, the idea is there. So we had dinner, and then we all moved upstairs in those houses, and in the back there in the east most of the living room was on the second floor.
So we moved up on the second floor, and after a little hamming and hawing, Lois said, well, let's hear about yourself. So I started in, and I guess they got me wound up, and I guess that talk would put me at one o'clock in the morning. And I remember Bill said I walked the subway with her, and I knew that he wasn't going to go for a drink, or that he had a bottle in the house anyway. And on the way over, he put his arms around my shoulder just before I went in the subway and said, I don't know what you got, kid, but you got something, and I want to get it.
Well, he didn't stop drinking right away any more than I had stopped drinking, back there that summer when my extra crew boys came to see me, but the idea was in there, and the idea happened to get in Bill's head. And at that time, I had moved to a mission on First Avenue and 23rd Street in New York City. It was run by Calvary Episcopal Church, and called Calvary Mission. It was run under the auspices of this Oxford group.
It was just a typical so-called Bowery Mission. We had 12 men who were running it, and… Ahem. We only had available beds for about 35 men, and they were full every night.
[00:30:04]
And I was living there, and about two nights after I'd been over to see Bill, he appeared at the mission. Just as the meeting was about to start, he had a guy in tow, and they were both visibly drunk. Well, not too bad. I'm wrong about… Those meetings there were what's called testimonial meetings. We had a man up on the platform, and he would call on various men in the audience, and they'd get up, say what they'd found.
Of course, most of them were doing it just to get a place to sleep. They're called picking a nosedive for God to get a flop, that's the way they expressed it. Well, in the midst of all these proceedings, Bill gets up and walks up to the platform, and he's about 6'3", you know, he leaves his elbow on the piano, and he starts to spout. And the superintendent says, get him down, that's your friend, pull him down out of there.
I said, let him go, let's hear what he's got to say. The guy gave me a dirty look when he let Bill talk. And then two or three days later, this was sometime late in November, as I had been talking to Jim and Dick and some of the other boys, I wished that either Bill or I or somebody had kept a diary back there so that we could remember dates and have some kind of memory to our stories, because you go back 24 years, and you come out to the life, you recall things accurately.
Well, this was sometime late in November in 1934, and it's a few days later that Bill got himself a taxi cab and two or three bottles of beer and went up to Towns Hospital in Central Park West. And when I heard he was up there, I guess the next day I went up to see him, because I made up my mind that having started this with Bill, it was up to me to figure it out, which I think is a true thing in every AA 12-step case you go on.
If you're going to do it, don't stretch yourself too thin and take on 25 or 30 people. I'd rather see you concentrate on one or two. I don't know whether I'm my brother's keeper or not, but I do think, and if you start and put something in a man's mind and possibly in his heart and soul, you've got to stick with him through his tough spots as well as his victories, because you're the one that starts it, and it's up to you to see if he gets on his feet.
So I followed Bill up up there, and we had some talks, and he got out and went back down around Wall Street and learned to make a few little moves in there, and I kept riding hurt on him, as they say out in Texas, and I rode hurt on him. And he came around and he began to attend our group meetings, which I might add are exactly the same as AA meetings. They had a speaker, I mean a leader, that's what they called it, they didn't call it chairman, they called it a leader, and three or four speakers.
And Bill spoke many times from Calvary House in Gramercy Park North in New York City, and later on, when we slipped from the Oxford group and became Alcoholics Anonymous, we went back to that place and had our meetings there up until about two years ago. The original Manhattan group. And of course, Ohio, Cleveland, and one of the other cities, claim that they are the original AA, but, well, I don't know, I kind of dispute that a little bit.
Because there was a clear succession right through from the Oxford group meetings until the time we broke off and the meetings went to them and Bill's house, and then they went to Steinway Hall on 57th Street, and from there to Burt Taylor's shop on 5th Avenue, and we occupied one of the floors of his Taylor's shop. And, let's see, there's a direct succession, but I don't care whether Cleveland or anybody else claims they're the first group, it makes little difference if they can get started.
So, Bill and I were together a great deal that first winter, and then I went back to Albany in 1936, and Bill went on to found AA, and he's really the one. I just had something to do with giving him the idea. He went on to go back to Bob and found AA, and in 1937 I had a slip.
[00:35:10]
I fell off the wagon after two years and seven months, which was slightly different from that DuPont film. The DuPont film had me falling off a month after I talked to Bill, but that wasn't so much two years and six months later. And I've had a good deal of trouble off and on. If I want to go back and count the years, I can count possibly 15 years, a complete variety out of the 24, maybe 16 years. But they were the longest was 16 months and eight months and seven months and so on.
In the summer of 1953, I was again in New York City drinking, and I walked into the intergroup one day and Hazel Wright, one of the secretaries there, said, I think I've got a man that can help you. He's got something real and something casual. She said, I'm going to call him right away. She called this man who came down to see me. He said, how many have you drank? And I said, oh, around a third. She said, come on, let's go.
He said, I ran into Steve McGrath, a man who originally came to see you over in Paris, France. He said, how's old Evie doing? This guy said, I don't know Evie, but I hear he's not doing at all. So he says, Steve told me that you didn't have a chance here in New York, and we don't think you have. I said, I know damn well I haven't. I said, look, I can't throw it off. He said, how about going to Texas?
Well, I said, I don't know about that. Well, he expounded on the virtues of Texas and the good old American ways of living that were still down in these parts of the country. He gave me $5 and bought me another drink and said, I'll see you tomorrow night. So he did and approved the performance, and of course, I worked him for another $5. That's for sure, and a few more drinks. And that was Thursday night.
Now, he said, I'm not going to see you anymore, but the office still holds good. Saturday morning, I walked over to his apartment building, and he was outside. He was coming in one door, and I was going in the other. I said, Charlie, here I am. His name was Charlie Milton. I said, here I am. Well, he said, you ready to go to Texas? I said, I don't know about Texas, I said, but I'm ready to quit drinking.
I had a night of drinks last night. So he took me up in his apartment and got me some clean clothes and a shower, which I barely needed. That night, he called up Oli Lancaster in Dallas and said, how about taking this guy down there? All right, he says, send the Yankee son of a bitch down. I could hear Oli booming it up. So the next, we got a reservation that night, American Airlines, for Sunday evening, and it was a Sunday before Labor Day, September 6th.
And the dirty so-and-so never even gave me a drink. After three months drunk, I got on board that plane, and I didn't know whether I was on a plane or a ferry boat, or where I was. And I got off the plane at the land stop, and I would have been off-shore in hell if it hadn't been for another stop. I got off that plane, and I was the first person out of it. And no sooner had that thing rolled up, and I zoomed, I was down on the steps.
I had enough flying for one night. And I got down there, and I looked around, and I saw two big guys, and of course, I was having hallucinations all over the place. And I said, they're either a couple of demons or a couple of goons from some gangster squad. And then I heard that booming voice again, there's the Yankee bastard. There he is. I've seen him in New York. So they got a hold of him, and they pulled me in a car and took me down to Texas Clinic.
And I stayed there. I guess I stayed there all together about two, three months. But the first two or three weeks, it was pretty rugged, because I'm going to tell you right now, I had hallucinations all over the place. I didn't believe I was in Texas. I didn't dare go out of the place. One of the girls there that was taking care of the boats and sort of running things took me downtown one day, and I couldn't get back in that place fast enough.
I was scared of the cars, the traffic. I was scared of everything. And it wasn't while I was there two weeks. The guy said, I'm going out to mail some letters to the airport. Do you want to go out? And I said, I sure do. I want to see this airport and see if I'm really in Dallas. And I got out there, and I got out of the car, and I walked up to this placard that said, Lowfield, Dallas, Texas. And I put my hand on it, and I said, all right, I'm in Dallas.
I believed it. Well, as I stand here, I did not believe I was in Dallas. Because I'd been a pretty rugged drunk and a pretty hot summer, and I hadn't had much to eat in those three months.
[00:40:02]
And I had everything I could lay my hands on, and then to be cut short like that. Furthermore, they gave me a few goofballs down there, and I hate those things anyway. I hate the effect of them. They just make me… I'm sorry that I've taken up so much time telling you, and it's all been of myself, but I didn't know how to bring the history of AAN. You've all seen how it's spread, how it's worked. I know that if it hadn't been for AAN when I got to Texas, I never would have been able to survive.
Just coming out here alone, I'd have been lost. It was tough enough as it was, because I was among strange people, slightly different ways than ours. It was an upheaval to get from the barley down here in six hours and change yourself all around. But if it hadn't been for those good Texas people and the people in the suburban club, if I hadn't been able to go around there and stay there and shake after two weeks before I went in the club, a little over two weeks, I walked by it one day and started up a sense loss, and went back to the clinic, almost like a guy going back and hiding under the bed.
And I know the troubled times. They said, well, I heard him talking. I don't know what we're going to do with this guy. He's gone goofy. And then I heard a colored girl that worked there, she's quite an old woman, and she said, don't you worry about that man. He doesn't mean him no harm. He's coming out of it. He's sick. And that's just what I was. I was sick, mentally and physically. And gradually, I worked out of it.
Nature took over. And then I was able to get around the club and get into the activities. And maybe I got in it a little too fast. That was the hottest summer that had been on record in the Texas Weather Bureau. I went down on a ranch, and I was out working a sheep with this man, and he put me in as a shoot man, and that's kind of rugged work in a 95-degree day. And I got mixed up in an oil deal, and I sold some insurance stock, and every one of them flopped.
The insurance company did, almost. It was still struggling to get back on its feet. And I got in another deal, and that flopped. I was sober a year, and one month after the year was up, I flopped. And that was in October 1954. Now, that's 13 months, and I only had a few days drinking then. And it was over a three-week period, but I got slapped in the county jail for 10 days and got in Mr. Bill Decker's emporium.
And I came out, and some friends took me in their house, and I sobered up. And I haven't had a drink since. In other words, I've had about five years' sobriety. In Texas, out of five years in one month, I've had five years' sobriety, total. And I know, and I'm grateful to Seba Graves over there, and Paris and Charlie for following it up, and for the people in Texas, and over here, all of you people, who have given me another chance.
I wouldn't have done it by myself. It isn't under my own steam I did it. And I know that my sobriety in these four years, these last four years that I've been sober, it hasn't been my sole effort that's kept me sober, nor do I believe it has been entirely the friendship and the help of people. I think it was then the help of a higher power. And while I've lost that idea sometimes along the way of life, thank God I got it back again.
Because I know that I couldn't exist without it. There are times when I know I'm not like the great many people I hear talk of. They say there isn't a day in their life that they don't fight the desire to take a drink. Well, I'm telling you right now, flat out, I'd go get drunk. I couldn't be that much of a hero to fight it every day and every hour. I don't have that. But I do have periods every three or four months when it's maybe two or three days that's all I think about is taking a drink.
And if I haven't got myself conditioned to the correct way of thinking and knowing that if I take that drink, well, I'm going to end up, and I have no doubt that this time, and I know that that last drink that was drunk, that liquor knocked me so badly physically and mentally, too, that I'd never survive another one. And I get that in my head, and I keep it. And I get that in my head and I get, I keep it there in spite of the fact that I want to go out and, I get sick of this being in harness every day and going to work, and uh, I'm getting along in years and I, I like to have a little rest once in a while, but I gotta go to work, and I often think if I come home tonight if I could take one good slug of whiskey and one bottle of Valentine's Ale and go eat, it'd help me a lot and it probably would help me physically, it'd give me a lift,
[00:45:22]
but I know I can't do it, so what is the use of time of the idea? I don't quite get from what the idea is, I wish to, and I'd like to get drunk, although that occurs once in a while because I think in every one of us there's another person, there's an alter ego, and that old drunk that knows every factor is still in there, he may be dormant, but he's there, just like a wild canary, he picks his top off and he's going zoom, or this time he goes zoom, boom, and it'll be all over, and I haven't got anything much more to say except stick to your AA and stick to God, and I think that you'll find that if you're having any trouble, you'll find help there, I want to thank Dick, and I want to thank the other members, and all you people who've entertained me, and I sure have enjoyed coming to Memphis, thank you.
Applause. The AA out there is no different than the AA that you have here in Memphis, Tennessee, because my first visit to Memphis was in 1935, when you were first organized and you were getting together then, and one of the great pleasures of AA is to walk in and see men and women right in this audience here tonight, who are here and active in 35 that are here and active tonight. Everyone that comes in AA just doesn't walk in, brush themselves, and stay sober. You have a disease called alcoholism, and it's a tough one. Some people are lucky, I don't know. I don't know who I shot, whose mother-in-law or mine, that I pushed downstairs, that gave me the right, I can never grasp, even as today.
Why should I stay sober and some other guy didn't? He's an alcoholic just like I am. I don't know what it is, and I'm not going to try to answer it, but I do know this, as long as you remember yesterday, it's a great help for tomorrow. You're quick and you forgive yourself. You're quick and you're going to get well. But when you forget where you found your sobriety, how you got sober, and you retire at the country club, and no longer are active in AA, you are no longer taking your medicine.
And if you don't take your medicine, someday down the road, oh, you can point to me as every can. I can show you guys that are sober five, six, and seven, eight, and ten years that never show up anymore. But for your information, they're not dead yet. I know a lot of people with a different diseases that have arrested them. You can arrest your alcoholism, and maybe you can stay sober if you never come back to AA. And if you never come back to AA, I'm one that will never miss you.
Because if you're ungrateful as that for what you found, I don't think, me personally, that I would need you, and I'm only speaking for myself. Because you found it, I found it, and I think today the greatest thought that we can have in Alcoholics Anonymous, not for you who are so lucky that are here tonight and all over the world in AA, if God or his infinite wisdom gave us the privilege of staying sober such as we are tonight, and I turn my back on the guy I left behind me, I don't deserve to die. That's merely my own opinion.
I belong to the greatest fellowship in the world, and that fellowship is called Alcoholics Anonymous. Everything I have tonight, everything I will ever get any other night from here in comes from men and women. God bless you just like you. May I always be with you, and may someday I really be worthy of you.
[00:50:09]
In all meetings all over the country, those who wish to join us, we call by saying the Our Father. Those who care to, will you join us? Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory forever and ever. Amen.