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Source: DICOBE-00291 – Bill W – HOW THE BIG BOOK WAS PUT TOGETHER – 1954-06-12.mp3 File: dicobe-00291-bill-w-how-the-big-book-was-put-together-1954-06-12.mp3 Duration: 01:13:17
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Now that we're assembled here, in full strength, and in all the joys and sorrows of life, we have the joy of this superb occasion, I first want to renew my thanks to all who have made it possible, to Jack and his committee, to each one of you, to the untold miles of travel that you've all made to be present, to inspire me, to fill me with the warmth of your hospitality, to be with each other. I'm grateful to the governor of this state, the mayor of this town, for their recognition that we are again, not only members, but citizens of the world.
We once more belong, so these friends have said. I'm deeply grateful to this hotel, and the owners of it, who have housed us, especially me, so superbly. Could you see that apartment I'm in, you'd wonder how the hell anybody could stay sober in it, it has bars. And as for me, I came here in great gratitude, not only for the many tokens of your generosity and affection that I have received in this tent, but for what you are making possible for my sponsor, Ebi, just as much a founder of AA as I, or any of the score, without whom this thing couldn't have been.
So again, I recall my deep gratitude, and I can find no better words to say this. I think I'm on the bill for tonight's show, with a talk on the tradition, the 12 traditions of AA, but you know drunks like women have the prerogative, or at least seize the prerogative, of changing their minds, or to make any such decision. Since this is a banquet, something very effective, I think the tradition, 1 to 12, would be a little too grim, might bore you a little.
As a matter of fact, speaking of traditions, when they were first written back there in 1945 or 6, as a sort of tentative guide to help us to hang together and function, nobody paid any attention, except a few againners who wrote me what the hell mail about. Nobody paid a slightest attention. But little by little, as these traditions got around, and we had our clubhouse squabbles, our group riffs, this difficulty and that, it was found that the traditions indeed did reflect experience and were guiding principles.
So they took a little more, and a little more, and a little more, so that today the average AA coming in the door learns at once what they're about, what kind of an outfit he really has landed in, by what principles his group, and AA as a whole, are going. But as I say the dickens with all that, I'd just like to spin some yarns, and they will be a series of yarns which cluster around the preparation of the good old book, Alcoholics' Knowledge.
Some people reading the book now, they say, well, this is the AA Bible. When I hear that, it always makes me shudder, because the guys who put it together weren't a damn bit biblical.
[00:05:09]
I think sometimes, you know, the drunks have an idea that these old timers went around with this almost visible halos and long gowns, and they were full of sweetness and light, and oh boy, how inspired they were. Oh, yes. But wait till I tell you something. I suppose the book yarn really started in the living room of Doc and Annie Smith. As you know, I landed there in the summer of 35. A little group caught hold. I helped Smithy briefly with it, and he went on to found the first AA group in the world.
And as with all new groups, it was nearly all failure. But now and then, somebody saw the light, and there was progress. Pampered, I got back to New York. A little more experience, the group started there. And by the time we got around to 1937, the thing had leaked a little over into Cleveland and began to move south from New York. But it was still, we thought in those years of flying blind, a flickering candle indeed that might at any moment be snuffed out.
So on this late fall afternoon in 1937, Smithy and I were talking together in his living room and sitting there by the gas lawn, and we began to count notes. How many people had stayed dry? In X, in New York, maybe a few in Cleveland. How many had stayed dry and for how long? And when we added up that total, sure, it was a handful. I don't know, 35, 40 maybe. But enough time had elapsed on enough really fatal cases of alcoholism.
So that when we grasped the importance of the small statistics, Bob and I saw for the first time that this thing was going to succeed. That God in his providence and mercy had thrown a new life into the dark caves where we and our kind had been and were still by the millions dwelling. I never can forget the elation and ecstasy that seized us both. And then we fell happily talking and reflecting. We reflected that, well, a couple of score of them, but this had taken three long years. There had been an immense amount of failure, but a long time had been taken just to sober up this handful.
How could this handful carry its message to all those who spilled it enough? Not all the drunks in the world could come to Akron or to New York. How could we transmit our message to them? By what means? Maybe we thought we should go to the old-timers in each group, which then meant nearly everybody, find the sum of money, somebody else's money of course, and say to them, well, now take a sabbatical year off your job, if you have any, and you go to Keokuk and to Omaha and to Chicago and to San Francisco and to Los Angeles, wherever it may be, and you give this thing a year and get a group started.
It had already got evident by then, for we were just about to be moved out of the city hospital in Akron to make room for people with broken legs and ailing livers, that the hospitals were not too happy with us. We tried to run their business perhaps too much, and besides, drunks were apt to be noisy in the night, and there were other inconveniences, which were all commensurate.
[00:10:03]
So it was obvious that, drunks being such lovely creatures, we would have to have a great chain of hospitals, and as that dream burst upon me, it sounded good, because you see, I've been down in Wall Street in the promotion business, and I remember the great sums of money that were made as soon as people got this chain idea, you know, the chain drug store, the chain grocery store, the chain dry goods store, why not chain drunk tanks and let us make the dough?
So we needed some missionaries, some guys, we needed a chain of drunk tanks, that got very clear, awful clear to me, Bob is a conservative type of Yankee, I don't think he was quite so fast for those items, but I was very insistent. It would take a pile of dough to finance all this, but after all, with this brand new light shining in our dark world, we just squirted in the eyes of rich guys and made up with the dough.
Besides, we reflected, we'd have to get some kind of literature. Up to this moment, not a syllable. This program, so far as I know, was in writing, and it was a kind of a word of mouth deal, with variations according to each man or woman's fancy. Well, in a general way, we said, well, the booze has got you down, boys, you got an allergy and an obsession and you're hopeless, if you are, you better get on it with yourself, take stock, you ought to talk this out with somebody, kind of a confession, you know, and you ought to make restitution for the harm you did, you ought to make amends, all that kind of business.
Well, you prayed as best you could, according to your life's fanny. And that was the sum of the word of mouth program up to that time. But as I say, variations on that were already appearing. How could we unify this? Could we, out of our experience, get certain principles, describe certain methods that had done the trick for us? Yes, obviously. If this movement was to propagate, it had to have a literature so its message could not be garbled, either by the drunks or by the general public.
So, Bob and I reflected that late afternoon in 1937. Missionaries, chain of drunk tanks, and a book. Well, even by then, he and I had begun to learn that we were not the government of alcoholic phenomena. He, I guess more than I, already realized that the conscience of the group, the opinion of the group, when it was an informed opinion and the group's interest could be better than our own. We'd better consult folks. Well, there was dear old non-alcoholic, his wife, T. Henry Williams, there in Akron. They'd let us meet in their house. After it got out of the smith's piler, it got into theirs, and he was great friends of ours.
So we called meetings of the Akron group, that is to say, those who had been sober any great length of time. I think for this particular meeting we scraped up about 18. And that evening, Bob and I told them that we were within sight of success, that we thought this thing might go on and on and on, that a new light indeed was shining in our dark world. But how could this light be reflected and transmitted without being distorted and dark? And at this point, they turned the meeting over to me, and being a salesman, I fit right to work on them drunk tanks and subsidies for the missionaries. I was pretty poor then.
And we touched on the bus business. And the group conscience consisted of 18 men, good and true. And the good and true men, you could see right away, were damned skeptical about it all. Are Damn Skeptical About It All, Almost With One Voice They Chorus, Let's Keep It Simple,
[00:15:06]
This Is Going to Bring Money Into This Thing, This Is Going to Create a Professional Class, We'll All Be Ruined, Well I Counter That's a Very Good Argument, Lots of What to Say, But Even Within Gunshot, At This Very Hour, Alcoholics Are Dying Like Flies, And If This Thing Doesn't Move Any Faster Than It Has In The Last Three Years, It May Be Another Ten Before It Gets To The Outskirts of Africa, How In God's Name Are We Going to Carry This Message To Others, We've Got to Take Some Kind of Chance, We Can't Keep It So Simple It Becomes Anarchy And Gets Complicated, We Can't Keep It So Simple It Won't Propagate Itself, And We've Got to Have a Lot of Money to Do These Things, So Exerting Myself to the Utmost, Which Was Considerable in Those Days, We Finally Got a Vote in That Little Meeting, And It Was a Mighty Close Vote, By Just a Majority of Maybe Two or Three, And The Leader Said With Some Reluctance, Well Bill If We Need a Lot of Dolls, You Better Go Back to New York Where There's Plenty of It, And You Raise It, Well Boy That Was the Word I've Been Waiting For, So I Scrammed Back to the Great City, And I Began to Approach Some People of Means, And Describe This Tremendous Thing That Had Happened, And It Didn't Seem So Tremendous to The People of Means At All, They Said What Thirty Five or Forty Drunk, Sobered Up, They Have Sobered Them Up Before Now You Know, And Besides Mr. W. Don't You Think It's Kind of Sweeping Up the Shavings, I Mean Wouldn't Something for the Red Cross Be Better, In Other Words With All of My Motivational Impressions I Got One Hell of a Freeze from the Gentleman on the Left, Well I Began to Get Blue, And When I Began to Get Blue My Stomach Kicked Up As Well as Other Things, And I Was Laying in Bed One Night With Imaginary Ulcer Attacks, Used to Have Them All the Time, I Had Once a Time Twelve Steps for It, And I Said My God We're Starving to Death Here at Clinton Street, By This Time The House Was Full of Drunks, They Were Eating It's Out of House and Home, In Those Days We Never Believed in Charging Anybody for Anything, So Lois Was Earning The Money, I Was Being a Missionary, And The Drunks Were Eating Meals, This Can't Go On, We Gotta Have Them Drunk Tags, We Gotta Have Them Missionaries, And Hell We Gotta Have Them Missionaries, And We Gotta Have a Book, That's For Sure, Well the Next Morning I Crawled Into My Clothes and I Thought of my Brother-in-Law, He's a Doctor and he is about the last person who's talked to me, the one that's just way way down, The Only One Save of Course Dear Lois, Well I Said I'll Go Up and See Lois, So I Went Up to See My Brother-in-Law Leonard, He Pried Out A Little Time Between Patients Coming In Up There, And I Started My Awful Bellyache About These Rich Guys Who Wouldn't Give Us Any Dough, For This Great and Glorious Enterprise, So Well On It's Way, And It Seems To Me That Somehow He Was Tied Up With The Rockefeller Family and Their Charity, And If You Wanna We'll Call Up The Rockefeller Offices and See If There Is Such A Man, And If There Is, Is He Alive, And Will He See Us, Would You Like Me To Do That, Well I Hadn't Tried The Rockefeller Offices, So I Said Well Sure Give Them A Ring, On What Slender Threads Our Destiny Sometimes Hangs, Remember My Brother-in-Law Said I Knew A Girl, And I Think She Had Enough, So The Call Was Made, Instantly There Came On To The Other End Of The Wire The Voice, Dear Willard Riches, One Of The Loveliest Christian Gentlemen That I Have Ever Known, And The Moment He Recognized My Brother-in-Law He Said Why Leonard, He Said Where Have You Been All These Years,
[00:20:08]
Well My Brother-in-Law Unlike Me Is A Man Of Very Few Words, So He Quickly Said To Dear Old Uncle Willard That He Had A Brother-in-Law Who Was Apparently Having Some Success Sobering Up Drunks, Could The Two Of Us Come Over There And See Him, Why Certainly Said Dear Willard Come Right Over, So We Go Over To Rockefeller Plaza We Go Up That Elevator Fifty Four Flights Fifty Six I Guess It Is, And We Walk Clump Into Mr. Rockefeller's Personal Offices As To See Mr. Riches, And Here Is This Lovely Benign Old Gentleman Who Nevertheless Had A Kind Of Shrewd Twinkle In His Eyes, So I Sat Down And Told Him About Our Exciting Discovery, This Horrific Show For Alcoholics That Had Just Hit The World, How It Worked, What We Had Done About It, And Boy This Was The First Receptive Man With Money Or Access To Money, Remember We Were In Mr. Rockefeller's Personal Office At This Point, And By Now Too We Had Learned That This Was Mr. Rockefeller's Closest Personal Friend Perhaps, So He Said Why Yes, He Said I'm Much Interested, Would You Like To Have Lunch With Me Mr. W. Well Now You Know For A Rising Promoter That Sounded Pretty Good, Going To Have Lunch With Best Friends Of John Dee, Things Were Looking Up, My Ulcer Attack Disappeared, So I Had Lunch With The Old Gentleman And We Go Over This Thing Again And Boy He Was So Warm And Kind And Friendly, Right At The Close Of Lunch He Said Well Now Mr. W. Or Bill If I Can Call You That, Said Wouldn't You Like To Have A Larger Meeting With Some Of My Friends, And There Was Frank Amos, Any Advertising Business But He Was On A Committee That Recommended Mr. Rockefeller Drop The Prohibition, And There Was Leroy Chipman He Looked After Mr. Rockefeller's Real Estate, There Was Miss Scott He Was Chairman Of The Board Up At The Riverside Church, He Said A Number Of People Like That I Believe They Would Like To Hear This Song, So A Meeting Was Arranged And It Fell Upon A Winter's Night Late 1937, And The Meeting Was At 30 Rockefeller Plaza We Called In Paul Tate A Couple Of Drunks, Smithy Included Of Course Heading The Projection I Came In With The New York Contingent Four Or Five, And To Our Astonishment We Were Ushered Into Mr. Rockefeller's Personal Board Room Right Next To His Office, And I Thought To Myself Well Now This Is Really Getting Hot, And Indeed I Felt Very Much Warm When I Was Told By Mr. Richardson That I Was Sitting In A Chair Just Vacated By Mr. Rockefeller, I Said Well Now We Really Are Getting Close To The Bankroll, Old Doc Silkworth Was There That Night Too, And He Testified What He Had Seen Happen To These New Friends Of Ours, And These Drunks Thinking Of Nothing Better To Say Well Each Of Us Told Our Stories Of Drinking And The Recovery, And These Folks Listened They Seemed Very Definitely Impressed So I Could See That The Moment For The Big Touch Was Coming, So I Gingerly Brought Up The Subject Of The Drunk Tanks, The Substitized Missionaries, And This Question Of A Book Or Literature, Well God Moved In A Mysterious Way His Wonders To Perform, But It Didn't Look Like A Wonder To Me When Mr. Scott, Head Of A Large Engineering Firm And Chairman Of The Riverside Church,
[00:25:01]
Looked At Us And Said But Gentlemen Up To This Point This Has Been The Work Of Goodwill Only, No Plants, No Property, No Paid People, Just One Carrying The Good News To The Next, Isn't That True? And May It Not Be That That Is Where The Great Power Of This Society Lies, Now If We Substitized It Might It Not Over Its Whole Character? We Want To Do All We Can, We Are Gathered For That, But What If We Won?
Well Then The Salesman All Gave Mr. Scott The Rush And We Said Why Mr. Scott There Are Only Forty Of Us It Has Taken Three Years, Why Millions Mr. Scott Will Rock Before This Thing Ever Gets Home Unless We Have Money And Lots Of It, And We Made Out Our Case At Last With These Gentlemen, For The Missionaries, The Drunk Tanks, The Vote, So One Of Them Volunteered To Investigate Us Very Carefully, And Since Poor Old Dr. Bob Was Harder Up Than I Was And Since The First Group And The Typical Community Situation Was In Akron, We Directed Their Attention Out There, And Frank Amish, Still A Trustee In The Foundation, At His Own Expense, Got On A Train, Went Out To Akron, Made All Sorts Of Preliminary Inquiries Around Town About Dr. Bob, All The Reports Were Good Except That He Was A Drunk And Recently Got Over, He Visited The Little Meeting Out There, He Went To The Smith House, And He Came Back With What He Thought Was A Very Modest Project, And He Recommended To These Friends Of Ours That Well We Should Have At Least Just A Tolerant Amount Of Money At First, Say Fifty Thousand Dollars, Something Like That, That Would Clear Off Mortgage On Smith's Place, It Would Get Us A Little Rehabilitation Place, We Could Put Dr. Smith In Charge, We Could Subsidize A Few Of These People Briefly Until We Got Some More Money, We Could, You Know, It Would Start The Chain Of Hospitals, We'd Have A Few Missionaries, We Could Get Busy On The Book, All For Mere Fifty Thousand Bucks, Well, Considering The Kind Of Money We Were Backed Up Against, That Did Sound A Little Small, But, You Know, One Thing Leads To Another, It Sounded Real Good, We Were Real Glad.
Mr. Willard Richardson, Our Original Contact, Then Took That Report Into John Jay, Junior As Everybody Called Him, And I Since Heard What Went On In There, Mr. Rockefeller Read The Report, Called Willard Richardson Back, And He Said, Somehow I Am Strangely Stirred By All This, This Interests Me Immensely, And Then Looking At His Friend Willard, He Said, But Isn't Money Going To Spoil This, I'm Terribly Afraid That It Would, And Yet I'm So Strangely Stirred By It, Then Came Another Turning Point In Our Destiny, When That Man Whose Business Is Giving Away Money Said To Willard Richardson, No, He Said, I Won't Be The One To Spoil This With Money, You Say These Two Men Who Are Heading It Are A Little Strapped, I'll Put Five Thousand Dollars In The Riverside Church Treasury, You Folks Can Form Yourselves Into A Committee And Draw On Us As You Like, But Please Don't Ask Me For Any More, But I Want To Hear What Goes On, Well, The Fifty Thousand Then Shrunk To Five, We Raised The Mortgage On Smithy's House For About Three Grand, That Left Two, And Smithy And I Commenced Chawing On That Two, Well That Was A Long Way From The String Of Drunk Tanks Drunk Tanks, Books, Missionaries, What in Thunder would we do?
[00:30:04]
Well, we had more meetings with our newfound friends, Amos, Richardson, Scott, Chipman, and those fellows who stuck with us to this day, some of them now being gone. And in spite of Mr. Rockefeller's advice, we again convinced these folks that this thing needed a lot of money. What could you do without it? So, one of them proposed, well, why don't we form a foundation, something like the Rockefeller Foundation?
Well, I said, I hope it'll be like that, with respect to money. And then one of them got a free lawyer from Healy Hill Roots' firm, who was interested in the thing, and we asked him to draw up an agreement of trust, a charter, for something to be called the Alcoholic Foundation. Why we picked that one, I don't know. I don't know whether the foundation was alcoholic. It was the Alcoholic Foundation, not the Alcoholic Foundation.
And the lawyer was very much confused, because in the meeting in which we formed the foundation, we made it very plain that we drunks did not wish to be in the majority. We felt that there should be non-alcoholics on the board, and they ought to be in a majority of one. Well, indeed, said the lawyer, what is the difference between an alcoholic and a non-alcoholic? And one of our smart drunks said, well, that's the thing.
A non-alcoholic is a guy who can drink, and an alcoholic is a guy who can't drink. Well, said the lawyer, how do we state that legally? I wouldn't know. So at length, we had a foundation, and a board, which I think then was of about seven, consisting of four of these new friends, including my brother-in-law and Mr. Richards and Chipman Amos, and some of us drunks. I think Smithy went on the board, but I kind of coiled his state office, thinking, well, it would be more convenient later on.
So we had this wonderful new foundation. These friends, unlike Mr. Rockefeller, were told that we needed a lot of dough, and so our salesmen around New York started to solicit the money, again from the very rich. And we had a list of them, and we had credentials and letters from friends of Mr. John D. Rockefeller. How could you miss? I asked you salesmen. The foundation had been formed in the spring of 1938, and all summer we solicited the rich.
Well, they were either in Florence, or they preferred the Red Cross, or some of them thought that drunks were disgusting. And we didn't get one damn cent in the whole summer of 1938, praise God. Well, meantime, we began to hold trustee meetings, and they were commiseration sessions on getting no dough. What was the mortgage, and what was Smithy and me eating away at it? The five grand had about gone up the slew, and we were all stony broke again.
Smithy couldn't get his practice back either, because he was a surgeon, and nobody liked to be carved up by an alcoholic surgeon, even if he was for years. So things were tough all around, no fooling. Well, what would we do? So one day, probably in August 1938, I produced at a foundation meeting a couple of chapters of a proposed book in Roth and in mimeograph. As a matter of fact, we'd been using chapters of this proposed book, along with some recommendations of a couple of doctors down at Johns Hopkins to try to put the bite on the rich, and we still had these two book chapters kicking around.
So Frank Amos said, well, now I know the religious editor down there at Hopkins, an old friend of mine, Gene Axman. He said, why don't you take these two book chapters, your story and the introduction to the book, down there, and show them to Gene, see what he thinks about them.
[00:35:01]
So I took the chapters down. To my great surprise, Gene, who has since become a great friend of ours, looked at the chapters and said, why? He said, Mr. W. he said, could you write a whole book like this? Oh, I said, sure, sure, sure. Well, there was more talk about it. I guess he went in and showed it to Mr. Canfield, the big boss. Now the meeting was handed. The upshot was that Harper's Intermediate, that they would pay me, as the budding author, $1,500 in advance royalties, bringing enough money in to enable me to finish the book.
Well, I felt awful good, you know, about that. It made me feel like I was an author, a comer, maybe. I felt real good about it. But after a while, not so good. Because I began to reason, and so did the other boys, well, if this guy Wilson eats up the $1,500 while he's doing this book, after the book gets out, it'll take a long time to catch up, and if this thing gets some publicity, what are we going to do with the inquiries?
And after all, what's a lousy 10% royalty anyway? Well, the $1,500 still looked pretty big to me. Then we thought, too, now here's a fine publisher like Harper's, but if this book, if and when done, should prove to be the main textbook for A.A., why would we want our main means of propagation in the hands of somebody else? Shouldn't we control this thing? Well, at that point, the book project really began to get hot.
It began to take off. Why? We said what we ought to do is to form a book company, a publishing company, a corporation. We could call it, let it stay, Works Publishing Company, this being the first of a great many works, you see. And we could sell stock certificates to all the drunks, get some money coming in, support the author and the guy who collected the money and the gal who would help me on the book while this was going on.
Well, we took this idea to the next trustees meeting, and they all shook their heads, and they went out and made some more inquiries, and we had another trustees meeting, and they'd gone to some publisher friends, and the publisher says, well, these authors, they all got the crazy idea that they could publish their own books, but it ain't so. We don't believe them. Well, then we had kind of an alcoholic rebellion.
We said to our friends, well, after all, you didn't produce any dough. We think we'll try this on separate from the foundation. So I had a guy helping me on this thing who had red hair ten times my energy, and some promoter he was. He said, Bill, this is simple. Come on with me. We walk into a stationary store. We buy a pad of blank stock certificates. We write across the top of them. Worst publishing company, par value, $25.
So we take a pad of these stock certificates. Of course, we didn't bother to incorporate it. That didn't happen for several years. We took this pad of stock certificates to the next AA meeting, where you shouldn't mix money with spirituality at all. And we said to the drunks, well, look, this thing is going to be a cinch. Partners, he'll take a third of this thing for services rendered. I, the author, I'll take a third for services rendered.
And you can have a third of these stock certificates, par 25, if you'll just start paying up on your stock. If you only want one share, it's only $5 a month, for five months. And the drunks all gave us this stony look. What the hell? You mean to say you're asking us to buy stock in a book that you ain't written yet? Why, sure, we said. If Harper's will put money in this thing, why shouldn't you? Harper's says it's going to be a good book.
But the drunks still gave us the stony stare. No, sir. Well, we had to think up some more arguments. So we said, well, we've been looking about the printing cost of the books, boys.
[00:40:00]
We get a book here, you know, 400, 450 pages, it ought to sell for about $3.50. Now, back in those days, we found on inquiries from printers that that $3.50 book could be printed for $0.35, making a thousand percent profit. Of course, we didn't mention the other expenses, just the printing cost. So, boys, just think of it. When these books move out in carloads lots, we're printing them for $0.35 and we're selling them direct mail.
$3.50. How can you lose? The drunks still gave us the stony stare. No, sir. Well, we figured we had to have a better argument than that. Harper's said it was a good book. We could print them for $0.35 and sell them for $3.50. Why, thanks, and sell them for $3.50. But how are we going to convince the drunks that we could move carload lots? Millions of dollars. So we get the idea we'll go up to the Reader's Digest.
And we got an appointment with Mr. Kenneth Payne, the managing editor up there. Gee, I'll never forget the day we got off the train up to Pleasantville and went over to his office, ushered in. We excitedly told him the story of this wonderful budding society. We dwelled upon the friendship of Mr. Rockefeller and Harry Emerson Fosick. You know, we were traveling in good company, Mr. Payne. And the society, by the way, was about to publish a textbook, then in process of being written.
And we were wondering, Mr. Payne, if this wouldn't be a matter of tremendous interest to the Reader's Digest. Having in mind, of course, that the Reader's Digest had a circulation of 12 million readers. And if we could only get a free ad of their coming book in the Reader's Digest, we really would move some, you see. Well, Mr. Payne said, this sounds extremely interesting. He said, I like this idea.
Why, I think it will be an absolutely ideal… …ideal piece for the Digest. Well, how soon do you think this new book will be out, Mr. W.? Well, I said, we've got a couple of chapters written. He said, if we can get right at it, Mr. Payne, you know, probably this being, let us say, October, we ought to get this out by April, next May. Why, Mr. Payne said, I'm sure the Digest would like something like this, Mr. W.
He said, I'll take it up with the editorial board. And he said, when the time is right, and you get all ready to shoot, come on up and we'll put a special feature writer on this thing and we'll tell all about your style. And then my promoter's friend said, but Mr. Payne, will you mention the new book in the piece? Oh, yes, yes, Mr. Payne, mention the new book. That's all we need. Then we went back to Drunks and said, now look, boys, there are positively millions in it.
How can you mix? Harper says it's going to be a good book. We buy them for 35 cents from the printer. We sell them for $3.50. The Reader's Digest is going to give us a free ad in a piece and, boys, they'll move out by the carload. How can you mix? And after all, we only need four or five thousand bucks. So then we began to sell the shares, the work of Publishing Not Yet Incorporated, $5 a month to four people.
Some people could buy as many as, one guy bought ten shares. We sold a few shares to non-alcoholics and my promoter friend, who was to get a third entrance, was a very important man in this transaction because he went out and kept collecting the money from the drunks so that little Ruthie Hawk and I could keep working on the book and so Lois would have some groceries, although she was still working in that department store.
So the preparation stopped and some more chapters were done and we went into AA meetings in New York with these chapters in the rough. Well, it wasn't like chicken in the rough. The boys didn't eat those chapters up at all. I was just the umpire and finally had to stipulate, well boys, over here you got the holy rollers who say we need all the good old fashioned stuff in the book and over here you tell me we got to have a psychological book and that never cured anybody and they didn't do much with drugs in the mission.
So I guess you'll have to… with Drunks in the Mission, so I guess you'll have to leave me just to be the umpire. I'll scribble out some rocks here and show them to you and let's get the comments in. So we
[00:45:01]
fought, bled, and died our way through one chapter after another. We sent them out to Akron and they were peddled around and there were terrific hackles about what should go in this book and what not. Meanwhile, we sent drunks writing their stories or having newspaper people that we had write stories for them to go in the back of the book. We had an idea we'd have a text, you know, and then we'd have stories all about the drunks who were staying sober in the back. Move it up. So then came that night when we were up around that chapter five. As you know, I've gone all on about myself, which was natural after all, and then we did a little introductory chapter and we dealt with the agnostic and we described alcoholism, but boy, we finally got up to the point where we really had to say what the book was all about and how this deal worked. Well, as I told you, this was a six-step program then. On this particular evening, I was lying in bed in Clinton Street wondering what the deuce of this next chapter would be about. The idea came to me, well, we need a definite statement, a concrete principle that these drunks can't wiggle out from.
Can't be any wiggling out of this deal at all. And this six-step program has two big gaps in between. They'll be wiggling out. Moreover, if this book goes out to distant readers, they have got to have an absolute explicit program by which to go. Well, while I was thinking these thoughts, while my imaginary ulcer was paining me, and while I was mad as hell as these drunks because the money was coming in slow, some had to stop and weren't paying up, a couple of guys come in and they gave me a big argument and we yelled and shouted.
And I finally went down and laid on the bed with my ulcer and I said, poor me. Well, there was a pad of paper by the bed and I reached for that and I said, well, now you've got to break this program up into small pieces so they can't wiggle out. So I started writing, trying to bust it up into little pieces. And when I got the pieces set down on that piece of yellow paper, I put numbers on it and was rather agreeably surprised when it came out at twelve. I said, well, that's a good significant figure in Christianity and mystic lore.
Then I noticed that instead of leaving the God ideas of the last, I'd got it up front, but I didn't pay much attention to that. It looked pretty good. Well, the next meeting comes along. I'd done on going on beyond the steps, trying to amplify them and the rest of that chapter. And I took that chapter with the steps in the meeting and boy, pandemonium broke loose. What do you mean by changing the program? What about this? What about that?
This thing is overloaded with God. We don't like this. You've got these guys on their knees. Stand them up. This thing is. A lot of these drunks are scared to death of being God, but let's take God out of his heart. Such were the arguments we had. Well, out of that terrific hassle about the twelve steps, there did come a ten-strike. That argument caused the introduction of a phrase which has been a lifesaver by thousands. It was certainly not a miso. I was on the pious side then, you see, still suffering from this big hot flash of mine. The idea of God as you understand him came out of that perfectly ferocious argument. And we put that into the steps. Well, little by little the thing ground down and little by little the drunks put in the money and we kept an office open over in Newark, which was the office of a defunct business that I'd tried to establish my friend in. The money ran low at times, though, and little Ruthie Hart worked for no pay. We gave her plenty of stock in the works publishing, of course. All you had to do was tear it off the pad, 525, have a week's salary here. So we got around to about January 1939. Somebody said, well, hadn't we better test this thing out, hadn't we better kind of make a pre-publication copy of it, a monolithic or a mimeographed copy of this text and a few of these stories that had come in? Try it out, you know, on the preacher, on the doctor, Catholic Committee on Publications, psychiatrists, policemen, fishwives, housewives, drunks, everybody, just to see if we got anything that goes against
[00:50:00]
the grain any place, and also to find out if we can't get some better ideas here. So, at considerable expense, we got this pre-publication copy made and we peddled it around and the comment came back, some of it very helpful. It went, among other places, to the Catholic Committee on Publications in New York, and at that time we had only one Catholic member to take it there, and he'd just got out of the asylum and hadn't anything to do with preparing the book. And to our great surprise, this is a promising people something later on.
Well, so the book had passed much, and the stories came in, somehow we got them edited, somehow we got the galley together, we got up to the printing contract. Well, meanwhile, the drunks had been kind of slow on those subscription payments. The thing a little further on, I was able to go up to Charlie's town, where old Doc Silkworth held forth. Charlie believed in us mightily, and so we had put the slug on Charlie for $2,500. Charlie didn't want any stock, he wanted a promissory note on the book not yet written. So we tapped Charlie for $2,500, which we rooted around through the Alcoholic Foundation so it could be tax exempt, you understand.
So all told, we had blown in, supporting three of us in an office to do this job, in these nine months, upwards of $6,000, and the monitor till was getting very low. Well, we still had to get it printed. So we go up to Cornwall Press, the largest printer in the world, where we had made a previous inquiry, and we asked about printing, and oh yes, they'd be very glad to do it, and how many books would we like?
Well, we said, that's very hard to estimate. Of course, our membership is very small at the present time, we won't tell many the membership, but after all, the Reader's Digest is going to print a plug about it, that 12 million readers, this book should go out in carloads, Mr. Printer. And Mr. Printer was none other than dear old Mr. Blackwell, one of our great friends. And Mr. Blackwell said, well boys, how much of a down payment is it going to make? How many books would you like printed? Well, we said, we'll be conservative, let's print 5,000 of them just this time. And Mr. Blackwell said, well, what are you going to use for money? Well, we said, well, I believe we won't need much, I imagine a few hundred dollars on account would be all right with you, Mr. Blackwell, of course, after all, we're traveling a very good company, you know, we're friends with the Rockefellers and all that. So Blackwell started printing the 5,000 books. The plates were made and the galleys were read. Gee, all of a sudden we thought of the Reader's Digest. So we go up to the Reader's Digest, we walk in on Mr. Kenneth Payne, and we said, Mr. Payne, we're all ready to shoot. And Mr. Payne said, shoot what? Oh, yes, he said, I remember you, Mr. Parkerson, Mr. W. You were the gentleman up here last fall. He said, I told you that I thought the Reader's Digest would be interested in this new work and in this book. But he said, right after you were here, I consulted our editorial board, and to my great surprise, they didn't like the idea at all, and I forgot to tell you. Boy, we had the drunks with 4,500 bucks in it, Charlie Townes hooked for 2,500 bucks, on the cuff with the printer, maybe $500 left in the bank. What in the deuce would we do? Well, this fellow Morgan Ryan, the good-looking Irishman that had taken the books over to the Catholic Committee on Publication, had been, in earlier time, a good ad man. He said, I know Gabriel Heater, and Gabriel Heater is putting on these three-minute hot-plug programs on the radio, and he says, I'll get an interview with Gabriel Heater. Maybe he'll interview me on the radio about all this. So
[00:55:04]
our spirits rose once again. And then all of a sudden, we had a big chill. We thought, well, supposing this Irishman got drunk before Heater interviewed him. So he went over to see Heater, and lo and behold, Heater would interview him. And then we got still more scared. So we rented a room in the downtown athletic club, and we put Ryan in there with a day and night guard for ten days. Meanwhile, boy, our spirits rose again. We could see those books just going out in a circle. Then my promoter friend said, well, look, should we do a follow-up on a big thing like this Heater interview? He said, it'll be heard all over the country, national network. Now he said, I think, folks, that the big market for this book are the doctors, the physicians. And he said, I suggest that we pitch the last five hundred dollars we got in the treasury on a postal card shout, going to every physician east of the Rocky Mountains. And on the postal card, we will say, hear all about Alcoholics Anonymous on Gabriel Heater's program. Stand in 350 for the book Alcoholics Anonymous, short yore for off-holders. So we spent the last five hundred dollars. The postal card shower went out. They managed to keep Ryan sober, although he since hasn't made it. All the drunks had their ears glued to the radios. The group market in Alcoholics Anonymous was already saturated because, you see, we had 49 stockholders and they'd all got a book free. And then we had 28 guys with storings and they all got a free book, so we'd run out the AA market. But we could see it moving out in carloads to these doctors and their patients. Sure enough, Ryan is interviewed, Heater pulls out the old tremolo stop, and we could see them book orders coming back in carloads. Well, we just couldn't wait to go down to old post office box 658 Church Street, Ann Arbor. The address printed in the back of the old book. We hung to it for about three days and then my friend Hank and little Ruthie Hawk, that some of you remember, and I went over and we looked in box 658. It wasn't a locked box. You just looked through the glass. And we could see in there a few of these postal cards. I had a terrible sinking sensation. But my friend, the promoter, he said, why Bill? He said, they can't put all that stuff in the box. He said, they got mail bags full of it out there. So we go to the clerk and he brings us out 12 lousy postal cards, 10 of them completely illegible, written by doctors, drunk as monkeys. And we had exactly two orders for the book Alcoholics Anonymous. And we were absolutely and utterly stony broke. The sheriff then moved in on the office. Poor old Mr. Blackwell wondered what to do for money and felt like taking the book over. And at that very opportune moment, the house in which Lois and I lived was foreclosed and we and our furniture were set out in the street. And that was the state of the book Alcoholics Anonymous in the summer of 1939 and the state of grace that the Wilsons were in. Moreover, a great cry went up from the drunks, what about our $4,500? And Charlie, who was pretty well off, was eager to buy And Charlie, who was pretty well off, was even a little uneasy about that note for twenty-five hundred bucks.
What would we do? What would we do?
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Well, we put our goods into storage on the cops, couldn't even pay the drayman. An AA landed us a summer camp. Another AA landed us a car. The folks around New York began to pass a hat for groceries for the Wilsons, for which they supplied us fifty dollars a month. So we had a lot of discontented stockholders. Fifty bucks a month, a summer camp and an automobile with which to revive the falling fortunes of the book Alcoholics Anonymous.
We began to shop around from one magazine to another. Would they give us some publicity? Nobody bit. And it looked like the whole dump was going to be foreclosed, books, office, Wilsons, everything. When one of the boys in New York, who happened to be a little bit prosperous at the time and who had a fashionable clothing business on Fifth Avenue, which we learned was mostly on mortgage, having drunk nearly all of it up, one of those guys, Burt Taylor, said, I went to Burt one day and I said, Burt, there is a promise of an article in Liberty Magazine. I just got it today.
But it won't come out until next summer, next September. It's going to be called Alcoholics and God. It'll be printed by Liberty Magazine's Fulton editor, Fulton Housler, the then editor. And Burt, when that piece is printed, why, these books will go out in carload lots. We need a thousand dollars real bad to get it through the summer. Well, Burt says, you're sure that article's going to be printed, aren't you?
Oh, yes, that's possible. Well, he said, OK. Says, I haven't got the dough, but he said, this man down in Baltimore, Mr. Cochran, he's connected with the wet and dry forces. Well, I said, Burt, this wet and dry, Burt says, you ain't going to be fussy where you get this stuff. He's a customer of mine. He buys his pants in here. Let me call him up. So Burt gets on long distance phone with Mr. Cochran in Baltimore, a very wealthy man.
And he said, Mr. Cochran, he says, from time to time, he said, I mentioned this alcoholic fellowship to which I belong. Mr. Cochran said, yes, yes, Mr. Taylor. Well, Burt said, Mr. Cochran, our fellowship has just come out with a magnificent new textbook, Sure Cure for Alcoholism. Mr. Cochran, it's something that we think that every public library in America should have. And Mr. Cochran, the retail price of the book is $250.
But Mr. Cochran, if you just buy a couple of thousand of those books and put them in the large libraries, of course, we would sell for that purpose at a considerable discount. Well, Mr. Cochran said he didn't think he'd care to do that. And then Burt said, well, Mr. Cochran, some publicity has come out about, will come out next fall about this new book, Alcoholics Anonymous. But in the meantime, the books are moving rather slow and we need, say, $1,000 to tide it over.
And would you loan the Works Publishing Company $1,000? Well, said Mr. Cochran, what does this balance sheet look like, this Works Publishing Company? And after he learned what the Works Publishing looked like, Mr. Cochran said, no thanks. So then Burt said, well, now, Mr. Cochran, you know me. Would you loan the money to me on the credit of my business? Why, certainly, Mr. Cochran said, send down your note, Mr. Taylor.
So Burt hopped the business that a year or two later was to go broke anyway. He saved the book Alcoholics Anonymous, turned the $1,000 over to us. We lasted until the Liberty article came in. A thousand inquiries, 800 inquiries came in as a result of that. We moved a few books. We barely squeaked through the year 1929. But in all this period, we'd heard nothing from John D. Rockefeller. Meanwhile, there'd been foundation meeting after foundation meeting.
Too bad we were having such a hard time, but no, don't. When all of a sudden, in high about February 1940, Mr. Richardson came to a trustees meeting and he said, I have great news. Mr. Rockefeller, who we hadn't heard from since 1937, we were told had been watching all the time with immense interest.
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Moreover, Mr. Rockefeller would like to give this fellowship a dinner, to which he would invite his friends to see the beginnings of this new and promising style. And then Mr. Richardson produced the invitation list. And oh, here was the presence of Chase Bank and Wendell Wilkie and all kinds of very prominent people, many of them extremely rich. I mean, a quick look at the list, I figured, would add up to a couple of billion dollars.
So we thought maybe, you know, I'd laugh, you know, there would be some money inside. So the dinner came. And we got Harry Emerson Fossey, who had reviewed the AA book down there. He gave us a wonderful plug. Foster Kennedy came and spoke on the medical attitude. He'd seen a very hopeless gal, Marty Mann, recover one of his patients. I got up and talked about life among the anonymized. And the bankers, assembled 75 strong and in great wealth, sat at the table with the alcoholics.
Well, the bankers had come probably as a sort of a command performance, and they were a little suspicious that perhaps it was another prohibition deal. But they warmed up under the influence of the alcohol. Mr. Ryan, the hero of the here episode, still sober. For example, at his table was asked by a distinguished banker, Why, Mr. Ryan, we presume that you are in the banking business. Mr. Ryan said, Not at all, sir. I'm just out of Greystone Asylum.
Well, that intrigued the bankers, and they were all warming up fine. But unfortunately, Mr. Rockefeller couldn't get to the dinner. He was sick, actually quite sick that night. And he sent his son, a wonderful gent, Nelson Rockefeller, in his place instead. And after the show was over, everybody was in fine form, and we were all ready again for the big touch. Nelson Rockefeller got up and, speaking for his father, said, My father sends word that he is so sorry he cannot be here tonight, but so glad that so many of his friends can see the beginning of this great and wonderful thing.
Something, Nelson Rockefeller said, that it affected his life more than almost anything that it cost him. A stupendous plug that was. Then said Nelson, But fortunately, gentlemen, this is a work that proceeds on goodwill. It requires no money. Well, finally two billion dollars got up and walked out. Well, that was a terrific letdown, but we weren't let down very long. Again, the hand of providence had intervened.
Right after the dinner, Mr. Rockefeller asked that the talks be published in a pamphlet. He approached the rather defunct work publishing company and said he would like to buy 400 books to send to all of the bankers who had come to the dinner and all who had not. Well, seeing that this was for a good purpose, we let him have the books cheap. He bought them cheaper than anybody had since. We sold 400 books to John D. Rockefeller, Jr. for a one-buck fee to send his banker friends.
So, he sent out the book and the pamphlet, and with it he wrote a personal letter and signed every doggone one. And in this letter he again recited how glad he was that his friends had been able to see this great beginning of what he thought would be a wonderful thing, how deeply it had affected him. And then he said, but fortunately, gentlemen, this is a work of goodwill. It leaves little, if any, money, perhaps a slight amount of temporary help.
I, said John D. Rockefeller, am giving these good people $1,000. So, the bankers all received Mr. Rockefeller's letter and they all tied it up on the cuff. Well, if John D. is giving $1,000, me with only a few millions, I should send these boys about ten bucks.
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Some did. One, who had an alcoholic relative in tow, sent us in as high as $300. So, with Mr. Rockefeller's $1,000, plus the solicitation of all the rest of these bankers, we got together the princely sum of $3,000, which was the first outside contribution to the alcoholic foundation. And that $3,000 was divided equally between Smithy and me so that we could keep going somehow. And we solicited that dinner list for five years and got about $3,000 a year out of it for five years.
And at the end of that time, we were able to say to Mr. Rockefeller, we don't need any more money. The book income is helping to support our office. The groups are contributing to fill in. The royalties are taking care of Dr. Bob and Bill W. We don't need any more money. Now you see, Mr. Rockefeller's decision not to give us money saved his desire. He gave of himself. He gave of himself at a time when he was under public ridicule for his views about alcohol.
He said to the whole world, this is good. The story went out on the wires all over the world. People ran into the bookstores to get the no book, and boy, we really began to get some book orders. An awful lot of inquiries came into the little office there at VZ Street. The book money began to pay to answer them. We hired one more help. It was Ruthie, another gal, and me. And then comes Jack Alexander.
It was a terrific article in the Saturday Post. Then came an immense flood of inquiries, six or seven thousand of them, and Alcoholics Anonymous had become a national institution. Such is the story of the preparation of the book Alcoholics Anonymous. And of its subsequent effect, you all have some notion. The proceeds of that book have repeatedly saved the office in New York. But it isn't the money that has come out of it that is matter.
It is the message that it carries in it that has transcended the mountains and the sea and is even at this moment lighting candles in dark carriages and on distant beaches. Thank you.