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Source: DICOBE-00525 – Harold S – SPRINGTIME IN THE OZARKS – 1979-04-15.mp3 File: dicobe-00525-harold-s-springtime-in-the-ozarks-1979-04-15.mp3 Duration: 01:04:48
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Hi, everybody. I'm Harold S., and I am an alcoholic. It is wonderful to be here. It is an honor to be here. I certainly want to thank Harlan, his wife Jeannie, and this beautiful committee for asking me to come. And I also want to thank my wife who has stuck with me these years, and my beautiful AA friends from Omaha for coming down here to support me. Thanks a million. But I found after coming here that with all the hospitality and courtesies that all of you here have extended me, my wife, and all of us from out of this city and state, I could make it here even by myself. You people are something beautiful. I really enjoy meeting you. I've never been treated so hospitable. I mean, as we just walk around, drive around, you wave, you speak, you introduce yourself. And I told all of you, I'm going to take some of this back with me to Omaha. We're going to spread this out a little bit. It's really been wonderful. I like to sing. Also, I want to say, I want to thank Harlan and the committee.
As we walked into our room, which is a beautiful room, we had a welcoming bouquet of flowers. We had a blossom from a cottonwood tree, and we had a beautiful welcoming note to make us comfortable. And believe me, we've been more than comfortable. It's been a great way to go. And I couldn't have gotten any of these things. You wouldn't have dared invited me here had I not been sober. No way. And as I listened to this man up here, the manager, welcoming and thanking all of us drunks for being here and inviting us back, I said, no way, not a few years ago.
You'd have been glad for us to stay away. And I couldn't have lived very long had I lived here driving around here drunk. I couldn't have made it. I mean, it's terrible. It's pretty bad. Kind of dangerous living, you know. Now, I'm in tune with the theme, I am responsible. When anyone anywhere reaches out for help, I want the hand of AA to always be there. And for that, I am responsible. And I, too, am responsible for being here. When I came into AA, they told me I'm supposed to do what I'm told, and I can't keep it unless I give it away. And when Arlen called me, he told me to give it away, some of the things that I've received, some of the French benefits that have been so freely given me from people like you. So I am responsible to deliver here tonight. I'm going to tell you, as the big book told me, to tell you in a general way how it was, what happened, and how it is now.
You can see how it is now. I'm here. I'm sober. But it took me quite some time to get here, how it was. One thing I want to interject here, you know, you guys out there, you fellow men, you fellow brothers here in AA, we have a lot to live up to. We had two beautiful women speakers this morning. They were dynamic, Juanita and Carol. They were dynamic. We got to do it tonight, men. We got to hold on, you know. We got to stay in there, you know. I saw, as we toured your beautiful town down here, and we left the car like we parked, rather, downtown, and we strolled up and down the little hills, and we made most of the stores, and it was beautiful. And as I was in, browsing through one of the stores, and they had a lot of little sayings and placards and mottos and this kind of thing, and I saw one in there that said, big shots are little shots that kept shooting.
Now, they became big shots. And I'd like to paraphrase that. I was thinking about it as I was driving back, and I would like to say, winners in AA are beginners who kept right on staying sober a day at a time and depositing in their sobriety bank. That's the way it has worked for me. As I said, AA wasn't easy. I tried many,
[00:05:07]
many years, but we can get back to the beginning. I'm a Midwesterner. I was born in Des Moines. Well, I wasn't quite born in Des Moines, Iowa. There's 12 of us children. I'm the sixth, and all of them but me was really actually born in Des Moines, Iowa. But when my mother was carrying me in the latter few weeks, her and my dad was called Illinois, where my grandmother, his mother was very ill. And while they were in Illinois attending to her, I came along. So I was born in Illinois. And at the age of about two or three weeks, I was back in Des Moines, but my birth certificate comes from Illinois. But I never knew anything about Illinois until I got grown. So my home is Des Moines. That's all I've ever known. I went to school there. I did everything there. I didn't get into much trouble there, because I wasn't drinking there. But I had the average normal kind of childhood, a big family.
We sort of learned and stuck together. Being the middle person, I sort of learned from the older brothers and sisters and sort of passed on to my younger brothers and sisters. And we were pretty close-knit. In fact, everybody on our block, I don't think anybody on our block had underage children. So when Juanita and Bob talked about their nine children, I could identify very quickly because I came from a huge family, and I enjoyed every bit of it. I guess I was somewhat emotional or sort of thought I was left out, but I didn't know it. As I got older, maybe I could look back. But I thought I had a very beautiful childhood, a very strict parental guidance. So neither of my parents drank. They were both teetotalers. My father never talked very much about drinking, but my mother carried on. Every time she saw a drunk anywhere, she carried on about it, looked at him as terrible as, oh, it was just horrible.
And of course, I became very curious of what this stuff does to you, you know. So when I left, I left at 17 right after graduation and joined the service. Never did drink in the state. I ran track in high school. I wasn't big enough to play much else, but I loved to run track. And from what I can hear from what Harlan said, I was quite a track man. If it had been a few years ago, and I would have walked in Eureka Springs and said I was going to speak in this auditorium, I may have had to use my track shoes, you know. They tell me it wasn't too hospitable some years back, you know.
But I know all of that has changed, just as I've changed in being sober. I'm able to face so many things and to deal with it, and I consider this some of the French benefit for the rationale that I'm able to use since I've been sober, the open-mindedness I've been able to gain since being sober. I was always ashamed to even try anything. I don't think that I, I don't know if I would have not drank when I, before I left home, but I really respected my parents. I respected my mother dearly. I loved her dearly. I was respecting my father, but I was somewhat afraid of him. He was kind of quiet and explosive, and I didn't want to rub him too long, you know, so I didn't, didn't get too loud around him. But I got over there and I experimented, and I was like someone else that spoke earlier. As soon as I started drinking, it began to affect me. I didn't know anything about alcoholism, but I know it was getting me into trouble. But I was quite young man, and I played a lot of sports, and I sweated it right out, and I was on a rock called Guam. Some of you may have been to Guam. Gets a little warm over there. You won't keep booze in you too long over there. But by the time I came back to the States, I was a full-blown alcoholic, I know.
I came back to Des Moines to see my folks, stayed sober those few days for a visit, and it was too little. Des Moines was too little. I moved to Chicago, and Joe McHugh was asking me last night, had I met some man in AA that's been in AA many, many years in Chicago, and I forgot to tell him at the time I lived in Chicago, I didn't want to meet nobody in AA. I was just getting started with my drinking, my civilian drinking, and I considered myself a good drinker. But in Chicago, we sort of got in our little in crowd, and although I drank a lot of beer overseas, because that's where we could get the quickest, when I got myself in Chicago and thought of kind of seeking these in circles or in crowds, I graduated to teacher scotch, and it tastes like medicine. It was horrible, but as we, as I kept practicing, it got better, and pretty soon I could handle it pretty well. I was a social drunk. I seemed to be able to function. I worked right down in the loop of Chicago on Wabash, so I was able to be right in the midst of all the happenings, you know, and Sinatra and all them were there, Dizzy Gillespie, all of them was in that world at that
[00:10:02]
time, and I really caught myself enjoying myself, but I was getting sicker, and then I got married, and I kept getting sicker, and then my first son was born in Chicago. This, ladies and gentlemen, was my first bout with the geographic. I told my wife, I said, now we are having a little difficulty, you know, and my brothers and sisters live out in L.A., and by then they was writing us letters and sending us ads out of newspapers about property and this kind of thing, and so I said, why don't we move out there, and at that time things were getting kind of bad, and she was anxious to move anywhere, so I had to be the alcoholic. We went on the Chief or one of the big trains at Union Pacific, and we got in a dome car and a cabin, and we just did the whole thing. We went out there in style. When I got there, I was broke, but we got, went out there in style, and as I look back, this is a trait of the Alkies. Go big, regardless of how empty your pocket is, show, you know, so we got out there. My sisters and brothers had to kind of, kind of keep us straight and kind of take care of us for about a month until I got a job, and I stayed sober almost that whole month until I got a job. I wanted to look responsible to my brothers and sisters that had lived out there a number of years and had done well for themselves, but after I got a job and called myself my own man again and acting somewhat responsible, I got right into the job. Shortly after, I was fortunate enough to buy a home, and I began to do what I thought most men do with a family. They buy a home, they get a job, they get a car, they buy a home, they do all the things. I got a corner lot fenced in, just all the things that I thought men were supposed to do. I had forgotten about getting sober, though, or doing anything about my drinking, not knowing then that that wouldn't last very long. All those things were material. I wasn't able and willing to do anything to keep them, and I knew eventually they would vanish. I didn't know at the end, but eventually they vanished. The one instant mistake that I made, we moved next door to our neighbor's owned a liquor store, so when I was broke, I could just go next door. We were neighbors, and they always bought booze home, and so I could stay drunk quite a while, free. We went to church. I was raised that way, to go to church.
We was taking our little son to church on Sundays, and then all of a sudden I got the idea. It was basketball season. Bill Russell was in his prime then. They played on Sundays. The game would start right midway to the church, so I'd tell her to go on, you know, and I was going to see the game, and I remember one of the worst accidents that I've had. She took the car, and the kids, but no, I think I had a couple of kids by then.
She took the car and went on to church. I had about a, just a corner of a half pint of vodka. I'd gone from scotch to vodka then, and I just had a little corner, and I could sip on that until a half, and then I, it was too far to walk, so I jumped on my kid's bike, and it had one of the pedals off. Just that iron shaft was sticking out there, and I'm pedaling, you know, and pretty soon my foot slipped off, and that thing went right in the back of my leg, right in the muscle of my leg, and blood was shooting everywhere, and I was about halfway to the liquor store, and the pain was there, and I was going to get a half a pint, but then I knew I needed a pint to kind of dull the pain, you know, and so I began to get into that vodka. By the time my family got home, I was drunk, and was getting into trouble, and it was quite similar to some of the stories I heard earlier.
It seemed after some of this trauma, then we seemed to have another child. I had one boy, and then four years later, I had three right in a row. Every year we had a child, so we had four children, and it was deteriorating fast. I was working for the government by then, and I was able to lay off quite a bit, take some comp time, do these kind of things. Sometimes I think these are the kind of things that aid and abet us in staying drunk longer, having some kind of face-to-face confrontation, and somebody telling me, Harold, you're a loser, you're a bum, you drink too much, but I was able to escape all of those things, and of course my wife didn't tell me those kind of things, but I began to get in jail. I was beginning to get not necessarily drunk driving, but I was walking drunk and getting in jail, and then pretty soon my family was putting me in jail, and these kind of things, and the first time I went to jail, I was telling somebody I was really scared. I really got scared.
I really got scared, but after I went once, it was no big thing, I mean, you know, you went there and you made your stand, you let the guys know where you was coming from, you know, and they respected you for what you was there for, and you did your day or two, I fortunately enough, or unfortunately enough, should I say, I would get out usually in a day or two, with the exception of one time, I went in there and I was really out of my gourd, and they told me,
[00:15:27]
I call this cop everything but a child of God, but not until I was in the jail, and he was among all the other officers, so he couldn't beat me up too well, and, but I really put him down, they said, they said I made him just look and feel terrible, and that man didn't want to let me out of jail, when my sister came to get me out, I mean, he was angry, and he slowly gave me my possessions, you know, he just hated to see me leave, but in the meantime, this sister that had sunk down there to get me out, she had called some people that I worked with that she had heard that was in AA, by then my mother and them knew I was drinking bad, and I was one, because of the respect that I still had for them, I didn't go to Des Moines drunk, I stayed in Chicago drunk, I moved to L.A. drunk, I stayed drunk out there, and I'm sure my sisters and brothers wrote my folks in Des Moines how I was acting, but they didn't see me drunk, but a strange thing happened, my mother's health began to go kind of bad, so her and my dad sold out all their property and stuff in Des Moines, and moved to Los Angeles to be with the bulk of their children, there's a few of us scattered around, but most of us lived out there, and when my mother saw me, she just started crying, I was drinking so bad, I had lost a lot of weight, I looked like hell, and she just broke down and started crying, but what she told my wife then, is that she wasn't feeding me well enough, she didn't know I couldn't eat, that was what the problem was, I bought the food, she prepared it somewhat, she wasn't a good cook, but she prepared it somewhat, but I couldn't eat the stuff, you know, so I was going down fast, and yet I wanted to be with my mother, I knew her health was failing, but yet I'd stay clear on the other end of town, and about that time, the decision was made, not by me, but by my first wife, that that was it.
While I was at work, she called me and told me she was leaving me, she had applied for a divorce, she was catching the greyhound bus with my children, my four children, and leaving, I jumped in the car, I dashed into town, but where I was was sort of out in west Los Angeles, I drove in there real fast down to the bus station, it's getting on the bus, I waved at them, and I'll show you the insanity that set in, in a way I was sorry to see them go, I hated to see my kids go, but after the bus pulled out, I kind of felt relieved that they were gone, and I went right in that store, there was a thrifty liquor store that adjoins the bus station, and got me a quart of vodka, and proceeded to drink, I went home to that empty house, that beautiful house I thought that was on the corner, and there was one bed for me, she had sold all the furniture, one bed and the kitchen stove, she sold the furniture to get money to go to Omaha, and I stayed drunk for about three or four days, and it didn't seem like I missed them so much, but then that you reach a point when you drink, and some of you may know about this, that you got to come down, and as I begin to come down, then I begin to notice the emptiness in the house, I caught myself running many times to the bedroom where my kids used to be in bunk beds, and it was empty, and I was going crazy, I was drinking out of my mind, I was introduced to AA through my sister, a man drove in from Palace Birdie, the way up rich community, and he rode me around all night, and he took me to AA, and talked to me, I didn't want AA, I didn't know what I wanted, and I didn't want no part of it, so I went to the meeting, I was kind of bombed in, and I left, and I continued to get bombed, and then I stayed away from AA completely, I would have nothing to do with it, then a few years later I got sick enough where I had to go, and I had to check my liver and stuff, and they said it was getting kind of swollen, and kind of bad, I guess that was supposed to scare me, but it didn't, I came out, and I nursed it a little while, and I took care of my stomach with Maalox, and continued to drink, but then I, for some reason or another, I began to float around in some of the neighborhoods, and I heard someone mention a group on Figueroa, and I got in there in Los Angeles, it was a group that I could somewhat identify with, because there were some people there that had done some things
[00:20:01]
that I did, and I even played around with that for a while, but I ran into a guy, and he began to tell me, he was in a number of years, and for some reason or another, I, I was just attracted to him, his name was Hal, his name was Hal like mine, but they called him Hal, and I was asking him how'd he get sober, what did he do, and all that, and he said you don't drink, you know, you don't drink Hal, you keep the plug in the jug, that's where you start out at, you know, well that seemed kind of decent, but there was a liquor store right across the street from the A Club, and I thought that might be a little difficult, but I did try to listen to this man, he could see, I, I later got a blind spot, but this man stayed on me, he told me some things that I didn't remember until just not too long ago, when I was talking to some of the groups at home, and he was telling me, he said Hal, now you know how to get drunk, you know how to get drunk, you know how to drink, you know how to get drunk, you know how to act a fool, but you've asked me how to get sober, and I'm going to tell you how to get sober, and I've passed this on to many, many, and I'd like to share this with you, it helped me quite a bit, he said we're going to take this how to get sober, and we're going to take away, take that H, that first letter, and instead of saying the whole word how, we're going to take the first letter H, and we're going to say it's honesty, and we're going to use it as honesty, and we're going to find out what honesty is, and I've had you reading the big book, and if you've read in the fifth chapter how it works about honesty, it mentions that about four or five times on the first page, rigorous honesty, get honest with self, know something about self, and then damn it if I'm going to be your sponsor, start getting honest with me, I had to dig into self, I had to find out where Harold came from, I had to get rid of all these lies, and these fallacies that I had lived with for a number of years, I had to get rid of this ego, this false ego and pride that I had thought I was living the good life, I had to admit what happened to this family that I had lost, I had to admit that I had tried to be perfect and fail, I was only a novice, I had to admit that I'd been a drunk years ago, and that I had to come to grips with this honesty in me, and then in turn I had to share it with somebody, and at that time it was him, and tell him what I'd really found out about me, but he wouldn't let me stop with him. He said, Harold, what religion were you when you were young? I said, my folks made me go to a Baptist church. Did they tell you anything about anything? I said, no, they told me about God and all that kind of stuff. He said, if you remember in the big book that I've been having you read, it mentioned something about God, but what I want you to understand is that it's the God of your understanding, and you're going to have to tell him something, you're going to have to get honest with that God, that man above that you understand in any way that you can relate to him, let him know that you've been a bum, let him know you've been a manipulator, let him know that you've been an habitual liar and a grandiose dude.
Relate that to him, and then perhaps we can go on to the next letter of how, and as I take you to these other meetings, I want you to use the second letter of how, which is and we'll utilize that and say that will be open-mindedness. As we go to these meetings, we have to learn how to open that closed mind, that mind that has blocked out truth all of these years, that mind that has lived lies and failed to let truth come in.
We will use open-mindedness, and when you walk in that door and you shake these people's hands, regardless of whether they slap your hand, turn their back, be open-minded enough and say, they're sicker than me, they need to be here, we're all sick, and you start teaching me these things. And I begin to open my mind gradually, but the thoughts that I had, I've been out in that world quite a while, I've let it open a little bit for people that I decided that I liked, and then if I heard somebody up there talking and I thought they was a lousy bum, or they were phony, I'd close my mind, I didn't hear nothing they said, and sometimes that was the very thing I needed to hear. But that man, he wouldn't take me to no more meetings, he took me to three. He had a car and I didn't.
He told me, I've taken you to these three meetings, now if you want to come, you find your way. Now if I happen to be there, I'll give you a ride home. But it seemed like every time I was blocking out
[00:25:04]
these people, the things I didn't want to hear, the things that would apply to me that, you know, I didn't care for right then, seemed like he'd be sitting somewhere in that room like my conscience. And he knew I was blocking out some stuff, and he said, hey how's your closed mind tonight after the meeting, you know. And I'd feel so guilty, you know. What did he say? Do you remember when he said well now, you know, you didn't hear him. And as I kept going to these meetings, and I began to go to a lot of meetings, an assortment of meetings all over the city, I started hearing things that were similar, but they weren't exactly the same thing. But some, I meant to say all of them applied to me. All the people that I heard talk, I identified with in some way or another as long as my mind was open. I could take that, if I couldn't use it then, I could file it back as he told me.
And somewhere down through the years, I've been able to apply these things to my life. And it's let me live and stay sober one more day in this life. And I am very grateful to this sponsor. This sponsor moved on. I then got a sponsor who was totally blind, who was rugged. He had memorized the big book of A.A. And he would call me up. I'd have to call him rather. And he'd say, Harold, I want you to read page so-and-so and so-and-so this evening, and then you call me before you go to bed and let's talk about it. And sometimes I didn't read it, but I'd call him. I knew better than that, because the man knew every word in the first 164 pages of the big book, where the program is. And I couldn't lie to that man. So I had to stay honest. They taught me this program. They spoon-fed me with the fellowship of A.A. They spoon-fed me face to face, hand to hand. There were times that I was so weak, I had to put my hand in my sponsors to carry me through. But they got me here.
They got me well, and my higher power got me well to be here, to be anywhere that I am called to carry a message. Because if I don't carry it in that particular town, if I don't live it, if I don't walk it, if I don't talk it, some drunk may not have a chance to get sober. It was said by Father Martin, and I will repeat this, I may be the only big book of Alcoholics Anonymous that any drunk may ever see. And for that I am grateful that I'm able to carry the message in a way that he might say, hey, that guy must have learned it from somewhere, I want to be like him. And I'm not anonymous, I'm Harold S. everywhere. I was Harold S. the drunk, plus a few other names. And, you know, I am Harold S. sober.
There's nothing anonymous about me. I was taught, and I'm here to tell you the things of how it was. And here's now what happened. And these things that happened with my sponsors is what got me here today, sober, a day at a time. As I became more open-minded and began to see people from where they were coming from, who they were, what they were, what they stood for, I found that all of us was here for one reason. Even though we were shipwrecked and we were from all different phases of life, we'd come from all areas of the country and the world, when we were shipwrecked, we were faced with a common problem.
And we had nowhere else to go to solve that common problem but to the place called Alcoholics Anonymous. And in Alcoholics Anonymous, we were still together because we had found a common solution. And this common solution was handed to us in that 164 pages. And until my mind opened, I was not able to conceive what was said on those 164 pages. I was able to scan them. I was able to look at them. I was able to take out a few words, but I wasn't able to understand them. I couldn't take them in here at the gut level and digest them until my mind was completely open. But my sponsor told me, you're not at the point yet that I'd like to see you at, Harold. We have to use the last letter of the word how, that W.
That's a big W back there, and we can't miss that, else you won't have the program totally. That word, that letter, rather, we will use for willingness. I don't give a darn how honest you get, Harold. I don't give a darn how honest you get, Harold, how open-minded you become,
[00:30:00]
until you're willing to accept some of these things that is preached and practiced and shown to you as written down in the Big Book, and you cannot do nothing. You have to be willing. First, you have to be willing to accept the fact that you're an alcoholic, that you are powerless over alcohol, and that your life is unmanageable, not was unmanageable, you're not drinking, Harold, but your life is still unmanageable. Now, are you willing to continue to grow? Are you willing to continue to learn? Are you still willing to hang in there a day at a time and try to work on that with your higher power and your fellow A.A.s and learn some what?
To deal with your life in a manageable way. He didn't say manage it anymore, to deal with my life in a manageable way, and the only way I could do that was be willing to accept these things that had been put so spiritually in the book. So I began to be willing. I became willing, and I'm still willing because I'm still striving. I still want to get better and better and better. I still need to gain in my sobriety. I will be striving for better, more harmonious sobriety all of my life, so I have to continue to hang in there. I have to continue to be willing with an open mind. As I have been here and listened to all the speakers, and I'm glad that I was able to get here Thursday for the early bird and listen right on down the line, clear to now, they have helped me hold my program together. You don't know the effect that you have had on me, you fellow speakers. I listen to every word. I hang on what you're saying because I know you've been there. I don't care if you're Al-Anon or AA. We're in this together. Somebody said alcohol affected all of us, and alcohol drove us all in here, one way or the other. So whatever you say, it affects me, so say it well. Say it the way it is so that I can take it with me, because I'm going to carry everything we've done here back to Omaha, and I'm going to share it with my fellows back there. And we've been fortunate enough, I understand, to have some of you to join us there in August, and it's going to be a beautiful thing when we can get together and fellowship, when we get together and touch each other, when we can get together and hold hands as we're praying to the higher power that we best know, as we understand that.
I will continue to be willing to do whatever I am told to do in order to continue to function the way I do. I use the book a lot. I use the book a lot. I ask God in many prayers to help me. I often, in dealing with some of the steps, I read through there. Now there's some prayers in there, and they weren't put in there accidentally. They were put in there to use. Now I can go all over and find other prayers, and I do at times, but there are some prayers in the big book that were put in there for us drunk, at least this drunk, to use.
And on page 76, right after the sixth step, in me working with my character defect, in me being willing to get some help with my character defects, who pop up many times. I have many of them. They're getting better, but I still got a lot. I found this little prayer, and I'd like to share it with you. It says, My Creator, I am now willing that you should have all of me, good and bad. I pray that you now remove every defect of character that stands in the way of my usefulness to you and my fellows. Grant me strength as I go out from here to do your bidding.
And I'm here tonight to do his bidding. For every morning I wake up, I ask him, what is his will? And I try to remember if nothing but that last little phrase, grant me strength as I go from here to do your bidding. Because I know there's another alcoholic out there. There's another practicing alcoholic that needs a non-practicing alcoholic to reach out his hand. And as it says on the front of there, I'm responsible for this. I would be remiss.
I would not be doing the things that I was taught to do in the first 124, 64 pages of this book if I didn't make myself available so that that other alcoholic, that sick practicing alcoholic, could find me, see me, reach me in some kind of way. I wouldn't be doing what I'm supposed to do, and I cannot keep it.
[00:35:02]
I have to remind myself of this. I cannot keep it unless I give it away. I didn't get into this part of it deeply as far as practicing it. I was learning it in Los Angeles. I was learning it out there. They taught me the ground rule, the way to go, how to learn, how to relate. By then, I'd been divorced for quite a while. By then, I had lost my dearest mother, and I was sober. When she got so ill and she passed, I was sober. And out of the 12 children that she had, she called me into the bedroom. She wasn't in the hospital yet. She'd sort of been in and out, semi-comatose, and all that kind of thing. She called me in the bedroom, and she said, Harold, I got to die.
She told me, the drunk. She told me to sit down. I sat down on the bed. She was bedridden. She told me, I have to die. The doctors told me, I can't live, and I want you to know. Now, she was talking kind of low. Her voice wasn't very strong at that time, and my oldest sister, who had been so close to me, she heard it. And then she busted out crying, and all the rest of us. And we're all grown now, but that was our mother, you know. And we're all shook up, but I didn't. I did not cry.
And just a few years ago, when I was drinking, I would just slobber and cry all over the place, and probably wouldn't have meant half of it. But I knew what she was saying to me, and I knew how serious she was, and I knew she had to die. And I had grown to a point, even in my infant sobriety, that I was able to accept that. And I know my higher power was in me then to give me that strength, because normally I would have broke down, because I loved her dearly. And I was, through that period that she, it wasn't long after that, I was able to stay at the hospital, many of us, and I was able to kind of keep my dad together. I was able to make, to arrange the funeral with him, do so many things that I couldn't have done had I not been sober. Shortly after that, I came to Omaha.
I came to Omaha because my children I had missed for several years. A few times I was able to get them to come out there and spend two weeks with me when their grandmother was living. But now there was no grandmother to take care of their aunts. My sisters would take good care of them, but they had quite a few children of their own. And I kind of want to watch my children finish growing up. They'd gotten a few years when I wasn't there. And I came back to, came to Omaha. I'd never lived in Omaha. I'd been through there several times, a month here and there. But I came to Omaha to live.
I, I, I quit my government job out there sort of in a mutual way. They was glad to see me leave, and I finally, so we kind of agreed that I could leave, you know. So I came back to Omaha. I didn't have a job. My dad seemed to be quite upset then. Oh, you're going to go clear to Omaha with no job. You're going to go in February. You're going to leave Lafayette with 80 degrees out there. In February, yeah, Dad, I'm going. It's time to go. No job, nowhere to live, no relatives other than your kids, and they certainly can't support you. I'm going. I had made up my sober mind that I was coming to Omaha to see my children. I was coming to Omaha to make me a home.
And my dad forgot that he had told me this, but when I was drunk and raising hell and crying and saying I missed my kids and just going and just drunk out of my mind, I couldn't have been anything to my children. He said, Errol, one day when you get sober, you're going to find out that Omaha's big enough for both you people to live in, even though you are divorced. And you know, I found that to be true, that she's still there, my ex-wife. I'm still there. I'm married again.
She's married again. Our kids have grown on up. I got a boy over in the Philippines in the Air Force. My other kids are fixing to graduate and do all these things. And these kids, let me tell you, the four or three of them, now what I did, I increased my family very quickly. I got to Omaha in 72, February. It was cold. I had my summer clothes on. I soon changed that and got some winter clothes if I was going to survive, you know. In June, I met a young lady named Kathy.
She too was divorced. I had four kids. She had two kids. She started going with me everywhere. The thing that intrigued me about her, she wasn't an alcoholic. Her folks wasn't even in Omaha,
[00:40:01]
but she was going to coping groups and different things that related to alcohol. I said, damn, she's interested in this stuff, you know. And I mentioned to her that I was in AA, and she didn't say, no, you don't look like no alcoholic. She said, oh really, are you? You know, and we talked about it. And I told her I had to go up to the university there in Lincolnville School. She called me up and asked me if I got there all right. And then I was asked to speak in Kearney.
She went with me. None of us knew where Kearney, Nebraska was, but we took off, you know, and things went beautiful. So we got married, and she's been with me ever since. So my family increased from four to six, because she had two fine little boys. And now they're all growing up there together. They live in separate houses sometimes, and then sometimes they decide they're going to come over and live with their father, and Kathy fixes them all up, and she can cook.
I got a wife now that cooks, and she keeps me good and healthy, see. I can't do this work undernourished. I got to be fed, you know. And I've done pretty good here. You people in Arkansas don't play. I mean, you feed people down here. I like this. But you know something? I've done a little speaking around the state of Nebraska, but I got up there at the head table, and I couldn't eat. I knew I was going to come over here, and I couldn't get that food together. It was delicious, but I couldn't eat it. And finally, Carol was sitting beside me there, and she said, Carol, you better eat a little of this dessert, because you're going to need a little strength up there. So I finally got the dessert down. But I got butterflies. I don't think I can ever get over having butterflies until I look into your faces and remember one thing, that you're out there just like me. You're here for the same reason that I am here.
And you look up here at me, and you give me a smile every now and then. You give me a nod when I hit a button here and there, and then I know I'm on the right track. And then all those butterflies leave, and I know Harold can't do nothing until he gets honest with you. I am an alcoholic. I am not grateful because I became an alcoholic. I don't want anybody to ever think that. What I am grateful for, that since I did become an alcoholic, that the fellowship of AA was here, and that there were people like you here that I could be introduced to, intermixed with, told about, taught about a fellowship such as this so that I could too become a part of another family. I think God sent me to Omaha for many reasons. When I got to Omaha, I was in AA. I knew something about AA. I lived downtown in Omaha in a hotel for two weeks because I didn't know what side of town to live on, what to expect, or whatever. I'd call my kids, and they, I couldn't go near my ex-wife's house, so she'd send them down in a cab. I didn't have no car or nothing. So I got a job at Goodwill. It was hard to get jobs. I had been somewhat in rehabilitation, and I couldn't get nothing right away in alcoholism, so I took a job at Goodwill. Very low pay, but a very rewarding job. I started working with very, very handicapped people. And the thing that made it ideal for me is they were not only handicapped physically and mentally somewhat, I found out that they also, many of them, had the handicap of alcohol. And that, and I was called there, it seemed, to do something about that because they had been overlooking that. They was looking at some of those other problems that they had, and some of them were very crippled, very handicapped. But some of them were drinking too much, and I spotted it shortly after I was there, and was able to get in touch with some of the other people, my higher-ups and things, and we was able to work with some of those people.
I went to several alcohol centers to try to get a job, and some of them wouldn't even interview me. But in the meantime, I found a way to keep my strength and my sobriety. The day I arrived and went up to that hotel, who has a huge bar, and it's a Black Angus. It serves beautiful steaks. I went down to that bar and got me two 7-ups. I unloaded my baggage, it was, unloaded my baggage, and I called, looked in the phone book and for the central office, and the central office, I couldn't get an answer, so I called the 48th Street AA Club, and I asked them how to get there. I said, do you have a meeting there? They said, we won't have one today, but we'll have one tonight. Who are you? I identified myself, and they said, you catch the number two bus. Where are you? And I told them, number two bus, which was a block away from me. You come out here, Which was a block away from me, you come out here, and if you get here, we'll guarantee you, you'll get back, and I got out there, so all these times I was running around trying to find my way in Omaha, I had laid my bedrock, I had found an AA group, and I met friends out there, and they'd come and get me, they delivered me back, they'd take me to other meetings, so I knew I was on the right track, I did what my sponsor in LA told me, find your AA people, if you can't find it through
[00:45:21]
anyone else, ask the police, and at that time I'd learned not to be afraid of them anymore, they didn't bother me when I was sober, so I would go on down, I had the nerve, I'd go down, do you guys know where an AA meeting is? And I'd come to find out later, some of them was in AA, you know, so they knew where they were. But I laid the groundwork, and then I found that the majority of the black people in Omaha, especially at that time, seven or eight years ago, lived in North Omaha, so that's where I wanted to live, I wanted to be where my people were, I wanted to be where at that point I could identify and learn and meet some friends in the side of town that I preferred to live in, me, I chose this. So I went out there and I found an apartment building, very nice, and we didn't have any AA over there though, and yet when I drive up, by then I had a car, I drive up and down the street and there were black alcoholics, people in that community, not only black, that were down on the sidewalk, that were fighting and cut up and beat up, that were in jails, that were going to prison, I was reading about them in the paper every day. There were two people there that said that they had been trying to start something at the Catholic church over there, right in the community, so I went over there and I introduced myself to the priest, and he said, you can use the school room over there at night, where the kids go there in the daytime, but you can use it at night, and you'll get the keys from the sisters, they had the little house where they lived right next door, and the first night I went there, the sisters kind of looked me over, they didn't want to give me that key, you know, and I explained to them who I was and everything. I sat there for several months, and I didn't seem to be able to reach anybody. The other two people, a woman and a man that lived way north someplace else, when they saw me come, they just moved on back to their communities, and Harold couldn't do it. I would get some people from jails and stuff, and they'd come and they'd stay that one time, and they'd leave, and I knew the need was there. I had met Kathy then, and I'd tell her about it, and she'd come over there with me, and finally one night I was in there, and the priest came storming in the door, and he had this guy and his girlfriend by the arm. He said, Harold, they need this, and he shoved them in the door, you know, and that was all I needed. I had something to work with, you know, and we started. She is still in the program. He's decided to play games off and on. That woman is still sober.
We celebrated her seventh birthday in February. She is still sober. Sixth birthday, I believe. He's been out and in, but what they used to do while they were new in the program, and they both loved it. He stayed sober the first time around about eight or nine months. They taught me the community. They would ride with me in my car. They'd go up and down all these speakeasy jitney joints, and behind the walls things were happening. I couldn't go in there.
I would go in there, but nobody would talk to me. I was a stranger in town. Sometimes I wasn't dressed the way I was supposed to be to fit in, to identify, and they just plain wouldn't talk to me. They'd say, let me go in, and they knew everybody in Omaha, it seemed, and then they'd go in, and they'd tell them what I was trying to do, and then I could come in, and some of them would talk to me, and there for a while I'd go to pick up drunks in some of the projects and some of the public housing, and they'd start calling me Mr. Alcohol.
Here comes Mr. Alcohol down there. He's coming to get somebody, you know, and I really didn't care what they called me. It was right, because I was trying to spread the message. I was trying to get some people sober. I got into some pretty bad arguments out at the emergency ward at the county hospital with some interns. They were going to tell me my people are not drunk. They're going to tell me they're not going to let them in when they're flat on their back and sick, so they began to know my name out there pretty good, you know, and I started getting my people in there, and they started getting sober, and we started showing them a way to go. I had one meeting by myself. I sat there. I get the big book, and we finally started getting them in, and finally this woman got one year, and we didn't have no money, so my wife Kathy, she baked the cake. She had a candle there in the house somewhere, and we shaved it down to make it a neat size for number one, and we got it down there, and she had her birthday, and I think the first four or five one-year cakes
[00:50:03]
she made, and we shaved the candle, and there's some people right out here in this audience that came with me. They kept coming around. They'd kind of snook in, and then they'd leave, but they're here with me today. They're right here, and they're all sober, and they're looking pretty, and we got it going, and now we do, as he said. We have five or six meetings in North Omaha. We got a club or two out there. We got meetings that come up to 50, 50 at one meeting. We have several with 25, 30. They're not just coming there from North Omaha.
They're coming from all over, and they're all enjoying the message. They're enjoying the fellowship. We're celebrating now what, in fact, the central office told our secretary, you people are getting more buttons, more one year, six months, or two years than almost any group around. What are you doing out there? We're feeding them straight A.A. That's all we feed them. We don't play any games. We don't play around. We give them straight A.A.
And they're coming out of the wall. We are finally, and I was talking to Joe last night, and he mentioned the same thing. We are finally beginning to reach the black alcoholic woman in our particular area. They stayed hidden like all women, but we're beginning to reach them. And I was telling some people last night that it seems when they finally get there, they seem to be more ready to grasp that program and do something with it than some of the men we've been messing around with for years. They're doing a beautiful job, and they're becoming our leaders. And there was some friction in our group. How can this woman come in here and run something? Because she has sobriety, man. We didn't ask who she was. She's sober.
She's creating. She's ready to do something. Our club was a barn. Now we've got some sober women. We have curtains, drapes, tables, cereals, you know. It's getting pretty. They're doing their thing, what they're supposed to do. They pretty up things and get pretty themselves, you know. This is what we're seeing. We have asked Al-Anon to come in. They're coming in from everywhere. My wife's Al-Anon. She's helping and sharing, and we're pulling in numbers. We've got a good thing going. We've got a sober thing going. It makes me feel good, and as I look back, I know why I was brought to Omaha. I'm proud, and I'm grateful that I was sober when I came to Omaha. There was somebody there that needed me, and I didn't know that. I thought just my kids needed me. I have gotten a huge family in Omaha, Nebraska.
They're all ages, all colors, all heights, all sizes, and they're all over the state, and now I've picked up a lot of beautiful friends in Arkansas and on down through Missouri. I've met people from Texas and Tennessee, beautiful people, and my family is continually growing, and there are some people here that started as beginners or as pigeons, and now they're sponsors, and now they have pigeons, and it just keeps growing and growing, always reaching back to the group like this, that this is where the common solution is. This is where we come for nourishment. This is where we come so we can grow. This is where we come where we can rest. This is where we can come in and get on bended knees and pray to that higher power that we've grown closer and closer to as we stayed sober, and although we came in here, many of us denied that there was such thing as something greater than us as human beings. If we were to get honest, there was a lot of things greater than us when we came in here drunk, but now that we've begun to grab a hold, now that we've learned how to live, we can not only share with you the human being that we can see, but we can share with that one that we communicate with, that guides us. Bill W. was put here to write these 164 pages so that I could read them. Dr. Bob was put here to share with Bill so that he could work in the area that he was best at and practice his medicine, a gift that God had given him. God also has given me a gift, and I'm 12 stepping with it. He gave me a voice to talk with, and I used to get beat up all the time as a kid because they said I talked too much, but now I don't feel that I can talk enough. Anytime I get a chance to talk, anytime I get a chance to pass on a word to somebody that may be able
[00:55:00]
to hear it and pass it on to someone else, I'm going to do it, and nothing's going to keep me from doing it, and I know I'm able to do it, and I'm capable to do it if I stay sober, and my sobriety also hinges on keeping my spiritual program intact. That is the basis for it all. My spiritual program, my sobriety is contingent upon the maintenance of my spiritual program. It tells us that in the first 164 pages of the book, and that I believe, and it also tells me that I must make that daily deposit in my sobriety bank, because one day I'm going to get shaky, one day I'm going to get depressed, one day I'm going to get forlorn, and I'm going to that sober bank, and I ain't going to have nothing in there.
So I'm going to make a daily deposit at that bank. Somewhere or another, by talking, sharing with another alcoholic, I'm going to make that deposit. I got to give it away in order to keep it. I got to hurt to get well. I got to surrender to win, and I got to die this alcoholic death to be born into this sober world, to learn how to live all over again, and I was brought very, quite a close home on that. I took this tour. We went up here to the Christ of the Ozarks, and I haven't gotten myself together yet from up there.
It made me feel something. No matter where I went, I could see him standing there, you know, with his, it's gorgeous. My wife and I will be back. In fact, she told me to tell you that one of these days we may retire down here, but she said, don't get nervous now. It'll be a little while. We have some more work to do in Omaha. There's some people there that they have been introduced to AA, but they haven't been taught how to get there, what to do with it. We got some people floundering there and not knowing in which direction to go, so I'm supposed to be there. I wasn't taught this to hold in myself. I got to be there. Those that came down with me have to be there. We can't run all over. I don't want to do no whole lot of geographics because I'm needed somewhere. I can do something with my life. I have met friends. I have drunken friends, and I know one of these days, if I live the way I'm supposed to, if I am the beacon, and that is the name of our club, the Beacon Club, if I am the beacon of sobriety, and I hope to carry my light somewhere, then it may attract that shipwrecked vessel out there, just as I was rescued. With that problem, they may be driven to a common solution like I was. They may form this common bond with us all over the world like we have, and that's why I got to stay in Omaha.
Our Al-Anon has to grow more. Our kids don't have nowhere to go yet in that particular community. They have places to go in Omaha. We have loads of clubs in Omaha. But you know, you know, yes, you know, all of us are raised up in communities. All of us become familiar with certain communities. All of us become familiar with certain type of culturalistic kind of ways and attitudes and actions. We all become attuned to the language that is used, the various plateaus of things that we live by. So certainly we're more comfortable in that particular area. And many times if I were to offer a sick person, who's already sick and scared and shaky, an opportunity to go to someplace 20 miles away, 15, 10 miles away in a completely strange neighborhood, something that they could not identify with, and they're already scared and sick, it would blow their mind. It would blow their mind.
I may lose them forever. They may think I was trying to deceive them or mislead them. And at that time, I'm the person that's trying to hold them together or help put them back together. Therefore, I'm in that community and I'll stay there because they identify with me being sick. We'll be in touch with the hospitals and the emergency wards and the police and their families, so that they can join in and help them to get well.
[01:00:10]
So we have work to do in Omaha. We have work to do in North Omaha. I was in rehab myself for years. I eventually got into the treatment process. I became the director of one program in South Omaha. But soon as I got the opportunity, I got a program started in North Omaha, where I live, and it's grown and grown and grown. There's many people that worked with me, succeeded me. Not too long ago, I resigned from that job.
My wife and I have gone into private business. We were in private business, but she had to do all the work by herself for over a year. But we've been blessed. It's grown quite a bit, and I'm needed there, too. So I resigned from my job. I stayed on one month as sort of a helper or to be used wherever I could be, and now I've resigned from that. I'm with Cathy and I are working together totally, but I'm finding that it said somewhere in the big book, I don't know where, I think somewhere in chapter two or three, that some of us will not do alcoholism, work in alcoholism as an occupation, but we will find it advantageous to work in it as an avocation, and that's where I'm at at this point.
It will never leave me. I will probably work harder and longer hours doing my 12-step work, but whatever it takes, I'm going to be out there. And you know something? We got a huge ceramic shop. Well, it's not huge yet. It's trying to get huge. We're there. I pour molds. I do all that stuff. My wife does all the finished stuff. And somebody told me this, and I didn't pay too much attention. They said, hell, you ain't going nowhere. We don't care where you move. You ain't going nowhere.
And you know, we have three or four alcoholics in there with them ceramics every day in the basement, around the shelves, everything, drinking coffee, and we have to keep the coffee pot going because we both drink a lot of coffee. So I really haven't gone anywhere. I'm not in the process of all this funding, racking my brain trying to think, trying to justify why I'm asking for money when I know why I'm asking for money.
I'm through with that. Now I can go to a drunk and say, look, you need help? I'm here, and we're going. And it's been very helpful to me because I've worked in this field that I am known in these hospitals and various places where I need to take them. I don't have to go arguing with interns and doing all that. So it's been beneficial for me to have worked in the field. And it's beneficial for me to know others that are now working in the field that if they need me for any reason, they can call on me.
We're not looking for any monetary gain here. We're looking for human gain. We're looking for life gain. We're able to help that sick and suffering alcoholic, and we expect nothing but maybe a breath of sobriety. That's all we're looking for, and it's been so beautiful. I am certainly grateful that all of you allowed me to come down here and share with you. It has been a blessing, and it was only by the grace of God that I was able to do this.
Didn't have any money, but we still rented a car. Four of us joined up and we finally made it. It was just a beautiful—we just did everything, and it just fell right into order. We wasn't supposed to close the place. Just the two of us worked there. But there's a place, OIC, an occupational place, and they had loaned us a girl or they saw a pair on some kind of something. They loaned us this girl, and she helped us clean up all our work and get it kind of fit where we could leave.
The lady next door is kind of looking out for the two young kids that are home. And everything just worked out beautiful to get us here. And I know I was gotten here because I was supposed to get here. And I again thank Harlan and everyone for asking me to come down. And I know, and I feel this good, that I know that we will, all of us, someday, trudge along that beautiful road to a happy, sober destiny.
And I would like to say, may God bless you and keep you until then. Thank you. Thank you.