Audio
Transcript
Source: DICOBE-00553 – Ken B – TWELVE STEPS – 1958-08-21.mp3 File: dicobe-00553-ken-b-twelve-steps-1958-08-21.mp3 Duration: 01:01:55
============================================================
Mr. Chairman, Chairman Smiley, and Governor Barnhart, I should have said Bishop Himmler first. I apologize. Mayor Keller, I bring you greetings from Canada, particularly from the Hill Group in Toronto, Ontario. But along with that, I also bring you greetings from a great many others, from all the Alcoholics Anonymous and their associates and their friends. And to Governor Barnhart, if he is still here, I bring to him the personal greetings from our Prime Minister, John Diefenbaker, who is a great friend of mine. I bring also to the Mayor the kind greetings from our Metro Chairman of Toronto, Fred Gardner, and just the feeling of gratefulness and gratitude that Canada and this United States can be as they are, close beside each other, with such a great common bond towards one ultimate desire, that of great and lasting peace. All this I bring to you because I have learned how to live through Alcoholics Anonymous. I'm going to just refer back for just a moment to the Governor, to Governor Barnhart and his talk. I'm not just sure if I understood everything he said right when he was dealing with the manufacturing business. I'm not sure he said if we rank well in the manufacturing of high stockings, or high in the manufacturing of stockings. I like the first one the best. And if North Carolina ranks well in the manufacturing of high stockings, then I think that this is where I should live. Because you see, when I came to AA, I had my eyesight. I had pretty good health, yes. And I was one of the boys that did love to stand on the corner and watch all the girls go by, you know. But in the AA we shouldn't again. I lost my eyesight, so now I get to feel these girls. So you see, my friends, if we give something away, we get something back. In Alcoholics Anonymous, we never learn to lose our humor. A day is only good as a happy day. And that's wonderful.
I was born in Western Canada. As a matter of fact, I was born on a dry area outside of Saskatoon, in Saskatchewan. My dad and mother had moved out there under a homestead. And I was born in the sod shack. Now I don't think the dry area that Dad homesteaded in, or the fact that I was born in this sod homestead farm home, had anything to do with the ultimate thirst that I acquired. But I think that, as I mentioned before, just came from doing things naturally. I was one of ten. Now my dad was an alcoholic. My dad drove, he was a hard-headed guy, and he knew that he was an alcoholic and found that out shortly after he and mother were married. And he quit drinking for years. But it just goes to show that when you quit drinking, you don't have to do everything because you're a gentleman.
It's just a little thought. When we stop drinking in Alcoholics Anonymous, we don't quit living. We just keep on growing, getting bigger and better. Now, I had my first drink with my father because he returned to the bottle after a number of years. And he said to me, Son, I'm going to let you have a drink. In fact, I'd like you to learn to drink now. I was about 16 maybe, 17. I'd like you to learn to drink because then if you learned only, maybe you'd learn to drink. And I never could. He knew it was wrong for him. He knew
[00:05:04]
he couldn't control it. But because he'd been raised in a strict home, he thought possibly if he treated me a little differently, I might grow otherwise. He had pretty good odds. There were 10 of us. I'm the only alcoholic. Poor guy, he was asked out everywhere. Now, my drinking, and I know that my father wouldn't have given me that drink had he realized that he was giving me the first injection for me of the most dreadful disease in all the world. He wouldn't have done that. My parents loved me. I was the elder son. I was the boy on whom they planned and included in their future. But that drink at that time didn't do any good to me, but shortly after it was in the prohibition era and area too. We were of course subject in those days to go to country dances and so on. And I learned quickly that I could dance better with a few drinks, and I could drive a car better, and I would argue with anybody that I could drive a car better and so on. But I was an alcoholic and this drink became compulsory to me fairly early in life. I was rather adaptable in that I was, even for young lads and before my twenties, I was fairly successful in a material manner, in handling, putting responsible positions and apparently handling them well. Money at that time was not a problem to me at all. And I went on, gladly going down the road into long hormones of drunk. Tonight I can't take very much time on the story at all, but through the years, my friends, I have been drunk in the best of hotels and in the best of places. I've been drunk on the finest of wines and the best of liquors. And incidentally, Jane and I, I would have loved to drink with that girl. She likes scotch. My favorite brand was Johnny Walker's Black Label. And I loved it. And Jane would have loved it too, and I would have loved her. And anyway, it took me on. And I was just as sick in those places as it was humanly possible to be. But my life basically was in the North Country. I lived a healthy life, construction work, freighting in the wintertime. In the North, amongst the Indians and right up to the Eskimos. Learned to fly in early age, and flew at a mere feet, although I was fairly successful as a young couple. Oftentimes pointed to with a little bit of the envy that I later pointed to other people. A couple that had everything. But I also had a disease that was killing me, and we didn't know it. We called in doctors.
Nothing seemed to work. I have been drunk in the Indian shacks on all the substitutes in the North Country. I have been drunk on vanilla and lemon extracts. Hair tonics and moose milk, which is a concoction of brew the Indians make. Flavored with anything that you could get, and lots of times with $1,000 in cash in my pocket. But by gosh, you can't go to a spruce tree up in the bush and hand them ten bucks and say, get me a drink. I have wakened up in the morning when I was the only Indian on the floor. Like the old story of the pig that got up and slowly walked away. I didn't want to do this, my friends, I didn't like it. I wasn't born for that purpose. I was the most disgusted and derelict person in the world. And the way through the years, and I tell you this right now, I wasn't any sicker after a long drunk on the junk than I was after a long drunk in the finest of places on the best of whispers. I received understanding many, many times. I remember one night in the Saskatchewan Hotel in Regina, when Frankenstein come in the window of my room. And he come walking in with his two hands out, you know. And I was in a hurry to get out of the room and I forgot to put any clothes on. And I rushed down the hall.
[00:10:09]
And I met a very great man, the house detective, and I say this in sincerity and honesty. He grabbed me, he knew that something had to break sooner or later, and he was outside of my room. And he grabbed me and he said, Ken, come on back in. And that man got me in and he talked to me for a few minutes and he said, Ken, just excuse me for a minute or two, will you? I have a duty, I have to perform. And he went out and he came back, my friends, with a half bottle of whiskey. And he sat there till morning and he nursed me. Understanding it was impossible to believe. I was an alcoholic before I fell, or met Olive and fell in love with her. Olive and I made great plans before we were married. We planned what we were going to do and how it was going to be, how many children we would like to have, and all these things. But we forgot just one thing, my friends. We forgot to take into the plan the fact that I, her husband, or her husband-to-be, was an alcoholic. That I was stricken with the worst, the dirtiest, the most insidious and progressive disease of all the diseases there are. And I speak with authority. I've got it. But the one disease I can't control, that I can't handle, or never could until I came to AA, was alcoholism.
It would take me unawares. It would catch me when my desires, and after I had taken and sworn that I would never have a drink again, it would catch me at the most inopportune moment and make things happen for me. And so, over the period of time, I attended 32 hospitals. I've taken most of the cures, I guess, that are known to science. Money was not any object in the effort to buy the health for Ken there. Money meant nothing to us if only we could find a way to get Ken to stop drinking, know how to live. But Ken was a victim of this disease, this growing progressive disease getting worse all the time. I broke my neck one time going north to one of the lumber camps. Getting ready, I was practicing for Christmas. It was December the 12th. I know all the alcoholic emotions, I believe that there are. I know all the alcoholic desires. I know the little animals and the little peoples and God bless the little leprechauns, the sons of the Dansea. I know them all by their first names. I've lived with them when nobody else would come near me. I've got to be the kind of an alcoholic that would drift away. And one time, Olive came and got me after I'd been gone a couple of months and found me out in the West Coast. Blackouts of interminable length, never knowing what would happen. The longest drive that I was was after 11 months.
It was 11 months after I'd waken up one morning and I didn't know what jail I was in. I didn't know where I was. I didn't know what day it was or what year it was or anything else. And so, when I say to you that I do know what the disease alcohol means, I speak with experience. I was there, Charlie. But now I'm back. I don't know if the dignitaries, if the governor, the bishop, the mayor are still here. When I used to get in front of those men and they talked to me, I had to stay. But lots of times at these meetings, I find that they are here when I start, or when they start, but I find they've taken a powder by the time I get going.
But if they are here, I want them to listen attentively because now I'm going to move into what I understand about the steps. But first, before I get in there, I must tell you what I have learned about alcoholics and non-alcoholics. And what I say tonight, my friends, are the things that I have learned from trying to live this way of life. I've learned from trying to live this way of life, knowing in my heart that I can't take a disease, I can't take a drink, knowing that I don't want to return to the way of life that I had before, knowing that all I ever truly accomplished, prior to my entrance to AA, was that I had become a most successful failure in everything that I attempted, I don't like being a failure, I didn't like being a failure then,
[00:15:28]
I didn't like it when I told Olive that I would never take another drink, and that this day was one that I certainly wasn't going to drink and I was going to do right, and then have her come two weeks later and find me in a hotel under another name, gee, I knew anonymity long before I ever got here, and so I came, and I must tell you first, how wondrous AA truly is, Alcoholics Anonymous, my friends, in my humble opinion, is not an association of unknown drunkards, a bunch of human derelicts, there isn't one derelict amongst us, we are a group of people who, as I have said, are tired of becoming absolute beings, absolute failures, we are not frightened of the deeds that we did, they are done, we are frightened that the future may hold for us a life that was a repetition of that we've become so sick and tired of, I used the first choice that God gives all people, or the first power that God gives all people, the power of choice, when I was about 18 or 19, and I found out that a few drinks of whiskey, it only took a little bit of money, a little bit of time, two or three or four drinks, and I was a different man, I used the power of choice mistakenly, without knowledge, without thought, and I chose to put my God in a bottle, a bottle that I could reach over and get, take a couple of swigs, and I had power to do anything, but God was false, so false that he took everything I had, everything that purely, physically left me a spiritual and a moral derelict, but he could not kill that final thing that I had in my heart, a bit of good that caused me remorse after every time that I got drunk, if it meant nothing to me, I would not have had remorse, though I had this, I was ashamed of the things I did, and I was frightened that I might do them again, I knew that material and physical health, as rendered on this world, was not good enough to accomplish the miracle that had to be in me, and then one night we had moved from the west to Toronto, and our elder son Jim said to his mother, he said, Olive, or mother, we've got to get rid of dad, he's no good to us, can't give us anything, we're living in a huddle here, we don't know how he's going to be when he comes home, we're in his little joint, we can't bring anybody in, we can't take anybody out, and this little place of ours was kind of a master bedroom, and we had one of those sort of couches that you take apart, and the boys slept on the cushions on the floor, and I and Olive slept on the bed, only my last drunk was quite a long one, and if I ever got in the bed, I would always have a vision of Olive going out of the room, I would see the back end of her nightdress with a pillow under one arm and a comforter under the other, and so I got to know the rear end of Olive a lot better than I did the front end over the years, because I slept like an old billy goat and nobody could sleep with me, so most of the time I was all in a kind of a sun porch we had there, and Jimmy said, we haven't got anything over this huddle we're in, and my Olive, the girl with whom I'd fallen in love so long before, said, look son, you and I and Gordie are alright, but your daddy's sick, he's much, much sicker than I ever thought he was, all these years and the times that we put him in the hospital, I've turned to the doctors for help and everything else, but now Jim, we're going to turn your dad over to the care of God in town, what happens now is according to the will of God, I'm not going to call a doctor again, I'm not going to do those things, but Jim, you and Gordie and I will starve, we're going to be alright,
[00:20:16]
but remember son, the day will come when you and Gordie will grow up, if your daddy's still alive and still like this, I'm not going to kick him out, when he was able, he gave us everything we desired, and more maybe than we should have had, now that he can't give it to us anymore, I'm going to stay with him, he's going to be where I am, well, A works in very strange ways, the following Sunday, I went in to Alcoholics Anonymous, and I learned in there that afternoon, I learned both, there was truly a chance for a guy like me, and quickly I started to put this together, my friends, we have a serenity prayer, which is God grant us this serenity, to accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things we can, the wisdom to know the difference, my friends, I was sick and tired of being another failure, I wanted to be the fellow that Allah fell in love with, I wanted to be a father that my boys could respect, it was good in my heart, I never was frightened of anything, it didn't matter damn what it was, I would stand up because I was the biggest guy that I ever met, and I was the greatest thing that God ever created, the terrific arrogance of the alcoholic, but in here this afternoon, I met great men, the first day in AA, I met a man who was sober for 12 months, and I said to him, don't you own half of Toronto?
Anybody drive for 12 months and didn't have at least 5 million was unheard of, but I found out that I had an incurable disease and that helped me, that made me think I had something to work, but hope went in my heart that it could be, and so I soon found out we had 12 steps, found out there were things we needed, and I went to work because I realized that the biggest job that Ken B. had ever faced was this one, this was a successful business if I could make it, but it was the biggest one I ever attempted because it was for life, and I couldn't enter into that job without all the equipment I could possibly get, and all the help that I ever could gather around me was going to be needed, and I quickly realized that I was not in AA because I was a rotter, that I was a runt, that I was all the things that people called me, I was in AA because I wanted to live the right way, and I tell you now that in Alcoholics Anonymous we get everything we ever drank for, we drank for confidence, for self-reliance, for assurance, for poise, for ability, and when I mention ability, those of you who may be here tonight and who say, well, it's beyond me, I can't take it, don't worry fellas, your brain wasn't harmed, it was just pickled in alcohol, it's still brand new, give it a chance, you can use it.
Now, I came to Alcoholics Anonymous and I found right away there was hope for me, but I knew I had to work, I knew I had to study, I knew I had to live, I wanted to live, I still had health and I had strength, and I thought I was the great I am yet, but I met great men that afternoon, and every one of you here is great. If you were not great, you wouldn't be here, because Alcoholics, the true meaning of Alcoholics Anonymous is people who are learning to control the most terrific disease in all the world, and true anonymity is true unselfishness, my friends.
The greatest desire we have and that we drank for was to help people. We in our false assumption thought that by being big shots we could help. Now we are learning that by being big shots we must get down and start from the bottom and earn our way up, and so in Alcoholics Anonymous, sure it's a real way of life. None of us came in here to find out how to stop drinking. Hell, every one of us knows how to stop drinking. I stopped every time I got drunk, but I'm in here to learn how to live without liquor.
I'm an alcoholic. I've got a disease. I'm also a diabetic. Nobody slaps my hands because I don't put sugar in my coffee. I've got a heart that is not well. I was officially dead over eight years ago.
[00:25:12]
I think they took me up to the gates, and I think St. Peter said, well, Ken, we're glad to see you, but you're not good enough to get in yet, but you're too good to send to hell, so we'll slap you over. And so I went back, and I'm still here, my friend. I like to think that St. Peter said, no, Ken, we're not going to let you come in yet. Maybe there's one more drunk you can still help down there. We're going to let you go back, and it's been truly great.
I've learned to live to love and to live each day and love each day. Now, I've still got to stock up on steps. We've become great, and we are great people because we are in here not to find out the rottenness, but to learn to do that which we're all wanted to do, be truly unselfish and in the true, absolute, unselfish manner of seeking to help without reward. True anonymity is true unselfishness, my friend, not the fact that I must not let anybody know that my name is Ken B.. In groups and in amongst meetings, anonymity, I think, is a little bit in error in that they call us Ken B., and so on, in public meetings, press, and so on, and in the traditions that is laid out.
But if in my own meeting in the Healing Group in Toronto, if nobody knew my name, and I say I'm here because I want to learn to live right, I want to learn to live the way that God taught me or put me on this earth to live, but you mustn't know my name, who can I help? How would I know where to find a meeting? I couldn't phone anybody. But outside of AA, my friends, I don't think there's any excuse whatever for a break in anonymity. If my good friend John from the West Palm Beach, or if someone asked me if I knew John, I'd say sure, I've known John for years.
Tell me, Ken, is he a member of AA? If the question was asked without sincerity and just with curiosity, I'd answer like this. Look at my friends, what I know about AA is that it's a very personal matter. If you want to know if John's in AA, you call him up. If he wants you to know, he'll tell you. So, it's left like that. But with the true desire to help, we must do it. Now then, how great are we? I was the great and arrogant Ken B., the king of the north, the strong man about whom some of my feats of strength are still legioned in the north.
But yet, I came to AA and I said, can you fellows really help me? I was great enough, my friends, so that I realized that where I was going was no good, and I moved in. The true greatness and the test of my desire is encompassed in our first step, which reads that we admitted we were powerless over alcohol, that our lives had become unmanageable. The great guy, me, going in and saying, fellows, I can't drink. This stuff has got me lit. I've tried everything. What do I do?
That my life had become unmanageable, my friends, was not the fact that I had lost all the money that I had, that all my companies were gone, that I was broken down. No. My life was unmanageable because I lost everything that God gave me at birth, my rightful inheritance to live a good life. I had lost the right to love. I had sacrificed the proper right to be loved. I had lost the right or the knowledge of how to respect or to be respected. I had sacrificed my friends. All the things I couldn't buy were gone by the board, and my life truly was unmanageable.
I couldn't go by myself, but that wasn't, and I quickly learned that that was no good for me. I could walk through a door and say, well, I'm here, ain't I? That's admitting that I'm powerless? No, no, no, no. I had to know in my heart that Ken was ill, that I was ill with the worst of all the diseases that I have ever heard about. I had to realize that and know it, and I moved on because I had come to AA, and I had hoped the first afternoon.
First afternoon, I evolved a little plan that is becoming a little better known, the 4-H plan for AA's.
[00:30:01]
The first H was hope. I attained that that afternoon. I could hardly wait to phone Oliver and tell her that I'd get home right away. The second, honesty. I quickly learned that without honesty, I couldn't even get the first H, because I met fellows, and I'd say to them, How long were you in AA? Oh, so long and so long. Well, I darn quickly learned that I better not ask a question like that. That was plum silly.
Because in AA, we still have the boys that aren't so honest, you know. But most of the time, unlike church, we can smell them. Right? So, I learned that to ask that question could prove very, very utterly futile insofar as I was concerned. I quickly changed that as, How long since you had your last drink? And then I learned things. Now, then I talked with these men, and hope was born, and then I knew that honesty was a direct and quick requirement.
When I had a little hope and a little honesty, then I learned, of course, that humility wasn't far away. And when you mix hope, honesty, and humility, you will attain, as our good friend Wes mentioned last night at Hendersonville, you will attain happiness, the ultimate desire of us all. All its content is sobriety, peace of mind, security, as you will, but it becomes our foresakes. Now, I wasn't in AA very long until I found out about how dreadful this disease is, until I found out that we learned to control it one day at a time.
By God, I'd quit drinking a thousand times forever, but I never quit for just one day. I was a brand new one, sounded all right, about the only thing I hadn't tried, so I said, All right, today I won't drink. I didn't drink. I had fights, wasn't easy, because I, as you can well understand, was a hard drinker. But then the second step was that we came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
Well, I was all right. I was in blackouts for a long time, and I had cracked up eleven cars and trucks, and I had walked out of three planes, and I had been underneath the ice in the wintertime on the way up in the north and everything else, but I couldn't accept this word sanity. Well, my friends, for those of you whom it does deserve, sanity in AA means continued sobriety, my friends, one day at a time.
How simple Alcoholics Anonymous becomes. You'll see that every step is in its exact position, every word its right meaning, continuity is perfect, and they mustn't be changed. So I had to come, and it was easy for me because I'm very practical. I knew that I had expended every force that could be obtained on this earth, every force. I'd been expended in my desire for sobriety or controlled drinking or something, and it was of no avail.
And here I was going along talking to a bunch of fellows every day and so on, and going along, and not drinking, and running home and saying, hey, look at me, sober by gosh, not one drink. Oh, proud? I tell you, it was wonderful. I was going home truthful. Honesty was starting to work. And I had to give credit to a power greater than me that would allow me to have this continued sobriety, to restore me continued sobriety, in other words, could restore us to sanity.
But the third step was a sticker. Here I, the great, arrogant Ken B., had to come up to a place where I was to make a decision to turn my will and my life under the care of God as I understood it. As I told you, I was very practical. This program is only good to me if I can live with it. I know that if I can send any one or two of you people home thinking, I will send home one or two people who will not be drinking.
And I learned quickly that I had to think. And I was now attempting the biggest job that I had ever attempted, and it's going to take a lot of hard work and study. Because I would not admit, and I knew that if I admitted something to a God that I understood when I didn't understand a God, I was going to have trouble. And so I started to find a God that I could understand because I was sincere. I had a great desire to live this way of life.
Already friends were coming back. My fears were diminishing. And so I went around and I poked these old fellows in the back that ran ahead of me. Hey you, I'm Ken B.. I've been in here for three months, four months. How long have you been in? How long have you been driving? Okay, so you're longer than me. How did you take the third step? What did you do about it? How did you learn to know God as you understand him?
Because I certainly do, and I don't at the moment. Well, some of them talked to me by the hour and some of them by the minute, but they all meant pray.
[00:35:00]
My aunt was a hard thing for me to pray because I hadn't prayed. I knew there was a God, because lots of times I got in terrible jackpots, and I called on God to help me out. But then when I got out, I'd say, well, I guess you came a little too late, God. I got over that one myself. So I didn't need to even bother too much to thank him, you see. And so I had to go into this. Now I tried to pray about all my friends.
That forever hypocrisy would come in. I'd be in the midst of my prayers, and the old disease would come in, and this dirty disease that I told you about. It's the damnedest disease, and it's the oldest disease that God put on earth. I believe that King got into some fermented grapes when he slew Abel. That's how old it is. I do know that a way back for a long time it was here. But here I wanted to learn to control it, and I would pray.
And that disease, alcoholism, would come in, and I said, what's the matter with you, Ken? Before you got into AA, you never had to do this kind of stuff. You were along all right, a little high and up, sure, but you were on the way to a break. Look at you now. You're sober, you're working, things are going. What the hell's wrong with you anyway? That's the way this disease works. Oh, it's miserable, it's dirty.
But I knew that old way. I had come to AA because I had good in my heart. I wanted to be a good husband to all of them. I wanted to be a husband who could accept the responsibilities and punish the requirements of a home. I wanted to be a father that my boys could at least respect, and we had two boys. I wanted to be a son that my mother and father could come and visit and not take a 200-mile circle when they were in the territory to get away from you and say, well, I'm sorry, we've got a relative over here we have to see.
So one night after my prayers echoing back for so many, many nights, night after night after night, this night I guess maybe a little of that humility was in my heart, and I said, dear God, please help me. I want to do these things. I want to be a good father. I want all this. But I'm frightened about in New York where I was and where I was drinking so much. Is there any way that I can find somehow that I don't have to go so alone?
I can't take all my AA friends. I can't take the meeting places. And that night, my friends, the answer came back, Ken, would you take me along as your senior partner? Oh, my friend, that senior partner since that time has been closer to me than my very hand on the end of my wrist. Closer to me than the blood that courses through my heart. Closer to me than the skin on my very body. Because when I'm inclined and I am inclined, I'm still the arrogant guy of old when things are going good.
He clips me right down and he said, hey, Ken, just remember, before I moved in with you or you came on my side and took me as your senior partner, you weren't doing very good. Just remember. And slips me right back in my place and I can bow my head and say, please, God, don't leave me. Don't let me get away from you. And when I'm down low and I get low like everyone else, he says, hey, Ken, remember, it used to be pretty bad too, didn't it?
It was always a lot worse than this when you're coming out. And I come up with confidence. And I have learned to love this God that I understand. I have learned to love this God that I understand. This God that I learned from you people. The guy that wouldn't recognize a God and that said, well, when your number comes, you've had it. I now tell you from my very heart that I have learned to love in a manner that I never knew was possible.
I also know and I feel the very presence of that senior partner of mine, power greater than myself. God, as I understand him, he's right with me here tonight. And I am attempting to do right now that which what AA teaches us, to live in the ever-present. I'm a proud member of Alcoholics Anonymous. It is my great desire to do good, to be truly unselfish. I have to give to you everything that I can because I have no guarantee of the future.
And in AA, we learn to live in the ever-present. All rehabilitation is based on good. The deeds that we did do not count. What we do now is that which counts. And so now fear is out of my heart. True love is cast without fear, one of the teachings of the Apostle Paul. And our fourth step is that we made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
[00:40:04]
The first afternoon I went to AA, a fellow said, you can take this pencil and piece of paper and go and sit in that corner and write down what kind of an S of a B you really are. And this was a big fellow and I was sick. And I looked at him, well, because I told you I was practical. And when I had trouble, I always walked right at it. And I said to him, hey, Bob, are you nuts? In the first place, I couldn't write.
I tried writing on lots of checks, it wouldn't work. In the second place, I just knew in my heart right then that if I went down and wrote down all the deeds and everything he told me about, I would never finish. I'd be so disgusted and so sick, I'd go and start to drink. And I didn't want to drink. I wanted to go home with Oliver. And I wanted to be a father to those boys, not have them turn on me and disgust me.
And so, my friends, I learned to take inventory, made a searching and fearless moral inventory of myself. Not a deed in the inventory at all. But quality. First of all, I had courage. I had courage to go in and say I don't like being here. I was good or I wouldn't be there any more than you would be here. Alcoholic and non-alcoholic. Seeking to change that way of life so that we can live the way we have always wanted to live.
Be a true, normal, and useful human being. Recognized in the world for good. Just as our lieutenant governor read the letters of the state tonight. So we have good over top of the defects of our character. But we must write down our defects. We are taking a complete inventory. This is the fourth step, my friends, not the first. Number four, remember, the time comes. And so we learn to control the defects with the good that we have.
And with the assistance of God as we understand him. And our fifth step in which we admit it to God, to ourselves, and to another human being. The exact nature of our wrongs is a marvelous step. But I couldn't just say, well, God, you know it all. I had to say, look at God. This is me. This is Ken B.. I've seen what can be. Now, I want to cement this. I want to try to make it as permanent. I want to make it so it's sure each day.
So now I bring the auditors in to make sure my inventory is right. Have I true courage? Have I true love? Is my desire right to control these defects? If instead of being a continued drunk, can I now become a continued human being? With open eyes, keeping an open mind, easy does it. I realize, but for the grace of God, I would never have been given this opportunity to see life as it is. It was easy, I guess, maybe, to talk this way with God as I understood him.
Because I'd learned to love him. He was a true partner with me, as I said. He was very close. To tell it to myself was a little different. Because I was a very accomplished liar. I could go home after I'd been gone for two weeks or two days. And I would tell all of each city I was in. I would describe the room, even the paint, the color of the decorations that were on the wall, and the lovely carpets of some of the dignitaries' homes that I had visited while I was away.
And if I had told her in the true state the carpets that I had visited when I was away, well, I guess, well, I just wouldn't. But I've got so I could tell these stories and I would believe them myself. Now it's a little bit hard because here I am going to take out my own stuff and put them up where I can look at them. Have I got them all? Or have I reserved that little right of getting up in the morning and saying, well, this coffee is absolutely the crap.
And kicking the table and walking out. Am I going to keep some of these things? Or am I going to put them all out where I can see them? And admitting to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs. My friends, many of us become so confused that we want to get in and tell about the time that we were away someplace that on the night of June the 30th, Bill Smith was out in California and I got over here in Mississippi, and God, his wife was nice, and I stayed with her that night, and so on.
Well, you see, my friends, there's no place for this in AA. Our males had a sexual defective character, and our males had a lapse of judgment, but now I'm in AA, and I'm down the fifth step. And along with learning to love and to live this way, And along with learning to love and to live this life, I still want to live. I'm not going to tell anybody about that night I was with Mr. Bill Smith.
[00:45:11]
Well, I'm just, I'm just learning to love living. And so I tell him about my resentment, about my jealousy, about my defects. But no place in AA do we stick the finger on the wall and say this is it. I often wonder when I hear some speakers talking about the times that they robbed a bank or that they did this or did that. I wonder what those fellows would say if a man got up out of the audience and walked up and said, Look it, Bob, here's my credentials. I'm with the detective agency. I've been looking for you for five years.
I bet you anything they would quickly revert right back and say, Well, look it, Mac, I'm a member of AA. This is just a story I'm telling these guys to put it over. I told you I was very practical on this. I don't like to create hazards. I prefer, I prefer to admit these things to my God and let him understand and not to somebody else who might change their heart. And because they're human, might not like me a few months from now.
But I've checked this thing now. I know that I've been honest up until now. And now I move in closer to my God as I understand him, power greater than myself. And I'm entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character. My friends, there's a lot of things in here bothered me. The word remove is so often interpreted as take away. The word is removed, my friend. This is how come that he doesn't take away all your habits, that he doesn't take away those defects of character.
But we all have faith. We have as much faith as we ever desire or need. Or that any one time if we will so use it. And when we have those days that cause us trouble, God will remove those defects of character. And let us move on one day at a time in the ever present. And we humbly ask him to remove our shortcomings. And I've heard so many people get up and say, well, I used to do this and I used to do that.
But thank God I don't have any desire to do it anymore and so on. And I think what has maybe happened is that they, like some alcoholics, have found out how to stop drinking, but are not here to learn how to live without liquor, which is an entirely different manner. Truly in here learning to live is to live happily, to enjoy it, and to have the desire removed. The desire can be brought back if we let go.
But if God took away all my shortcomings as I reasoned, this step could then be the end of the AA lesson. But I know through experience that alcoholism is incurable. It took me a long time of thinking and study, my friends, to realize the word is removed, not take away. If God takes anything away from us in his infinite wisdom and strength, that is gone. That is not part of us anymore. But we know that we still have the ability to hate and to resent and to be jealous and be frustrated.
And all these things are still with us. But we find these things there, but now we have known our God. We have come to love him, to trust him, to have faith in him. I have a little split. I have faith in my God. It's just a little part of my own. I have faith in my God as I know him and as I revere him and love him, and I have belief anymore in my human fellow man. Just a difference. I reserve the word faith for my God and belief for my man.
And so God removes these things from me. In the days when I've grown miserable and black, as I often do, and I don't mean that because I can't see, when the days are there and I just get so terribly licked, I come to my God and say, Please help me, God. Please take away this impatience. Please give me that power again to see that I can return to sanity. I use all my steps to see every day. There's a step for every emotion, every mode and method and part of life.
There's an answer for it in our program, in our living. And so God removes these and lets me move through the day, one day at a time, just today, ever enabling me to do that which I can to help.
[00:50:00]
And so now it comes time to start to give a little bit, and I made a list, step number eight. I made a list of all those I'd harmed and become willing to make amends for them all. And I wrote down enough water names before I remembered that I was here, too, and that I couldn't help anybody until I had straightened myself out, until I had got myself cleaned up, because I quickly realized that I couldn't help anyone, that I couldn't carry or do things, that I couldn't give things to my own always, that I couldn't make amends to my mother and my father any more than I could clean a pure white wall with a handful of mud.
I had to clean my own hands, my friends, and how can I do it? Through the teachings of A.A., studying, trying to live, doing my best to be honest, to be humble, to be appreciative. And so now that you've made a list, and you're number four steps on your inventory, bring it on down here now to number eight. You can use it. You don't do anything in A.A. that's wrong. You might just misplace a little bit.
But regardless of what opinion you make or form in A.A., you have to think to do it, and when you're thinking about A.A., you're thinking about something good, and we know that a thinking person is not a drinking person. But now we make direct commandments, step number nine, to all those with arms, wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others. Well, that is so wonderful. My father died a year after I was in A.A., approximately a year.
My mother found him that early Sunday morning. I'd been in A.A. about a year, as I said, and I believed that everything was there, and I quickly told him, I said, please, God, help me get home to Prince Albert. I want to be there to help him be with Mother. My desires were always that. I loved my mother. And so the bank was open for me on a Sunday. Funds were made available, and I got onto an airplane, and I went home.
And I was going down the gangway, and there was Mother with some of my brothers and sisters, and she never spoke. She just opened her arms. She said, well, son, I've lost one man, but I've found another. Oh, my friend, a man? I never went back when I was in my hometown, chasing around to find that bootlegger that charged me 18 bucks for that last bottle of gin. He charged me 25 for the one I got just before it.
He was paid off. But if I met him, I was willing. But I wasn't searching. Not for him. Let us make our amends for the truly good. I made my amends to myself. I am still making amends, I hope, to all of each and every day, to wherever I come. We lost our son in Korea, our elder son, Jimmy. He was a great lad. We had no choice there. But again, we refined to the prayer. God granted us serenity. We couldn't do it.
But we just didn't have that. But through time and turning to the God that we had learned here, we were able to truly see that we had lost our son. But actually, he has given for us. All that he has. And when his personal effects came back in his pocket was an AA card with the serenity prayer on one side and these very 12 steps on the other. Our Jim. He didn't ask questions. He went there. He's been there for two years.
He came back and our government asked him to go back to do a special job. A lot of things happened to Olive and I after we got into AA. Gee, after two and a half years and I thought I was such a great guy, I was helping so many and doing so much, I was stricken with a serious psychosis. She had to do the work to keep me there. And we got worried about our Jimmy. It was hard to take. And again, we got worried that I was going to be permanently blind.
And I had to have my eyes removed. Pretty rough deal. People say, well, Ken doesn't drink, my gosh. He's in his bed all the time. He doesn't have anything. I had to build up a way for us to earn a living so that Olive and I could carry on. We have another son. We didn't lock the door on the first son. We realized that we had to live for the second son. But Christ said, let the dead bury the dead. Jimmy was all right.
He was in God's hands. Much greater help than we could have given. We had to do what we could to help Gordie. And so we worked. But all these thoughts were good. Of men's, my friends, sure. One time I was in Nassau. Actually, I was able to get out of bed. And I was instrumental in helping a group of colored boys down there get the first fever. A few minutes of peace. A few minutes of time that were not important.
And the day that we got the card, the wire from the governor about our Jimmy, along came a letter from the lad in Nassau, this colored boy. And the letter wound up easy, Desert Sam. Remember, just one day at a time.
[00:55:02]
My friends, good is the greatest expanding force in all the world. If you take nothing away from the good, you have God. Good cannot help but come back. That's why I am proud to be a member of AA. Why I'm a proud member of Alcoholics Anonymous. I've attained so very, very much. But things are denying me things. Now I've got to live forever and ever. My desire is to carry on as long as I possibly live.
Every day. So I continue to take personal inventory. And when I'm wrong, I promptly admit it. Sometimes I can't promptly admit it. Sometimes it's rough because I'm human. But there is a way. And if I can admit that to myself before it becomes action, then the thought is much easier and I can control it and bow my head and say thanks, dear Father. I'm glad that I made a decision to turn my will and my life over to care of you.
But of course I'm human and I'm stubborn. And sometimes I just won't. So I then find that we have an 11th step. Where we seek through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understand Him. Praying only for knowledge of His will, my friends, and the power. The power to carry it out. I used to take my power from the bottle. From the God that was so false. Now I have a true God that's with me all the time.
I love Him. I know He won't let me go wrong as long as my desire is to stay on His side. To seek His advice. And if I can't promptly admit that I'm wrong, I quickly turn to my 11th step and say, Dear God, please give me that power. I know that when I'm in an alien room, an alien coming into the very air, and that we're all so anxious to go home and our desires are right and we almost make promises to ourselves that when we arrive home, we're going to do this.
We're not going to allow our husband to create that fear in us again and kid us about being a member of AA or our wives to do this and that. We get wrong and conditions are so different. AA isn't with us. My friend's the God that we learned and AA is with us. There's power greater than ourselves when we turn to Him. And instead of taking a couple of drinks out of the old bottle, now we turn to the power step and we get the power.
And truly then we come to the part that I love to call my overflow step. I have attained such happiness, such love of life, such gratefulness of living, such a grand desire that I've got to give it away. I've got to get rid of it. And so heaven has this spiritual awakening as the result of these steps. I try to carry this message to Alder Harlot and to practice these principles in all my affairs. A spiritual awakening, my friends, as the result.
A lot of people get that little word, the, I think it's a conjunction or something. It doesn't matter. As a result, a lot of people say, but every word in our steps of correction is in its right place and it's true meaning. As the result. When I first came in, the first steppers and the twelfth steppers used to get up and talk so wonderfully about what they did. But you know something? If the guy was a little bit honest, inside of three minutes, he told me about how drunk he got before long.
If he was a more embellished liar, I might have to wait five if honesty came to him. But I never yet met a first stepper and a twelfth stepper that continued on that way and continued in perfect sanity or continued sobriety. They talk about their slips and their relapses, and they all come back and say, well, I was doing the first and twelfth stepper and I admitted the rest. This awakening comes as the result.
The only result of these steppers. Of the study of them. And we try to carry the message to alcoholics and old men. Oh, I about broke my back carrying those figures to here. I tried carrying alcoholics to this thing for so long. When I got to the twelfth stepper, I looked, you know, I used to talk to myself a great deal, but now I answer myself. I say, look, what kind of a boy are you anyway? Here you are trying to get all these fellows in.
The message is an awful lot lighter than they are. You carry the message. Let them come. And then I started to work and it started to work because I sensed the nicest word in the English language is the word come. When Paul, or Peter, I mean Simon Peter, was in on his troubled waters, and he held his hands to Christ and he said, can I walk over these waters? Jesus said, come. Is there ever a Peter in all the world, in all the time, who is in the water?
There's no one in all of time who is in and on more troubled waters than the still-practicing alcoholic who doesn't know about this disease and the way it operates, and we, in AA, say to you, my friends, come, we can help you, practice, the greatest deterrent, I believe, to spiritual progress in AA, or in any spiritual progress,
[01:00:17]
is the word why, so often practiced by the so-called intelligentsia. Why should I do that? My friends, if I could explain miracles, they wouldn't be miracles. It's because I can't explain miracles that I know there is a God. I suggest to you that you see us. God has granted us the two greatest powers of all history, the power of understanding, the wives, the friends, just as equally and as much as the alcoholics. We alcoholics can help the poor drunkard, because we understand how he thinks, more so than we do the others.
The wives can also help in their showing of confidence and responsibility, and they are ever ready to help each and every day. And so when we take the message to the other alcoholics, let us do it with open hearts, clear minds, and studies of AA, knowing that we are carrying the true message. The message that started many, many, many years ago, twenty centuries ago, there was another great leader, and he taught the same principles that we are teaching today. But we start to renounce that teaching. Now we have one of our own that takes us back there.
And let us ever remind that when we take that to the new man, take it with honesty and trust, asking the man to practice because we have been given the book.