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Source: DICOBE-00616 – Paul W – TWELVE TRADITIONS – 1961-01-15.mp3 File: dicobe-00616-paul-w-twelve-traditions-1961-01-15.mp3 Duration: 01:08:09
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Thank you, I.N. Lee. You know, that's a funny thing. That's actually one of my character defects, too, diastema. My name is Carl W., and I'm an alcoholic. And it goes to God, and the help of the early will of life, and the help and fellowship of people like yourself. I've been sober for twenty-five years and one month and twenty-eight days. One day at a time, I was simply seated and not taking the first drink.
And since I.N. Lee has called us Gratitude Month, there are very few of you in here who have more to be grateful for than I. And I didn't come up here to tell you about that. I came up here to talk about seduction. We hear a lot of people say, I don't want to hurt you. But we stay sober by the practice of the principles, the care of sex, and the care of seduction. And somebody will ask you what the principles are, and you can't tell them. And they're talking about seductions, and they say, well, we got them written on the wall up there. And so, I don't know why it is, but rarely do I get a chance to talk about seduction, because I.N. Lee said this is one week that I have, every year, and when she called me the other night, I said, well, what week is it going to be?
And I didn't really remember what she was talking about. I just wanted to know what week it was, what Friday it was going to be, or what night it was going to be. I didn't actually change shifts to get able to be here, but I would have made it somehow or other, because this is one of my traditions, which you might trust. Talking about traditions, we have N. Lee, a guy that I greet by the customs I used to go to.
He decided to inaugurate a little thing, and he said, this is one of the great traditions of this beach that we're going to trust this year. A little tradition is something, in order to get into the tradition, it's necessary to get a little bit of a history of our age. And I am not one of the people who kept most of the history, but I have been acquainted with some of them who did, and I know enough about the background. I've been around long enough. I was here before we ever thought about traditions.
I was at the meeting where they were adopted worldwide, so I know how it was done even though I wasn't there. And this meant, actually, two days from today in 1934, Bill W., one of our forefathers, went to Cairns Hospital for what was to be his last breath after this day. He's an alcoholic, so he can't go back tomorrow, but this was his last breath from that time on. He had already been pronounced a hopeless alcoholic, and that's what we were before he came along, and that's the only reason that we have so much to be grateful for.
And in this hospital, the doctor told him that he would go to his last. The doctor told Lewis that he would take this, and that he would die either in some time there, or in the violent phases, or not too far in the future. Okay, Bill is sitting there, and what side of this town, Ebby, after he passed away a few years ago, and he incidentally never did make the children, and he never did maintain continuous sobriety, but Ebby had come to Bill with a new idea that he'd gotten from the Oxford group.
It was based on the four absolutes, and we don't hear about them anymore either, we used to talk about them a lot. The four absolutes were honesty, purity, and self-control for Lewis. And through the Oxford group, some of the people in this Oxford group had found a way to stay sober. And so Ebby told Bill about it, and this was great. Bill was going to start practicing these things, but he was just like so many of us, he got drunk while he was practicing, and so he wound up in this town hospital this night of 11th and 12th of November, 1934.
[00:05:00]
So Dr. Shelton, as he was beating Bill in the middle of the time, coming off of these drinks, said, Bill, there's not much that I can do for you. And of course, Bill was begging for one more drink to taper off for him, and he said, but I'll tell you what I'll do, I'll give you a drink if you do something for me personally. And of course, Bill would have done anything for that drink. He said, there's a guy, a young guy down in the floor below you, who is just beginning to hear that you're just about to wind up.
If you go down there and just let him see what's going to happen to him, if he don't quit drinking, then I'll give you that drink. And so Bill did, he went down and he talked to this guy, and during the process of this conversation, something happened. Now, I can't tell you what happened to Bill, I can't even tell you what happened to me on that first day of September 1942. But whatever it was, Bill thought that he was crazy.
He thought that he'd been eating something that had collapsed in his brain. And he asked Dr. Shetworth about this, and Dr. Shetworth said, well, I don't know what it is or whatever it is, you better hang on to it, it's better than what you had. And so, through six months of just talking to other drunks, Bill managed to space over. He never did get anybody else to space over, but he spaced over six months just talking to other drunks.
He didn't have the big desk, he didn't have the little chair, he didn't have the class desk, all he had was a sword, a sword handed down. And that's what you're getting tonight, is a sword handed down from those who went before. After six months, Bill had lost most of his alcoholics. He said, well, if I go down to Wall Street to work, that's where I stay drunk, where I get drunk. If I go down there, so he said, well, he lost most of his money anyway, so he didn't worry about that.
But somebody told him that he was going to have to get out of his chair, so he went back down to Wall Street, and a deal was promulgated, and he went to Austin to conclude this deal, and it turned sour. Everything that Mitch had promised him turned bad, and on the night of around May 6th or 7th of 1935, Bill was in the lobby of the Mayfair Hotel in Austin, and he could see in the back this ballroom, and these people drinking, and he was lonely, and he wanted a drink, and he thought about going back there and having a seven-up, like so many of us have done.
And he saw in the lobby a list of the 50 women that were treated. And he got to thinking about it, and he spent several weeks, six months, talking to Jets, so he decided that he needed the Jets to talk to, and so he called down to the last lane in this list, and I asked him, there were ten lanes, and he was on the last lane in this list, and he got a hold of a non-alcoholic who was a member of the Oxford group in Austin, and he said, I got just the man for you.
And so he called Dr. Bob, and Dr. Bob happened to be passed out dressed at the time, but most days, he kind of tended to give Bill 15 minutes of his time. He'd come in and spend five or six hours. I heard Dr. Bob tell about this, and I heard Bill tell about it, and they sat there, and they finally said they had something in common, and so we had the beginning of AA. Now, there wasn't any AA at that time, and there wasn't to be an AA for another three or five years, but we had what started what we got left.
When we left, we had the fellowships of men and women who slept. One jumped back into another. I won't go into all of the details of how this thing grew, but it was a lot of fights and tribulations, a lot of sociality conflicts. In fact, I was just five minutes before I passed here a year or so ago, and the history of AA, and I got together all of these different versions of it, and it was the very next conflict on the 30th of July.
We got up and found out we were going to have an AA day.
[00:10:03]
Well, around about 1938 or 39, they found out that a lot of these people that were having these spiritual awakenings weren't staying sober, and a few of these agnostics that couldn't have their spiritual awakenings and getting together once a week to sit with a person and talk to the bill, they were staying sober until Jesus. Now, this was in 38. This was three years after this person. Two years. Until prior to that, in 1937, Bill had gone out and talked to Dr. Bob and stayed out there about three months, and they talked about what they heard, and they found that there had been people staying sober in these places.
They had six limited-mass sets, and God was not included in these things, that they would use, and you can imagine how many versions you could probably get of six verbal sets from the people that the different ways would tell. Then this group began to flourish in 38, and they decided that in order to keep it in an orderly fashion, they better write down what they were doing. A lot of people didn't really, you know, let's keep it simple, you know.
It's really easy to say, let's keep it simple, unless there's any work involved in complication. Of course, Dr. E.T. will hear that quite often, let's keep it simple, let's don't have any general service, let's don't have any GSRs, let's don't have any energy, let's don't have any carnivores, let's don't have any furniture or club, let's just keep it simple. A lot of those things involve work, and so we're always looking for a way to get out of that.
But anyway, Bill went ahead and contended to several different things that I've heard with him. Bill and the little Jesus teacher in the little church house that was originally a clubhouse in New York that I visited, and this is what he did. And when that happened, the transcripts were actually written in less than 45 minutes, and there were very few words changed in the original language, and Bill wrote them in a slice of what I call divine inspiration.
And they didn't have a title for the book. Actually, there were eight people that had as much as one year of sobriety when this big book was written. There were a hundred people at OA, and actually New York combined that there were eight people with a year or more of sobriety. So this went on in 1939, and OA published its paper after a lot of trials and tribulations and financial struggles, and nobody wanted to buy it.
And in 1941, the first nicely published article about OA was written, and really at that time they only had, the options still belonged to the Oxford group. The reason this was mostly New York was it still belonged to the Oxford group because they got kicked out because too many of them got burnt and so they'd been a stigma in the Oxford group. So they had to stock out on their own. But when I came into OA in 1942, they were still T.O.A.s.
Fortunately for me, I got to T.O.A., and fortunately for you, there's not but one time left, and that's T.O.A. But this article came out, there were some 2,000 members in about seven or eight groups in 1941 when this article was published, and just in a few years, it jumped to 10 or 15 times. Apparently when people, when OA got started in California, a woman got a big book from a friend of hers, a relative back east, and she started the first OA group in West Lake Park in L.A.
in March of 1920. And that's what I feel important in this big book. The guy that started AA in Houston, which is the first AA group west of the Mississippi, had never attended an AA meeting when he started AA down here, all he had was a big book.
[00:15:13]
So you can imagine what different personalities started groups in this manner without knowing how it was done in other areas, how confused, and how limited his hands were. There was no correlation of effort. Everything had to be done down here the way Larry wanted it, and finally when Esther came in he said there ain't gonna be no women in our alcoholics' election. And when Larry overrode his objections and let her in anyway, and then on top of that they elected her secretary of the group because she could write.
Who said it? So you can imagine, if you're an alcoholic, I assume most of you are, you know what confusion is, and you know how you got to run things your way, you know how other people in the family and the services they were running their way. And so this is the way it was done. There was no, there was no 12 steps to the group, there was 12 steps to the individual, but there were no guidelines to the group. And I can remember when I came in, when we had a problem in our group, our only contact was with one of the headquarters, we called it the Alcoholics Foundation in those days, and we would write those people up there and tell them the problem, and usually it was always they, and then they would introduce that and show them to you out and tell them to tell us what things to be done. That was about the gist of the letters that we would write.
And these guys up there were such smuts, they figured out real quick that these jerks wasn't going to do what they told them to do, so instead of telling them what you've got to do this or that, they would write back and ask them for the reasons for them, and over the years we had this problem, and this is what they have done. Until 1945, Bill and Dr. Bob decided that we needed some sedition. I say Bill decided it, Dr. Bob was always the ultimate, he was always the one to say let's keep it simple.
And Bill was the one who would keep us, I mean they would balance each other out perfectly because one was always getting too far ahead and the other was dragging back until he came out with an equal pass. Until the first sedition arrived, sedition came out about 47 or 48 or something like that, it was very, very quick and simple, and nobody did it. But these were the guidelines, until 1950 they were convinced that it wasn't fair, and they were adopted, I said I was at the meeting, I was not at the actual meeting where these things were adopted, because they were adopted in Cleveland.
But these folks in a nice way were convinced, which comes back to this guy who's alcoholic and all of his friends were convinced, I was at the meeting in San Antonio when they were brought back. And so these seditions were given to us in the form that we have now and they are not enforceable, even when we say sex is enforceable. And our bodies wonder about how the groups stay together just like our bodies wonder how we stay together because they don't understand, there's no head, there's no tail to this thing, there's no godliness, there's no guiding light.
But the one thing we have got is John Bonneton, the greatest enforcement agency around, because we have to conform to our own self preservation. It don't do any good for me to tell someone around me that you've got to do this or you'll get burnt, because if they get far enough out of the program, they'll find it out, and they won't listen to me anyway, I know that much. Well I want to try something that I have never tried before and that is to show how I have tried these seditions in my life. In the previous years I have always used the group basis and used various assembly groups for example, and I think this is good.
[00:20:21]
And I heard over across the state line here a while back, I heard an individual putting it into his own, how he lived it. And I know that in my life I evidently have lived out these seditions because I'm selfish and I've been selfish a long time. And so I got the sedition. The main reason I got the sedition, I didn't like him anyhow, and I disagreed with most everything that he said, so I had to stop and think about why I disagreed with him.
But he did. You know I drove all the way to Wichita, Kansas one time and got a speeding ticket before I got to Conroe. And I got shot with the state police in Oklahoma City and I got up there and the committee had had a big hassle and I found out that I wasn't going to be the speaker, that's where I got to. And I sat up and listened to somebody else talk about the 12 steps, my 12 steps. And I disagreed with everything that he said, but I think it did me more good than anything that could have happened because it reinforced, it made me think out why I believe like I do.
And so when I heard this guy talk about the seditions, I got to thinking, I would never consciously, because without an ISI, I would never actually try to tell anybody or a group, I'd tell individuals about it, what each sedition means to me as an individual. First seditions of our commonwealth I should come first. Personal recovery depends on AA unity. From the beginning of AA unity was those 15 or 20 people that were there, some of them accepted me. I was the newcomer, I was the one that needed what they had and didn't know how to get it.
Because their unity was the thing that was most important for me until I found a place. Now I came to AA not to come to something but to get away from something. I came to get away from the situation that I could not live in. And I didn't know what I was getting into. And if somebody had told me then that 25 years or two years later I'd be up here talking to y'all, I got drunk that night. And so I wouldn't have believed it. I wouldn't have thought it possible.
So the unity that these people had is the thing that set me free. And if you think back to when you first came in and they started talking to you about transsexual, transsexual sedition and big butts and forced abortions, you didn't know what the hell they were talking about and you didn't know, you didn't think you'd ever be able to guess it. But you could look out here and see something in these people's face that made you move.
And that was the unity that they had. Now we don't all have the idea, the same idea, or we're not all speaking to the same day or we're not all going down the same road to get there, but we're all tied in the same way and that is by the same set of principles. And this is our unity. I've got this tradition that says that for a good person there is the one ultimate authority. And now that you know how to be a good person, then a good person, our leaders are the chosen servants, they do not govern.
Now this is a tradition that was written, I think, well, it might have been written with me in mind because I set out to be a governor in this day, I could. I could remember in the early days of my strength when the first thing I wanted to do was find out who was in charge of this business so I could get next to him. And I found out that there was some sort of a mysterious thing to me that contained the three people and I didn't know which ones they were that let me see it.
And those were the ones that I wanted to know about.
[00:25:12]
Now you might tell me that you didn't come here with some such idea of winning this thing, and you might believe it, but you're not going to make me believe it because if you're an alcoholic and you spend all your drinking days trying to win other people's business, I stayed drunk for a good many years because they wouldn't do what I wanted them to. And actually they don't now, it's been over 25 years and they still don't.
So I was up to learn that I am not a governor. I just got through this period for me to do this. This is a real hot point in my head and it's a little humorous now when I think back about it. But I spent this time, as I said, I was quite concerned. I couldn't find out who was running the deal. I didn't know where the money came from. I didn't know what the gimmick was. I knew there had to be something taking somewhere because these people were happy.
And I couldn't see where they were beating anybody out of anything and I didn't know how they were going to be happy unless they had some kind of gimmick going for them. Because to me this was life. But I found out by a few discreet insides that this steering committee was composed of these three members and they served 90 days and one was elected each 30 days. So there was a rotated steering committee and that you had to do several 90 days in order to serve on this committee.
And I didn't have 90 days so this kind of eliminated me from thinking and put me back a little bit in my ambition. And then we had a business meeting and it happened to be on the day that I was 75 days sober. And this was after I had had my six week slip and came back and became willing to go to any length which I said at any time. And I didn't know just how many lengths I was going to be forced to go through at the time and I might not have been so willing. But anyway, I missed the kitchen a lot on that night and I fell with a sort of mixed guilt and resentment.
I was really disappointed I didn't have 90 days so I could be elected on this steering committee and a little guilty because I felt that way. Because I was beginning to develop a sort of a conscience, maybe, to it. Because on the premise of this juice that was there, all those who had been sober in 90 days or more had already served on this steering committee. Now I said we had 15 or 20 members and out of that 15 or 20, possibly 3 or 4 of them had over a year.
So all those who were about like me, they came in and stayed a while and they got broken and left a while. But all those who had 90 days had already served on this steering committee. Well, it's kind of a hard-hearted thing and I think it was us who said, well, Carl is doing pretty good and he's only got 75 days but I make the motion that we raise these 15 days and elect him on the steering committee.
Would it be possible for me to tell you how thrilled I was with this? I mean, you would have to know just how low down I really was and I even thought I was lower down than that. And then when somebody is beginning to touch me, I think they did good and they voted unanimously to raise these 15 days and I was elected on this steering committee. Well, it's a good thing that they didn't have anything to do because I would have started out with a bullwhip and started getting it done. I served my 90 days on this steering committee and never had a meeting. But I was one of them.
But everyone, as you have seen, turned out to come and vote and vote to be a journalist. And that's why I was there. Now I know that I am a journalist. Now I know that no matter how wrong I think what you're doing is, and how detrimental to the group it might be, that there's not anything that I can do about it.
[00:30:11]
It has to be a matter for the group's benefit. I was one of the bloodiest of the bleeding deacons, and we had this problem, and this is not something new where people come in and want to run it. It's been all CAA. They call them car drivers. And I have seen so many of them born to earth just like I was a good many years ago by this group tactic. I don't care what the problem is, if you can get most of the members of any group together and sit down and talk about this problem with the right answer for the group and come forth, it just never fails.
I was sent to New York in the General Service Conference in 1954. And a matter that affected all of us delegates, not only the person that was there but the preceding two persons and the ones that followed. A matter came up and I was instructed to vote in one certain manner. And we voted. We got one out of a two-thirds majority, telling the business in the way that what it was, it was going to sort of persecute us smart people that had been elected delegates and let us come up to St. Louis free and be an honorary delegate in 55.
And actually it was written up in the original third-legacy motion that the first five senators would meet together in 1955 and see if they really wanted to adopt this as a whole. So we could never get that one extra vote. We could get 65, but we couldn't get 66. And we debated on that thing from around 10 o'clock in the morning until midnight. We had unusual, lengthy, windy discussions, including some by myself.
We had vote after vote. We had talk by bill. We had bonus minutes. We had all kinds of things come up and still we could not tell this thing the way that the majority wanted it. Bill got up at 12 o'clock and he said, well, even if we could get one more vote for this thing, that would be too soon. So that would mean that one vote out of every three I say would be unhappy. And he said, yes, and I think that's too late.
But let's go home and stay on this and come back and vote on it tomorrow. There were 75 delegates at that. He was qualified to vote. And we came back the next morning and I wish that we would have attention at midnight. And we gathered up in little balls and lapsed around there and talked the rest of the night. And we came back in session the next morning at 10 o'clock. And in five minutes we had voted unanimously the other way.
But we would not. But we would not try to protect ourselves and others. But we would not stay up there. But we would turn this over to a new panel of delegates in the next year. This is inconsistent work. I was a part of that group process because by honestly turning this over to God, I thought that the answer was yes, obviously. I went up there and stuck it to this leader, but the other way, I think, in effect, I said, sir, if I really wanted to be back up there at the delegate another year, that was my last year.
And it wasn't God's will that I did it. So we had no problem. It's just we can't just not take care of it. And this is the way that we do it. Each individual can give part of it over to this higher power. And then when we sit down together, we'll all feel the way it's supposed to be when we're ready to come out that way. The good, the good, and the bad is, uh, needs very little explanation. It says the only requirement for AA membership is a desire to stop working.
I don't mean, I don't mean at all. I mean, it's just what it says. It doesn't say that you have to regret a certain number of years or a certain amount of alcohol or you have to be in a certain number of jails.
[00:35:05]
It says if you have a desire to stop working, you are eligible for membership. It doesn't say you even have to be an alcoholic. It just says if you want to quit working, you are a member. Which is not always true. We used to see these numbers pretty close. We did a little bit of research into it. And boy, you talk about the most important thing is that you're doing research. But I was one of them. And you know, if I were to say, if you were to talk about somebody now, if somebody said, well, let's just say we're doing some certain things, you'd say, well, I don't really think he's an alcoholic.
Well, let me see what you say about it. You know, everybody will start looking at him and say, well, he don't act much like one. Well, I've told physicians, I've told them he has to be an alcoholic to be a member. All he's got to do is only quit working. It's hard for these people, these groups, to be autonomous. Especially in matters affecting other groups that are everywhere as a whole. They're not in any good shape, that.
They're a poor and disadvantaged group. They're the one that they're missing by a threshold. On a group level. Individually, it means that to me, I have a right to any opinion that I can live with in any age. I have a right to express that opinion. But I also have to give you the same certainly. Because if I want to be autonomous, you've got to be. But if we're going to be stable together, we've got to go back to that first tradition and have unity.
Who has very little problem nowadays with one group wanting to tell another how to run their business? We don't have as little of a problem as one individual wanting to tell each other how to run their business. So this works on a group level, and it also works for me on an individual level. I have tried on two or three different occasions, somebody that I love very dearly and I could see where they were headed straight together.
And I've gone to them and solicited and told them what I think they were letting themselves in for. I have been invited out of their house, I have been stood on, and I've been served. I don't make that mistake anymore. If you ask me my opinion of how you've been, I'll tell you just exactly what I think. And I'll tell you now, don't ask me to make you what I think about it, because I'm going to tell you right or wrong.
But I won't tell you, I'm not going to come up to you or anything else to give you any advice whatsoever. The best addition to each group has but one primary purpose, to send this message to the alcoholics that still suffer. And I don't think that any one of us could possibly make any perfect or any good apply it to our personal life. Until we assume that our primary purpose is to stay sober and help other alcoholics to achieve success.
So this group, or any other group that I remember of, our primary purpose is to stay sober and send the message to the alcoholics that still suffer. It doesn't mean that we've got to have a better clubhouse, or that we've got to have a better floor, or we've got to have this or that, it doesn't mean that we've got to have culture or anything. Our primary purpose is to carry the message to the alcoholics that still suffer.
And anything else that detracts from that is strictly against the tradition. So there are a lot of ways to carry this message to the alcoholics that still suffer. This doesn't happen to be the group that I'm aware of, the group that has just said hello here by pressing places like Corning Mills and the 24 House Club. And they've got some people that are going around and preaching this is strictly against the tradition.
If this group, here at Corning Mill, or here at the 24 House Club, or whatever they call this place now,
[00:40:01]
if we give them 10 bucks, if we give them 20 bucks, or if we buy a case of gasoline and go down there and hire some of them to meet us, we just aren't in time to carry the message to the alcoholics that still suffer. I got a call the other night, late at night, and I was tired, was unable to sleep, from a 14-year-old girl. And she said, someone told her, fell on her head and she's bleeding all over everything.
And said, will you talk to mommy? And mommy got on the phone and she said, I'm drunk. The brother girl is drunk. And they're calling and said, will you please come over? I said, I do want to take it myself. I got over there and I told the little girl to put some ice packs on her, bleeding, and stop the bleeding, and tell her to sit down and get up and do this. I got over there and she said, what can I do?
I mean, they're two great girls. One of them hurt, I don't know how bad. I'm not a doctor. I don't prescribe pills. I called Connie May, she wasn't there. She said, I'll get a hold of her and call you right back. And I said, can I bring her? You sent your man there? Yes. Now, you know that if it got down to a matter of dollars and cents, that would have been worth a whole lot of money to me. I didn't have any place to take it.
I couldn't keep them both up because they were fighting like cats and dogs together. I had to get them separated. I couldn't lock one of them in the head and work on the other one. That's not ethical. I had to do something. So if you're going to set up something like that, because this is not the group that I'm going to go down and make this talk in the group that's just been going on, and I hope I'm not caught about it soon if I have been this week.
If you can tell me that the money that this group takes out, that that group takes and can pay them as I asked to do and donate it to a place like Connie May's, if that's not spiritual money, if that's not the primary purpose of this group sharing the message to the alcoholics, to the sufferers, then you don't see this thing the way I do. You'd be lying to yourself. This is kind of all over now. And this has happened not just at Connie May's.
They were members in the other women's center. I thought we were going to do it together. I think that's what we did. These places are necessary. And when you tell me that it's against the traditions and what's important is the church tradition, it says, I don't agree, I don't know the support, I don't know the support, finance on the NDAA names or any related facility or outside enterprise. That's probably the property money and can't be diverted from our primary purpose.
If you're going to tell me that taking $10 out and giving it to this group because they got it to start and giving it down there is diverting us from the primary purpose, you see the traditions different from me. If you're going to tell me that contributing money to that other group, and I heard this, not at this group, but at another group that I'm teaching at these types too and the traditions not too well.
Why should I contribute to the other group? What do they do for me? By God, I'm sober. They don't have to do anything for me. The thing is, I was up there today for maybe 40, 45 minutes and Carla was all sick and losing all by herself and all of that period of time she had just about five minutes to talk to me. She was talking on two phones and turning them on and punching buttons and I keep, get somebody there, I call her, I do it all the time.
If you're going to tell me that the money you contribute to any group is not AA money, if that's not spiritual money, and people will tell you And people will say, why should I spend three dollars a year to give you a service in court?
[00:45:00]
What do they do for me? You know, AA put me in a position to do for myself. They put me in a position to where I could make enough money to live comfortably on and have a few dollars over. And I heard Bill say one time that money that we use in this way is not material. He said that that dime that's in, that dime that's in February 5th was a nickel in New York. He said that dime that Eddie spent, come over and see him, and he put a nickel in there to get over and a nickel to get back.
So that was not material. So that was spiritual money. So that dollar worth of gas money that you sent me across to go out and make this pile in the middle of the night, is not material money. That's spiritual money. And you know, if that General Services Headquarters or that Alcoholics Foundation hadn't been there to keep these little geeks alive in Houston, after 9-3-0, so that it was here when I got here in 1942 and got ready, I'd be dead.
They don't have to do anything new for me. I've been getting $2 a year for marriage for a long time. And it won't hurt me any if it was make the same kind of money but for some other poor sick alcoholic. But if you work in a job that pays over $10, you ought to be working more. I mean, when you get a $15-dollar a year job, you take that $8-dollar a year job up to work in General Services Headquarters and see, double the work, you almost half the money.
Thank you. So anyway, I appreciate that $1,000,000 comment. And anyway, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, outside enterprise, let's talk a little bit about the money. And trust me, believe me, that you're not going to get out of here and live here in the state financial institutions, these tax creditors that will take you in if you've got $125 in your hip pocket. The alcoholics that need help and wonder they've got $125 in their hip pocket.
So I put my money where the need is. And many of us, I think, the biggest problem that I've seen in my time is AA Goose was just starting up a rehabilitation center or something. They were Indianapolis started one back in the early fifties. And the Goose ran it. And you could stay there for five days for $125 to pay it in advance. And I was up there in 55 or 56. And they took me out and they were telling me it was a nice good.
I'll tell you that it was nice. Tell you that it was. And they wanted to know what I thought about it. And what did they want me to say? I said, well, if I don't have $125 and I got ready for it, I'd have gone and got dressed with you. I said, I come down here. So I couldn't, I didn't have the money. I said, if I didn't have the $125 to get in, I'd be dead now. Well, I see the time is going faster than I have.
As soon as I get through listening, as soon as I get through talking, as soon as every other shit person gets started, by 9 o'clock they get up and go home. Keep talking, man. I said, hold on a minute. Keep talking. My parents' position has only been about to be $25 to pay it. The county outside contribution. We don't have much trouble with that anymore. We don't have much trouble getting the members to contribute when they do the county outside contribution.
I haven't had any problems like that for a long time. Look. The problem here in the past has been that people are, people are real mean people. And I saw this in a group where those boys come in and we buy half alcoholics and buy half nuts. And maybe 50% nuts and 40% alcoholics. And we've seen some real wealthy farm men and he lived sort of like a hog and we got him in the jeep and he got sober and he washed up and he shaved and he started wearing shoes
[00:50:00]
and some of these rich relatives got real proud of him. And they wanted to do a whole lot to this jeep. Oh, they bought him a good old master's degree of female. They bought him a hi-fi set and a PA system and a bunch of speakers to go around the room and then emphasize all kinds of stuff like that. Nobody said anything about the county outside contribution. They bragged about what a wonderful thing they were doing for the jeep.
And then they're saying the 1890s had some real estate that the taxes were just eating them up, right? And they couldn't rent it so they were going to give it up to the jeep. And while they started going to the banks and did that buying money to rehabilitate this house and buy some adjacent land for a parking lot and going to the… How many days were they going first time? And they kept on hanging this long, drawn-out biscuit about it.
And the meeting went on just like this the entire certain time and they were still talking and talking and talking and… You know what they were talking about? They wasn't talking about whether they accepted him. I think they were worried about what they were going to do with him. You know what I mean? Every smart immigrant child had a smart idea about what they were going to do with him. And finally somebody asked me what I thought.
And I said, well, I don't know. I said, I haven't heard anybody making that kind of prediction yet. I said, that says that we don't take these things. Well, I've eaten out of the store. I didn't get out of the land safe I had to talk. Well, they hadn't even gotten the property yet. It had just been supposed that they'd get it. Incidentally, they never did. But just the idea that they were going to get it down here broke up the group because they couldn't make up their mind what they were going to do with it when they got it.
They sat there and argued from 10 or 11 o'clock in the night about what they were going to do with it. They couldn't… Nobody could see that just the idea that they were going to get something that they were going to work for. So you can see the value of this tradition. Now, for me… Well, let's go way back. I remember, you know, I said it ought to be fully self-supported. You know, the only way it can be self-supported is for me to put something in that basket when it comes back, if I got it.
It took me a long time to get courage enough to not put something in there if I didn't have it to start. I probably developed that much courage. But if I got it to start and think, you know, I put it in there. But I can remember when I first got out of the service, and this was really… not too good for me. I mean, I don't mind admitting it now, because it's been 21 years ago. But… And we didn't have the tradition then either.
So I used to say, you know, boy, So I used to say, you know, boy, that's earned a long-run hit in some milk plants outside of San Antonio. And probably… And I was an iron worker, making $1.37 a horse just to iron. And they tied that basket, and I put in, maybe put in a dollar, and I said, well, if you put in a dollar, and figure out quick, well, a dime would be a big contribution for me. And I said, well, I hate to put in a dime, so I took the iron to the damn train wheel.
Sometimes. I don't get it. You know, if it works, if… I don't know. Maybe I think I blame myself for the things that I do too much, because they're the only things that I love. I mean, they're the things that I do do. I don't do them for personal things. I don't remain them for personal things. They're just the way things work. It's worked for me for 25 years. I had a $50 farm down here two or three months ago.
And most of it had been tossed into junk dumps. I mean, I got a call and it was about 2 o'clock in the morning, person-to-person selection. They talked for an hour and a half. You can't turn them down.
[00:55:01]
But you know, at the same time that I got this bill for $50, that was for a month, I was working in a job that just the overtime and the time definition for working a month was $56 a week. When I came to say to her, I said, she said, God, that's a heck of a big bill. I said, just be glad we got it. That's a big deal. Money's not important. Just say you got enough to get by. He said, he said, he said, he said, he said.
First condition for the alcoholics' man was to remain for over nine to take care of what our service centers may employ as special workers. Well, that doesn't have much barrier on me. I've never hired out. So if I went to work at the standard group office, or if I went to work in New York, or if I went to work in this one time I considered doing, working for the state, not in the alcoholics' anonymous field, but in the alcoholics' field.
I'm not educated on alcoholics. On alcohol, what did he do to me? He said, what you doing? They were saying to me, it can be the person that just killed me. If I made a fair conversation out of it, I'd take money for it. But I have never heard yet of a person taking money to make an impression. I said, the alcoholics' anonymous can remain for over nine to take care of. Most everybody that I know that works in the field of alcoholism, with the members of alcoholics' anonymous does just about five to eight that they'd have to do in a comparable civilian job for just about half a minute.
And we justify ourselves, and that's why I always charge them for doing cross-cut working, which they said can't. They're doing something that we have to pay a lot of alcoholics a hell of a lot more to get them to do, and they wouldn't be willing to get a job at it. And that's the difference, that all our stuff might never be organized. But anyway, he is firmly towards us committed to directly responsible for those they serve.
To me, this means that if this group elects me on a committee to do something, I have been on committees. The general service area committee elected me to be chairman of one of the two departments down here. And I was responsible for that general service committee that elected me, and that general service committee was responsible for the groups that elected me in. That's real. But I was responsible also to do the best job that I knew how to do in that field.
That was my responsibility, to do well. Of course, in addition to that, all it's anonymous, I take too many positions, and that's sad. Uh… I can't help but get it. That's how it is. But, you know, it may not never be done in a public conference, that'll get me confused. This means that in politics, or religion, or anything, other than the group business, we've got no concluded opinion. I have a personal opinion on a lot of things.
I made a conference in Louisiana here in Goldwater, where I was the chair of the group. There was, uh, about 150 people there, and it was up in northern Louisiana, and every damn one of them had a Goldwater butt name. And I'm a die-hard reporter, a business reporter. And just before the meeting, one of the people had invited me up and said, what do you think about this Goldwater business? And I said, I think anybody would vote for him over Haley's Hood, exactly.
And everybody there disagreed with me on that. And 30 minutes later, they was all sitting there listening to me making A.A. talk, and there was no disagreement on that. So we can't make a decision on outside issues. We have no, we have no opinion. Alcoholics Anonymous cannot have an opinion on outside issues without destroying ourselves. Between 18 and 50, there were six guys got together and decided they wanted to quit working.
Together and decided they wanted to quit working and they were alcoholics, and they called themselves the Washingtonians, and this was in 1860, this was over a hundred years ago, in ten years they had a hundred thousand members of the Washingtonians, that would be comparable probably to over a million today, so they took in everybody, and they endorsed candidates, and they took a position on, on
[01:00:19]
every political issue, they went into one little town in Massachusetts and joined up their whole damn bunch, men, women, and children, and two years later nobody knew anything about the Washingtonians, the only people that they knew of which they told was their six guys that started it, so maybe I'm in the drunk business, I know about that, I thought I knew a little about the drugs I was doing yesterday and I found out I don't know too much about that, but I do know about the drunk business, I know what it'll do to you, I know how sick you're going to be and I know how afraid you are and how scared, and how guilty you feel, and I know what that remorse is, I know a lot of stuff I don't know, but I know that for a fact, and I know it's in central little things that they taught me twenty-five years ago that if you follow, you'll stay sober, and you will too, the eleventh tradition, that our public relations policy is based on attraction rather than promotion, which we already know and that may be a hint we need to always maintain personal anonymity at level, especially when you're in jail, now this tradition is originally brought forth and made necessary because back in the early days there were a lot of big shots, I remember one particular case where a very famous baseball player, a manager, he wasn't playing anymore, he was a manager, he joined O-8, and every sports page in the country had a big write-up about this, this wonderful thing, how wonderful it was that so and so could join O-8 and quit drinking, and everybody in the sports field knew what a drunk he'd be, but all the baseball players that drank too much had to join O-8, this was just fine, but next year when he got drunk that didn't look so good, what we need to do, I don't know, people, a lot of people, my way of thinking, overdo this anonymity bit, the way a slave, and I've seen this happen, particularly with girls, and girl alcoholics have a lot more trouble than boy alcoholics do, but they go out and get a job and they'll be scared to death to tell anybody that they belong to O-8, and they'll stay there long enough, they like the job real well, and then they'll be scared to death that some other member of O-8 is going to come by there and shoot them, and so they live in a constant fear, they're afraid they didn't tell them when they started, they're afraid to go tell them now, and then they're afraid that they'll find it out and some other way and they'll lose their job, you know anything that builds tension in me is something that I need to eliminate, and I decided a long time ago that I wouldn't work for a man that didn't hire me because I was a member of alcoholics anonymous, I wouldn't, I wouldn't, if he got more money I don't want to work for him, but I really didn't get along with that a lot of times probably, he wouldn't do any good for me to go down, and this is my personal opinion, he wouldn't do any good for me to go down and get on the radio or the television and say my name is Carl Hartman, I'm an alcoholic, but he saw that, he thinks he's more than damn few, so what, but the main thing that this division has done is maintain good relations with the press, radio and news because in the early days, now those of you who haven't been here for a long time don't remember, but in the early days the news stations and all of the news media was looking for the gimmicks in this thing, he published a massive public article, an article that Jack Alexander wrote in the Saturday Evening Post, Jack Alexander was a hard cynical reporter, and he excused the two top baby standers and had hard cynics put in the penitentiary, and he had just finished that exposé and AA was beginning to get a little prominence around New York, and John Lee Rockefeller had endorsed it and several other big businessmen, and so the publisher of the Saturday Evening Post said it looks like we've got something going over there, go over there and find out what the gimmick is,
[01:05:15]
and he came in with all sorts of stuff before him and finished with him and looking for the gimmick, and four months later he wrote the article that bought so many copies of the Sunday Evening Post, including myself. Now if he had gone anywhere and found a book of self-teaching or publicity-teaching people, he couldn't have written an article like that. There are such good self-relations now that every once in a while somebody in their exuberance will break down a ministry on a national level and the newspapers will suppress the ministry, without us even asking them to.
It reached the point when they wanted to make a movie in 1955 about alcoholic anonymous, they went with that bill and said it was a conspiracy to see that none of its traditions were violated. That's what this enormous tradition has done. And this means to me that whatever I do, I do it to keep me savory. I don't do it to gain your savor or to get by your gossip. I don't seek credit for anything, because I am working in serfdom. The only problems that I've ever had since I've been serfdom, God knows I've had a lot of them, every one of them has involved personality.
No one of us in here is any better than another. One person here, I've said this several times, when I was in the hospital and my very life depended and helped some new people, just like it did 25 years ago when I came here, there were three people that saved us. It so happened that those three people were people that I was real close to at that time. But there are thousands of people in our area that I have been just as close to or that would be just as willing or would have been just as capable of setting up their risk trading when she insisted that I needed encouragement to live, not just to get well, but to live.
And the doctors own statement, they were done. And I haven't heard one of them yet get out and beg about it. Thank you.