DICOBE-00621 – Talbot H – KANSAS STATE CONF – 1970-09-26

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Source: DICOBE-00621 – Talbot H – KANSAS STATE CONF – 1970-09-26.mp3 File: dicobe-00621-talbot-h-kansas-state-conf-1970-09-26.mp3 Duration: 01:28:56

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Thank you, Dale. Hi, folks. Can y'all hear me all right back there in the back? One of these things is sort of like a ballroom spit tune. If you don't get exactly the right range on it, you just make a hell of a mess. Y'all have a custom out here that we don't have back at home. It's a surprise to me. My granddaddy always told me that when in Rome, shoot Roman candles or something. So my name is Talbot Haygood, and I am an alcoholic. And through the grace of a kind and a loving God, and through the teachings of wonderful people like you, it has not been necessary for me to take a drink of anything containing alcohol. Since the third Friday night in November, 1950. Since that time, I've been drunk a lot of times, but it won't necessary. Like Dale, I don't believe I've ever seen this many people.

And it don't take but about five out there to get me a little upset. But if you bear with me for a couple of hours, we'll get through this somehow. I don't know why, but when I get up in front of one of these things, every time my hands get wet and my dentures get loose, and I want to go to the bathroom. I heard a story a while back that kind of explains how I feel. It's a story they tell of this B-29 crew back during World War II. They'd been all through basic training together, and they could almost anticipate each other's thoughts. And it was a good time.

It was a good crew, but one member, the navigator, had a slight speech impediment. He stammered. And when he got nervous, he couldn't talk at all. But as the story goes, they took off from Langley Field late one night, headed for England. They got out two or three hours over the Atlantic, and everything was quiet, going along real smooth. Some of the fellows were reading, some listening to the radio. All of a sudden, the intercom popped and cracked, and this very excited voice said, he said, navigate, pilot, right engine is on fire. And the captain, with a very calm voice said, Well, that's all right. We'll just feather that prop and blow that fire out. We'll go on on one engine. We'll be all right. He said, Ohh, okay.

Some two or three hours later, they were out past the point of no return. Most of the crew was asleep. Even the captain, he had the ship set on automatic pilot and he too was asleep. And all of a sudden the intercom popped again and this very excited voice said, Navigate, pilot, that damn left engine is on fire now. Captain said, Well, that's all she wrote. We don't have a choice. We just hit the ship. He said, Hell, I can't do it. I ain't never done it.

Captain said, Well, there's nothing to it. Let the rest of the crew bail out and you meet me at the back door. I'll show you. He said, Oh, okay. A few minutes later, the rest of the crew's gone and the captain and the navigator standing at the door and the captain says, You just catch hold of this ring and fall head first. Count to ten and pull this ring and you just float gently down just like a feather. He said, Oh, okay. Captain's gone.

They're up about 3,000 feet and when the captain got down about 50 feet from the water, something went by him like a battle to hell. This is the navigator and when he went by, Captain heard him say, Six.

[00:05:01]

I can't hesitate to tell you why I was raised here. This is why I was raised. Because like everybody in AA except Dave, it was in a Christian home. And we hear this so often, you can't help but wonder, maybe this ain't a bad place to try to raise children. But I was raised under these conditions by a very wonderful mother and father. And I can't for the life of me think of any real reason that I might have had for drinking.

Certainly no reason at all for me becoming the town drunk at 14 years old. All of the psychiatrists and so-called experts say that there is a reason for every drunk drinking. And I used to argue with these people. But I've had the misfortune of dealing with nine of them over the years. And I can't argue with them because all nine of them came up with the same identical reasons for my alcoholism. They said it was because of an inferiority complex due to these scars on my face.

The last one told me that a drink or two of whiskey made me feel like I was the other fellow's equal. As I say, I never argued with these kind of people because every one of them I ever got hooked up with seemed to be screwed up enough as it was. But screwy as that theory might sound, I think there's some semblance of truth in it. I was burned in a house fire when I was 18 months old. And for most of my, all of my drinking life, in fact up until my early 20s, I had no ears.

Three-fourths of my face was covered in scars. I couldn't close my mouth, nor could I completely close my eyes. And I know as a child I was more than a little sensitive about this, because I'll never forget the first day that I attended public school, seven years old. Nobody had ever told me that I looked any different from other children, and I was not aware of it. But at what we called Little Recess, all the children went out to play.

And as I remember, they were all in a circle. And when I tried to get into that circle, one little tough country boy turned and he spit in my face. And he said, you scarred-faced SOB, we don't want you to play with us. And he knocked me down. I discovered that day that I had temper. Because when the teacher came out, this little boy was unconscious and I was choking him and beating his head against the rock.

The teacher asked just one question, who hit the first lick? All the children said, Talbot did. She sent this little boy's sister after a switch, and she came back with a limb off of the cementry. And that teacher gave me a whipping. Back in old days in the country, we had a rule at our house that if you get a whipping at school, you get two more when you get home. After I got that whipping, the teacher wrote a note to my parents and sent me home.

On my way home, I was thinking, well, just wait till I tell Mom. She'll fix that teacher. But she didn't. She fixed me. And she sent me upstairs to bed. All that afternoon, I was telling myself, well, just wait till the old man gets home. He'll fix them all.

[00:10:03]

But he didn't. He fixed me again. For the next 25 years, I was not capable of feeling any emotion for another human being except pure, unadulterated hate, including my own mother and father. I hear people say they are born alcoholics. I don't know that I was born one. But I know that that day, my first day in public school, I acquired an awful lot of the characteristics of an alcoholic. So when the psychiatrist said that two or three drinks made me feel like I was the other fellow's equal, I didn't argue, but I knew he was wrong.

Because two drinks of white liquor always did put me so high above and so far ahead of everybody else that, hell, they looked pitiful to me. And after three drinks, well, I just took over. If I was at a party, it became my party. And I told everybody just what to do and exactly how to do it. If I was at a dance, it became my dance. And everybody danced the way I wanted to dance. The orchestra played just what I wanted to dance to.

If they didn't, then me and the orchestra leader, we'd step outside a minute, or like it or not, I'd take a poke at them right there on the floor. You know the taste. Just an ornery, troublemaking, fighting drunk. Don't know if they ever whipped anybody much, but I made a hell of a lot of folks whip me. You can understand, too, why in a very small town with a population of 90-some people, after a short while of this kind of drinking, I found myself to be a mighty lonesome boy.

I wasn't invited to parties. And I couldn't find my way into a dance if I'd ever been to one there before. It got so I won't even welcome in church because all the preachers around home soon woke up to the fact that any time they saw me sitting in the congregation, they could expect me to come around when the service was over to tell them how much I had enjoyed the sermon. How much it had meant to me.

How it had shown me all my mistakes and just what to do about them. And how if he'd just let me have about two bucks till I could get on my feet, I was going to be one of his strongest church folks. I had more drunks financed by preachers than any other one class of folks. Well, I managed to get through high school and without learning anything. They gave me a diploma, not because I had met any of the scholastic standards of the school, but just to make sure I didn't come back another year.

My daddy gave me one shot at college. I went out to West Virginia to Bluefield College. I enrolled in September and I come enrolled in November. Just before Christmas holiday, they asked me not to come back for the good of the school. Well, I came home that Christmas full of a lot of good promises and a lot of good intentions and a lot of good liquor. I was going to settle down and get a job, and I got a job.

I got a whole lot of them. But somehow I couldn't seem to hold one more than just one payday. And my daddy must have had a soft spot in his heart somewhere for me because he let me lay around home all that winter drunk. But I reckon I just sort of wore him out Every Monday morning he'd come down or he'd send somebody down to pay my fine and get me out. But the following spring when the weather began to get a little warmer, he took me out in the front yard one morning.

U.S. Route 360 run right by his door. Well, he showed me the road. And he said, son, I don't know what your trouble is or what you're going to do about it, but you're going to do it somewhere else. And he said, till you get yourself straightened out and quit drinking altogether, you just stay gone. I was 16 years old. And I had felt nothing for this gentleman since I was 7 years old except contempt.

And I resented it, being sent away from home.

[00:15:27]

living or existing with just one thought in mind, that next drink. During these four years I saw a lot of country, drank a lot of liquor and a lot of other stuff, got to know a lot of judges and jailers, enjoyed the hospitality and temporary employment of a lot of towns and cities. My headquarters was the nearest city of any size, Lynchburg, Virginia, some sixty miles from my father's home, because I felt sure that it would be just a matter of a short time before he'd realize he'd made a big mistake, that he needed me.

I couldn't have been more wrong. But there in Lynchburg, Virginia, they had what we called a jelly roll, a very special sentence for drunks and a standard sentence. Five and a half pounds, eleven days on the city farm. And I remember along about 1938, pulling three of those jelly rolls in thirty-three days. They'd get us up every morning at five-thirty or five o'clock and they'd feed us at five-thirty and load us on the truck at six and take us into the courthouse and turn us loose.

I'd go down on Main Street and put the bee on a couple of live ones and get me a jug. I'd get picked up and back in front of the judge and pick up another eleven days and be back at the city farm for lunch. In AA we hear a whole lot of talk about controlled sociable drinking and uncontrolled alcoholic drinking and that thin invisible line that separates one from the other. I think maybe it was right along about here that I crossed the line.

Because you pull three eleven-day sentences in thirty-three days, you ain't handling it too good. And I don't know where all this might have ended, but on September 16, 1940, when I went before Judge McCarron for the eighty-fifth time, they tried eighteen of us that morning in a bunch and they read everybody's service record and one old fellow that had been before this judge a hundred and twelve times, but he was older than me.

But I noticed when we were marched into the courtroom that something new had been added. Because along one wall there was a row of tables and behind each one there was a recruiting officer from some branch of service. That morning Judge McCarron, instead of giving us the customary jelly roll, gave us a choice of either a hitch in one of these branches of service or a year and a day on the state road.

Well, that afternoon I became a soldier. Not because of patriotism or anything as foolishly sentimental as that, but simply because I thought the Army had more to offer a man of my ability than the highway department. But when they marched us out of the courtroom that morning in columns of twos, I was walking alongside of an old boy and he and I were leading the column. An old boy that weighed over a hundred and ninety-five or two hundred pounds and was about six feet four or four and a half and he was all man.

His name was Ham Masters. And remember that name. I may mention it again tonight. But when we came out of the front of the courtroom there was a recruiting poster by the door, one of these big cast iron things on a big heavy frame. And it showed a picture of a soldier and a sailor and a marine standing at attention holding the flag and right under it it said, Our Nation's Finest. Ham reached and picked this thing up and they marched us on down the steps, two blocks to Main Street, eight blocks up Main to Twelfth and then four blocks up Twelfth to the Armory.

[00:20:11]

Sixteen and the raggedest, scurviest looking bunch of bums you've ever seen in one congregation following a banner which read, Our Nation's Finest. And a picture of that outfit came out on the front page of next morning's paper and right under it it said, God Save the Commonwealth. Well the Army didn't stop me from drinking. It changed my drinking pattern a little. Whereas before I'd been able to devote twenty-four hours a day to drinking or bumming something to drink.

In the Army they expected me to work about four hours. Other than that I didn't find it too different in civilian life. I was called to jail by different names, Stockade or Brig. I was spending the customary time in it. But somehow I didn't take to that Army life too well. I resented all that discipline and had to pretend respect for a bunch of people that just weren't as smart as I was. And after about seven court-martials I went too far from getting one of them blue slips.

That's not exactly a dishonorable discharge, but well it ain't the kind your wife frames and hangs in the living room either. And I was mighty close to getting one, but in 1941 during the Louisiana Maneuvers, I was riding a motorcycle doing escort duty from Indian Town Gap and Fort Hollowberry down to Fort Benning, Georgia, and Fort Bragg, North Carolina, escorting convoys. And early one morning just outside of Richmond, Virginia, me and the motorcycle and the guardrail poles tangled, and I wound up in Walter Reed Hospital up in Washington with a leg crushed through the back.

And the first few days I was up there, it looked like I was going to lose my leg and I was pretty sick. And when I realized it, I had been sober without a drink of anything for a whole month. This is the first time anything like that had happened to me since I was 13 years old. And for some reason I sort of began to take stock of myself. To look back on the past six years and what I saw when looking back wasn't very pretty.

For six years before I had walked out or been asked out of a good home, had passed up a much better than average opportunity of making some money myself, and had set out on my own fully confident I could do as well or probably better than any of my folks had ever done. But now six years later, what did I have to show for my effort? A home? The Army was all the home I had. I knew if I lost my leg I'd be discharged, and I figured a service record with seven coat marches on it would keep me from being captured in a veteran's home.

Money, I had $50 coming next payday. And what had I made of myself? A one-legged drunken bum. I felt pretty sorry for myself. But what could I do about it? I couldn't think of but one thing. Down on Ward 11, every night about 8.30 or quarter to 9, the little nurses came down through the ward getting everybody fixed up for the night. Some of the fellows got a shot. Some of them got a capsule or pill.

Some of them got just a back rub and a smile. That night, Private Higwood in bed 13 got right near a full quart of rubbing alcohol that somehow got misplaced while the nurse was fixing bed 14. Along about 3 o'clock next morning, they rolled me into a private room, blind, stinking drunk, and raising holy hell. I was a patient at Walter Reed for 3 years and 27 days. And except for that first month, you could very easily and very accurately say it was just one long drunk.

[00:25:02]

Good liquor wasn't too hard to get. Wine was easier because it was cheaper. And that rub-a-dub was everywhere. You could buy a 4-ounce bottle for most any ward boy for 15 cents. And it was while I was at Walter Reed that I had my first case of DT. Somehow I had missed them up until now. But I remember it was during a particularly long and hard session with that rub that one night in the middle of the night I run out.

You remember what that was like. But I got up and in the dark I went through everybody's wall locker and I gathered up all the bottles I could find and put them in a pillowcase and made it back to my bunk. And I fumbled around in there and I picked out the biggest bottle I had and got it open and I took a big dust cutter. Four or five big swabs. But as it turned out, it wasn't Aquavelva or Lucky Tiger or anything as palatable as that.

It was Clenzo shampoo. I could blow all them bubbles out but I couldn't get none of them back. And this little Mexican kid in the bunk next to me, he seen me foaming at the mouth. He figured I'm having some kind of a fit so he called the nurse and they rushed me over to the emergency room and I swallowed yards and yards of that hose and while they was pumping me out, I blew up. And they transferred me from there over to Ward 16.

Or as we called it up there, I went over and joined the yo-yo squad. After a few days when they got me so I could stay on the ground, they turned me over to an old colonel who at that time was said to have been one of the most successful psychiatrists in the country in dealing with our kind of people. He got me in his office and he took a little rubber hammer and he tapped all of my joints. Took a pair of calipers and measured my skull.

Asked me about a million questions, the kind I wouldn't ask a dog. And all the time he's doing this, he's writing. In three weeks he wrote a book on me about the size of Gone with the Wind. And that's exactly what I thought I was too. Finally, when he had me just about nuts, he told me one morning, he said, that does it, Haggard. He showed me his notes stacked about that high. He said, a solution to all your problems is right here in these notes.

Hell, my whole family history was in there. He said, I'm going to have to study these for a few days and in the meantime I want you to go back to your room and just take it easy. And he said, try not to worry too much because we might be able to do something for you. Well, now all this had scared the living hell out of me. I never had had DTs before and had all them little bitty little people climbing up from in my pajama jacket and out the pillowcase.

I mean people I knew. Now a whole lot of them were dead. So I went back to my room or to my cell, but I didn't take it easy. I walked the floor night and day. Except when they'd flip me something to knock me out. My stomach hurt. I couldn't eat. I figured that's ruptured ulcers. Him measuring my head with them calipers, that's cancer of the brain or at least a small tumor. So I even began wondering what my funeral was going to be like.

There I was 200 miles from home. I didn't know nobody except the patients over on Ward 11. They all bed patients. They couldn't come. I could think of a whole lot of folks back home that would enjoy very much seeing me put away, but I couldn't picture none of them driving 200 miles for it. So that left me and the chaplain and the bugler and the pawguys and the firing squad. The Paul Giles and the firing squad, and I was the only one in the bunch, I even knew.

[00:30:00]

So I won't get no better. One morning, the little nurse opens the peephole and she said, The colonel wants to see you. I walked in his office and he didn't help a thing, none. He said, Sit down, son, and get a grip on yourself. Says, I got some bad news for you. He said, Before I tell you what I've discovered, I want to talk to you a few minutes about alcohol. Well, that was all right, because right about then, a pint of rum would have been about two good drinks.

He said, Son, whiskey can kill a man three ways. Says, It can ruin his stomach. And my ulcer started burning. He said, It can ruin his liver. Just make it harden until it stops working. Mine felt like a rock. And he said, It can affect a man's mind. He says, Now don't let this throw you, boy, but your mind might not ever be normal again. Well, it didn't throw me. Hell, it didn't faze me. My mind never had been normal.

And then he said, Much as I hate to tell you this, in studying your case history, I have discovered that you are an alcoholic. How about that? This old genius, for three weeks, done worried the hell out of me with his hammers and his calipers and them embarrassing questions, and then left me for two more weeks walking the floor wondering if they were going to bury me next Sunday evening or early Monday morning, while he was studying.

And then after all this research, he comes up with this amazing discovery, something I know back in grammar school. I think maybe I did go a little off there for a while. It was a few days before anybody could get close to me, if anything, except to get cussed at. But there at Walter Reed, they had what we called a cocoon shaking. They had these long white sheets that they rolled and wrapped you in till you couldn't move nothing but your eyeball.

And they had these two big colored balls, one on each end. And they had two tubs of water. It was about two minutes past freezing and the other just before boiling. And they just dunk you in the first one and then the other. Well, it don't make no difference how mad you are, you get over it. And it won't long till I ended up back in the colonel's office, and he was real nice to me, he always was. But this time he used a little different approach.

He said that in his opinion, since I had been drinking so many different kinds of stuff for so long, and since alcohol seemed to play such a major part in my personality makeup that he thought should be dangerous, certainly foolish for me to even try to quit, that instead I ought to learn how to drink, like a gentleman. Well, I didn't know gentlemen drank. But he said they did, but not rubbing alcohol.

And Solox and Clenzo shampoo. He said gentlemen drank mixed drinks. And if they didn't drink them, about a quart or half a gallon. He said a gentleman at a party or dance during the course of an evening would have one or two, certainly not more than three drinks. And I remember thinking a gentleman must have mighty weak stomachs. But after a few days of this kind of hogwash, he told me one evening, that since I was responding to treatment so nicely and get along so well, he thought it would be safe to let me go back to my own ward, and that provided I could find some reliable person to go with me, and he might even arrange for me to get an overnight pass to go over town.

Well, there on Ward 16, there was a little nurse. She was from Macon, Georgia, pretty little thing. We called her Peachy. I'd been talking to her ever since I'd been over there, and well, just judging from the way she talked, I figured she'd be mighty reliable for a pass. She had promised to go out with me, if I ever got out. And sure enough, in a few days, I had me a pass, and the date with Peachy was raring to go.

That afternoon, when we went by the colonel's office to pick up the pass,

[00:35:03]

he threw a little cold water on my plan. He said, hey, get on this pass, you've got 24 hours, but I want you to take just one drink. I thought, that's a hell of a way to treat a man who's been locked up for six weeks. But we went on, and we ended up in a real nice place down in Washington, and Peachy knew about it. A place with about 15, 20 tables, and about twice that many people. After the waiter had gotten us seated, Peachy told him we'd have something to drink before we ate, and he brought us the whiskey menu, I reckon you call it.

I looked at it, I couldn't pronounce half of it on it. So I called the waiter back, and I said, Doc, what's the biggest drink you got? Well, he looks down his nose at me like I ain't real clean, and he points to something down near the bottom of the page he said was mighty popular. It was Blue Blazer. Two dollars. Two dollars sounded like a hell of a price to pay for one drink, but, well, the name of the thing kind of appealed to me.

A Blue Blazer sounded like a right potent drink for a gentleman. So I ordered one, and Peachy ordered something, and in a few minutes he'd come back with a little thing about big as a egg cup. Had an olive in it with a little ginger ale or something splashed over it. That's for Peachy. For me, he's got a thing about big as a milkshake shaker. Got a good pint of liquor in it, and I thought, Look out, Colonel, I'm going to be late getting home.

Well, he set it down in front of me, and then done what I thought was the damnedest fool's thing I ever seen a white man do. He struck a match to it and set the fire. Now, I hadn't been used to nothing like that. Back home, sometimes we'd accidentally spill a little white liquor on the table or on the floor, and we'd set the fire just for fun, but, well, hell, the two dollars was over, I wasn't playing.

I looked around, and there wasn't nobody else paying no attention to it. Peachy's sitting right there at it. She wasn't upset. And I was just an old country boy. I didn't know nothing. But I knowed I wasn't going to pay two dollars for a drink, sit and watch it burn up. So that takes me a deep breath and pulls it down. Fire and off. I still think it ought to be against the law to sell a man a thing like that without either telling him what to do or at least ask him if he knows what the hell he's doing.

Peachy said my neck run out about a foot and looked like a red streak. I turned red all over. I upset the table right behind me trying to get out, but before I could get to the front door, two big waiters grabbed me, one on each arm, and on out through the kitchen to the back door and dumped me out in the ass. By the time I got out to the sidewalk, the MPs had come, and they took me on over town somewhere and locked me up.

That was the longest night I ever spent in anybody's day. I drank water out of everything in there. Next morning, the old colonel come down and got me and took me back to Ward 16. That afternoon, we was all in his office. Peachy was telling him what happened because I couldn't speak above a whisper. Peachy said he'd scared her away, damn near killed me. I just give up all hopes of ever being a gentleman drinker.

I knowed I just didn't have your stomach for it. The old colonel, I reckon, was a little bit disgusted with me because it weren't long when they got me so I could eat a little soup and drink a little milk. He gave me my discharge one morning. He said, go on home, Haggard, and quit worrying. He said, drink your liquor and have your fun. He said, you probably won't live long, but when you die, you won't know the difference.

[00:40:04]

I had been home once before on a convalescent furlough in between operations. I had gotten married. Something else I did drunk. And I was glad to get that discharge. The war was still going on. Everybody's still feeling patriotic. It wasn't hard for a veteran to get a job, especially one on crutches. And I ended up with a pretty good job. I was a telegraph operator for the Southern Railroad. On the strength of having a good job, using the GI bill as well, I managed to borrow a few thousand dollars to build a home.

It's a cinder block house. It's supposed to have been a brick house, but I drank up the brick while it lay in the block. Everything was going along real good, I thought. I was doing just like the colonel said. I wasn't worrying. I was drinking my liquor, and I didn't think it was bothering nobody. But one night I copied a message off the wire that said for me to be in Richmond, Virginia at the chief dispatcher's office next month.

Of course, I was there. And the old chief was a kind old gentleman. He tried to talk to me like a father. Tried his best to explain to me that as a telegraph operator handling train orders, I was really handling people's lives. And it was foolish, even dangerous, to try to do this kind of a job half drunk. He tried to be nice, but I was still a smart-ass, a know-it-all. So I told him what he could do with his railroad, and I quit.

And I didn't lose a day from work. Men were scarce, even my kind. The next morning I went to work for the Norfolk & Western. But I wasn't with the N.E.W. very long. The old chief over there called me in one morning. He didn't even try to be nice. He just said, you get the hell off this railroad and don't come back even with a ticket. But I hadn't been drunk all the time. We were expecting a family, and I had to work somewhere.

So I went back to Richmond, Virginia, and I swallowed my pride, and I had a lot of it in them days. I went back to the old chief over to Southern and very humbly asked for my old job back. And I got it. After promising, of course, that I never would take another drink. Shortly after that, one night, but for the grace of God, I would have killed two trainloads of people. I forgot to give a conductor a meet-off.

I was fired in the middle of the night in no uncertain terms. I was advised a few days later by mail that it would be a waste of time for me to try to find any kind of a job with any railroad within the continental limits of the United States, that my name was going to be passed around. And it was. I tried the Union Pacific out in Texas, the great northern up in Maine, the Florida and East Coast down in Miami.

Them folks knew me better than my wife did. Things began to get a little rough then. I drifted from one laborer's job to another until finally I couldn't get even that. My wife had to go to work, and in a small town she did pretty well, but the best she could do didn't much more than keep me in decent liquor. Of course, our credit ran out. Some of the merchants at home hated to sell my wife groceries for cash because they knowed I was going to eat some of them.

And one day, I'll never know why, but glancing through the newspaper, I read an article that said, as a disabled veteran, I was eligible for educational benefits, that I could not only go to the school of my choice, but that the government would pay me $135 a month while I went. So I went back to Lynchburg, Virginia, where I had already pretty well educated in some of the founding institutions. I went to a small business college and enrolled for a course in higher accounting, not because of any sudden thirst for knowledge, but simply to draw $135 a month.

I used to grow $135 a month, but this was at least $125 more than I could earn honestly.

[00:45:00]

And after registering it at school, I had several days before classes started, and sitting around the room in the house one day, I got to thinking back, and I recall having heard different ones in the past. So I used a few of these things, but I didn't drink. And at the end of the year, I had good grades, an all-round average of 98.6. And believe me, I'm anything but smart. But when you're taking that many benzes a day, you got to do something with your time, you ain't gonna sleep.

So I've been studying. And then, too, at the end of that year, I had finished all of my major subjects. I had a few more words to get and type in, a few in shorthand, and I had to take filing, little snaps of it. I had one more quarter in school, and I figured for three months I could handle a little light stuff like beer. And I think maybe I figured, too, that I thought I owed it to myself for this great sacrifice I'd just made.

So I started on beer, but then I switched to wine. And finally, the wine won't put me exactly where I thought I ought to be, and I begin mixing a little rub or a little Solox with it. Ain't it amazing what them ingredients can do for one another? That the rub gives the wine something that it needs, and the wine takes something away from the rub that ought not to have it in the first place. Well, you know what happened.

One day in typing class, me and a typewriter just rolled out in the floor. And to cover up this sudden fainting spell, I invented heart trouble. I told Miss Price, the lovely old lady who was the typing instructor, that ever since I'd come out of the service, in fact, the real reason they discharged me was because of a mild case of angina. They didn't want nothing to get upset about it, that I'd be perfectly all right if I could just go back to my room and rest up for a couple of days.

And bless her heart, she bought that. But the dean of men was an old Navy man. He knew a drunk when he saw one. So he took me by his office and told me, by all means, go to my room, but not for no two, three days, to take all the week. And this was on a Monday. And he said, if you're not sober and perfectly all right by Friday, just get on overtime. As much as we'd hate to expel you with your scholastic record, we're not operating this school for your kind of people.

So I went back to my room, and I wasn't worried. I'd gotten off of a thousand drunks by myself. I think maybe what threw me was having that deadline to me, be sober by Friday. Anyway, when Friday rolled around, I was even drunker than I was on Monday. And late that Friday night, I found myself sitting on a dark, lonely street corner. And it was cold. It was in November. This was the night that I reached a point beyond which something inside of me could not or would not go.

Or as we say in AA, I hit bottom. For that night, for the first time in my life, I took a good look at Talbot Hayden. And I despised everything I saw. I had a good look at the past and saw nothing but filth and rottenness. A good look at the present and saw more filth and more rottenness. As for a future, I wanted no part of anything tomorrow might have to offer, because I'd had it. I tried to think of one human being that I might call, if I had a nickel for a call, and get anything at all except trouble.

But after thinking a while, I realized there wasn't another human being anywhere on the face of this earth who cared for as I lived to die. And I didn't care either. I tried to think of some place that I'd been before that I might be a little bit welcome if I went back. But there was no such place. So for the first time in my life, I seriously thought of suicide. And I wish I could say that this thought came to my mind because of some spark of decency

[00:50:05]

somewhere inside of me. But I'm afraid to say that, because I honestly don't think there was a spark of decency, or that there ever had been, anywhere in me. I wish I could say that because of some respect that I had for a lady, a very fine lady who lived 60 miles away, a lady who had a piece of paper that said, legally, she and I were husband and wife. And that piece of paper was the nearest thing to a marriage that she ever had.

But I'm afraid to say even this, because I don't think I had felt respect for another human being since I was seven years old. And also in that same house where that lady lived, there was a little boy five years old who had never had a father. And I wish I could say that I thought of suicide because of some love that I felt for that little boy. But I'm afraid to say even this, because I don't think I was capable of even knowing what love meant.

I don't think I'd ever been capable of it. I think the thought of suicide came to me because I knew what I was, and I could no longer live with myself. I was 32 years old. And all I had to show for my 32 years here on this earth were the clothes that I had on my back. Four pieces, if you count the shoes separate. A bottle of wine, a bag of tobacco, and a pot of aspirin. Not much of a success story.

Some people say that it takes an insane person to commit suicide. I have to disagree. For that November night on that street corner, this is the only thing that made sense. And I don't think I was insane. I had offered nothing to another human being except heartache and misery. And I couldn't live with this any longer. And I think somewhere inside of me was a thought that if I did that, maybe this would in some small way make up for some of this.

At any rate, I know I was going to. With that last swallow of wine, I was going to wash down a pocketful of sleeping pills, and I had them. But before I could get to this, I heard men's voices from somewhere in the distance, and they were laughing. And as soon as I heard them, I hated their guts. Hated them because they could laugh. I hadn't been able to for a long, long time. And I kind of drew up in a small knot right at lamp post, waiting for them to go by because I knew they would.

Nobody stopped for me but to believe. But a very strange thing happened. They not only stopped, but they sat down. And for somewhere in the neighborhood of two hours, they talked to me about something called A.A. And it sounded wonderful. Three of these men were strangers. I knew them by reputation. One was a member of city council. One, an executive in one of the larger construction firms. One, part owner in a multi-million dollar chain store, department store chain.

I had nothing in common with these men. But the other one was an old drinking buddy. An old boy that I'd slept with many a night out under the stars on the river bank. Shared a many a can of Solox and Sterno with. A boy from my old outfit in the army who, by the way, got one of those blue slips. His name was Ham Masters. And when I recognized this boy, I offered him a drink and a smoke. And Ham just smiled and he said, Sol, but I haven't had a drink for three years.

And I didn't believe this. Because I knew Ham Masters was just as much of a drunk and the same kind of a drunk that I was and always had been. But anyway, this must have been a loud as well as a long meeting because somebody in the neighborhood called the police. When the patrol car got there, it was my old friend Sergeant Murphy.

[00:55:03]

He knew these fellas from AA because he said, you fellas done bit off more than you can chew this time. But they said, let us chew on him a while. So when the meeting broke up, Ham went with me and got me a room. He even spent the night with me. And I never have quite understood this because I smell like something that ordinarily you don't find on street corners. Next morning, one of these men came and got me and took me to Lynchburg General Hospital and got me a private room.

For a couple of days, I slept between clean sheets and I was treated like somebody. And I wasn't used to this. A couple of days later, he came and got me and he took me to his home. For 24 hours a day for all of the following weeks, there was somebody with me around the clock from AA. They didn't even let me go to the bathroom by myself because they didn't trust me. And I didn't trust me either. And all of this week, they were talking about this wonderful thing called AA.

The following Thursday night, they took me to my first meeting at the clubhouse. And if there was ever a doubting Thomas that came to AA, it was Talbot Hagler. These four men had told me all the wonderful things that AA had done for them and I believed it because it showed. But could it do it for me? I didn't think so. Because everything in the book had been tried on me. I'd been preached at and prayed over.

I'd been doctored on and psychoanalyzed. I'd been locked in and locked out and locked up. I'd been lied to and beat up. The doctors had told me that if I didn't quit, I was going to die with cirrhosis of the liver. The psychiatrists had told me that if I even tried to quit, if it didn't kill me, I'd end up even more mentally unbalanced in the world. That's just another way of saying you ain't sick, you crazy there.

The preacher said if I died drunk, I was going to hell. One of them said that's where I ought to be. I even had one run in with two representatives of our local chapter of the Women's Christian Temperance Union. There's an outfit for you. These two lovely old ladies fell in on me one evening, both sundown, and I was down, defenseless, in bed. And I was batching my wife. She'd been gone home to mama.

And they let in on me with all four feet that I was a disgrace to my family, a disgrace to the town of Clover, and you ought to know that town. They said I was a disgrace to the whole human race, that all I'd ever done was make one mistake after another ever since the day I was born. They even insinuated my being born was the biggest mistake been made. But now all of these were good, well-meaning people.

They did the best they could with what they had, but nothing had ever worked for me. I was sort of like the tomcat that got locked up in the taxidermy shop. I tried everything, but just did nothing work. And I didn't think A.A. would either. And it was in this frame of mind that I went to my first A.A. meeting. I don't know what I expected to find, but I wasn't prepared for what I did find. I walked in on a fairly nice club room, a rather small group of about 30, 35 people.

But these were different kind of people than the circle I'd been traveling with. The men had on clean shirts, and they were clean shaven. A couple of them had on a tie. One smart aleck even had on a coat. I didn't even own a coat. And the ladies had their hair combed, and they had on lipsticks. Hair combed, and they had on lipstick, and didn't look like he got hit in the mouth with it, it was on straight.

And they were smiling. These were happy people. In fact, they looked so happy I felt out of place.

[01:00:06]

And before I could duck out, and I was going to duck out, this real pretty little lady from Wales in the middle of the group got up and came over to me and she said, My name is Ruth Dickens, and I'm glad you made it tonight. And she shook hands with me. Not one of them flabby, wishy-washy things, but the kind of handshake that says, I know all about you, but I love you. Ruth meant that. Within the first ten minutes, I shook hands with everybody in that club room.

And they were all just like Ruth. They all meant it. I don't remember too much of what was said during the meeting. I know that for the first time in my life I heard alcoholism and alcoholics and drunks discussed in a way that made sense. But sometimes during the course of that meeting, a feeling came over me that I had never had. I realized that maybe, just maybe, I had found that which no practicing alcoholic has ever found, as long as he was a practicing alcoholic, equality.

Equality. How could I find it? How could I recognize it? I didn't know who the hell I was or what I was. But something told me that I've come home. I've found my people. And after the meeting, one of my sponsors told me something that no one had told me since I started drinking. He said, you don't have to drink anymore. Nobody had ever told me this. Preachers and psychiatrists, doctors, judges and policemen, they'd all said, your kind never changes.

And for years I'd been able to live with this. And accept, not gracefully, but accept nonetheless, the life of endless drunken wandering. I didn't like it, but I'd been able to resign myself to it. And at my first AA meeting, somebody said, you don't have to drink anymore. And I think from that moment on, I knew that I could live the kind of life I'd always wanted to. For the next few weeks, I spent every day, and sometimes they'd let me sleep in the club room at night because I was afraid to stay in a rooming house by myself.

Certainly afraid to walk the streets by myself. And a few weeks later, one of my sponsors, and I had seven, I needed seven, handed me a copy of the Twelve Steps. And he said, these are the tools of AA. And among these tools, there's a wrench to fit any nut that comes in here. And he said, don't just read these, study them. Don't learn them by heart, study them until they become a part of your heart.

And I'd like to say here and now that I had good teachers. And I never was afraid to ask questions. And I still ask them. Through the grace of God and with the help of people like you, I was to know 11 years of the kind of happiness that I never dreamed possible for a thing like me. And I was real active in AA. Not just at the local level, but I was one of the fortunate ones. I got to go to a lot of places and to meet a lot of you.

And for a few minutes now, I'm going to talk about something that hurts. Something that I've been told that I shouldn't talk about. I've been told that I shouldn't mention this. Because it might give the new man or the new lady the impression that you can leave this program and drink a little more and come back without getting hurt. I don't go with this. Late in 1962, I found myself in serious financial difficulty.

I had built up a real good profitable little public accounting business.

[01:05:01]

But I hadn't been working at it too faithfully. I'd been too busy attending events like this, leaving nobody at home to mind the store. And I realized one day that I was not only broke, I was in hock up to my neck. And without once referring to any part of this program, without once consulting one of my sponsors, without any benefit of prayer or meditation, I simply decided on my own that I would drop out of AA for a while.

Work real hard. Get this little business back on its feet and take in a partner. And come back to AA. It seemed so simple at the time. So late in November 1962, I just dropped out of sight as far as AA is concerned. And I worked real hard, 18, 20 hours a day. I didn't go to meetings because I didn't have time. I certainly didn't have time for a 12-step call. I told myself I'll get to this as soon as I take care of what has to be done.

I didn't even have time to drink coffee with sober AA friends. And on April 15, 1963, about midnight when I dropped the last batch of tax returns in the mail, I had accomplished exactly what I set out to do. This little business was back on its feet. All of my bills were paid and I had a little money in the bank. I'd even acquired two small farms. My home was paid for. Two automobiles. Nothing now to keep me from going back to AA.

But on the way home that night, on the way home that night, I stopped at a bootlegging joint and went in and told myself I'm going to take just one and go straight home. I got home six weeks late. Sixteen months later, when I stood before a judge for two charges of drunken driving, one charge of vagrancy, the judge sentenced me first to six months on the state farm. There was a doctor in the courtroom that told the judge that if he put me on the farm, I wouldn't live ten days.

I weighed 118 pounds. For more than a year, I'd been drinking Solox and cheap wine, Sterno and anything I could find. So the judge allowed me a choice of either six months on the state farm or a hitch in Eastern State Hospital, a state-owned and operated mental institution in Williamsburg, Virginia. On July 1st, 1964, I went into Eastern State as a mental patient. And I wasn't put in the alcoholic section, but back in the jumping jack section, and this is exactly where I belong.

For this is stark, raving insanity. When you have 11 years of AA sobriety, and all the many benefits that go with it, and you trade it for one drink. A few weeks later, one afternoon, I was walking around out on the grounds with the keepers and the other patients, and I looked at these people. They're all mental patients. They're there because they can't help it. So why was I there? I was there because of a lack of faith in God.

I was there because of a lack of faith in you and all that you stand for. I was there because of too much faith in the one weak link in this chain. Myself. A lot of crazy, wild thoughts came to my mind. Some of them not so crazy. A lot of crazy, wild thoughts came to my mind. Some of them not so crazy. One, the words of a poem that I'd heard somewhere. Isn't it strange that princes and kings and clowns that caper and sorter strings and common folk like you and me are builders for eternity?

Have we been builders who built with care? Or measured life by the rule in the square?

[01:10:02]

Or have we been wreckers who stalked the town, content with the labors of tearing down? I wasn't a builder. I was a wrecker. For I had not only wrecked eleven years of the kind of happiness beyond my wildest dreams, I had also wrecked the hopes, the dreams, and the faith of a lot of other people. People that I had sponsored. People that I had tried to pass on what had so freely been given to me. And all during this time, this sixteen months, I had known the most god-awful guilt that I had ever felt in my life.

And I felt it with that first drink. And mind you, the guilt feeling was not new. I'd felt it for nineteen years before I met you people. But during that nineteen years, I didn't know what I was guilty of. But on April 15, 1963, when I took a drink, I knew what I was guilty of. And I had never in my life felt the hate that filled my heart from me. The self-loathing, the contempt. And that afternoon, out on the grounds at Eastern State, I said, Dear God, if I'm worth ruling with, may I have one more chance?

May I go back to AA if they'll take me back? And there, with your help and theirs, perhaps I can still rebuild of the lumber that's left in my life. Not another tavern, but a temple. Dedicated not to my selfish desires or selfish pursuits, but dedicated to the service of man. To the service and the love of God. And you know, after I said this prayer, I had a feeling that I had said it to empty space.

That nobody heard it. But I promised myself that when I left this institution, I'd go back to AA and I'd take up right where I left off. Thirty-three days from the time I was committed, I escaped, I wasn't released. And the first night out, I went to an AA meeting, and I sat down and talked to a new man. I was taking up, I thought, where I left off, twice that work. When the meeting was over, me and the new man went out and we got drunk.

I was not to get off so lightly. It was to take five hellishly long years. Five years. I experienced every horror known to man. And I would not want this for anyone else. And if there's anyone here tonight, with any length of sobriety, whether it be one week or twenty years, if you've been playing with the thought that maybe you could have just one and nobody would know it, for God's sake, don't. You don't have to.

I made this mistake for you. I talk about this because it's happening to so many people all over the AA, all over this country. There are men with fifteen, twenty, and more than twenty years who simply take over. That which they have turned over to God. And the result every time is the same. Three years ago, one of my sponsors was eighteen years old. The quality of sobriety very few in our part of the country know.

This man had worked himself up to an executive position with one of the largest construction firms in the South. A job that demanded more and more of his time and left less and less for AA. He stopped making meetings. He stopped making 12-step calls. And one night, Twelve Steps, and one night some three years ago at a cocktail party, he very nonchalantly took one highball, just a few days later he walked into his garage and he shot himself, his name, Ham Masters, so many people don't live

[01:15:15]

to come back, don't try it, you have nothing to gain, everything on earth to lose, and looking back, rough though that five years was, I realize now that all during those five years, that this wonderful God of my understanding and his infinite mercy and kindness, as always, dealt very gently with me, and I realized too that it was necessary for me to go back to hell for five more years, because I had reached a point in my AA life where I was no longer teachable, I had gotten right, when this happens, you've already started to rot, I've heard it said that God created everything out of nothing, and everything God uses, he reduces it to nothing first, for the second time, I had to be reduced to nothing, he let me know fear, that I might one day have a more abiding faith, he let me know hunger, that I might more freely partake of spiritual food, he let me be homeless and friendly, that I might look on all men as brothers, he let me feel both from without and within unadulterated hate, that I might have a greater capacity for love, all these things my God let me feel, simply because the God of my understanding is a God of love, and for reasons known only to him, he loves me, I'm glad I'm an alcoholic, grateful for the privilege, I may never know whether I was born an alcoholic or became one, but I honestly believe I was put here to be one, that this was the only way I could learn the lessons I was put here to learn, that this is the only way I could be of any service whatsoever, to my God and to my fellow man, I'm glad I'm an alcoholic because that alone enabled me to become one of you, and a part of all this, down through the ages there have been many philosophies, both good and bad, that man has followed in his never-ending search for happiness, peace of mind, and a little of what we call serenity, and one of the first of these that we read about was that of a man who lived some 280 years before the birth of Christ, a man named Aristotle, who said briefly, be thyself, and a thinking world caught on.

And along in this same period of time there was another man who was somewhat of a philosopher in his own right, a man named Plato, who liked the teachings of Aristotle, but who felt that somehow he had sort of put the cart before the horse, because Plato said also briefly, to be thyself, first you must know thyself, and again a thinking world caught on. And then some 2,000 years ago there came to this earth a man of humble birth, a man who walked the highways and byways of a faraway place called Galilee, teaching and preaching a philosophy that startled everyone, give thyself, and love one another, said a little Jewish carpenter.

[01:20:07]

How fortunate we are, you and I, that here in this simple 12-step program we have a combination of all three of these, the best philosophers known to mankind since the beginning of time. Steps 1 through 5, the first feeble efforts we made, to know thyself. 5 through 10, be thyself, the real self, the self that your Creator intended you to be. Steps 11 and 12, give thyself, and love one another. I hope and pray with all my heart that I may never again turn my back and walk away from all this, to drink again, for I might not make it back another time.

But if for any reason one of us should have to leave, I'd much rather it be me and you. Because for all that you have done and are still doing for me, I love you. If there's anyone here tonight who is attending an AA meeting, this meeting, and this is your first, I'm sure that you're asking yourself a question that a lot of us, all of us, in fact, have asked from one time or another. What makes this AA thing worth it? I think it's worth it because of one simple little thing, a thing called love.

And here in AA, there are different kinds of love. First, there's our love for each other. For among the memberships of Alcoholics Anonymous, we have men and women from literally every walk of life. Ministers, priests, doctors and lawyers, painters, ditch diggers, carpenters, bricklayers, nurses, stenographers, housewives, successful businessmen, successful career women, and a lot of bums like me. And yet here in this fellowship, social possession and financial standing is neither a hindrance nor a help.

So here we are bound together in fellowship by one common promise. And in our search together for a solution to that problem, there's born within each of us a feeling for the other. And that feeling is love. Then there's another love, our love for God. And surely no group of people anywhere on the face of the earth tonight has a greater reason for loving God than you and I. But then there's still another, a far greater love than both of these, God's love for us.

A few years ago while working the tobacco market down in Georgia, I heard a story that I think exemplifies this particular love. The story of an old tenant farmer and his family who lived in the northern part of Georgia. And if any of you are familiar with that part of the country, I'm sure you know as I do that from an agricultural standpoint, North Georgia is not the most blessed spot on earth. Any man that digs a living out of the ground fully deserves the few blessings that he gets.

But as the story goes, this particular year when the crops were sold and the cotton seeds and the fertilizer bills were paid, there was a little money left over. Not much, just five dollars. But it was the first time there had ever been any left over since this family had been a family. And they felt that this called for some kind of a celebration, that they should buy something. But knowing the value of a dollar, they knew that they couldn't each one go out and buy something.

So they got out your sealed and robust catalog and after much thumbing through the pages, they finally settled on one thing. Something they could all enjoy equally. It was a looking glass, a mirror. They'd never seen one. So they made out the order and they mailed it off and after many days of anxious waiting, the postman blew the horn down at the foot of the hill one day. They went down and got the package and later they gathered around the kitchen table and they opened it.

And of course, Paul being the head of the household was the first to see himself in the mirror.

[01:25:04]

And when he looked, all he said was, well I'll declare. And he handed it to his wife. She looked and she just smiled. Then she gave it to little Sid. She looked and she preened and she giggled. Then it was little Joe's turn. Little Joe was one of the gentle people. A little fellow, about twelve or thirteen. But back when he was a real small child, he'd been kicked in the face by a mule. He wasn't a handsome child.

He wasn't a handsome child. And when he saw himself in the mirror for the first time, he didn't know whether to laugh or cry. And he looked at his mother and he said, Mom, did you know I looked like this? She said, Yes, son. I knowed it all the time. He said, You knowed I was this ugly and you still loved me. She said, Yes, son. I love you cause you're mine. This, I think, must be the kind of love that God has for you and me.

For surely he has seen us in all of our ugliness. None of the wrong, rotten things that we did were hidden from him. He saw them all. Yet when the day came and we found ourselves flat on our backs, unable to even get up, much less stay up. We knew that day that we couldn't go any further without help. But we knew, too, there was no need to expect help from friends, because all the friends were gone.

We knew, too, there was no need to expect help from family, because the family, too, was gone. That didn't leave anybody but him. And we hated to ask. But we did ask because we had to. And what happened? Without once reminding us of any of the wrong, rotten things we'd done to hurt other people, to hurt him, to hurt ourselves. Without a moment's hesitation, without one word of reproach, he simply reached out a hand that held all the help that you and I will ever need.

That hand is still there. It always will be. The hand that they had. And to all of those who are yet to come. To these pitifully sick people who have been and have left, keeping this hand outstretched is your responsibility. It's my responsibility. I'm sorry it's taken me so long to say so little. But thank you so much for listening. And for letting me share with you a little of what you've given me.

Thank you for giving it to me. Thank you for everything on earth I have. Thank you most of all just for being what you are. And when you say your prayers tonight, please pray for me. I'll do the same thing for you. God bless you. Thank you.