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Source: Dr. Luke R. and Bill – Bill W.’s 32nd Anniversary Dinner (1966).mp3 File: dr-luke-r-and-bill-bill-w-32nd-anniversary-dinner-1966.mp3 Duration: 01:10:47
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The Park-Madison Group here in New York City, and I am an alcoholic. In case you're wondering how many people there are gathered here this evening, the figure is 3,050, which is a tremendous amount. We do want to remind you, particularly the members of the press, of our twelfth tradition, which tells us that anonymity is the spiritual foundation of our fellowship, ever reminding us to place principles above personality.
If you hear anyone's last name here, or if you recognize them, please don't repeat that name outside of the room. And to begin this evening in the proper spirit, we call on to say the invocation, a member of the Park-Madison Group here in New York, my friend, Father Jerry. We ask you to stand, please. Almighty and merciful God, to whom eventually all alcoholics must come for survival, let your healing benediction bless all of us gathered here tonight. Let your blessing extend beyond this room to all members of AA and their families who cannot be present with us, but who share with us the joy we feel in our hearts tonight.
And, O merciful Father, we beseech you, let your healing blessing be felt in the hearts of those alcoholics who are this night still in the dark shadows of suffering. May the blessings of your grace be showered in a special way on Bill, our beloved surviving founder, whose 32nd anniversary we are celebrating. May your divine power and your protecting, loving care be always with him. May your Holy Spirit continue to guide and direct his efforts in the light of your wisdom and your inspiration.
Join all of us here this memorable night in heart and spirit as we begin this meeting of our fellowship. Plant deep in our hearts that simple and precious virtue of gratitude. Inspire each of us to be deeply thankful to you for our own sobriety this night, and to be profoundly grateful for the high privilege of passing on to others the mighty miracle of freedom which we have experienced. Strengthen our efforts to manifest our gratitude by carrying the AA message of recovery to those still bound and shackled in degrading slavery to alcoholic drinking. Confident because we know your goodness in our own experience, we bow our heads and humble our hearts to receive your blessings.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Thank you, Father Jerry. We do mention that there were over 3,000 people here tonight, and that didn't just happen. That was the dedicated labor of love of sober drunks, both here in New York and all over the country. And I'm speaking now of our dinner committee who did such a tremendous job, and I'm going to ask them to stand up now so we can see them and thank them. Will you all stand please from the dinner committee?
And while you're beginning, I want to take just a moment of your time to introduce the dais guests to you here this evening. I'm not going to go into a glowing introduction of each one of them, but I do want you to know that there's a tremendous amount of 12-step work represented up here on the platform. And I'm going to begin down on the left end of the dais with Ann B., of the Lenox Hill Group, who is a member of our Arrangements Committee. Oh, excuse me. And I will ask you not to applaud until the very end. Please hold it until the end.
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Next to Ann is Jane E., who is a member of the Secretarial Staff of our Intergroup Office. The next two I'll introduce as a couple. It's Nene and Jim F. Jim is the co-chairman of this dinner tonight. The next couple, please hold the applause until the end, please. The next couple is Mrs. and Reverend C. The Reverend C. will be saying the benediction this evening. And the next couple we have is Harriet and Dr. Luke. They're both members of the Northside Group in Youngstown, Ohio. Down at the left end of the dais, my left, and I can't see who is down at the very end. Oh, it's Ellen, the newest member of our Intergroup Staff.
Next to Ellen is Bruce K., a member of the Park-Madison Group, who worked with me both this year and last year on the dinner. The next person doesn't need any introduction to many of you. It's Doris, the Executive Secretary of our Intergroup Association. Sitting next to Doris is George B., the Treasurer of the New York Intergroup Association. The next two I'll introduce as a couple is Helen and Ralph A. Ralph is the President of our Intergroup Association.
Next is a young lady who you're going to hear later on this evening from the Rhinelander Group, Lee A. Next to Lee is Father Jerry, whom you just heard. And next is a member of the Brick Church Al-Anon Group in East Orange, New Jersey, my wife, Marge. The next two I'll introduce as a couple, who you all know and love very much, are celebrants Lois and Bill. Right, I didn't think I would need Bill. He takes too much time.
You're right. Oh, again, good evening. As I said earlier, my name is Bill and I am an alcoholic. And this meeting will begin, as every other meeting does, with a reading of the Preamble, which tells us that Alcoholics Anonymous is a fellowship of men and women who share their experience, strength, and hope with each other, that they may solve their common problem and help others to recover from alcoholism.
The only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking. There are no dues or fees for AA membership. We're self-supporting through our own contributions. AA is not allied with any sect, denomination, organization, politics, or institution, does not wish to engage in any controversy, neither endorses nor opposes any cause. Our primary purpose is to stay sober and to help other alcoholics achieve sobriety.
I'd like to begin by offering my congratulations to Bill on his 32nd anniversary. Because he began some 32 years ago, it's possible for me to be up here with some seven years of sobriety through the help of the AA program. And you know, it took me about ten years to get to the program, to Alcoholics Anonymous, and for me it was a long ten years. There was a… so many things happened. You know, perhaps more could have happened, but so much did happen, and it all happened to me.
And it got me to the point where, at age 25, I walked into a New York Intergroup Association asking for help. At the very beginning, when I first started drinking, booze did an awful lot for me. It allowed me to mix with people, to feel comfortable.
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I thought I had found a friend, and later on, of course, it was no friend at all. I think, as is the case with many of us who come to AA a little on the young side, the progression is very, very rapid. For instance, there was almost no social drinking in my life. I think that I was an alcoholic from the word go. I don't mean that I was falling down drunk or anything like that, but booze did so much for me that I wanted to have done, and I fell in love with it right from the very beginning.
The first two or three years of my drinking aren't particularly important, with a couple of exceptions. I started to have blackouts, and I didn't know what they were, I didn't know that they were caused by booze, and I didn't know that they only happened to alcoholics. I thought that this was what everyone experienced when they drank, and it was perhaps part of it. I did establish a pattern of drinking, which meant that I drank every opportunity that I got.
At age 15, 16, and 17, this might have only been a quart of beer on a Saturday night with the guys before going to a dance or something like that, but that quart of beer was so important to me. This was the most important part of it, at least as far as I was concerned. And yet, I didn't see anything wrong with this. I went into the service at age 18, and here, away from home, I was a heavy drinker right off the bat.
This was truly what I wanted to do, I know. I remember one of my first duty stations, it was with a lot of ranking men, tech sergeants and master sergeants, and they said of me that I was the only PFC that could drink like a master sergeant. I thought this was great, you know, that I had arrived, finally grown up. But you know, I wasn't growing up at all, I was just getting a little bit older. At age 18, too, I started getting the shakes.
And even then, I was blinded to this thing of alcoholism. I would not blame the shakes on drinking. I went to a psychiatrist in the service, and he spoke about anxiety, neurosis, and this sounded pretty good to me, a lot better than drinking, so I latched on to that. And as the drinking progressed, so did that anxiety, neurosis, and it got worse and worse and worse. But the point is, I could not, even then, see what was happening to me.
I was blinded to this thing called booze. I got through my three years in the service and got out with an honorable discharge, which was more good luck than anything else. I simply didn't get caught doing the things that I could have been caught for. And so, at age 21, I had my discharge from the service. I was going to go to school on the GI Bill, and I thought that life was just planned for me in time.
You know, four years of college, and then a degree, and then several years as a junior exec, and then on to an executive position, and I thought it would be a breeze, there'd be nothing to it. I didn't know about alcoholism. I didn't know that I was an alcoholic. And this plan that I had for myself simply did not work out, could not work out. I found, for instance, that I couldn't go to school and drink at the same time, and I could not stop drinking.
Many, many things happened to me, even early, age 21 and 22. For instance, there was an automobile accident that caused the death of two other kids in the car with me, and I was in a blackout. Didn't know what had happened, and yet, even with this, I wouldn't blame that on booze. It was slippery roads. I was losing jobs. I didn't blame that on booze. I was blinded to what was happening. I went through, I guess, another two or three years of drinking.
I could no longer go to school, and so I felt, well, if I could just work at my trade, things would be all right. I'd be able to make enough money, and it would be fine. But here I was changing my plan because of booze, and yet it didn't matter. The important thing, of course, was the drinking. But I, too, discovered that I couldn't work and drink at the same time. And in that four or five year period from getting out of the service through getting to AA, I lost some 14 jobs as a result of booze.
I was kicked out of two universities as a result of booze. And so, at age 25, when I came to the program, I was pretty much of a wreck. I didn't know it. I didn't even know that I was unemployable, but I was, because I could only work when I was sober, and I could only stay sober for two or three or four weeks at a time, and then I'd be drinking, and so I'd lose the job.
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What got me to AA was not another job loss or anything like that. It was one brief moment when there was this flash of honesty, which I did not bring on myself, but it came to me. I was sitting in a gin mill one morning with the idea of straightening out so that I could go to work, and I had four or five highballs. I did straighten out. I could have gone to work, and for the first time in my life, I admitted to myself that I didn't want to go to work.
I wanted to stay there and drink, and I never knew that I was hooked on booze like this. I always thought that I was drinking, well, I guess primarily for the anxiety neurosis, you know, but that wasn't the case. I was drinking because I wanted to drink, and I realized it that morning. And so a couple of days later, I came into our New York Intergroup Association, and that was June 10th of 1959. And with the grace of God, working here in the AA program and through the people in AA, it hasn't been necessary for me to pick up one drink since then, one day at a time.
And you know, the first day I came into the group, several very important things happened. Number one, I met my sponsor. I didn't pick him as a sponsor then, as a matter of fact, it was some two or three months later, but he was on duty there, and I met him. And you know, they told me that first day at Intergroup that, well, they said three very important things. They said, number one, I could stay away from one drink one day at a time.
They said any alcoholic can. And now this, too, is part of my experience. I can stay away from one drink one day at a time. They told me, too, that I'd never have a problem in a 24-hour period that would be too great for me, that I'd have to pick up that first drink. This, too, has been part of my experience. Over the 24 hours that have elapsed, there has never been a problem in one day that has been too great.
There are many things that perhaps I could have projected. You know, how can I live on X amount of money for the next six months and so forth? If I looked at it that way, perhaps it would have been too great. But bringing it into these 24 hours, how am I doing today, there never was a problem that was that great for me. And the third thing they told me that day at Intergroup was that I could be happy, staying away from one drink one day at a time.
Quite honestly, I didn't believe them, but now that is part of my experience, that indeed the thing that I searched for so much in the drinking I finally found when I stopped drinking, and this was happiness. And I realized today that I was looking for it in the wrong areas. During my drinking, when I was, I guess, searching for happiness, I was really seeking pleasure. You know, and that always left a bitter taste in my mouth.
But I found today, in the program, that happiness comes from doing the things that I ought to be doing, rather than the things that I want to be doing, necessarily. And one day at a time, this is the way it's working, and it's working beautifully for me. I'm convinced, you know, well, number one, coming to AA, I did just about everything wrong. My first three months in the program, I thought I was too young for this.
I thought that being primarily a beer drinker, I was different. I could keep seeing the things that made me different. I could not see, in the beginning, how I was essentially the same as every other alcoholic. And at the end of about three or four months of this type of thinking, I was upset to get drunk again. And I knew it. I knew enough of my past history to know that this would be the thing that would happen, and I didn't want it.
And what I did was very, very simple. I asked for help. For the first time in my adult life, I asked for help. I asked Jerry of my group to be my sponsor, and this was the turning point for me. I'll be eternally grateful to this guy. But in asking for help, I admitted that I was an alcoholic, just like every other alcoholic, and I came to believe that perhaps it might work for me. And in the admission and in the coming to believe, I lost the desire to drink.
And this, to me, is the miracle of AA, that one can lose the desire to drink. I'm not a booze fighter today. I reject it completely, don't want it. And this, of course, is the result of sharing here in the fellowship. And I think that's enough to qualify me as an alcoholic. I do belong here. Our first speaker tonight is a man who I have not yet heard, but I met him this afternoon,
[00:20:04]
and I've been talking to him, and I'm looking forward to hearing him. He's from the Northside Group in Youngstown, Ohio, Dr. Luke. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Mr. Bill, your beloved spouse, other guests, press, and fellow sober inebriates. This, for the press, means alcoholism. I've seldom looked over and upon a more dignified group of recovered gutter bums. Here you sit, most of you, with your dentures in.
[Unclear] are on, right side up. Eating with the utensils. This, I'm sure, for the uninitiated to this organization, is a great departure from the ordinary concept of the alcoholic. Well, my name is Luke R., and I'm a varsity, all-star, 14-carat, true blue alcoholic. In and out, bottom up, upside down. I'm a physician. I'm an M.D. Bill told me I only had 20 minutes to deliver this, and out in the prairie country where I live, we have meetings a little differently than here.
So I'm used to being required to take a little more time, so I've had to stretch this material. Now I'm up against shrinking it. I have two talks, really. The Mother Hubbard, which covers all and touches nothing, and the bikini bathing suit, it's very interesting what it reveals and very vital what it covers. I'm a little bewildered. They might have a drunk on the sidewalk, moving from one side to the other, having trouble keeping a straight line, and a couple of nuns approaching.
They weren't really sure which way was going to shift, so as they got to him, they parted, one to one side, one to the other, and as soon as they got by him, they closed ranks. As they walked on, he turned and squinted, and he said, I wonder how the hell she did that. My speech really is directed to that individual who's here and who's only been sober a few days. For the purpose for which we're all here, I'm going to identify myself as an alcoholic, I think, so there won't be any question about it.
But in so doing, the important thing is to get across to you the idea of why and how I found out I was an alcoholic and how grateful that I am that I had the good fortune in God's world to allow me to see this. I was born in Indiana and raised in Ohio. My father was a school teacher. My mother played organ in the church. We were simple people, poor people. I never saw or knew anything about alcohol as a small boy.
My dad told me at the time I was ready to go to college, he said, no offspring of mine shall ever use whiskey. There's no excuse, no use in it, has no value. Of course, this narrowed the field. I was his only child.
[00:25:06]
I had already tested the stuff. I was a musician and I was a pro at an early age. I belonged to the union when I was 15. Some of you recall the bootlegging days. We played in some pretty disreputable joints and some pretty disreputable hours. We were paid various ways, sometimes in money. I tested various beverages. But I learned very shortly at a young age that in order to get paid, I had to be sitting on the piano bench to play Home Sweet Home.
Otherwise you didn't get paid. So I learned to scale my drinking and pick a pace which was consistent with survival. And therefore I learned and did then, over the years which followed, take great pride in the fact that I could drink and hold a great quantity and still walk a seemingly straight line. I didn't care much about the cork lickers who hollered and sang and made a lot of fuss. I rather would keep mine disguised.
My wife, in fact, often spoke of my gait as I walked, as though I were walking on eggs. The fact was that I was keeping a straight line. In medical parlance, this is a broad base. My feet were two and a half feet apart. With each step, and this is the way I kept a straight line. I'm not going to spend too much time going through the play-by-play details of my drinking life. Suffice it to say that I am certain as a physician that I am on borrowed time.
I would have long since been dead had I continued the program of drinking which I had followed all the years. I got through school. In fact, I was a Phi Beta. In fact, I was an honor student in medical school. But these so-called indications of intelligence didn't mean a damn thing when it came to the evaluation of my own situation with regard to alcohol. As a medical student, I learned about alcohol.
In the pharmacology book that I studied, our professor was a renowned authority. In the section on alcohol, he described it as a suitable vehicle for terpene hydrate and iron and quinine. It's a good solvent. It would take spots out of certain garments. The discussion so far as alcohol as a producer of any disease or illness was in small print at the bottom of the page, and it was very terse, and all it talked about were some of the very dire complications of the miserable alcoholic who lives exclusively on alcohol or wine, and therefore it gets a lot of byproduct medical deterioration, Korsakoff syndrome, and polyneuritis, and all of the things which represent a combined deterioration with alcohol and other things.
There wasn't a word about alcohol as a producer of disease and sickness in a great segment of those people who use it. There's nothing about this, and there wasn't anything in fact said all the way through medical school. I had to learn this the hard way in the many years which followed. In medical school, rather than going back to college, I had a band and played every day in a restaurant. I learned in those days that the cook at the fraternity house had a still.
I helped procure the supply for my fraternity brothers. This proved to be a lucrative matter. In later years in medical school, I found in Cleveland a good source of 10-gallon lot white alcohol. This, remember, was in the Prohibition days. I bottled it. I put oak chips in it so that it was dark brown and had a resemblance, and in this way I augmented my income. These are gentle ways of telling you I was a bootlegger,
[00:30:07]
but essentially I was a frugal soul, Scotch-Irish descent, and I wanted to be sure that I always had my own supply, I didn't put in those terms and I didn't realize what it really meant then, this is what it meant, through medical school I was doing the thing which many of you have done, namely periodic weekend drinking, interval drinking during the week with horrible hangovers and small troubles, I wasn't truly addicted yet, I hadn't reached the point at which addiction began, addiction means craving, means tolerance, means withdrawal symptoms, these are the signs of addiction according to the World Health Order, these are the symptoms which really spell trouble and problems with us, I hadn't gotten there yet, I was on the road but like so many alcoholics I escaped, I didn't have bad accidents, I didn't have a lot of the things which are disastrous at an early age, so that I did get on through college, I got on through medical school, I got a good internship, I knew when I was serving my internship and residency that I was drinking too much, and I kept thinking, well someday I'm going to have the responsibility of a family and I'm going to have the responsibility of the practice, and I'd learned the Hippocratic Oath and I knew what this meant, I knew my responsibility to my fellow man, what I must do, and I felt that this would be the thing that would straighten me up, after all I was still a college boy and I had divided responsibility and small income, so I might as well kick it around for a while, and I was kicking it pretty good.
In all this time I didn't seem to meet the troubles that some do, I was playing in orchestras, I was meeting people, in Cleveland I used to go out and I belonged to the union, as I say, and I played with booking organizations, and many times the whole band that I'd be playing with were smoking marijuana, I'd stop on my way through town to make the Lakeshore Hotel on the west side and pick up eight or ten sticks, in those days you could get them for a quarter apiece, so help me, I have never tried one, I was so ingrained with the idea that I would never be addicted to anything, while I'm carrying these marijuana in a box on the seat beside me I've got two pints of whiskey in the back of the car or on the seat beside me, which I intended to use, this was something different, alcohol was something different in my book.
As an early sign, I think I might mention that I did a stint at Boston City Hospital, and while I was on the service there, we were South Boston, there are a few of you here, you may recall in those days South Boston was loaded with Irishmen, I suppose it's different. At Boston City Hospital, a great percentage of the admissions on the service where I was, the neurosurgical service, most of them were head contusions, brick bat type, and our great problem on the service was to determine which ones had subdural hemorrhage, that is a busted skull with a clot underneath it, and those which were just plain drunk and abused, and we had a ward for those where they tried to keep the walls free of ladders to keep the boys from climbing all the way out, and then the rest of them that got upstairs that we felt had hemorrhages we operated on, and we operated one case every day at least of a broken head with a hemorrhage.
Well, I was interested, as was my chief, in the question of determining whether these people needed fluid or not, and we devised a test in which you take a hypodermic and make little pricks in the skin, these are called intracutaneous tests.
[00:35:18]
We used saline as an agent, and we couldn't tell, we never knew how much whiskey the admission patients had drunk, there was no way to make a scientific study out of it, and the chief suggested that we should have a volunteer, and of course you might guess who the volunteer was. And at the expense of Boston City Hospital and my chief, I would get drunk, come in at 4 or 5 o'clock and go straight to the laboratory, and then the girls would start putting skin tests up my shins, maybe 20 or 30 on each leg at intervals, and determine how long it took to absorb the saline.
I think this was a sign, my heroic volunteering I think was some indication of what was to come in my drinking. This meant I got drunk on alcohol and I didn't have to work the day that these tests were being done and all these things which were definitely advantageous to me. Anyway, life went on, I went to practice, in the meantime I found a girl. It was with some difficulty that I found a real alcoholic.
I looked pretty far and wide and I found my match. Fortunately she sits here and she is not a member of Al-Anon. We started in practice and things didn't work out just as I planned. I thought I would be able to quit drinking. I slowed down a little bit. I went to a town where they were dying for doctors, it was a crucial need for physicians at that time, so I could hardly help but be successful. That is, I was busy.
So I guess time prevented me from drinking too regularly and too hard, so I went on and had a number of years that were quite successful. But as the war came along, my drinking and our drinking progressed so that it was approaching a rather dangerous level. We were having small contests between us that involved furniture, falling down stairs, wearing of casts. I split my ankle once instead of a log on a picnic with the kids.
Some of these things that every alcoholic does. Then the Army, they didn't take me right off. The Navy refused me and sent me home saying that I had tuberculosis, that is, from Cleveland where I was examined. This wasn't true at all. I don't know whether they smelled my breath when I was examined, but this was a challenge and it made me mad. So then I really got in to the battle and I made many trips to Columbus and called Washington and talked to people in power, insisting that I be taken.
Well, by the time they finally took me, I signed so many waivers that I couldn't possibly draw a pension from any sickness or disease that I might contract in the service, maybe dumb-dumb fever, kela-azar or something like that. But tuberculosis or most any condition, I waved. In other words, the Army assumed no responsibility if I made contact with these diseases or conditions. The Army was quite a ball.
Actually, I wasn't as busy as I had been in practice so that I had a chance to accelerate my drinking. I met some good companions, as you all know, who were in the Army.
[00:40:02]
This was a considerable activity. In the off hours, and there were a lot of off hours, we didn't have much to do compared to private practice. So this got worse. Drinking was worse in the Army. I was stationed in the United States for some time on the West Coast. My little musical background got me acquainted with the drinking element in Hollywood, of which there are a few. Musicians and others. So by the time I finally went to Japan or left the country, I was in a pretty constant glow.
My wife, I won't give her the lead, she had departed and taken the children back and was trying to live in Youngstown. In Japan, I really didn't have much of anything to do and I used my ingenuity to trade cigarettes for yen. And yen bought a lot of whiskey because we were in a town where the finest distillery in Japan is located. Our special service officer would issue a case to each officer, oh, every eight or ten days.
At a price that actually in American money was somewhere near a dollar and ten cents, and it was excellent scotch. I didn't like scotch particularly well, but I was not too choosy at this stage. Well, we had a pool in which nurses came up from the islands through Osaka and then on from there to Tokyo, where I was stationed. These nurses would come and go, there was a pool of four or five hundred. And on issue day, they being nurses, of course, I never forgot, they all had an insignia of some sort, and they were entitled to a case of whiskey.
So I would go down for breakfast and I would sit at the table with five or six nice girls and engage them in conversation. Before we got through, I had a little line of girls following me with a handful of yen, and we would go through the line and each of them would get a case of whiskey. They needed that about as bad as I needed mascara, but in this way I was sure of my supply. And in a very magnanimous way, I would hand out a few, three or four or five bottles to the sergeants and some of the boys would help me carry it over.
And the rest of it somehow disappeared, as you might guess. When I returned from a very glorious combative career in the Army, my talents were recognized by the rank of lieutenant colonel. At this time I was quite involved with whiskey and still not recognized myself as an addict. Resuming practice, I had not been in practice long until I got some mumps, double mumps, upstairs, downstairs, with headaches.
It was an encephalitis kind. Well, this was awful, they wouldn't take me to the hospital and I was real sick and they gave me transfusions at home and all of this. And after I got better from this, I became depressed. And my wife and my family were worried because I'd sit on Thursday afternoons, that day off in Youngstown, I'd sit in the room and clean my 45. And I shined the bullets over and over again.
Then a little later, I'd wake up in the morning. We had little kids then and usually I'd put the gun in one cupboard and I'd put these clips of shells elsewhere in the house. But I'd wake up in the morning and I'd find this gun all assembled, cocked, 45 shell in the chamber, no lock on it, nothing. Lying under the bed and have no recollection of how it started or what happened. I'd say good morning to Harriet and she wouldn't speak to me.
So I was afraid that maybe I better get the gun out of the house. She and my mother and a few others decided that maybe I was too depressed, so they talked me into seeing a doctor. Well, I saw one of my good friends, an internist, who went over me carefully, and he said,
[00:45:01]
well, your liver's a little bit touchy, and you've got a few odds and ends, but, uh, actually, I think you should see a psychiatrist, you're depressed. So I went to a psychiatrist, not his choice of a psychiatrist, but I picked my choice, and he will guess he was also an alcoholic. He and I had trained together, that is an alcoholism. He took his, he took his psychiatry in Boston, and by the way, this fine fellow is now dead, um, contributed, I think, by alcohol.
At any rate, we decided that I should have some psychiatric interview, and I went to Cleveland every week for about 12 weeks. We solved some very important issues, I think. I mean, he delved into my entire path, as psychiatrists do. One of the conclusions we reached shortly, that I'd probably been nursed too many times on the left. Uh… There was some complicated affairs developed between me and my wife and so on, but the gist of it all was that I was still a good doctor so far as other people were concerned, I could make good decisions with other people, but for me, no decisions.
I shouldn't buy anything or sell anything or divorce Harriet as I had contemplated, or sell the house or move, I was going to move. I mean, all these things. When we would talk, of course, he'd say, well, what about your drinking? This was a passing remark early in our visits, and of course I gave him the classical answer, a couple before dinner. Most doctors fail to ask what a couple is, and you know what a couple is.
Anyway, after some 10 or 12 weeks with this fine fellow, he decided that maybe I could be discharged, I was better, and I quit shining the .45, and I wasn't talking about dying all the time and thinking about it. So really I guess I was a little better, and so on my last trip up I'd fail to get an appropriate gift. I knew this fellow wasn't going to charge me because professional courtesy, and we were buddies and so on.
I didn't think he would. I should have bought him a television or some appropriate thing. His fees ran around $40 an hour in those days. And so as I got into Cleveland I was disturbed a little because I had not made any provision to make a gift, and of course as I was coming into the suburbs I thought, oh, I have it. So I stopped and bought a case of old granddad, a natural gift and one in which I could share.
This, I think, is quite typical. Well, things went on endlessly and in trouble, of course, and somewhere along the line in those days I remember doing a physical examination for life insurance. A young man, and I asked him about alcohol. Had he been treated? He said, well, no, he hadn't been treated, but he belonged to AA. And I said, would you wait until I finish some other patients here and let me talk to you a bit?
This was just ten years before I knocked on the door myself and asked for help. However, the thing that's important about this is that herein were the seeds, the grains of faith, which grew and developed into something which ultimately saved me. I asked him some questions. I don't remember what he told me, but I guess I thought, here is a port in the storm. I went on ten years of trouble, trouble, trouble.
I was a handyman. I mean, I'd get drunk and we'd have a big house. I bought a house from a gangster. We still live in it, about seven bathrooms. I got a good buy on it. I can't get rid of it. We thought we needed it then. We had three kids and two dogs.
[00:50:02]
We have no kids at home and four dogs now. I fancied myself quite a handyman. My dad had taught me some tricks. So usually about 10.30 or 11 at night, I would start some new task, like installing a base block, putting up some drapery rods or something. We have some monuments to this handy work in the house yet, like grooves in the floorboard where a screwdriver burned a hole into the floor. I thought it was sporty to do this without turning off the power.
You wonder how people can do these things, get into these messes and maintain a business, but I did. I had a pace. I had a program of drinking. You hear people talk about periodic drinkers and so on. I was a periodic drinker. My period of drinking was at four o'clock every day. I worked until then. I was drunk until two from the night before, but I didn't drink until after I finished the work of that day.
I still have the nurse that has been with me for over 20 years, and she's seen these transitions. She reminds me of the days when I would come into work and she was running around frantically pulling out air wicks and with sprays and so on and so on, and she would be trying to cancel appointments or increase the appointments for the remainder of the day in terms of the aura, the odor, which she would get as I came in the back door.
She tells me about this. Somewhere in this abyss of trouble, it occurred to me with this great medical intelligence of mine that, after all, this great amount of whiskey that I drank from four or five o'clock on until I would pass out, a lot of it I didn't really need. I wasn't having too much fun after a certain amount, which I suppose is somewhere between a half pint and the next half pint, and then a considerable amount of drinking followed that.
So I was conceiving in my mind what happens to the stomach. The stomach is a muscular organ, and when it gets drunk, the muscle of the stomach, it stretches. And I was thinking of this stomach looking something like a medicine ball or a boxer's bag, this great big dilated thing containing liquids of various sorts, including whiskey. And really, I wasn't absorbing too much whiskey after a certain period, and this then explained why I was still drunk until two or three o'clock the next day, because I didn't drink in the morning.
I got up and suffered a bit, but I was still able to endure it until maybe two or three o'clock, and then I really started to shake. So I thought, well, the last considerable quantity of this that I drink doesn't really do me any good, and there's no use carrying it around, going to bed with it, and sleeping with it. So I used this fine brain, and I went to the hospital and bought myself a stomach pump.
This, for any of you who are uninitiated, is a hard rubber tube about the size of your middle finger. It has in the middle a little squeeze pump, and it has on the other end a rubber funnel. With this, I bought a two-quart white enamel pitcher. I took up to the bathroom adjacent to my bedroom a pint jar with some mineral oil in it. I took another quart jar with a mixture of salt and soda. This makes a very nauseating solution when it's tepid.
One of my problems had always been that I was unable to induce vomiting. This is one reason why I became an alcoholic. If you can't hold it, you don't get to be an alcoholic. But I could hold it. So I started this program after I was pretty drunk in the evening,
[00:55:04]
and as I would come to the period in which I was about to fall on my face, I would go to the bathroom, I would dip my tube in mineral oil, I would fill the two-quart container with this thickly salty soda water, and I would feed the tube in. I would pour in the two quarts. Of course, that on top of what I already had made me look a little pregnant. And I would turn the funnel over into the receptacle and start to pump.
And then would come this mysterious conglomeration of contents, which did, in fact, relieve me of some of the dreadful symptoms. I slept much better, and I seemed to feel better in the morning. And I followed this practice for two or three days, and on the fourth day I couldn't talk. [Unclear] Well, enough of this. My time's almost gone. I came to AA as a desperate man, but I was ready. I was quite fortunate.
The man whom I first talked to told me some very simple things, and the idea which I got then and I've always had was that I don't have to live the whole rest of my life today, and I don't have to think of the whole rest of my life today. The important thing is, where this matter is concerned, I only live a few minutes at a time. I don't try to figure out how I'm going to get through Christmas. I couldn't imagine decorating a Christmas tree sober.
I couldn't think of going to a funeral sober. I couldn't think of going to a wedding sober. I was the kind of a guy that carried a pint of whiskey under the seat of my car with a straw, so that when I drove in at the funeral parlor, I could lean over as though I'm tying my shoes, and in this way I could get the fortification that I needed to go on through this ordeal. Now to face life, look ahead of what there might be left for me, but in that alcoholic confusion that we all have at this stage, to try to face life ahead without whiskey was inconceivable.
Yet this man said to me, get through the next hour, get through the next day, and this idea was great. This was besides all of the other things which developed. These great truisms, this faith in a higher power, these great traditions and basic elements of the philosophy which we follow, I could gather in a little at a time, but that first day, as you know, is a pretty foggy one. But the endurance and the faith and the help of these fine people that came to my rescue at that stage, just as you have all done many times for other people, was the thing which made it.
A great concept to me was that I actually had a disease. There isn't any doubt that alcoholism is a disease, whether a lot of people in the general public do not accept this entirely. The fact is that it is legally. It is so designated by the American Medical Association. I've talked to lawyers and responsible individuals, and there is no question that this belongs in the category of disease, just the same as anything else.
Tuberculosis, anything which produces sickness, loss of services, loss of work, is a disease. It is, in fact, an addiction. We are a breed of cat that differs from our fellow man in that we are not able to use alcohol in the same way. This is a mystery just exactly why. There's a lot of cues, there's a lot of hints upon why the alcoholic differs. There are chemical studies that suggest leads in this direction, but there's no absolute proof.
[01:00:02]
There are exciting studies that have been done with living tissue, live cells have been kept alive in ringers and other isotonic solutions, and have been addicted to alcohol by increasing the bath in which they live. And when these cells are deprived of alcohol suddenly in this media in which they live, they go through a reaction which is convulsive in nature. They have a serious cellular disturbance and response.
This has been proven without any question. So the thing we don't know is what is the ingredient, what's the agent. Not like diabetes, we know in diabetes it's insulin, the lack of insulin some people can't produce, and therefore they have the disease. With us we don't know yet the specific button to press, we don't know the hormone, we don't know the thing exactly to do to change it for us. However, it was a lot easier for me when I realized that I had a sickness, a real sickness.
This was not because I didn't have any guts or because I couldn't hold my booze. You see, we've gotten confused in our thinking in society. Drinking is an acceptable thing, it's almost mandatory. Many of us here, people that we try to work with say, I've got to drink in my business, how can you be a salesman and not drink with your customers? And so on and so on. It's somehow mixed up with manhood and virility, I mean all this chug-a-luck and Kappa Beta Phi that you get in college if you can hold your booze and all these things.
These are indications that many people in society accept it as an indication of your virility and your manhood. It isn't that, we're sick, we have a sickness. It's a lot easier to live with this problem if you can look upon this in yourself and in other people who has a hormone defect or a physiological defect of some sort, but it's a sickness. It really isn't the individual's fault because he lives in a society in which alcohol is thrown at him all the time.
We learn just like the patient who has allergies, who is sensitive to penicillin, who is sensitive to strawberries, that if we eat strawberries we're going to pay the price, we have hives or we itch. If we're sensitive to penicillin or some of the other drugs, all we need is one more shot to kill us. So we learn. Now I've learned about alcohol that I am sensitive to this. I'm unable to handle alcohol.
I have to have it out of my life. I had to make a life in which alcohol is not needed, in which I have a complete and total choice in whether or not I will take a drink. It's not easy, but it has been easy for me. It isn't easy for everybody, but I've done it in small bits, a little bit at a time, a day at a time, and therefore with me I say now it is easy, and looking back it doesn't seem long, and yet it's been quite a few years since I had my last drink.
I've learned that for me it's a busy program. It's something that I must do and think about all the time, every day. It isn't so much a question of must now. It's a must, I think, for a few weeks, but as an active proposition, as an active program for me, to get out and do something, to take part in a program and a philosophy which I could understand, which I could put to use. Certainly we all don't have total enjoyment and pleasure with every other individual in AA, but just like any other group of people, there are among those who embrace the program people with whom you can identify yourself, with whom you can talk, with whom you can play.
That's why I think like everyone who has enjoyed the program of AA, we've taken an active step every day to increase the pleasure of living,
[01:05:04]
and the pleasure is our participation. To me it's a great reward and a great source of joy and satisfaction to have the part in helping someone who needs help, who's drunk, who doesn't understand, and who needs to find a way to live without alcoholism or without alcohol. When I have a part in a successful few days, a successful few weeks, to me this gives me a great deal of satisfaction. It helps me in this revised ego that I have.
We have self-respect, we have a restoring of an ego that is on a different plane and in a different value after we become sober and stay sober for a while. AA is my health. I know that without it, without the program, I'd be dead. My wealth, whatever I have in the way of a few worldly things, a little bit of security, my family, my grown children, all of these things are my wealth. These I would have lost were it not for AA.
AA is my peace. AA is my peace of mind. AA is my faith. AA is my hope. [Unclear] lost my faith in God, [unclear] lost my faith in every man and every thing. And anyone who wants to die every morning and wonders why he didn't die during the night has lost almost everything. So how will I spend the rest of my life? Well, I've learned that I'm going to spend it a day at a time. I want to live, I have great hopes.
I want to see other people recover. I want to see my children grow. All of these things. And I know that the way for me to enjoy these things is to continue to believe and think as I do. I think countless times each day what a great pleasure it is to not have to take a drink. After all these years, I can remember the shivers, the shakes, the stomach wretchings and discomfort and all of the things which go with the hangover of which I have many.
My rewards are endless. I certainly am not going to take the time to give them to you in detail. The opportunity to be here tonight was an honor which I never in my wildest dreams could have anticipated. This is a great reward, a great honor. I am so everlastingly grateful to everyone and all that I have met and the countless persons in AA. One of my great rewards has been the love and great friendship and help of Del and Maribel.
I always close my lead with the words to a song which Del wrote. A day at a time, a day at a time, if you live it that way you will find a wonderful, wonderful way of life and the thing we're all seeking, peace of mind. A day at a time you work and you sleep, do the things to be done in each day and yesterday's cares will fade away if you take the time to pray. Pray for health, pray for happiness, that's all very fine.
But the best prayer of all is thy will be done, not mine. Three score and ten years are thousands of days and you can't live them all at one time. And a wonderful, wonderful life is yours if you just live it a day at a time. Thank you. Applause. Thank you very, very much Dr. Luke. Dr. Luke spoke of activity and this has been so vitally important for this alcoholic. You know I discovered that if I become interested in someone else then I forget about my own problems
[01:10:04]
and what a wonderful way to stay sober by forgetting your own problems and it does work that way. And I had the extraordinary good fortune of joining the Park-Madison group when I first came around to AA and all the members of that group were active and through imitation of what they were doing it brought me to the point where I am today. It brought me this feeling that one day at a time things are going the way they should be.
And I know that it's the continuing active interest of the older members of our group that makes it, I think, such a great group. I know that everybody feels that same way about their group but it's particularly important to me.