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Source: Ed B – Speaker Talk – Date Unknown.mp3 File: ed-b-speaker-talk-date-unknown.mp3 Duration: 00:52:55
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So it is with a great deal of pleasure that I present to you at this time, Ed B. of Northridge, California. Thank you, Dave. Wouldn't you know, they'd put me on with the greatest comedian here. After all these wonderful speakers we've had here, I wondered why they had saved me for this spot. As some of us used to say in show business, this is a spot you wouldn't give a leopard. But I understand that it's not because I deserve this final spot. I think it's mostly because I have two stories.
I forgot to introduce myself. I, in Southern California, usually am greeted with an answer, as those of you who have visited that part of the country know. So I'll introduce myself now. Oh, I want to keep my anonymity. I know anybody here who sees my face and hears my name will certainly not have any idea who I am. So I will say that my name is Ed B., and I am a grateful alcoholic. My wife, God bless her, gave me a whole bunch of notes, and there they are over there. And so if I stumble through here, you'll probably understand.
Walter O.K. last night mentioned the Texans, and Manny, of course, has talked about his father and his uncle. And combining the two reminds me of a story of a trip I was making from New York to California by air. And we put down in Houston. But from New York there had been on the plane a little old Jewish fellow. Apparently it was his first airplane ride, and he was all hunched up in a seat over by the window with another vacant seat on the aisle.
And he didn't talk to anybody. He just stayed by himself, and apparently he was determined to make this trip even though the fear of travel in the air, as I had for many years, was with this man. Now we put down in Houston while they refueled, and a big Texan got on. He must have stood six feet two. And as Walter mentioned, with the cowboy boots and the Stetson, he looked still bigger. And he looked around, and the only seat was that aisle seat next to that little frightened Jewish man that was sitting all hunched up at the window.
And he sat down there, and he took off his Stetson, and he put it on his chest, and he stretched out his legs after buckling the belt, and he went fast asleep. Now there was a great deal of turbulence from Houston to Los Angeles, and the plane dipped, and it fell, and it raised, and it went up and down. And this poor little Jewish fellow, he was getting more frightened and I think more sick by the minute, and the Texan was sleeping all through this.
And apparently the little Jewish man didn't know how to ring for the stewardess, and he couldn't find that little bag that they have there in emergencies. And finally the inevitable happened. And the Texan sleeping there, it went all over the Texan. Now the poor little Jewish man is in fear and trepidation of what's going to happen when this huge Texan wakes up. And finally, of course, he did wake up. And at first he didn't know what it all was about, and he looked down at himself, and he saw this thing that had covered him, and the little Jewish fellow looked over him, and he touched his arm, and he said, Do you feel better now?
[00:05:14]
I've got to tell you about my Uncle Patsy. My people came from Ireland a great many years ago, and our baby daughter, Maureen Kathleen, as some of you may know from the newspaper and television stories, radio stories, that our daughter was born prematurely while we were on a visit to Ireland. The baby is now four years old, and some of you have seen her on the Mike Douglas show, I guess, yesterday afternoon.
But my Uncle Patsy lived to be 104 years old. But when he was 84, he fell in love with a girl 26. And, of course, my cousins were mortified. They could not believe that such a thing could happen. And they talked to my Uncle Patsy, but he wouldn't listen to them. He said, I know what you're going to say, and it doesn't make a difference. That was his way of putting it. I love this girl, and she loves me. I was married to your mother for 35 years, and I brought you children up the best way I knew how.
And your mother's been dead this many years. I've been a widower, and I'm lonesome, and I met this girl, and it's true. She's only 26, and I'm 87, but I love her, and she loves me, and we're going to get married. Well, my cousins got together, and they said something must be done. And finally, they decided that one of them must be the one to go in and lay the law down to Uncle Patsy. And so, my cousin Mick was selected because they figured he was the most diplomatic member of the family.
And he went in to see Uncle Patsy, and he was told specifically to make it clear this terrible thing that Uncle Patsy was doing. And he came in, and, of course, Uncle Patsy said, I know what you're here for. Now, I told you before, your mother and I were married for 35 years. I brought you children up the best way I know how. But I've been a widower these many years. Now, I fell in love with this girl. It's true.
She's only 26, and I'm 87, but I love her, and she loves me, and we're going to get married. And finally, my cousin Mick figured there's only one way to do this, to settle this finally, and that is to lay it right out there on the table. And he said, Papa, that girl is only 26. You're 87. You marry her, and it could be fatal. And my Uncle Patsy thought about it for a minute, and finally he turned to him, and he said, well, if she goes, she goes.
You know, when I mentioned about the anonymity, I was kidding, as you all know, because I am talking to you. My people, the people I love who have done so much for me. And it reminds me of years ago, up in the little coal mining town in Pennsylvania, a little Italian fella ran a movie theater. You couldn't hardly glorify it by calling it a movie theater. This is years ago in the silent pictures, and it was a little bit of a place, a little storefront, and they only had movies one night a week on Wednesday night.
And the movies they got were so worn that it was difficult to run them without having them break and have to splice it again. And, of course, anybody who was going to the movies in that little bitted town on Wednesday night, they collected around the front of this little storefront, and the Italian did the whole thing himself, this little Italian fellow, and he sold the tickets. And then the people who were going into the movies, they had to wait until all the people who were going to buy tickets had done that, and then he would go around to the door and open the door and stand at the door, and they would go in and he would take the tickets as they went in.
Then he would close the door, and then he had a little iron ladder about that wide that went up to a little old broken down projection booth.
[00:10:00]
And he climbed up that thing and all the people that were in there, all the people, 50, 60, 70 people, were sitting in there on those hard chairs. And he would climb up there and he would run these old, worn out, silent pictures. But this was the only recreation they had, and movies were new in those days. And he would stop and splice them when they broke. And, of course, there would be the usual, but he paid no attention to that.
He was used to it, and the audience were used to it. They did it as a matter of course. But one night he got a film one Wednesday night, and it was so old and so fragile and had made the rounds so often that it was impossible. He spliced, and it broke, and he spliced, and it broke, and it spliced, and it broke. And finally he climbed down, and he went down the aisle, and he got up on the stage, which was about a foot in front of this old curtain he had there.
And he addressed the people, and he said, gentlemen, ladies, I'm sorry. No moment of picture tonight. That's not my fault. That's the machine's fault. The machine is a break it. And one wise guy sitting over here in the front had his feet up on the chair in front of him and said, ah, for God's sake, talk English. He said, you kiss my foot. I'm no speaker for you. I speak for the people. And this is exactly what I am going to try to do.
I'm going to speak to the people, my people, the people who have meant so much to me. I told you I had two stories, and I'll try to start and carry it through in some way. The first drink I remember taking was when I was a boy, probably nine years old. My parents must have been having a wedding anniversary or something, some kind of a party, and they had a keg of beer out on the back porch. We lived on the second floor of a six-family tenement house in Hartford, Connecticut.
And I wanted to try that. I saw these grownups having such a wonderful time, and so I sneaked down the front stairs and around the house and up the back stairs and crawled under the window so I wouldn't be seen. And there was a glass there, and I turned the spigot and had half a glass or something of that beer. I must tell you that I did not like the taste of it. Besides that, it made me deathly sick.
Now, that would have been, for any ordinary boy, the end of it. I tried it. It's distasteful. It made me sick. I don't want it. But I was determined, I guess even at that early age, although I didn't know it, to go through the entire routine that we alcoholics have known. I used to hang out with a gang that thought it was very, very smart to go into the front part of a bar on Asylum Street in Hartford, which was partitioned off from the regular bar as a sort of a bottled goods place, where men on the way out, or even people, men on the way in, could buy a bottle of whiskey or whatever spirits they wanted to purchase.
And when the bartender was busy, it was easy for a young boy, and we were two or three very agile young boys who used to do this, we would sneak in very, very slyly and open the glass door of this case and grab a bottle of wine and sneak out again, and we'd have the wine. And of course, the same thing happened to me. I got deathly sick. But I kept drinking, getting sick, and drinking. When I was 13, I traveled with fairs and carnivals and circuses. They had a cheap gin they used to buy, and I had to be one of the men.
And even though this stuff was the most obnoxious stuff I had ever tasted in my life, I had to taste it. And of course, I got drunk. This continued. When I was 15 years old, I worked on the New York, New Haven, and Hartford railroads. I worked on the New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad, and if any of you are a railroad man, there's one wonderful railroad man here, a conductor, God bless him, who gave me the most wonderful shine today.
[00:15:12]
I was a boy, 15 years old, and I worked from 7 o'clock at night to 7 o'clock in the morning. My job was a call boy. Now, please don't misunderstand me. That was nothing like a call girl. My job was to go around with a list to the homes of the engineers, the firemen, the brakemen, the conductors, and call them for a certain run. Well, I was very energetic, very good at my job. I got around very well, and also I did many favors for these men.
If a man didn't want a certain run, and his name was at the head of the list, and I called at his home and he said, no, I don't want to take that run, his name automatically went to the bottom. Now, if this man was like some of we alcoholics, he would say, come here, kid. Look, I don't want to take that run, but you leave my name at the top of the list. Say I wasn't home when you called. Yes, sir. And he would give me a nice drink of whiskey. And so the inevitable happened. Fifteen years of age, I was fired for drunkenness.
My next job was a job in a small theatrical hotel, Long's Hotel in Hartford, Connecticut. I was a bellhop, and again I was working. Fifteen years of age, from 7 o'clock at night to 7 in the morning. Part of my duties were carrying drinks up to the guests in the room. Also, I had to run the elevator. It was a cable pull elevator. And I was very, very good at this job, and the bartender, he admired me very, very much.
Fifteen years old, I used to be able to get those drinks up to those guests and get down again, and the bartender was very proud of me, and he would always give me a little bonus. I'd get a little drink of whiskey, or a big drink of whiskey. And the inevitable happened. The people were waiting in the lobby, just like we've seen them out here when all our gang got in front of that elevator, only this was an antiquated elevator. And they're all waiting there, ringing the bell.
And finally, after an interminable length of time, the management sent somebody up to find the empty elevator with the door open on the fifth floor. No elevator boy, little Eddie B., was dead drunk asleep in the toilet on the seventh floor. And so I was fired again. Now, this is the way my life was going. I joined the United States Navy when I was 18, thinking that I can't do it myself. I know if I join the Navy, they're strict, and they will force me to knuckle under.
And not for any patriotic reasons whatsoever, but simply because I felt that the Navy could do what I couldn't do myself, make a man out of me, make me live a normal life, I joined the United States Navy. Well, I must tell you that I don't remember too much about the two and a half years I put in the United States Navy. I was on a United States Naval radio station in Tuckerton, New Jersey, and they have a lot of alcohol on a radio station.
And I was slim enough in those days to climb through a transom and get a five-gallon tin and open the door from the inside and pass it out to my buddies, and we would take it over to the mess hall and cut it. But after a certain length of time, I would forget to cut mine, and the result would be that somebody came up behind me with a baseball bat, or so I imagined, and just hit me a wallop back of my head because I just fell flat on my face, my face was all scarred, and I would be out completely, and it's a wonder I lived through it.
We put a destroyer into commission in 1921, the USS Stuart, and putting new supplies aboard her, we're putting paint aboard, and the first time I heard about this innovation, somebody suggested we get a gallon of shellac and a loaf of bread and cut the ends off, both ends of the loaf of bread.
[00:20:08]
And pour the can of shellac through the bread, which was supposed to strain all the residue out of there, and we were supposed to get pretty good alcohol out of it. Well, you can imagine what my stomach was like, and what it's still like. I got out of the Navy, an undesirable discharge, because of the drinking. I married and I settled in Philadelphia, and my drinking continued until a doctor there in 1922 told me that if I ever took another drink, I was signing my own death warrant.
Now, that was 1922. I can't remember that doctor's name, but I had the friendliest feelings for him, and I hope nobody ever tossed him into a vat that held all the whiskey I drank since that, because he sure would be in trouble. Now, I continued drinking. I was a theater manager. I worked at innumerable jobs, because I could get a job any time, but I couldn't hold a job. I would be fired for drunkenness.
I kept going back to my hometown, Hartford, Connecticut, and finally in 1931, I became connected with a radio station in Hartford, Connecticut, and for the first time, I hit what I call a solid plateau in my entertainment adventures. I was able to do innumerable roles in radio dramas. They had what they called a radio stock company there, Radio Dramatic Stock Company. Many of them you have seen in motion pictures since that. They've become famous.
Gary Merrill was a boy sitting around hoping to read a few lines during rehearsal. Michael O'Shea, who was married to Virginia Mayo, was one of the company. Louis Nye, who you see in the nightclubs, was one of the company, and there were several others whom I can't think of at the moment. But I was sort of the white-haired boy in the dramatic end of it. I was one of the original company in 1931 and was doing fine, but eventually my drinking caught up with me, and one night they brought me in, two fellas, one under each arm, and I was out so completely that they had to cancel the program and take a network program.
This happened three times. The third time I was fired, they gave orders down below that I wasn't even to be allowed into the building, but I still kept drinking. I used to find anniversaries. I would find birthday parties, any kind of a holiday. If there wasn't a holiday, I would make one. This is when I could tie an extra special drunk on. I went down to New York when Howard, when Walter O.K. was substituting for Fred Allen, and I coerced or soft-talked Walter, I don't know why I want to call him Howard, into giving me a job as a dramaturge.
He used people out of the audience, supposedly amateurs. They were amateurs, really, but I wasn't an amateur, and Walter knew it and tried to talk me out of it. He said, Ed, you sound too much like a professional. I said, I need that money. I'll sound more like an amateur than any amateur you bring up there, and I think I did. But all I wanted, he used to give them $10. That was the money he gave each one of these people who appeared in his program. And, of course, he gave me the $10, and I couldn't get out of that studio fast enough to get across the street on 6th Avenue in New York to the nearest bar until it was finished.
I went back to Hartford again. As I say, I kept going back and forth to my hometown of Hartford. My father died. I took this as an occasion for going on the drunk of all drunks. Now, before this, I had been picked up out of the gutter. I had been hospitalized. I had been in jail. I had gone for weeks without eating. As we all know, an alcoholic will go without eating. But now I was beyond that point. Now I couldn't sleep, and I think, as you know, that sleep is the one thing that is necessary to keep us going. We can go without food for an awful long time.
[00:25:18]
I would try to get little naps in a chair. I couldn't lie down, because the moment I would lie down, my heart would thump so much that I would think it was going to jump right out of my body. And I ended up in the hospital. And the doctors who knew my record, who could see my charts, who knew that I had been in hospitals in and out, time after time after time, and finally figured that it was no use, they discharged me. They said, get him out of here. He's taking up a valuable bed that somebody who needs it could use.
And they sent me home. A friend of mine in the welfare department in Hartford came after me in his old jalopy, helped me to dress. I was so weak, I could hardly walk. He had to support me to his car, drive me to my home, help me up the stairs into the house. But I want to say first that while I was lying there, I knew I was dying. And I thought of all the misery that I had put my family through. My little wife has long since died. She used to go out and work, because every penny I made I spent on booze.
I didn't care about the food for the family or paying the rent. I was so far in debt that I couldn't see my way out. I owed everybody except the people from whom I bought the liquor. I always paid my liquor bills. And I was able for a while prior to that to shave and straighten up a little bit so that I could go and do a job and get paid and then get drunk again. But I ended up in this terrible state in this hospital, the municipal hospital in Hartford, where now stands an alcoholic rehabilitation center.
And I came home on my bed in the hospital knowing what I had come to and feeling the terrible stigma that I was leaving my family. I was dying and I knew it, but I felt, why should these innocent people suffer? And I asked God to please let me live for three weeks, a month, six weeks. I wanted to do one thing, one good thing that somebody might remember after I was gone. Because I knew I would be six feet under, but my wife and son had to live with that terrible stigma, you know, your father, your husband is a drunken bum.
And so when I went home that time, my wife put me right to bed and cared for me and gave me nourishment. And before I was really able, I got out of bed and shaved and bathed and my wife was pleading with me not to do it. I was so weak, but I insisted. And I went down to the radio station where I had been the big egotistical man who knew I was in demand down there. And I went now with my hat in my hand and pleaded, not for one of the big roles I had been playing, not for one of the leads, not for one of the juicy roles, throw me a bone, anything, a couple of lines so I can make a couple of dollars.
And they tried their best to talk me out of it. I was too weak. And I looked like an advance agent for death, really. But they did. They took pity on me and certainly they were overly generous because I had been such a heel. But they did give me a little bitty thing, enough to make a couple of dollars. And I worked. And I got better. And I got healthier. And I started to work at every job I could, adding to the regular acting chores. I took every job to pay up my bills, to pay the back rent, to pay the back grocery, to pay everything.
Grocery to pay everything and to put a couple of dollars in the bank and I began to feel
[00:30:01]
differently about people. Now I didn't know a thing about AA. I had never heard of AA, but something, somewhere, somehow must have inspired me because I know now that I was doing what we are told we must do in AA. I had everything but you people, everything but the fellowship, everything but what is absolutely necessary. And I went on that way getting more prosperous and getting bigger and healthier and going to New York and appearing on plays in Broadway, appearing in motion pictures, going to Hollywood, doing television and the longer I went the more egotistical I became.
Now I began to hear about AA and people would say to me, Ed, you know, you could do a great deal for some other drunk and this will give you a clue to what happened. I began to think that I had done it all by myself. I forgot that I had turned to God and asked him, please, to let me live for three weeks, for four weeks, for six weeks. By this time now I was in the habit of saying to hell with them.
Let them do it like I did. Use a little willpower. Now you know this was the beginning of the end, but I didn't know it. I was in Hollywood working in motion pictures and making a very, very fine salary and I went back to New York. By this time I owned two houses, one on Long Island in New York and one in California and I went back to New York to visit the house there and I got a telephone call from CBS and they put me under contract for seven years for live television, a situation comedy series.
This was in 50, 51 and I thought this is the way to get into television with both feet. I had done television before that, but this was the way to get into television with both feet, even though the salary was much lower than what I'd been making in motion pictures. And so I signed the contract for seven years and I knew I'd be tied up so I figured I would go to Europe and celebrate before I got into full harness and got going.
My brother and I went to Ireland and we went to England and we went to Paris and I bought liquor and brought it home. I caught a cold the first day I landed in Ireland and they said, a little Irish whiskey will be just the thing for you. I said, no, no, thank you very much, no, no, give me some hot tea and a lemon. And I had hot tea and lemon. I didn't drink. I wouldn't order a dish in France if I knew beforehand that it had been cooked in wine.
That's how far I went. I came home, I brought the usual quota from Shannon Airport of whiskey and gave it to my friends. I always served liquor in my house. I usually was a bartender. Now we started this wonderful plunge into live television, this seven-year contract with CBS, the Situation comedy series. And it was the worst turkey I have ever been connected with. It was horrible. The thing I had looked forward to, it was awful.
They changed leading ladies five times in 13 weeks. They changed the director several times. I became more frustrated and more frustrated. And I said, what have I done? I left California where I was doing so well and I came back here and I began to feel sorry for myself. And the more frustrated I became, the more sorry I felt for myself. And finally I said, I'll show them. And I went across the street and I said, give me a double Irish.
And I picked it up and I drank it. And I thought to myself, my gracious, I can handle it now. Fourteen years wasted. I could have been drinking all that time, having a wonderful time as a social drinker. And I took the second drink and the fifth and the tenth and the fiftieth. I don't know where it happened or when, but I know very, very quickly I realized that I was like the monkey who gets his hand caught in the coconut trap.
I was caught.
[00:35:01]
Those 14 years of sobriety I had were out the window. And I wanted desperately to get sober again. I wanted to be able to see. I didn't want all those imaginary bunches of insects flying by my head and by my eyes that I imagined were there that weren't really there. I didn't want to have an auto horn blow behind me and I'd almost jump out of my skin. I didn't want to be so fearful about crossing a street.
And I could not get sober. I will give you my mental picture of the position I was now in because I had known what 14 years of normal living was. My mental picture of the position I was in was of being out in the middle of the Sahara Desert down in the bottom of a deep, deep, deep dry well where no caravan ever passes. So helpless and so hopeless nobody will ever come by there to give me assistance, to help me get out.
And even if they did, all my shouts would never reach them. They would never hear them. This is the black picture I carried in my mind of the position I was in. And believe me, it was that very type of position that I was in. I was in New York now and I was living in our Long Island home and across the street from me was a man by the name of Charlie K.. And this man had often talked to me, like so many had talked to me, about AA.
And I'd say, yeah, yeah, sure, yeah, yeah, yeah, very good, yeah, I think it's a great thing, Charlie, yeah, fine, yeah. And he would talk to me, gave me literature. And finally, this so-and-so got on my nerves so much that I told my wife one day, I said, you know, I think that guy gets a commission. I think that's what it is. Nobody's going to do a thing like that. This guy, he must get so much ahead for the people he brings in there.
He's a phony. Well, I went on and on, and one week I was to do the Robert Montgomery. I'd been doing shows, I'd been doing television shows, and always the guest star where I carried the load and I would have to take Peraldehyde to pull myself together enough to get in and do the show. I remember being on one show with Brandon DeWilde, who was a little boy then, he's now a grown man, and Buster Crabb, and Jan Minor, an actress in New York who had known me in Hartford.
And we were doing this thing, and I was getting very close to the point of strangling little Brandon DeWilde because I wanted to get the hell out of there and get to a bar and just, you know, start pouring him down. And he was pulling around there, and I had his back, and he was doing all that, and I thought, oh, jeez, if I can only get my hands around his throat, I'll strangle that little… And finally this Jan Minor came over to me, and she said, Ed, and she's whispering, somebody in here has got ether.
Can you smell it? I said, no, I can't smell it. This is the way I used to be able to get myself through some of those programs. Now I forgot to tell you that I finally finished out the 13 weeks of that horrible program that started all this and was so glad it was over that I really started in drinking seriously. And finally a friend of mine, a director, called me and gave me a sales pitch. He wanted me to do a character that had been on once a week and now is going on five times a week a combination radio and television show.
Now the money I was getting on the other one, the CBS seven-year contract deal, that was bad enough. This one was still lower, but I thought maybe I could wipe that out of my mind, and I took
[00:40:00]
this. Now I must tell you that the show is still on the air. This one, it's called Edge of Night or The Edge of Night, I don't know. But on this show we did a 15-minute radio broadcast and a 15-minute television show the same day. And on this show I played a minister, doctor somebody or other, and wore a Roman collar. Now this was a fine thing because I'm telling you, I couldn't see the camera. I found out years later in talking to one of the actresses on there, when I told her this story, she said, my God, Ed, do you know the story that was going around at the time?
I said no, what was it? She said the story was going around at the time that Ed B. was too proud and wouldn't wear his glasses and couldn't read the teleprompter. So they never knew. They let me go after six or seven weeks, paid me off, but they never knew. Never worried about my drinking, and I know to this day nobody ever knew what was the real cause of my difficulties. But anyway, here was this Robert Montgomery show that I was trying to get ready for.
My brother Martin had come out to Long Island and had sat with me all day for moral support, trying to get me sobered up. They didn't know between my brother and my wife whether they were going to send me to a hospital or whether they were going to have to call NBC and Robert Montgomery Presents and tell them Ed was suddenly stricken with an Achilles heel cancer or something and he's not able to make the show.
But my brother was sitting there devoting his whole day to keeping me company, giving me moral support. I, after seeing the pictures that Judge H. had, I'm glad they didn't take a picture of me then during this period I'm talking about, because I looked like something really with a beard and the dirty bathrobe and pacing up and down and my brother's there and I'm putting on the phoniest act for the benefit of my brother, you know, and I'm pacing up and down.
I really had to pace, but also I was using it to advantage, too, because I'd sneak into the kitchen and very quietly open the refrigerator and there was a couple of cans of beer in there. I'd take a can of beer. Now, I'm not a beer drinker. The only time I ever drank beer when I was up to here in whiskey just to put a cold layer over the top, but this was all there was. And so I would take this can of beer out of there and I would get an opener.
They didn't have these fancy cans in those days and I would take an opener and very quietly I would open it and that was gone, but it did nothing for me and I'd pace back and forth again and here were these swarms of insects, these imaginary insects flying by my head and the jitters and then I would go out again and finally the beer was gone. There was no more and I look up over the kitchen. We had a kitchen cabinet there and my wife had put some, for decoration, some old straw-covered Chianti wine bottles up there and there they were.
Now they've been up there for months, maybe years, I don't know, but here there's nothing else there and I'm looking with longing eyes thinking, I wonder if there might be a drop in that one and a drop in that one and I'll put them all together and I might get that much of a drink. This is how desperate I was and finally I walked into my den. I had a desk there and if any of you ever read those stories years ago about the Colliers brothers' estate in New York, which was a rat's nest, they were scavengers.
That's what my desk looked like, unanswered correspondence and unpaid bills, but on that desk was a little meeting book given to me by Charlie K., the man whom I despised across the street, my neighbor, the man who worked on commission. And thank God the type on the serenity prayer is bold type and it was on the inside cover of that meeting book and absently I picked it up and how I could focus my eyes I don't know, but again I say that the good God was looking after me because I was able to read, God grant me the serenity.
Able to Read, God Grant Me the Serenity to Accept the Things I Cannot Change, Courage to Change the Things I Can, and Wisdom to Know the Difference.
[00:45:02]
And something happened. I don't know why I should deserve it, but I'm grateful that God thought I did because it happened. And I went to a meeting that night. I called Charlie K., who became my sponsor. And I went to a meeting that night. And the first meeting I went to was an interracial group. And this was in Freeport, Long Island, two miles from Merrick, where I lived. And I sat on my hands. I had to.
And he didn't come himself. He was going to rub my nose in the dirt. He sent my co-sponsor, we'll show this big shot Ed B.. And I was sitting there at this meeting. I say it's an interracial group. And there was a colored fellow sitting next to me and kept looking at me. And finally he said to me, he said, did you speak Garden City? Speak at Garden City? This was my first meeting. I could hardly sit still.
Well I knew what it was. This is the thing I had feared about going into AA. How will I act? Ed B., the actor, the big celebrity. You know, what will people think? Ed B.. I never thought what they thought when they found me lying in the gutter, when they found my car smashed up against a tree and two policemen hauling me out, or whether they saw me when I was being rushed to the hospital. I never thought about that.
But I was worried about what they might think about seeing me go to an AA meeting. And this is the thing that had been troubling me. And finally I turned to this colored fellow and I said, no, I never spoke at Garden City. You know, thinking maybe that that'll end it, you know, say. And finally he said, well, did you ever drink at the White Horse Bar? I said, no, I drank at a lot of bars, but I never drank at the White Horse Bar.
No. And I thought, this is it. Thank you, God. You've given me the clue. Now this is the way to do it. This is what I must do. And I turned to him and I said, no, you probably have seen me in movies or television. And he said, yeah, yeah. And he moved over. I suppose he said to himself, I was told I'd meet all kinds in here, and here's one of them. But you know, it taught me a valuable, valuable lesson.
I went to a meeting every night in the week because those groups out there in Long Island were two, three, four miles apart. And I kept going to meetings every night on Sunday afternoon or whenever and wherever possible. And I have been going to meetings now for a long, long time. I was in Vietnam recently in March. I spent my 67th natal birthday in Vietnam, and I spent my 14th AA birthday in Vietnam, April 4th.
And I want to tell you that I am so very, very grateful for what I have gotten from AA. When I first came into AA, the people whom I had felt so superior to were so much better than anything I could possibly ever have imagined. I thought they were the finest, the cleanest, the sweetest, the gentlest, the friendliest, the warmest people I had ever met in my life. And nothing has happened in that 14 years to make me change my opinion.
I just am so very, very happy that you have invited me here to be a speaker and to have met as many of you as I have. And if there's any possible message that I can leave with you, I would like to leave this message, that none of us are strong enough to overcome that first drink.
[00:50:06]
As long as we keep the cork in the bottle, as long as we never reach for that first one, we won't have trouble with the second, the third, the fiftieth, or the hundredth. This is the one lesson that I have learned and I have had adversity since I have been in AA. Things have happened. I get the greatest help from my little wife who is with me here. Many of you have met her, Helen. And she has been so great and wonderful to me, knows how necessary it is for me to get to meetings, and is always understanding.
And I must tell you another thing. After we were married, we've only been married less than six years, our baby is four, my wife stopped drinking. I don't think she's an alcoholic, she doesn't think she's an alcoholic, but she did that to help me. And I think that's a wonderful, wonderful thing, and I'm very, very grateful to her. It probably wouldn't have been necessary, but she did it, and I'm grateful.
And I'm grateful to you people because you are so necessary for me and for my sobriety, and I want to thank you very, very, very much for this wonderful, warm reception that we've had here in Charlotte. Thank you. Well, I'm sure there have been no surprises. It was wonderful, Ed. This has been a great convention. I'm sure that all of us will carry back with us much more than we brought. Now may we close by standing and praying the Lord's Prayer.
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory forever. Amen.