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Source: Lela S. & Ebby T – Great Bend KS – Reel 0805-nonum1 (early 1960s) – Date Unknown.mp3 File: lela-s-and-ebby-t-great-bend-ks-reel-0805-nonum1-early-1960s-date-unknown.mp3 Duration: 00:34:38
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So our next speaker this afternoon is Lila Bell. It's been said that no one ever listens for at least one minute after a person gets up to speak. So I'm going to try to get all my speech in this one minute, and then you'll be the worst beware. When our good cousin John got lightheaded and invited three of his Texas cousins to come up to Great Ben's, I want to say West Ben's, he didn't really know what a great compliment he'd paid me.
This has been going on for a long time. Icky's been trying to get me to practice my speech for quite some time, but actually I've been in the making of this speech for 15 years, so I didn't need any practice. But anyway, when John wrote to us and asked us to come, I think Icky twisted his arm a little bit. I think you really ask Icky, but finally he included Abby and myself, and Abby and I, we're really glad to be here too.
But he didn't know it, this is the first time I've really been asked to be first. Now I've spoken a number of times, I never will forget the first one was back in 1946, and I went down one night and they asked me to make a talk. Well, they didn't really ask me to make a talk, they asked my friend Grace to make a talk, and Grace says, oh no, get Leelabelle to do it. So I've always been second choice up to this time.
So it's really a great honor to be here, and I just love every minute of it. Your chairman talked a lot about fellowship, and my mind went back to a little meeting that we go to down in Texas. We didn't go this year, but we've gone many years. Held in Corpus Christi, Texas. It's a nice place about the size of this town, and oh, there's the most wonderful fellowship that you've ever seen there. We go and stay in this hotel, and we're there for about three days, and we just have a wonderful time.
I never shall forget the first time I went down there, the night before things got started. As Icky says, we now go the day before and are there the day after. But we don't stay three days after like we used to. But anyway, we went down to Corpus, and we were there the night before, and we had this dance upstairs. I was dancing with this guy by the name of Charlie. Charlie said, saw a friend of mine on the street the other day.
He says, what in the world happened to you? I never see you anymore. So he said, well, I just thought I'd tell him. He was one of my old drinking pals, and I just thought, well, I'll just tell him what's been going on. And I just said to him, well, I've joined Alcoholics Anonymous, and I go to the meetings, and I see the people that go to the meetings, and well, I just haven't seen you for a year. This guy said, well, you mean you can't see anybody else, that you just have to see these drunks all the time?
Well, Charlie says, it's not so much that, but it just seems to me like everybody else has lost all their zip. And that's the way it is. I mean, that's the kind of fellowship that you find at a place like this. We've been doing that for a long time. It was back in 1947 that I drove out to Lubbock, and Icky flew out the next day, because it had always been our ambition to know Lois and Bill and Ann and Bob.
And Icky said, I just want to see this guy Bill and say thank you. And then I'm just going to say to him, now, I put my pants on just like you do. But anyway, we did want to say thank you. And we did go out to Lubbock, Texas, and we met Lois and Bill. We've been all around the country. We had a perfectly wonderful time there. And Lois helped me with a great number of things. We play Scrabble a lot. I just love words.
And these words aren't always the ones we use in Scrabble, because some of those words are words like cooperation, which is a hyphenated word. You can't use that in Scrabble. But Lois told me something there about the word love. And she said in the translation from the Greek to the English that the second meaning of the word love was well-wishing. And that meant a lot to me, because I used to think I loved my husband.
Of course, I loved him one minute and wanted to pinch his head off the next. But I thought really all the time I felt the way that I should. You see, I didn't know there was anything at all wrong with me. And then I realized that I had not wished him well and that I could always wish him well from then on. That was one important thing that I learned at that time. Now, this first talk I was talking about, that's going to be my third subject,
[00:05:03]
because they gave me a subject that night, and that was the word cooperation. A third word that has meant an awful lot to me is the word normal. It came about on the same trip that I mentioned when Lois and Bill came on down to Austin, Texas, where we were holding our first state meet. We met out at old St. Edward's University. We had a perfectly wonderful time there for a few days. On Sunday afternoon, this man came, a Dr. Jelinek.
And Dr. Jelinek had done a great deal of research on alcoholism. So he was invited out, and people did ask him questions about the disease of alcohol, and he was willing and glad to tell them all that he had learned over these years. But I didn't have the courage at that time to ask him what I could do. But I followed him on out of the auditorium, and when he got outside, I said, Dr. Jelinek, what can I do to help the alcoholics?
He said, your husband? I said, yes. Did he go to AA? Yes. Been there about 18 months. What would be normal? Well, I had no idea at that time what normal was. Now, I was beginning to learn a little bit, but my education was very, very slow. I'm always reminded of this little boy who was down saying his prayers. Down on his knees, he said, now lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, and with that, he gets up and he runs downstairs.
He's gone about 10 minutes, and then he comes back up. His mother said, you didn't finish your prayer. He said, yes, I know. He said, if I'm going to die before I wake up, I want to clean up all that mess downstairs. Well, I didn't know how much mess there was downstairs at that time, but I was trying to learn a little bit. So I went and I looked up this word normal in a dictionary we had at that time called, it was a Funk and Wagner dictionary.
And I found something very strange in there. I found the word perpendicular. So I went on and I looked up perpendicular, and I came up with a very strange thing. Moral uprightness. Well, it's like I said, I didn't know about all this mess at the time. So I wasn't quite ready to accept that. But I'm awfully glad that I didn't have a Webster's dictionary in the house, because let me read you what he says about it.
Because he goes into a word, rectitude. First of all, he says very rare. Undeviating adherence to moral standards, uprightness, correctness of judgment, or procedure. I'm awfully glad I didn't find that in Webster's at that time, because that would really have been a load. There were so many people that helped me along about that time. There were so many people that helped me get my sense of humor back, because I was the most serious person in the world.
I knew this thing was a life or death matter. But I didn't know that you didn't have to go on being grim about it. We went to the first conference up in New York in 1950 or 51. I've forgotten which year it was. And I met this woman from Kansas City there. She helped me a great deal. My husband was there for the conference meeting. We were going out to Lois's that morning. We were sitting there talking about all the things that had happened, all these wonderful things that had happened to us.
She said, I went to, oh, this great big party out at the country club the other day. I came home and my husband said, did you have a good time? Well, she said, no, not too good a time. She said, I'd rather go to an AA meeting and listen to a guy talk about chasing his wife with a butcher knife. So get your knives sharpened, boys. I won't be up here but just another minute. That third word that I was talking about always comes to my mind, cooperation in the form of a joke.
This came from the old Literary Digest. And if you remember the Literary Digest, it was a very staid publication, so this could not possibly be off color. It seemed that there was a man named Mose working in a mill.
[00:10:02]
And Mose and his wife had just had this new baby. So the boss saw Mose one day and he said, what's the baby's name? He said, oh, the baby's name is Dynamo. Dynamo? He says, yeah, you know my wife's name's Dyna and mine's name's Mose, so it's Dynamo. Well, that's cooperation in a way. Because it says here to cooperate you act or operate jointly with another or others. If the press or the radio or television, anybody wants to sum this speech up, I'd like to give you the words of the country parson that I read the other day.
It says in this complicated world, you either help others solve their problems or you become one. Thank you for inviting us. He's someone I've heard about from John and some of the older AAs for a number of years. There might be a lot of things I could say about him. Some of them could be true and some false. So I figured it would be better to just introduce him as Ebby. This is the man that carried the message to Bill W.
I'll give you Ebby. Well, as you know, my name is Ebby and I'm an alcoholic and a member of Alcoholics Anonymous. And while it's true I did carry the message to Bill, I mean, I was the first one to see him. I want you to set you straight and get the record straight because I haven't had, that was 25 years ago last November, I haven't had complete sobriety. I had two years and seven months that first trip.
And if ever there was a man in this world with a single track mind, I am he. Believe me. And I, that single track mind that I had before I went to see Bill and my old drinking days got working again and I got drunk again. And I've had trouble off and on. I guess if I sat down with a pencil and paper over the last 25 years and added up the phrase of 30 days or more of that and sober, then without a drink I could probably figure 16, 17 years.
But that two years and seven months was the longest stretch up to the time when I came to Texas. Man, I've had a better time since then. I always tell this to recognize this Texas and do the credit for it. Well, I'm not going into any blow-by-blow description of my drinking career. It was bad enough, started in school, was mostly fun and then social mixed drinking later on and then the compulsive drinking.
And finally I think it was drinking just to survive. But come to the summer of 1934, my family had some years previously bought a house in Manchester, Vermont. I lived in Albany, New York, at least a summer in Manchester, but it wasn't until 34, 23 they bought a house. My father and mother are dead and the house is standing idle. And I'd gone back to Manchester, one of my drunken sprees, and parked myself in an inn, a little village right next to Manchester.
It's all part of the same township, but they're three separate villages. And I was drinking there steady all the time. Well, I did have two, three months of sobriety. I finally in the spring of 34 decided I'd go up and open up the house. Might as well live there. So I did. I didn't have much furniture because my married brothers had taken most of the stuff out. And I lived there alone, drunk all the time, got in trouble with the law on two occasions, was fined five or ten dollars.
And the whole situation had really boiled down to the fact that the good people of Manchester were getting pretty sick of me hanging around there. And, of course, I can't imagine why. I was trying to behave myself or I was drunk every day. But we painted the house. And one day, two or three days after I'd finished the painting job, I got drunk again because the work was over. And the pigeons had settled on the roof of the house.
And this was a house built with a roof running over it. House, and this is a roof, this is a house that was built with a roof running one way and another, another way, you know, all these gables and stuff.
[00:15:04]
And I could hear them up there, and I decided this is about as good a time to eliminate them as any rain or not, and believe me, it was pouring down rain. So I loaded the old double barrel shotgun, and I went out, and I was backing up on the wet grass, and I wasn't gonna get a shot. I went down, I went on my back. And I wasn't lying on my back, and I didn't see any reason to get up and shoot at them, so I was banging away on the grass.
And I guess my neighbors could see me from their windows, and I imagine they complained to the law. Well, I'm a little ahead of my story there, because just three or four weeks before that, two men had come to see me. Two boys that I'd known for years and had drunk with, and I'd been drunk more times than they had, because I couldn't, I was more of an alcoholic than they were. In fact, I think they were both steady or heavy drinkers and not alcoholics.
But anyway, they wandered into my house, and they sat down, and a lot of hemming and hawing, and finally they kind of opened up. I couldn't figure out what the dickens they were driving at. And they said, did you ever think of turning your life over to God? You've been trying to run it every thatch of the way all your life, and you're not getting very far. And they said, we've run into something, and he's done us a lot of good, and we'd like to give it to you.
And they had become associated with a group called the Oxford Group. And they talked pretty good common sense to me, and I liked the cut of the whole thing, and so I determined I'd do something about it. And I'd been trying to paint the house alone, and the ladder was too short, and I was too damn drunk most of the time. I finally made a deal with the boss painter, and he sent me over a man and some equipment.
And I knew this fella. He didn't drink. I got sobered up, and we painted the house. It took about a week or ten days. It was a big house. There was a lot of stuff, and cutting the sash and all that, you know. And then, as I say, when the thing was over, I fell by the wayside again. Well, I got drunk the third time, and I guess the law was looking for me for a couple of days. But I was locked in the house, and they didn't have any search warrant or any warrant of entry.
But I walked uptown, and this boy, I call him a boy, I went to school with him. One year, and he nabbed me, and he said, we've got to get down to Bennington to see the judge. Well, the judge happened to be the father of one of these boys that had come to see me. He was quite lush in his own right, believe me. And he said, well, he says, I haven't got time for you today, but he says, this is Friday.
He says, I want to see you back here Monday, and I want to see you sober. So this fella drove me back to Manchester. We'd gone down to Bennington, the county seat, 22 miles away. And on the way back up again, I think of three or four cold bottles of valentine ale that I had down in the cellar. So this fella let me out, and I went in the house, and I said, well, the judge told me to come back sober, but he didn't say a damn thing about taking a drink.
He didn't tell me not to take a drink, so I went down to the cellar, and I reached for one of these bottles of ale. I got my hand, and I said, wait a minute. That's not exactly playing cricket. I walked back upstairs, and by the time I got back upstairs, the devil was on my shoulder again. He said, oh, what the hell? Nobody's going to know anything about it. He said, they won't sell you any liquor in this town over the weekend.
Everybody knows you've been drunk. You're in trouble. Go on down and have that ale. I got down there, but I couldn't take it. And finally, I just wrapped those three bottles up and took them over to a friend of mine. I said, here, I don't want it. And he looked at me with his mouth wide open. I said, what the hell would happen to me? Well, now, that's a simple thing, and it isn't much in the telling, but it meant everything in the world to me at that time.
It was the difference between maintaining my sobriety for two years and a half and not. Because that night, when I got down on my knees to make a little prayer to God, I said, God, I don't remember the words I used. The gist of it was, God, I mean business about this drinking. And believe me, it was just like having a weight lifted from my shoulder, and I went to bed and slept like a baby. That night, it was about a week in closing up the house, and this man came and took me down to where this third man had come to see me, and I had to go back to the judge, and he just released me on my own recognizance, and I was more or less paroled in this man's custody.
I only had to pay the court costs. And this man, it took about a week to close up the house, and then this man took me down to live with him. He lived about 15 miles below the town where I did get a place there, and then within two weeks, those fellows had me out speaking. I don't know what I spoke about. I swear I don't.
[00:20:00]
Remember, the second weekend after I was sober, we made a trip through Vermont, and some people came up from New York, and from Friday night to Sunday night, I spoke five times in five different places. I don't know what I talked about, but I felt something, and I just talked about that. That's all. Then we went on to New York, and I stayed with one of these fellows and his wife in an apartment for three or four weeks, and then they took me down to this mission, Calvary Episcopal Church, which was connected with the Oxford group, and I stayed there and lived there a year.
Of course, I wasn't doing any gainful occupation at the time, but I used to get down sometimes in the daytime to see some friends of mine down Wall Street, some of my old drinking companions, and the good money of Bill W.'s in-laws were down there. And I met all these fellows, and I got very bad reports about Bill. His drinking had got pretty bad, and they didn't want him around any of the offices down there.
So I got to thinking on some of the nights that I was lying awake, by golly, I ought to go over and see old Bill and see what I could do. You see, Bill and I had known each other in Vermont. While I was one of the summer people, Bill was born in a little town six miles north, and I used to see him around there playing baseball, and we went to school up there in the fall of 1912. Of course, I was only two years old then.
Anyway, it was a high school, and Bill was there at that school at the time, and we became pretty good friends. And I saw him off and on during the years. We only got drunk together once, that's when we came to Albany, and I was playing around with a bunch of flyers that were out of the airport, and we got mixed up on a Saturday night, and finally about midnight decided we'd fly to Manchester the next day, and we did.
We chartered a plane and rolled out of that thing. It was the first landing of a plane at the new airport up there. Everybody was out. I thought they even had the town band out there. Well, Bill and I, we just fell out of the plane. That's the only time we ever drank together. So I finally called up Lois, and she told me to come over for dinner a certain night. I sure wish that some of us had kept a diary back in those days.
Nobody ever did, because after 25 years, I'm telling you, it's a tough job to remember things exactly as they were. Well, that's the night I got talking to Bill, and I went over there for dinner. It wasn't exactly as it is in the big book, but the gist of the thing is, and I guess the fact that Bill saw me sober for the first time in New York, the first time in 10 years I'd ever been to New York sober, I guess it must have impressed him, because he walked the subway with me for his arm around my shoulder, and he said, Oh, boy, I don't know what you got.
And he says, I want it. Well, he didn't sober up right away. Two or three days later, he came over to the mission where I was at the meeting one night, and he was drunk, and he had a merchant seaman with him, and he was drunk, and Bill was kind of a little bit obstreperous and wandering around. He wanted to make a speech. I said, Let him talk, and the superintendent says, No. I said, Let him go ahead.
Let him see what he's got to say. And Bill got up and put his elbow on the piano this way and talked away. Well, the next day or the day after that, he got himself a few bottles of beer and went up to Towne's Hospital, and I followed him up there, visited him, and I saw him when he got out. From the time he went to Towne's Hospital to this day, he's never had a drink as far as I know. I'm pretty sure he hasn't.
He went on to found AA the night that I went on there. Well, I was around there in New York two years. Stayed sober. Bill and I worked together a lot, and I had my work at the mission. Then I went back to Albany, and after six months there, I got drunk again, although I had to come to New York to do it for seven months there. I was working on the Ford plant outside of Albany in Green Island, New York.
Two weeks days and two weeks nights, and I used to take the long weekend, and I was on the night shift and get through Friday morning. I'd have to go back on Sunday night to come to New York, and one time I just walked in and took a drink. But as I said, I had to build up that old one-track mind and get working again on some things that I always wanted, and I hadn't been able to give them up, and they got the best of me, and that was it.
And the years went on, and as I tell you, I could figure up so many years sobriety, so many months drunk, maybe I'd be sober four months, drunk three, sober three, drunk six, 16 months dry in Philadelphia, eight months on several occasions, all as a break over. And then in the summer of 1953, I was drunk in New York City,
[00:25:05]
drunk steady for about two or three months, and along the first part of September, I dropped into the A.A. Central—I can't think of the name. It was in the Central Office. It's an intergroup. It's on Lexington Avenue, Ben, and it was on Lexington, just below 28th Street. And I used to drop in there in Maine, and see if I could make a touch, maybe, or a couple of dollars, or sit there and shake it out for a while.
And this girl, Hazel R., whom some of you may know, was one of the secretaries. She's now secretary in the Maine office. Said, you know, Ebby, I think I've got something for you. There's a man named Charlie M.. He's got something. He wants to get in touch with you. Said, I'll get him on the phone. She got him on the phone. She says, keep the bird there till five o'clock. I'll be down. So Charlie came down, and he said, where do you drink?
And I said, over there in 3rd Avenue. He said, let's go. So he ordered me a doubleheader and sat down. He said, you know, I was over in Paris this summer. He has to travel for this company, is what. And I ran into one of your old friends, one of those boys that came to see you with the Oxford Group years ago, back in 34. And he says, how's old Ebby doing? I confess that I didn't know old Ebby, but what I'd heard about him, he wasn't doing very damn well.
And that was the truth. So he said, well, you know, Ebby's licked in New York. Why don't you see if you can do something to get him out of there? He says, the boys are all down on him. Well, they were, but I can't blame them. But there were three or four people who were still sticking by me. So Charlie said, how'd you like to go to Texas? I said, by God, man, what do you want to send me to Texas for?
There's a drought on down there, the cattle are dying. I said, I haven't any money, I haven't any clothes, nothing. Well, he spoke of the virtues of Texas and the life down there and everything, and he said, here, here's five dollars. Get yourself a place to sleep tonight and something to eat, and I'll see you at five o'clock tomorrow afternoon. Well, tomorrow afternoon, I figured I could stretch that one out another night.
So I saved enough money to get a flop that night and had a few drinks. Met him at five and he repeated the process. And this was on a Thursday night, and he said, Now, he says, I am through with the handout. Here's another five, but that's it. Now, he said, do you want to talk business? He said, come over to my apartment. Here's the number and telephone number and street address. So I managed to get through Friday night all right.
I did a little drinking. I must admit, though, I was thinking this Texas deal over pretty seriously. On Saturday morning, I got up from my place of residence, which is on Bleecker Street, the Mills Hotel, a pretty grim place to sleep, and I walked up. It wasn't too far. It was Charlie's apartment on Lower Fifth Avenue. And I walked in, and he was out, but he had the dormance. There he is now. He's coming right in.
He came in and said, Well, he says, you ready to go to Texas? I said, Well, let's not talk Texas right away. I said, I've quit drinking right now. Is it now? Well, he said, Come on upstairs. So long and short of it was, he got me washed up and got me some clean clothes and called up Oldie L. in Dallas. That Saturday night he called him up, and I could hear Oldie saying, Well, put the Yankee son of a bitch on the telephone.
And I think I'd met Oldie in New York once, just a casual meeting. So Oldie said, Well, come on down here. He says, We'll meet you. So Charlie called up American Airlines, got a reservation for Sunday night. It's the only one we could get. And he put me on that plane without a doggone drink. I can murder that guy every time I think about it now. Because when I got to Texas, I didn't know what I did.
Texas? Man, after three months drunk and sobering up without a damn thing to drink or sleep until arriving. The fellas met me and they took me down to the Texas clinic. And for the next three or four weeks it was touch and go whether I was going to lose my noggin completely or not, because I was hallucinating all over the place. I'd see, I'd look across, look out the little window and across there and there was a balcony with some chairs there and I'd see the chair and I said, Well, get up and go over there.
I'm not kidding you. And I was there three weeks before one night when the boy said he was going out to mail a letter and he said, Well, I got out at the airport. He said, Let me ride out with you. And my sole purpose was to find out if I really was in Dallas. And I got out and there was a placard on the brass, bronze thing on the plate on the side of the entrance to the Love Field Terminal there it was, the Love Field Terminal there.
[00:30:24]
I certainly was, and Mickey S. was one of them. You know, there are times in AA when we are sobered up, and we think that things ought to happen faster for us, or even we've been sober for some years, maybe things are going rough financially, things aren't straightening out at home. God knows that that example, there I was in New York, another week or another two or three weeks, and if Charlie had come to me, it might have been too late, because I was going down here very quick.
I'd reached the end of my rope, I was licked in New York, I knew it, or just think I was fortunate enough to have enough spark left and enough life in me to finally pull out of it. Lord knows things, you may never get the breaks, and maybe you will, but there's one sure thing, if you get a break and you're drunk, you won't be able to do anything about it, but if you get a break and you're sober, you'll be able to take advantage of it, and that is for sure.
I know there are times when I get discouraged. I haven't set the world on fire in Dallas or Texas, it'd be a damn hard job to set Texas on fire, because it's hot enough anyway, in the summertime, but I haven't done much, I've managed to earn a living, and that's about all, I sometimes get impatient on it, but thank God I'm still able to be grateful for the guy over in Paris, Charlie, who put the thing into action, he didn't come home and talk about it, he did something about it, he got on the telephone, he put out some money to send me down here, he paid the plane ticket, and the fellas that met me here, Nicky S., and I got a double bit of gratitude to Nicky because after thirteen months here, which by the way, I don't throw away like some people do, I was sober thirteen months before I got drunk, and I've been sober five and a half years since then, that makes it six and a half years here in Texas, now I don't, people get drunk sometimes, and they say, oh well, that's sober, Brad, it really doesn't amount to anything, don't you forget it, they can never take it away from you, I'll stick up for that part of it, a lot of them say, well, that doesn't count, you've been drunk so what, you had, maybe I accomplished more in that thirteen months than I did in the five and a half years since then, but I got drunk and I was thrown into county jail by some overzealous AAs I think, Mr. Nicky S. was the only one that came to see me, and he came and left some money at the, with the warden or whoever takes care of the place, the sheriff, the high sheriff, and I was able to get cigarettes, and you don't forget those things, I try not to forget the things that really have happened, the simple fact that I've been able to buy a car, it doesn't amount to a hell of a good car and all that, but it's the fact that I've been able to make the time payments on it, and for twenty years I didn't anymore think of making a payment on anything because I knew I'd be drunk and I never made it, and there's a lot of satisfaction in just being able to do that, and also being physically able to drive the thing, hell I wouldn't have gotten behind the wheel of a car there in New York for so many months, if I'd gotten behind the wheel and there were two cars ahead of me I'd have seen six, my nerves are so shot, and I always hope that I can hang on to that, and I know if I do that I'll never get drunk again, it's been nice coming here, I'm not much of an ardor and I don't like to take up too much time, I'm glad we made the trip, snow or no snow, and I'm grateful to all of you for asking me, thank you.