Dr. Earl M. — AA Meeting (1956)

RS-G064 · PIONEER ERA · AA · 1956

Dr. Earl Marsh

AA Meeting · Odessa, TX
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SpeakerDr. Earl Marsh
EventAA Meeting
LocationOdessa, TX
Year1956
EraPioneer Era
FellowshipAA
Duration47:03
RS NumberRS-G064
Full Transcript

Transcript

Well, Alcoholics are odd. All of us are unique. Each one is different from the next. And I, like the rest of you, am also unique. And in two respects, I differ from many of you. Not all, but many. One is, that it wasn't the effect of booze that I liked so much. It was the taste. I just loved it. And the next thing is, we hear at many, many meetings about exceeding and frightful loss. Loss of family. Loss of children. Loss of jobs. Loss of prestige. Loss of money. None of these happened to me. I lost nothing. My wife, at no time, said she was going to leave me. She may have felt like it, but she didn't have to say it. My children were reasonably pleasant to me. I made more money the last year of my drinking than I ever made before in my whole life. From a medical standpoint, I was given unusual honors. Mine was the skid row of alcoholic success. Any of you low-bottom drunks out there who would make it any tougher to be in San Francisco and fourth in Holland than it is to be on the skid row of alcoholic success, you're nuts. And I'll be glad to talk to you later about that. And I'm not going to give you a drunkologue tonight because it fundamentally is no different. I was a reserved, quiet, secretive drinker. Maybe my profession made it that way. But I am going to tell you a little bit about the last day of my drinking. I was very drunk. And I went up the hill to see a friend of mine who was in AA. He had had lots of trouble. And I went up to see this fellow, and I don't know exactly why, but I knew he was back home. He'd been on the AA program for seven months. And I went up to see him. And we talked about AA. I hadn't seen him in seven months that he'd been on AA. And so he gave me a paper to read. And he asked me about the 12 steps. Now, it so happens that I am a surgeon, licensed to practice in the state of California. But it also happens that my medical training has two paths. Not only was I trained as a surgeon, which is a…

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