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Source: DICOBE-00294 – Chico C – SERVICE WORKSHOP-AREA ASEMBLY – 1985-01-15.mp3 File: dicobe-00294-chico-c-service-workshop-area-asembly-1985-01-15.mp3 Duration: 01:07:06
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You're going to wire me up. Oh, well, I think it's going to work just fine. How's that? That's my stomach. I think the reason that he wired me up is because if I get out of line, I receive a severe shock through this thing. I believe that's the whole plan here. My name is Chico C., and I'm an alcoholic. Hi, everybody. I'd like to give you a little background about this service manual seminar that we do in South Florida so that you'll know what's going on.
We started a few years ago to do this. I was the immediate past delegate at the time, and the gal that was the area chairman asked me if I would do the service manual, and I said yes. And then after I said yes and had hung up the phone, I started wondering if maybe I should have my head examined because I didn't know what I was going to do. So when I talked to her again, she said, well, just do it. You figure it out. And so that's where it was. And I went to the first service manual seminar that we had. Well, let me tell you how prepared I was. I was so nervous, I left my service manual at home. So I had to borrow one. Unfortunately, the one I borrowed didn't have any notes in it, see?
So I got up behind the podium, and I did the service manual seminar. Bob Pearson, who was then the general manager of general service office, happened to be the speaker that evening, so he was there, which made me even more nervous. But it went okay. And the thing that happened was that we continued to do this now for almost two and a half years, and some of the other areas in the country have started to pick up on it. You might have read the article that came out earlier this year in Box 459 on the service manual seminar. Tennessee has begun doing this as part of their regular agenda at their quarterly assembly.
So I was really thrilled to come down here and share with you on this because it's really important. And basically what I'm going to be doing, and I know you all can read, and I know every one of you has read this book through and through many times, right? So I always start off when I do this by thinking about the thing that I thought of the first time that I went to do a service manual seminar, and that was that being asked to do a service manual seminar is something akin to being asked to make the dictionary more interesting, right?
And so I know where you're at, you know, because I've been there myself. I'm going to start at what I consider the beginning, certainly, of the service manual. It's on page 5, AA's Legacy of Service. And if you're following along, you'll find that I'm not reading everything word for word and that I'll probably intersperse a lot of it with my own personal experience or comments. You'll just have to weed it out, and we'll go on from there.
The very first sentence in the session that says AA's Legacy of Service, which is by Bill W., says, Our twelfth step, carrying the message, is the basic service that the AA Fellowship gives. This is our principal aim and the main reason for our existence. Therefore, AA is more than a set of principles. It's a society of alcoholics in action. We must carry the message else we ourselves can wither and those who haven't been given the truth may die.
Hence, an AA service is anything, whatever, that helps us to reach a fellow sufferer, ranging all the way from the twelfth step itself to a ten-cent phone call and a cup of coffee and to AA's General Service Office for national and international action. The sum total of all these services is our third legacy of service. Now, I bet that there are people in this room that did not know that they were here because they were doing twelfth step work or making twelfth step work possible. I sure didn't know, and like probably a lot of you, I didn't come to Alcoholics Anonymous and get sober and then say, Gee, you know what I've always wanted to do is get active in service. I mean, did you ever say that? I never said that.
I was six months sober in a group. I'll tell you how our group went. I was the soberest and longest when I had six months in our group, and the rest of them thought I should be the intergroup representative for our group, and so they asked me to be intergroup representative, and I didn't want to be. So I said to the guy that asked me in the group to be the intergroup representative, I have to ask my sponsor. Good answer, right? So then I went to my sponsor, and I said to him, You don't think I should be intergroup representative, do you? And he said, By all means, I think you should.
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So for the next six months, on the first Monday of every month when they had the intergroup meeting, I resigned from intergroup to my wife on the way to the intergroup meeting. During this period of time, I started to notice a few things while I sat at the meeting and pouted, and that was that I started to notice that you people at intergroup really didn't know what you were doing, and maybe I better stick around a little longer in case you needed me to help you.
Isn't that interesting? I mean, that's just the way it goes, you know? And so I got interested in service, and I found out that being in service is truly making 12-step work possible, that it includes not just the regular things that we talk about, it includes being here and being a part of this. The most vital yet least understood group of services that AA has are those that enable us to function as a whole, namely the General Service Office, AA World Services Incorporated, the AA Grapevine, and our Board of Trustees, which is known as the General Service Board of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Until 1950, the overall services of Alcoholics Anonymous were the function of a few old-timers and some non-alcoholic friends and Dr. Bob and Bill. And at that time, they realized that the fellowship had grown and was ready and able to take the responsibility from them and that without a direct linkage to AA, future trustees would not be able to function alone. And so that meant that a conference had to be formed. Those of you here this morning, you heard quite a bit about that background, and that in this conference that was going to be formed, that they would meet with the Board of Trustees and assume responsibility for the guardianship of AA tradition and the direction of our principal service affairs.
Now, this body known as the conference is made up of area delegates from the United States and Canada, and I might mention that our conference, because there's more than one general service conference in the world today, our conference is called the North American General Service Conference of North America, and it includes Canada, the United States, Bermuda, the Bahamas, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands.
Okay, and that's the General Service Conference of North America. Okay, now let's go back to the beginning because there's some really good history in here. I don't know how you read this thing, but for a long time I read this book when I read it because it was more of a duty, you know, well, I should read this. And there's a lot of history in here, but there's more beyond that. I discovered that there's a lot in here that tells you a lot about the way that our early members thought, particularly Bill.
There's a lot of insight in here as to who Bill Wilson was, you know. I mean, he was just another alcoholic just like ourselves, and there's a lot of identification there. It tells us that one day in 1937 at Dr. Bob's Akron home, he and Bill added up the score of over two years' work and for the first time saw that wholesale recovery for alcoholics was possible. So Dr. Bob and Bill met with 18 of the Akron group at the home of T. Henry Williams, a non-alcoholic friend.
The Akron group still thought that they should stick to the word-of-mouth process, but the majority felt that they needed, at that time, they thought they needed their own hospitals with paid workers and, above all, a book for alcoholics that could explain to them our method and result. And that would require considerable money. It says here millions perhaps. Isn't that something? Just like alcoholics, right?
Anything we do, we've got to do big, right? Lots of money. And so they were planning on getting a lot of money, and the Akron group commissioned Bill to go to New York and raise funds. He went to New York, talked it over with the New York group, and they thought that was a good idea, and they were in full agreement. So in the winter of 1937, a meeting was called at the office of John D. Rockefeller, Jr.
Present was Mr. Richardson, Willard S. Richardson and his group, and Dr. Silkworth and alcoholics from the Akron and New York groups and Bob and Bill. After a long discussion, they convinced their new friends that they urgently needed money. And it says, and lots of it too. Did you all ever do that? One of them, Frank Amos, soon made a trip to Akron in early 1938 to investigate the group. He returned with a very optimistic report, a digest of which Mr. Richardson laid quickly before John D. Rockefeller.
Though much impressed, Mr. Rockefeller declined to give any large sum for fear of professionalizing AA. Over the years, as I have been active in service from time to time, we hear in some quarters a lot of criticism about non-alcoholics, maybe non-alcoholic trustees or maybe at the local area, non-alcoholics whom we are supposed to be cooperating with.
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I think it's important that we go back and look at the very beginning of the history of Alcoholics Anonymous, that very often it was the non-alcoholic that saved us from ourselves. And this is a good example. It's in 1938. John D. Rockefeller declined to give any large sum of money to these early AAs because he had a fear that professionalizing Alcoholics Anonymous would be the end of what was seeming to be a very good thing for alcoholics.
He did, however, donate $5,000 and that was used to keep Dr. Bob and Bill going during 1938. Now, they still needed money. In the late spring of 1938, Bill had drafted what are now the first two chapters of the book Alcoholics Anonymous and mimeographed copies of these were used as a part of the prospectus for, as he says here, a futile fundraising operation. Then Frank Amish remembered an old friend, Eugene Exman, a religious editor at Harper Magazine, or the book publishers, rather.
And Exman was impressed and he suggested that Harper might advance $1,500 in royalties to finish the job. And then they got to thinking about it. If Harper publishes the book and we get this $1,500 in royalty, it's an advance, we're going to owe them that money. But even more important, if they publish the book, then it's their book. And do we want to put something that would be so valuable to the fellowship in the control and in the hands of someone else?
That was the question. I mean, we have the big book and it's our big book. You know, the big book's a bestseller. Did you know that the big book's a bestseller? It is. But it's our book. Now, in the beginning, had they decided to go ahead and take the $1,500 advance and let Harper publishers publish this book, it would not be our book today. It would be their book. Which would mean that they would have control over what was put into the book, and if they wanted to change the book or rewrite it or do whatever, we wouldn't have much of a say in it.
And so what happened then was that they realized that if this was going to become the basic text for Alcoholics Anonymous, that its ownership could not be in someone else's hands, that we, as a society of Alcoholics Anonymous, should publish and control our own literature. And then they did something which I think is typical of who we are. I mean, it was just the very thing alcoholics would do. They didn't have any money.
They have to have the book published. They want to be able to control the book. So what did they do? Well, Bill and Hank decided since they didn't have any money, the logical thing to do as alcoholics was that they bought a pad of blank stock certificates. They wrote them up, put on a par value of $25, and then they tried to sell them to their friends. Now, I don't know how it was back then, but I had a funny feeling that if I walked into my home group and I said, hey, you know, I've got these stock certificates here, you know, Cortez Publishing Company, and I'm going to sell them.
I'm coming to you first because I know you'd be the first ones to want to know about it, and I'll sell these to you for $25 a piece. I don't think my reception would be very good. And that's what they did. And what happened, as it says here, was that when they approached their friends to try to sell them the stock certificates, they just laughed at them. Just like you guys. See, I mean, you know just exactly what's going on, right?
Who's going to buy stock in a book that hasn't been written? Okay, so they figured somehow they would have to be persuaded. So they went to Reader's Digest, told the managing editor about Alcoholics Anonymous. He liked the notion, promised that in the spring of 1939 that they would do an article, put a piece about it when the book was ready, and what happened was that when they went to visit the publisher for Reader's Digest, he gave them a blank look, scarcely remembering that he ever talked about them.
The article never came about at that time. And in the meantime, of course, they had the book published. They had ordered 5,000 copies of the new book. So they had these copies that had been ordered. The printer wanted to be paid. They had all these books. They didn't know if they were going to be able to sell them or anything. When the book finally appeared in 1939, they got the New York Times to do a review, and Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick supplied AA with another good article also, but nothing happened.
Good article also, but nothing happened anyway.
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And you know, things were tough then. Things were really tough then. Bill and Lois were dumped on the street, you know, to the charity of AA Friends. The sheriff had come to the New York office where they'd been working, and the landlord had sold the house where Bill and Lois were living, and you know, things were looking pretty bleak. Just think about it. I mean, we take all this stuff for granted now, because we're part of a fellowship that's well over a million strong, and all of these things are after the fact, right?
I mean, we're the recipients of all this experience, but suppose you were brand new, and here was the brand new fellowship, and the co-founder's out on his ear in the street, right? And there's 5,000 books, and nobody's buying the books. You know, they're not buying them or the stock certificates. And things are looking bad. I mean, what would you do? Would there be a strong temptation to say, well, maybe this isn't going to work?
Think of all the different ways that things could have gone in Alcoholics Anonymous and didn't. Okay. The first big break came in September 1939. Liberty Magazine carried an article entitled Alcoholics and God that was written by Morris Markey. There was an instant response. About 800 letters from alcoholics and their families poured in, and Ruth, who was Bill's secretary, non-alcoholic secretary, answered every one of them in closing a leaflet about the new book, and slowly the book began to sell.
Then the Cleveland plane dealer ran a series of articles about Alcoholics Anonymous, and at once the Cleveland group mushroomed from a score into many hundreds of members. More books were sold. Now, they hadn't heard anything from Mr. Rockefeller since 1938, but in 1940 he put in a dramatic reappearance. He and his friend Mr. Richardson came to a trustees' meeting smiling broadly. Mr. Rockefeller said he wanted to give Alcoholics Anonymous a dinner, and the invitation list showed an imposing collection of notables.
And Bill says here, we've figured them to be collectively worth at least a billion dollars. And you see the dollar signs going in Bill's eyes, right? Oh, boy, we're going to hit the big money now. I mean, alcoholics, you know, they figure that money's the answer. I don't know about you, but I spent a lot of time when I was drinking looking for cosigners. And I'm not going to tell you that the day that I got sober I quit looking either.
The dinner came off in February at New York's Union League Club. Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick spoke in praise of us and so did Dr. Foster Kennedy, the eminent neurologist. Then Bob and Bill briefed the audience on AA, and some of the Akron and New York alcoholics that were scattered among the notables responded to questions. The gathering showed a rising warmth and interest. This was it, we thought, that's what Bill says.
We thought this was it, we thought. Our money problems were solved. I love that. I mean, you can just picture the excitement. They're probably looking at each other going, ha, ha, ha, you know. But then Mr. Rockefeller's son got to his feet, Nelson Rockefeller, to speak for his father who was ill. His father was very glad, he said, that those at the dinner had seen the promising beginning of the new Society of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Seldom, Nelson continued, had his father shown more interest in anything. But obviously, since AA was a work of goodwill, one man carrying the good news to the next, little or no money would be required. Bill says, at this sally our spirits fell. That is probably an understatement from Bill, you know. When Mr. Rockefeller had finished, the whole billion dollars worth of capitalists got up and walked out, leaving not a nickel behind them.
Next day, John Rockefeller, Jr. wrote to all those who had attended the dinner, and even to those who had not. Again, he reiterated his complete confidence and high interest. And at the very end of this letter, he casually remarked that he was giving Alcoholics Anonymous a thousand dollars. Only much later did we realize what Mr. Rockefeller had done for us. At risk of personal ridicule, he had stood up before the whole world to put in a plug for a tiny band of struggling alcoholics.
Wisely sparing of his money, he had given freely of himself. Then and there, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. saved us from the perils of property management and professionalism. Part of our traditions, isn't it? We take for granted that all of this that is part of AA today, as we know it, that somehow we did it ourselves. But so much of it was given to us freely. Sometimes when we didn't want it, but freely.
And all of this experience was just given to us by people who saw something in Alcoholics Anonymous. And this group of alcoholics, this struggling group of alcoholics, they saw something there that I'm sure that those early members perhaps hadn't quite visualized
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quite as profoundly as this man had. And they began to lay the groundwork for what we know today as the Fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous, for what has worked and what has made Alcoholics Anonymous continue to survive. Because, you know, I don't know if you realize this or not, but AA is a survivor's club. It really is. We're the survivors. And there are just countless thousands of alcoholics who never get to Alcoholics Anonymous.
And even if you don't look at that, stop and consider how many people come to Alcoholics Anonymous and do not make it. So we truly are a survivor's club. And isn't it wonderful that we didn't have to depend solely on ourselves to begin to lay the groundwork that spells out as experience, strength, and hope that we could rely on people outside of Alcoholics Anonymous who had perhaps a vision of how we could best survive when we didn't.
And this is really what we're talking about. As a result, AA's 1940 membership jumped sharply to about 2,000 at the year's end. Best of all, increased book sales made a national headquarters possible. We took a modest two-room office right opposite the downtown church and ex-post office, and there the famous Box 658 was ready and waiting to receive the thousands of frantic inquiries that would presently come into it.
At this point, Ruth, though non-alcoholic, became AA's first national secretary. Through the whole of 1940, book sales were the sole support of the struggling office. More importantly, we had lists of prospects in many cities and towns in the United States and Canada. We turned these lists over to AA and traveling businessmen. They started still more groups for the benefit of our travelers, and we put out group directories.
And that's the way the World Directory came about. Now, Alcoholics Anonymous wasn't in every town that you went to. I've driven across the country and gone to AA meetings everywhere that we've gone. Sometimes one state, we drove 80 miles out of our way to go to the closest AA meeting, but it was there. You know what I mean? It was there. I come from an area where we have a lot of AA meetings. We have about 3,000 AA members in Palm Beach County, and we have somewhere between 200 and 225 meetings a week.
Now, I'm going to tell you something that happens when you live in an area like that. You know, you get a little comfortable, and you get a little jaded, and pretty soon you're saying, well, I'll never go to that meeting. I didn't like that meeting. That meeting wasn't any good. I'll only go to this meeting. And you start picking and choosing meetings, and you forget that it wasn't always that way.
You see, when I got sober, we had about 25 meetings a week. We've got a lot more meetings than that now. When we had 25 meetings a week, you knew everybody, and you went to all the meetings, and you could make all of the meetings there was in a short period of time. And when we went out west, and we had to drive 80 miles out of our way to go to an AA meeting, I'm going to tell you something. We didn't care what kind of a meeting it was.
We didn't care what they said, what they did, or how they conducted it. We just wanted to be in an AA meeting. And I well remember that day, because my wife and I were driving. We were sober about six years at a time, and we decided to go camping for a month on the way to the International. And if you're two alcoholics, been sober six years, and as crazy as we are, and you live within the confines of a van for a month, you know we needed a meeting.
We drove through this town, drove right by the meeting hall, and I said, I'm not going to any damn meeting tonight, and we drove right through town. By the time we got to the other end of town, it seemed like we needed to go to a meeting, so we turned around and drove back. As we passed the meeting hall, she said, I'm not going with you. So we drove to the other end, right? Man, we went in and out of town about ten times.
By that time, we went to the meeting. You know what I mean? We just stopped and went to the meeting. We didn't care. We didn't care. And you know, the thing is that I'm really grateful for these early AAs that traveled around, and they got groups started, and you know, these people are going around, and they were getting groups started, and alcoholics and others began to spring up here and there and everywhere as a result of that.
And you know, we talk about gratitude a lot of times, and that meeting we were at last night was a good meeting on gratitude. And you know, I'm grateful for these people because these early AA members have made it possible for my wife and I to drive in and out of town ten times before we could get together enough to get out of the van at the same time as going to a meeting, right? Okay. Moving on. That's not in here.
I just wanted to throw that in. Okay. At that time, they also thought that the book Alcoholics Anonymous should now become the property of AA as a whole. It was owned by, one-third of it was owned by 49 subscribers. It's 49 people they sold stock certificates to. And then one-third of it was owned by Hank P. And to remember,
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it was owned by Bill. And so they had the book company, Works Publishing, audit it, legally incorporate it. Hank and Bill donated their shares into the Alcoholic Foundation. And then what they did was that they borrowed $8,000 from Mr. Rockefeller and some of the dinner guests so that they could buy the outstanding subscriptions that they had, the shares that were outstanding from those that owned them, buy them back, and then they paid off some incidental debts and so on.
They owed $2,500 to Charles B. Towns of Towns Hospital. And the interesting thing about this is that two years later, the big book had done so well that they were able to pay off the entire $8,000 loan. And you know $8,000 is big bucks in those days. Big bucks now, but it was big bucks then. Bigger then, right? Okay, the spring of 1941 brought us a tense strike. The Saturday Evening Post decided to do a piece about Alcoholics Anonymous.
It assigned one of its star writers, Jack Alexander, to do the job. We've all heard the Jack Alexander story. Okay? He spent a whole month with Dr. Bob and Bill and elders of the early groups at Akron, New York, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Chicago and spent hours with them. When he could feel A.A. in the very marrow of his bones, he proceeded to write the piece that rocked drunks and their families all over the nation.
It was the lead story in the Saturday Evening Post of March 1941. Last year, I believe it was, they did a reprint of it. Did you all see that? Anybody see that? Last year they did a reprint of it. Okay. As a result of this article in the Saturday Evening Post, they were just overwhelmed with frantic appeals from alcoholics and their families. 6,000 letters hit the New York office. Remember, they didn't have general service staff and all these people and everything.
There was Bill and Ruth up there. Okay? 6,000 letters. Now, they found out that they weren't able to continue carrying on the way they've been carrying on, all their office expenditures, through the sale of the books. So they told the groups what the situation was and the groups responded. The measuring stick for voluntary contributions at that time was set at $1 per member per year. I think that's significant because today, you know, it's not that much more when you consider what's happened to the dollar since that time and the services that are provided today by the general service office.
And really, the cost is, if you were to weigh the cost on a per member basis, it would be much, much less money. Okay, they started in the year 1941 with 2,000 members and finished with 8,000. That's the result of the Saturday Evening Post article. The national spotlight was on Alcoholics Anonymous and we had to begin dealing with the public on a large scale. After much trial and error, sometimes punctuated by painful mistakes, the attitudes and practices that would best work for us emerged.
And here, this last paragraph in this section is really important because it's part of the basis of our tradition. 100% anonymity at the public level. No use of the AA name for the benefit of other causes, however worthy. No endorsements or alliances. One single purpose for Alcoholics Anonymous. No professionalism. Public relations by the principle of attraction rather than promotion. You know, that was unheard of.
I mean, it still is unheard of. Who else do you know besides Alcoholics Anonymous that believes in attraction rather than promotion? I mean, think about it. In late 1945, a good friend suggested that all this massive experience might be codified into a set of general principles, simply stated principles, that could offer tested solutions to all of AA's problems of living and working together and of relating our society to the world at large.
Such a traditional code could not, of course, ever become rule or law, but it could act as a sure guide for our trustees, for headquarters people, and most especially for AA groups with a growing pain. The traditions of Alcoholics Anonymous that resulted were first published in the so-called long form in the grapevine of May 1946. I'm skipping around a lot because I want to cover as much of this as I can.
Then Bill wrote some pieces explaining the traditions in detail. These came out in later issues of the grapevine. The reaction was mixed to say the least. Only groups in dire trouble took them seriously. From some quarters there was a violent reaction, especially from groups that had long lists of protective rules and regulations. There was much indifference. Sounds like today, doesn't it, almost? Several of our interviews Almost, Several of our intellectual members cried loudly that the traditions reflected
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nothing more than the sum of my own, meaning Bill, my own hopes and fears for Alcoholics Anonymous. Therefore, I began to travel and talk a lot about the new traditions. People would at first politely attend, though it must be confessed that some did go to sleep during my early harangue. But after a while, I got letters containing sentiments like this, Bill, we'd love to have you come and speak. Do tell us where you used to hide your bottles and about all that big hot flash spiritual experience of yours, but for heaven's sakes, please don't talk any more about those blasted traditions.
I like that. I've heard that before, you know. That was in 1946. You know, 39 years later, things are kind of going the same in some quarters. Only five years later, several thousand AA members meeting at the 1950 Cleveland Convention declared that AA's 12 traditions constituted the platform upon which our fellowship could best function and hold together in unity for all time. You know, as I've said before, we take all this for granted today, but you see, they weren't just sitting down and saying, well, let's see how this works.
Maybe we'll try this. What they were really gambling on was on their survival. That's what they were gambling on. Because if Alcoholics Anonymous didn't work, they might not survive, and the experience that they had and the experience that they were developing, they were really gambling their lives on. That's what they were talking about. This wasn't just if it works fine and if it doesn't, fine. They might not have survived.
I hear people say sometimes that Alcoholics Anonymous is certainly a God-given program in alcoholics, and when I read something like this and I consider how many different ways a group of power-driving, self-centered, egotistical, selfish, did I miss anything, alcoholics could have gone, certainly, I don't know about you, but I used to have a self-destruct button that I hit all the time, and it's still there.
I hit it once in a while, just to see if it works. I see, I see I'm not the only one that has one of those. But you know, just think about that. Think about that. When you go to some of these general service meetings in your districts or at the area and you go to some of these workshops and you think about it and you say, well, I'm going to go, but I don't really want to be here, and when you go back to your group and you say, I've got the report, and they say, sit down, and you say, well, okay, I'll go sit down, and this type of thing.
Think about it. Think about what has gone on in the past, and then you might get up before your group that doesn't want to hear the report and you'll be sneaky, see, like I've done, and when the secretary says, are there any announcements, you raise your hand, and you announce your general service report, of course, it only works once or twice, but after that you've got to be a little more innovative, you know, but it's important, it's important.
The reason a lot of people are not interested in service is because they don't realize what service is all about, and even beyond that, they do not realize how much of the history of Alcoholics Anonymous is so interwoven with service that when you're talking about service, you're talking about truly the experience, strength, and hope of Alcoholics Anonymous that has allowed you and I to be here sober today, and that's, you know, that's really, if there's anything else that I would want to get across, it would be that, that if I'm enthusiastic about service, it's a very simple thing, I'm enthusiastic about service because you see it's my survival, that's why I'm enthusiastic about service, because my survival is as a result of service, because someone somewhere had to carry the message to me, they took me to a group, and at that meeting there was coffee, and there was literature, you know, and someone made the coffee, and someone got the donuts, and the literature was there, it had to be printed and published, and our friend who was mentioned this morning by Wayne, who contributed so much to putting together a lot of the AA literature had to get sober, he had to go to that group where they almost didn't accept him, right? Thank God they did, to contribute his skills and talents so some of this literature would be available that they gave to me. And you say, well, that's 12-step work, that's what we're talking about.
Service work is 12-step work. Okay, in the year 1944, the Medical Society of the State
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of New York invited Bill to read a paper at its annual meeting. Three of the many physicians that were present stood up and gave AA their highest endorsement. These were Dr. Harry Thiebaud, who had coined a phrase describing alcoholics, which I like, he referred to alcoholics and the alcoholic personality as His Majesty the Baby. Lot of identification, right? See, they knew us. Okay. There was Dr. Colby Collier, also a psychiatrist friend and an early advocate of AA, and Dr. Foster Kennedy, a world-renowned neurologist. The Medical Society itself went further. They permitted us to print Bill's paper and the recommendation of these three doctors in pamphlet form. In 1949, the American Psychiatric Association did exactly the same thing when Bill read a paper at its annual meeting in Montreal. That paper was carried in the American Journal of Psychiatry, and we were permitted to reprint it. During the 1940s, two hospitals met all the urgent needs and afforded shining examples of how medicine and AA could cooperate. At St. Thomas Hospital in Akron, Dr. Bob, the wonderful Sister Ignatia, and the hospital staff presided over an alcoholic ward that ministered to 5,000 alcoholics by the time that Dr. Bob passed away in 1950.
In New York, Knickerbocker Hospital provided a ward under the care of a first friend in medicine, Dr. Silkworth, where he was assisted by a red-headed nurse, AA nurse, known as Teddy. It was in these two hospitals and by these pioneering people that the best techniques of combined medicine and AA were worked out. I don't know if you've had problems such as I'm going to mention in this area, but for several years in the mid-70s, there was more screening going on in our area between AA and treatment centers than you can imagine. I was part of it. I'm not blaming anybody else. We were the most non-cooperative cooperating people you ever saw. The letters went to New York hot and heavy, and there was all this screening going on, who do these people think they are, and all this other stuff. I was the area chairman then, and I read this book.
I even did an outline on the book. Unfortunately, I didn't study the book. If I had studied the book, and this is a study book, everything in a big book is a study book, but this is a study book. I would have realized that in the very beginning of AA's history, one of the important ingredients to the growth of Alcoholics Anonymous was the cooperation between medicine and AA. Cooperation, right? Not only that, you know what I discovered? Whenever we get into a snick with treatment centers or whoever it is, and we start feuding with them, we don't like what they do or what they say. When I was a delegate, the second year I was delegate, one of the things on the agenda was the term, the graduates. What do we do about it? It was a reference to people graduating from treatment centers. When it came up on the floor of the conference, somebody got up and said, I don't know why this is on the agenda. We don't endorse or oppose any causes, and this is an outside issue. The whole room applauded, and that was the end of that.
Do you remember that wave? Just like that. You see, here's the thing. Whenever we get involved in one of these deals, like we did in our area back in the mid-70s, you know who loses? The alcoholic who hasn't arrived yet. It was like they would bring busloads of people to our group. We had about 8 or 10 members in the group, and we said, we can't handle 60 people. We'll go broke. And they came, and you know what? We didn't go broke. A lot of them stayed sober. The only thing we did was we asked them if they were going to bring them, make sure they brought them all before meeting time because we thought it set a bad precedent for these new alcoholics to come to the AA meeting in the middle of the meeting. And so we said, the meeting starts at 8.30, and we'd appreciate it if you made sure everybody got here at 8.30 that you were bringing so you don't start any bad habits with new people. But you see, if we'd have said, if we'd have called them up and said, don't bring those treatment center alcoholics to our meeting, we'd get ours the honest way.
They almost die on the street before they get here. And when your group said that,
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and your group said that, and your group said that, where are they going to go? You know, it's like, it doesn't matter how I came to Alcoholics Anonymous. I came here, and the important thing is that I want everyone else who's an alcoholic to have as good a shot at AA as I had. Doesn't matter how old they are, doesn't matter where they came from, doesn't matter who they are, what their circumstances are in any way, how they came to Alcoholics Anonymous, whether they were taken to AA, such as I was, or whether they, you know, came to AA through a prison system or through a treatment center or, you know, their employer said, you will go to AA or you're fired. Or, you know, perhaps they said to them in prison, you will go to Alcoholics Anonymous so you'll never see the free world again.
Or maybe their wife said something similar to them, you know. I mean, whatever the reason, I want them to have the best shot possible. And when you look at this, that's why I say this is a study book, you look at this book and, you know, here we are, you know, it's telling us in the very beginning that Alcoholics Anonymous cooperated. And that as a result of this cooperation, by the time Dr. Bob died in 1950, 5,000 alcoholics had been administered to in one hospital. Okay. At that time, they began to have a rash of anonymity breaks and it says here, usually meaning well, members began to break their anonymity all over the place. Sometimes they wanted to use the AA name to advertise and help other causes. Others just wanted their names and pictures in the paper. Can you believe that?
You know, the interesting thing about that is that the number of people that break their anonymity hasn't really changed much over a period of time. And that means that, you know, there's a lot less people breaking their anonymity today percentage-wise than ever before. A few hundred people. About a dozen people make up most of the anonymity breaks every year, the biggest percentage of them. Most of us, you know, even if we don't know anything about anything when we come here, and that's the way most of us get here, we seem to know, right?
We seem to know somehow, instinctively, that we don't break our anonymity. And most of us would never consider. I'm really grateful for anonymity, I'll tell you. Because there's some days that I would be just as happy if people didn't know that you were an AA and so was I. And there's also some days when I know you're just as glad that they don't know that I'm an AA. But more importantly, you know, when I was drinking, man, I was following up and down the streets, drunk, going to jail and everything else, and naming the paper, writing all this stuff, never gave it another thought. But I got sober, man, I didn't want anybody to know I was an alcoholic. God, they might think I'm an alcoholic, you know?
I didn't want them to know I sank that low, right? And then we get, you know, we get really panicked about it. And then we get, you know, we get really panicked about it. But it's important, too, because, see, just the way that I felt that way, a lot of you felt that way, a lot of people coming in feel that way. And it's nice to know that when you come here, your anonymity is your own. You don't even have to tell anybody else your name if you don't want to.
I can tell you my full name, but I don't have a right to break your anonymity unless you tell me it's okay. And that's nice, because it shows something, the beginning of something that I think perhaps some of you might have been like me that I really didn't know very much about. And that was learning how to respect myself and learning how to respect you. See, because I didn't know anything about that before I came to Alcoholics Anonymous. Okay, moving along as we are, I want to get into the conference a little bit. On page 15, this paragraph, this section is entitled Birth of the Conference. It says, it was one thing to say we ought to have a general service conference, but it's quite another to devise a plan that would bring it into successful existence. The cost of holding one was easily dismissed, but how on earth are we going to cut down destructive politics with all its usual struggles for prestige and vainglory? Boy, he just knew us real well, didn't he? How many delegates would be required and from where should they come? Arrived at New York, how could they be related to the Board of Trustees? What would their actual powers and duties be? We felt that the first delegates should come from the U.S.
and Canada only. Each state and province might be allowed one delegate. Then they go on. Province might be allowed one delegate. Then they go on to say how the conference continuity was going to be done. The delegates would be divided in panels. An odd-numbered panel, panel one, elected for two years, would be invited in 1951, the first year.
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An even-numbered panel, panel two, elected for two years, would be seated in 1952. That's why, you know, when you go to some of these regional get-togethers, you see these guys running around or these forums, and they have, you know, like, I was panel 29, panel 29. You say, what in the world is a panel, you know? That was the year that they began to serve the conference. Wayne and I were panel 29 delegates.
Okay. Now, the question came, how could we pull the inevitable election pressures down? He seemed to know there was going to be a little pressure there. I mean, can you believe that? I love this. You're going to like this. To accomplish this, it was provided that a delegate would receive a two-thirds vote for election. If a delegate got a majority of this size, nobody could kick much. But if he or she didn't and the election was close, what then?
Well, perhaps the names of the two highest in the running or the three officers of the committee or even the whole committee could be put into the hat. One name would be drawn. And the very next sentence tells me that Bill Wilson never had to stand for office because he says the winner of this painless lottery would become the delegate. Easy for him to say. He was the founder, right? I mean, you know, when I stood for area chairman in our area, the guy who is now my sponsor, he and I stood together.
We're both from the same district. Bill is six foot seven. We really look cute standing together, you know? We went through five ballots. It was getting down to where it wasn't who they picked out of the hat. It was who survived the coronary that we were both experiencing, right? My name was drawn from the hat. And then you read in here, the winner of this painless lottery. I know that he never stood.
Okay, the first conference was set for April 1951. In came the delegates. They looked over the office, got acquainted with the staff. That evening we gave them a briefing session under the name of What's on Your Mind? We answered scores of questions. The delegates began to feel at home and reassured. They inspected our finances with a microscope. After they had listened to reports from the board of trustees and all the services, there was warm but cordial debate on many a question of policy.
Trustees submitted several of their own serious problems for the opinion of the conference. And he goes on to say that then and there they proved this never before and that AA's tradition too was correct. The group conscience could safely act as a sole authority and guide for Alcoholics Anonymous. In the midst of this exciting turn of affairs, the conference agreed that the Alcoholics Foundation ought to be renamed the General Service Board of Alcoholics Anonymous, where a foundation stood for charity, paternalism, and maybe big money.
AA would have none of these. From here out, we could assume full responsibility and pay our expenses ourselves. And Bill says, as I watched all this grow, I became entirely sure that Alcoholics Anonymous was at last safe, even from me. I want to get into the conference structure a little bit. They have a paragraph in italics that is entitled What is the Conference Plan? The conference plan is what this manual is all about.
It is a method by which AA's collective group conscience can speak forcefully and put its desires for worldwide service into effect. It is a structure that takes the place of government and AA and ensures that the full voice of AA will be heard, whether it represents the great majority or a minority. The conference plan was established as a guarantee that our movement-wide services would continue to function under all conditions.
The plan provides a practical successor to the founders of AA. AA traditions say that our program should never be organized, should always remain non-professional. Also, there is no authority in AA except that which expresses itself through a group conscience. These same traditions, two, eight, and nine, then go on to provide for the setting up of service centers with special workers, service boards, and committees, all responsible to those they serve.
The only authority, then, is that which is expressed in the group conscience and which is then communicated. And here is where the idea of the conference structure begins by the group to AA as a whole. That was a little confusing to me in the beginning because, you see, when I first came to Alcoholics Anonymous, I heard people say there are no leaders in AA. And what they really meant was there are no authorities in AA except one, as he may express himself in our group conscience.
And just before that, it says in tradition, too, that our leaders are but trusted servants.
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They never govern. And that's what makes the difference. And that's how we in Alcoholics Anonymous can say that we want the least possible organization and in a true alcoholic fashion turn around and create committees. Is that another paradox in AA? But, you see, the difference between that happening in Alcoholics Anonymous and that happening anywhere else in the world is that when we create a committee in Alcoholics Anonymous, the lifespan of that committee is contingent on how long that committee can be of service to Alcoholics Anonymous, not one moment longer.
That they don't become self-perpetuating dinosaurs that go on and on and on and live long past their need. Because we have a primary purpose in Alcoholics Anonymous, the fifth tradition that was discussed today. We carried a message to the alcoholic who still suffers. And when a committee stops fulfilling that function, it has outlived its need. And so we can say, yes, Alcoholics Anonymous is not organized in the sense that we think of organization as a whole.
Because the organization that we have is simply to serve. Never to dictate. Never to be an authority. It's like I heard somebody say, we have no authorities in Alcoholics Anonymous. And then he said, and they're not always right either. Take that as you want. Okay. On page 20 in my book, they have a graph here that shows the structure of the fellowship. And if I was ever going to add anything to this, I think I would put down here another little box that said the AA groups.
Because everything that we do in service begins with the groups. And the only purpose for what we do in service is to serve the groups. And so I think I would, you know, if there was anything I would do different, I would set another little box down here that said the AA groups. The conference plan, or as it's sometimes known, the Third Legacy Plan, was originally set up in 1950 by Bill W. and Dr. Bob.
It was confirmed in 1955 in St. Louis on the occasion of the Second International Convention. So as I've been saying, and as it says here, the conference structure starts with the group conscience, the group. You know, we hear a lot in Alcoholics Anonymous, a statement that says the group conscience is never wrong. And I'm going to tell you something, I don't agree with that. But I do agree and I do believe that an informed group conscience is rarely, if ever, wrong.
Because you see, too often, we have these group consciences that are not very informed. I remember when I was at an intergroup meeting a long time ago, I was an intergroup representative, and we had a discussion about whether we should have a paid secretary to answer the phone at the intergroup office or not. They'd had one before, now they didn't have one. And they tried volunteers, and you know when you have volunteers that are going to go there, or groups that are assigned, the phone goes unmanned a lot of times.
Somebody in the back of the room said in a loud voice, that's against the traditions. And sometimes we in Alcoholics Anonymous that loud voices know what they're talking about. And he just shouted this so loud and with so much conviction, we all said, yeah, that's right. And so we all voted against having this paid secretary. Now I'm going to tell you something, that was a group conscience decision, but it was not an informed group conscience.
That decision was based on the knowledge of the biggest big mouth in the room, not judging anyone, you understand. I'm just reporting. And it was not an informed group conscience. So I have to say, that the conference structure starts with a group conscience, and with the group, for God's sakes, let's become an informed group conscience. That's the thing that really amazes me. I don't know how many times, I mean the new GSRs, I mean if you haven't read this book, I can understand that.
But my God, I was a GSR, and I got the book, and you know, I'd put it up on the shelf, you know, collect dust with the other books. And then I became a DCM. And I found out the new GSRs thought I knew what this was all about, and I didn't know anything. And I'm going to take it a step further. I'll tell you what's really sad. I have been at area assemblies,
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where people have said, now that I'm an area officer, I guess I better get down and read the book. And I think, my God, why didn't you read it before? Even worse, I have heard people say, at the conference, I'm talking about the General Service Conference, I have heard people say, General Service Conference, well, now that I'm delegate, when I get back from the General Service Conference, I think I'm going to take a look at that service manual.
An informed group conscience. You want to know how good Alcoholics Anonymous is and its decisions? It's as good as you want it to be. You want to know how good the conference is going to be that you're sending your delegate to? It's as good as your delegate is and as the other delegates are, and they're a reflection of the interest, the enthusiasm, and the willingness to learn of their assembly. You show me an assembly that has dedicated General Service representatives, dedicated district committee members, dedicated area officers, and dedicated past delegates who are willing to come to these assemblies and be a part of it, and I will show you an area that is sending a delegate to the General Service Conference who is a product of an informed group conscience.
One who is going to be part, a vital part, of the assumed informed group conscience of the General Service Conference. It never fails. It never fails. In the South Florida area, we pay all of our delegates expenses because we didn't want being delegates to become a rich man's hobby. When I was at the General Service Conference in New York, I talked to some delegates who told me that being delegate in their area was a rich man's hobby.
That they elected delegates, those that could afford to go. And I'm going to tell you something. The day that we in Alcoholics Anonymous let that be the standard by which we elect delegates or anyone else to serve at any level, we're in deep trouble. We're in deep trouble because now we have reduced the leadership and the experience that we want to use as a determining factor for the survival of Alcoholics Anonymous down to a small handful.
And I ask you, I didn't mean to do that. I ask you, can we really afford that? I want to say a couple more things about this before I close. And one of the things that I want to say about the conference itself is that we often think of the General Service Conferences that week in New York, the week that your delegate is going to the conference. We say, well, we have the General Service Conference every April in New York.
But I want you to understand something. That that's not the General Service Conference. We are the General Service Conference and that's part of the conference. That the General Service Conference of Alcoholics Anonymous in North America operates 365 days a year. This is part of the General Service Conference. That week in New York is the week when delegates, representatives from all of the different conference areas meet.
But that you people right now are part of the ongoing General Service Conference. This is the General Service Conference. I bet a lot of you didn't know that, that you're part of the General Service Conference right now. And that what you're doing here right now is part of the group conscience of Alcoholics Anonymous. So you didn't know you were that important, huh? You're the most important people of all because you determine the direction that Alcoholics Anonymous takes.
We tend to think of AA as sort of a, you know, we've got it all here. It's been given to us. We've got the big book and we've got all the literature and everything. We tend to look at this as if it's carved in stone. But remember something, Alcoholics Anonymous and everything we know about AA is based on the living experience of alcoholics just like ourselves. And if we ever get to the point in Alcoholics Anonymous where the experience of Alcoholics Anonymous becomes so ironclad and so dogmatic that nothing can be changed on the basis of the experience of alcoholics that we may be on the way out.
That everything that we do in Alcoholics Anonymous today is a determining experience. Alcoholics Anonymous today is a determining experience of the future. You know, what we do in Alcoholics Anonymous, I'm going to close with this, what we do in Alcoholics Anonymous is we really share love and we really share what we have, our experience, strength, and hope.
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And being in service is an opportunity where we can share an awful lot and make Twelve Step work possible in many, many ways. And on a personal basis, and I want to say this on a personal basis, that I feel like being part of the service structure, having been part, I'm not part of it now, I'm just a past delegate that goes to the meetings, right? But being part of the, having been part of the service structure in Alcoholics Anonymous has really opened my horizons to what Alcoholics Anonymous is about.
Because you see in the beginning it was just my group and then, you know, there were other groups. And then I found out that, you know, we had an intergroup meeting and we all met in the area, or in the district and then in the area and on and on. But, you know, it has expanded my horizons. But one of the things that I've become profoundly aware of is that there are many people in Alcoholics Anonymous, who come to Alcoholics Anonymous and their one single contact of the day is to walk into a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous and shake somebody's hand.
And then they go back to wherever they are and that's the fellowship for them. And if there's anybody that should be in the forefront of carrying the message of the love of the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous, it's us, you know, people in service. Because we have so many opportunities to share. And it's really an important thing because I really believe this, there are people that come to Alcoholics Anonymous that have been here for some time and they feel just about as alone in AA as they did out on the street.
Because they come to the AA meeting and everybody's not outgoing and gregarious. We have people of all types. People come to Alcoholics Anonymous and they come here to go to the meeting and if it's big meetings, like in some areas where they have several hundred people and maybe several thousand in a meeting, they could just get lost in the shuffle. They come to the meeting and they maybe shake a couple of hands and have a cup of coffee and they hear a speaker and they leave.
And Alcoholics Anonymous doesn't become much of an experience for people like that. And it isn't their fault. Because it could become an experience, a real experience for people like that, if people in Alcoholics Anonymous took the time to go to these people and make them feel welcome. And I can't think of any group of people that would be more responsible for undertaking this type of responsibility than those in service.
Because we have the opportunity to know more people and to meet so many people, to learn so much about what the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous is about. And I want to read you an article to close that has absolutely nothing to do with the AA structure of fellowship, but I think it has a lot to do with the type of people that I've been talking about. Now I'm going to close with this. I think that perhaps we'll identify with both of the characters in this story.
Bad luck. The light turned red and I was trapped standing at the corner. I prayed for it to change quickly. It was standing too close to me. And besides, it was cold. I was getting wet from the snow. Can I have something for my file, mister, he asked. This one was a crazy. No doubt about it. The grimy box under his arm gave him away immediately. Crazies always carry something, usually a shopping bag with handles.
They can be pretty unstable and this guy looked pretty safe. Sorry, no money, I repeated. The old lie came out so often that it came out automatically. I half expected to hear myself say, this is a recording, please shove off and don't try again. Have you got anything for my file, he repeated. Finally his message sank through. I fished in my pocket, pulled out a brochure and handed it to him. No, he shouted and then almost pathetically he finished.
I don't have a file for that. I took it back and turned away. Come on, light change. I stepped over the curb to look for a break in the traffic. I'm Howard, he said. What's your name? Mark. One syllable was all the information I intended to give. I had no desire to have some crazy calling me all the time. I knew people who had to change their telephone number to stop calls like that. I liked my number.
I chanced a quick look to see what he was doing. He had a pencil in one hand and he was stooping to pick up a piece of paper from the snow. Just then the light changed and I took off. Halfway down the block I slowed down and looked back. The crazy had just closed his box and begun to look for a new victim. A few days later I was walking the same route when I noticed an ambulance parked outside a dingy alley.
I joined the crowd of onlookers to see what was happening. Two attendants in white wheeled a stretcher out of the alley.
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It was the crazy. His face was showing so I knew he wasn't dead. But as the attendants shut the door I could tell by their conversation that he wouldn't stay uncovered for long. A policeman questioned some of the people in the crowd but received no answers. Nobody seemed to care that much, not even the cop. It was just a little added excitement on an otherwise dull December day. The cop raised his voice and asked, Did anyone know this guy?
Nobody answered. Finally I volunteered. His name is Howard. The people around me backed away as if my knowing the crazy's name made me a crazy too. The cop came over and began to pump me for more information. His name is Howard. That's all I know, sir. Well, at least there'll be a name for the headstone. Thanks for your help. Oh, by the way, would you take this for me? He reached down and picked up the crazy's box.
He didn't want to skip the paperwork on this one. He shoved the box into my hands and walked away before I could say anything. Why would I want this guy's garbage, I thought. I looked around for a trash can, but I just couldn't toss the box. Maybe it was the stories I'd heard of millionaires who lived like bums, or perhaps it was just a slightly misguided sense of loyalty to the human race. Whatever it was, I opened the box. I was disappointed.
There was nothing but old clothes and a file folder. I pulled out the file and dumped the rest of the stuff. Then I noticed the crude printing on the folder, Friends. I opened it and looked inside. It held only one small scrap of paper. On it was written Mark. I want to thank you all for being here today and letting me share with you. And I wanted to close with that because I wanted to try to give you an idea of the importance of the responsibility of carrying the message in every way that we can.
And I can't think of a better way to carry it than through service. Thank you and God bless you.