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Source: DICOBE-00362 – Ted K – GOPHER STATE RNDP VIII – 1980-05-24.mp3 File: dicobe-00362-ted-k-gopher-state-rndp-viii-1980-05-24.mp3 Duration: 01:14:44
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If I wasn't nervous before that introduction, I certainly ought to be afterward. What do you do for an encore when you haven't even started? Thank you, Ruth. My name's Ted, and just for today, I belong to one of the biggest and best Al-Anon groups in the world, the Saturday Afternoon Radisson South. Hi, everybody. I would like to thank the committee for the invitation to come out here and be a part of this very wonderful happening.
I have to say that it was a delight just being in touch with Lorne and his wife over these few months. I got to speak to him frequently because I'm one of those speakers who drives the committee nuts. I will not pay attention to correspondence. I receive it, and I say, gee, that's nice. I lay it down, and three weeks later, I remember the note at the bottom that says, please advise as soon as possible.
And so I pick up the phone and I call, and I get to talk to a lot of people that way. I apologize to the committee for any anxiety. I may have handed them because of that habit. That's just the way I am. But I am delighted to be here. Bob Stuckey started it off by saying something about Minneapolis being appropriately the recovery capital of the world. I suppose that's true. I have heard Minnesota referred to in terms such as three treatment centers for every drunk.
I've never been one to knock it because anything that'll get them into the program is good as far as I'm concerned. And there's always some fallout benefit for the Al-Anons there because sooner or later the centers learn about us and come knocking on our door too. So we all gain in the long run. I've been aware of the activities out here in your part of the country for many years because of my relationship to the World Service Conference and my relationship to your delegates.
And I have admired it from afar, and it's great to be here and see some of it. Those hospitality rooms around the pool just blew my mind. I have never seen anything like that in my entire life. I've never seen anything quite like Gopher State either. So I think you all ought to be very proud of yourself where you are, and I just think it's great. The thing I think that impressed me the most was I found out just at lunch today that this is not the 37th or 49th annual Gopher State.
That's as long as it usually takes to get something like this going to the extent that you people have it going. You've done it in a very few years. Incredible. Whatever you have, bottle it and ship it to the rest of the world, will you? They want it up. There I think that'll do it. Can you still hear me? Fine. Fine. Okay. All right. I do think that it's time that I shift gears and get into the business of telling you why I came out here.
It was not just to visit with your AA delegate, who is an old friend of mine from here, there and everywhere, or Colonel Sanders who's going to speak tonight across the street, who's become a good friend, and other Minnesotans and Canadians that are around. That's not why I'm here. I'm here to do something that we are advised in the big book of Al-Anon is a good thing to do, and that's to tell you in a general way what it was like, what happened, and what it's like now.
It's as simple as that. That's why I'm here, and that's what I'm going to try and do. I'm going to try and share with you as best I can my experience, my strength, and my hope. And I want to tell you before we even start that in spite of that very lovely introduction, don't settle back and get ready for a success story. You're not going to hear it. What you're going to hear today is one man's struggle in the program of recovery from the family illness of alcoholism.
And in order to get started on that, I would like to reintroduce myself and tell you that my name is Ted K., and since the 31st of October, 1961, by the grace of God and with the help of the Al-Anon program, I have been attempting to recover from the family illness
[00:05:05]
of alcoholism, among other things. And it has taken me many, many 24 hours to fully understand what a program of recovery must encompass. I have to tell you that I learned about the family illness of alcoholism at my very first meeting. And when you hear later about my very first meeting, you will understand how very sick I was. I bring documents with me because people frequently do not believe where I was coming from.
But at my first Al-Anon meeting, I heard words which many of you have heard, probably at your first meeting. And hopefully they did for you what they were intended to do. Hopefully they gave you some peace of mind, some assurance. And those words were, you have been deeply affected by close personal contact with a problem drinker. Al-Anon is a family illness, and if you are in close proximity to a person with a drinking problem, you will be affected too.
And I heard those words, close personal contact with a problem drinker, I have been affected. And I hugged those words very closely to me. And they became, really, the meaning of my program for a long, long time. And what those words meant to me was simply this. All of the pain, all of the agony, all of the anguish of the years that led up to entry into the program were not my fault. They were my wife's fault, because she was the one that drank.
That's all those words meant to me for the longest time. That's how I came into the program. And I struggled with that for the longest time. And I tried to make the program work with that as a basis. And I'm sure you can very quickly tell how much success I had with that as the basis of my program. However, that was the way it went. Much, much later, I began to get some insights into myself. And I began to realize that it wasn't just close personal contact with a problem drinker.
Oh, no, indeed. It went well before that. I began to learn to understand that I had brought with me to the marriage many, many attitudes that contributed to the problems that were inherent in our marriage and to the disaster that our marriage had become by the time we entered the programs of Al-Anon and Alcoholics Anonymous. I learned that it wasn't all the alcoholic. It wasn't all just close personal contact to that problem drinker.
And it wasn't just that period of time. I had to go way back and get very honest with myself. Now there were three attitudes that were predominant in my own problem, and I want to make reference to them right up on top, and we'll talk about them in some detail as I go along this afternoon. One attitude that I brought with me to the marriage was my attitude toward alcohol. I also brought an attitude toward people, and I brought an attitude toward God.
Now very briefly, let's talk about those three attitudes and what they were like. My attitude toward alcohol when I got married derived from my experience with alcohol in my youth and growing up. Now I came from a family who had a, well, kind of a loose attitude toward alcohol. For many, many years we never had a problem drinker in our family. I say that now not with any amount of pride or boasting, I say it just as a simple matter of fact so that you can understand that I never saw the problem of alcoholism in my immediate family.
My family believed that no one with half a brain would ever let booze create a problem for them. You simply don't let it get in the way. And that's how I grew up, fully understanding that you don't let alcohol be a problem. Anyone that did that was a fool, and all they had to do was stop and think about it, change their ways, and everything would be fine. Right? Sure. Okay. Now if you think I'm kidding about my family's rather loose attitude toward alcohol, I want
[00:10:03]
you to understand that when I was born, my father went out and bought a bottle of Calvert Whiskey, a fifth. Seventeen years later, when I sailed away to World War II, he and I finished off the last drink in that bottle. Folks, that's a family that can take it or leave it, believe me. My attitude toward people and my attitude toward God developed a little differently and a little later. They developed almost simultaneously, and I think you have to know this about me, that very early in my life some people helped me to decide that I was called to the ministry and that I would spend my life preparing for service in the ministry.
I would enter college and enter seminary and become a very fine preacher, and that was my destiny. And I was really much too young at the time that these people helped me to understand that, to think much about it besides, well, they're the grown-ups, they're the ones that know. I guess that's what it's all about. And I lived with that from a very young age. But as I progressed through life, into my teens, into service, I had grave reservations about this calling, which I didn't understand.
And I was rather unhappy and didn't know why. And by the time I was ten or twelve, there were some mechanisms working within me that I simply didn't understand. But a great sadness settled over my life at a time when I should have been very happy. I didn't understand it. And when I graduated from high school, I was one of the very lucky people whose name was mentioned in a bunch of little cameos that were written up in the final edition of the school magazine.
And the final words of that little cameo referred to me as Ted K., tall, blonde, and morose. And I looked at it and I thought, ah, what do they know? But even at the age of seventeen, my peers had identified a prevailing sadness that had settled over my life. But I worked my way through this. I went in and out of service. I entered college, made it through three very good undergraduate years, good student, dean's list.
And just prior to my senior year, in the summer between my junior year and senior year, I had become attached to a very lovely young lady that I had known for many years in high school. And we were pretty much of a mind to get married. We didn't know exactly when we would get married, whether it would be before or after I went into seminary. We suspected it probably would be after I graduated from undergraduate school.
But for that summer, I decided to take a job at a resort hotel. And I was quite surprised to find that she was going to Europe for that summer, and I was going to spend the entire summer without her. I won't bear too much on the details. I will say I was very much in love with that little girl. I won't bear too much on the details, but I will tell you that she sailed for Europe and I never heard another word from her for the rest of the summer.
I was, in fact, jilted, not by her design, but by pressures from her family. I got all of this later in feedback. Pressures from her family. They took her to Europe and she was not permitted to correspond with me. And the early part of the summer, I was up and down the walls trying to figure out what happened and it began to dawn on me that there was going to be no correspondence. And I took off a little crazy and I made the most of what a young man can make in a summer resort, nearly destroyed my life and the life of a couple of other people, came out of that summer fully alienated from my family.
My choice, I think, not theirs. My choice, I think, not theirs, because the turn of events as a result of that summer had just turned everyone's life upside down.
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And I think today that probably it was I had found an excuse for a rebellion against something that I couldn't handle. I returned to school in the fall of the year, lasted about six weeks, decided there was no way in the world that I was going to see through college, enter seminary the following year. And so as an honor student I did probably the only thing that a young man of good conscience could do.
I dropped out of school, just that simple, and ran. I ran and I developed a frame of mind that was to stay with me for approximately 15 years. My attitude toward people began to take shape. People are no damn good. My troubles in school had caused me to go to some people that I relied on, ask for their advice and their help, and they couldn't give it to me. They couldn't help me. The answers I got were, well, you're going to have to work it out yourself, and I didn't want anybody to tell me that.
The answers that my family gave me, or I really should say the demands that my family placed upon me, were too much for me to handle. I ran away from them as well as the world. And I took that expression, people are no damn good, from a cartoon that appeared in the New Yorker magazine. It has since become famous, and perhaps many of you have seen it. It's a little man all alone, one of the most forlorn creatures in the world.
And the caption expresses his thoughts, that people are no damn good. And that's what I thought. And my attitude toward God, whom I had been attempting to get ready to serve, was reshaped dramatically. And I began to believe that maybe what I was hearing wasn't true. I really didn't believe that God was dead, but it was at about that time that that expression began to be popular among the young people of our time.
I didn't believe that God was dead, but I did believe that he was nowhere near me. I fancied perhaps that he was down in Brazil where I couldn't get in touch with him, and I really didn't care because I didn't want to talk to him either. And that's where we left it. And I ran away for about a year. I lived in a garret out on Long Island. I chose to go out on my own into that wonderful world out there, that world of opportunity, at a time right after World War II when the aircraft industry had folded up on Long Island and there were no jobs for anybody.
And for nearly a year I starved, just trying to keep body and soul together after having dropped out of school. My pride finally weakened a little bit, and I went back home to live with my family. And I came home with this attitude toward alcohol, with this attitude toward people, and this attitude toward God. And I thought I would flip this morning when I heard Ruth talk about her first impression of Huey because it so coincides with my first impression of Claire when I came home to New Jersey and met this four-foot-eleven-and-nine-tenths blonde bomber, this vivacious little creature who could drink more than any man I had ever met in my entire life.
And I fell madly in love with this little girl. Now she had a family that she took me home to meet that was only slightly different from my family. They had sort of a loose attitude toward alcohol too, but it was loose in a different sense of the word. As a matter of fact, her family lived a very simple life. They had only two rules for existence. If you got booze, drink it. That's one. Now you can't get by on just one rule that says if you got booze, drink it because if is a conditional statement, and you have got to entertain the possibility of the alternative.
If you ain't got it, what do you do? So they had a second rule. If you ain't got it, go out and get it. And life for them was simple. There were no complications. If you had it, you drank it. If you didn't have it, you got it.
[00:20:03]
And life went on and on and on. And I met these people, and I thought to myself, wow, are they loose. Nothing bothers them. They are super. Wouldn't it be great to have a family like this instead of those stick-in-the-muds that I've been stuck with? Hey, I want to tell you about those stick-in-the-muds family of mine. I told you before that we didn't have a problem drinker. This troubled me when I first came into Al-Anon because I began to hear some of the statistics about the incidence of alcoholism.
And I thought, how can we have such a big family and we don't have a drunk of our own? It just, it doesn't seem decent. We all know that alcoholism is a progressive illness. We got two of them now, and we're just as good as you. Got another one that's working on it. I don't know if he's going to make it or not. But at any rate, Claire and I began a very short relationship, dating. And in, I suppose, somewhat typical fashion, we were married within six weeks of our first date.
Slightly impulsive. Now, you weren't. I suppose I should have been forewarned of how things were going to go. We were married in 1952, okay? I'd been out of service for a few years now, and some of the high-rise apartments had grown up there in the east, and they're everywhere now. That was where we decided to move into. We had a little one-and-a-half room efficiency, vine-covered apartment up there on about the ninth or the tenth floor.
And we went to take a look at the apartment before we signed the lease, and it had one of those tiny little refrigerators underneath the sink counter where you pull down the screen. And there really wasn't much room in there for much more than, oh, a pound of bacon, a dozen eggs, a quart of milk, and maybe one little ice cube tray, a couple other little things. And as we left the apartment, she said to me, Now, I know that I've told you that I want to marry you, she said, but I want to ask you something.
She said, Would you promise me something? And I thought to myself, Promise her anything, right? You know, I was making about 60 bucks a week. I knew she couldn't ask for a Cadillac. I knew she couldn't ask for a mink coat. That was out of the question, so sure, honey, promise me anything. What is it that you want? She said to me, I'd like you to promise me that we'll always have beer in the icebox.
And I thought that was so sweet. I really did. And we got married, and we had a very short honeymoon, only a few days, in a local area. We returned home, spent a couple of days with her family until our apartment was ready. We moved into our little room and a half, vine-covered efficiency, and on the second or third day that we were there, a strange thing happened. I awoke one morning, perhaps at nine or ten o'clock, no, certainly no later, sleeping on the Castro convertible, and I heard a sound that the young people in our program probably have never heard, but some of the older people, I'm sure, are very familiar with it.
I heard a sound that went something like, crack, crack, the sound of a church key on a can of beer. You see, kids, today you've got pop-tops, and it just goes boom. Back then you had to hit it twice to get it open. And that's what I heard. And I looked up from the Castro convertible, and I said, what are you doing? And she said, I just opened a can of beer, I'm going to have a can of beer. She said, you want one?
Ugh, no. I said, a can of beer? And I looked at the clock, I says, hey, nobody drinks a can of beer at this hour of the morning. She said, you want to bet? We talked about it just a little bit, and I reminded her that, you know, that this just wasn't what we would call civilized behavior,
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and that I really didn't think that it was a good practice. I said, you know, I don't think that you ought to be drinking a beer this early. She says, hey, you remember a week ago before we were married, you came over to my house Saturday morning at 9 o'clock? I said, yeah. She said, my father said, would you like a beer? I said, yeah. She said, what did you say? I said, well, I says, honey, that was before we were married.
That was courtship stuff. She said, well, maybe it was for you, but it's not for me. And, you know, for the next ten years, she never quite understood what it was I was talking about, about this kind of drinking. We talked about it that day. We talked about it in the days that followed. And it never really got straightened out, because what had happened to me, I'm sure, happened to many of you. I simply assumed that when we got married, life would go back to normal to the way I viewed it, and that the use of alcohol would fall into the pattern that my family had developed over many years, and that she, being my wife, would conform to life in my family as opposed to hers.
Well, I lost on all counts. She continued to drink, as evidenced by the fact that I am now some nearly 30 years later in Al-Anon, and have been for a great many years. That attests to her devotion to her principles of, if you got it, drink it. And she held to that for the longest time. But we went on with a great deal of difficulty. Many years later, when she came into Alcoholics Anonymous, and after she had thought about it, she decided that she had been drinking alcoholically from the time she was 16.
And I have no reason to doubt that statement, and she documents it with cases. And so what I'm saying was, in spite of the fact that we were young people, I married a 24-carat, full-blown, practicing alcoholic. It didn't sneak up on us. It was right there, wham, from day one. And we were in trouble, wham, from day one. Within three years, we had moved from the little vine-covered efficiency to a little cottage down on the north Jersey coast in a very, very lovely little area.
It was an adventure for us. We had bought this tiny little house, and I was parading members of the family through on a regular basis. I wanted them to see how successful we were, and I was bringing my uncles and my aunts and my cousins, of course, my own parents. And one day she said to me, When are we going to have my family down here? You remember those beautiful people, those beautiful, loose people that I couldn't wait to have as members of my family.
And she said to me, When are we going to have my family down here? And my reaction was, Your family? Are we really going to have them down here? You know what problems they create whenever they come. She was terribly hurt by this. But in the three years that had elapsed, the relationship between her family and mine changed quite a bit. I didn't view them with quite the same enthusiasm that I had viewed them before.
But they came. I invited them because I couldn't say no to anything that she wanted. And we were very much in love in spite of the problems that we had, and by now we had serious problems with alcohol. But her family came. But I said to her, I'll tell you what, You won't have to lift a finger. I said, Let me take care of everything. I have to digress for just a moment. I said to you that things started off right from day one.
I learned very quickly what most men in the Al-Anon program have learned. I learned to cook. I told people that it was a hobby, that I was an amateur gourmet chef. And I will tell you with some amount of modesty, not a great deal of humility, I'm a pretty darn good cook. I'm a pretty darn good cook, okay? But I had learned to cook because being a former biblical student, I had uncovered a
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passage in one of the lost books of the New Testament that says that man does not live by the burnt offering alone. And when you are married to a pretty lady who drinks a lot, a lot of things get burned on a lot of nights. And so I had learned to cook. And so I said to her, yes, we will have your family down. I said, but you won't have to lift a finger. I said, I'll take care of everything. I'll prepare the meal, I'll cook the meal, I'll serve the meal.
Really sounds like I'm a nice guy, doesn't it? Actually, I know none of you would suspect me of it, but I was trying to control the outcome of that event, of her family coming to visit. I know I'm probably one of the few people in the Al-Anon program who has ever been guilty of trying to exercise control. And I tell this story only on the off chance that some stranger who needs to identify might be out there in the audience.
I planned a lovely dinner. Now I know, again, for the young people, this sounds incredible because when you go to the supermarket and look at the prices and the cuts, you say, no, nobody could do that. But back when this happened, it was a reasonable thing to do. I went out and I bought three of the prime ribs of beef to serve. Today I went to look, or not today, but just recently I went to look at a prime rib, and they told me I would have to make an appointment with their banker before they'd even show it to me.
But in those days, it was not all that big a deal, except that it was fun to cook and it tasted good. And that's what we were going to have and a lot of fancy things. I made a black bottom pie. I was going to make hollandaise sauce to serve probably with either asparagus or Brussels sprouts, and I was going to make it on top of the stove. And my plan was, when they arrived, I would greet them at the door, give them a drink, and sit them down in the living room, having just taken the roast out of the oven.
That's the way it would be. When the car drove up, the roast would come out, I would come out, greet them, give them a drink, sit them down, return to the kitchen, make—what are you laughing at? It was a good plan. Well, most of it worked. They arrived, and the thing that impressed me with the plan was I knew that they would arrive exactly on time because they lived an hour away. And if they left on time, they weren't going to dawdle, they couldn't go more than an hour without a drink.
They'd be there, right on schedule, and they were. I had the ice ready, everything. They walked in, I greeted them, I gave them a drink, I sat them down, told them dinner would be served shortly, returned to the kitchen, cracked an egg into the double boiler, got ready to start with the hollandaise sauce. Everybody tapped me on the shoulder and said, we're ready for another round. Reluctantly, I gave it to them.
Dinner never got served. Dinner never got served, and that's the truth. They went through everything that I had brought into the house to serve them with that day in the line of alcohol. They went through the bottle of Calvert that I had bought in case my son ever went to World War III. And Clare and her father went out on the highway and bought a pint at one of those stores where you knock on the back door and even though it's Sunday, they'll give it to you in a brown paper sack.
And they were back working on that. And I was so distraught by the whole thing that I gathered them up and I led them out to the car. I literally took her father by the arm and led him to the car with the rest of the family following. And I told them, I've had enough of you people, I don't want any more of it. And I made a very profound observation, which was to indicate very early in my life how little I knew about the problem of alcoholism, because I told them, if it wasn't for people like you, my wife wouldn't drink the way she does.
Now get out of here and leave us alone and don't bother coming back. And I turned around and walked into the house and my little child bride of three years was standing there and tearfully she issued to me an ultimatum. I could either go out to the car and apologize, bring them back and feed them, or she was going to pack her bag and go too. That's pretty heavy stuff. And I thought about it.
[00:35:01]
In great detail I thought about it for four, five, maybe six seconds. And I gave her what I thought was the best advice that a husband in my position ever gave to a wife. I said, baby, don't let the door hit you in the butt on the way out. I wish I knew whether it was the Al-Anons or the AA's that were applauding. Because do you know what that little ingrate did? She went. She packed her bag, went back up to the city, lived with a girlfriend.
This happened in late spring of that year. And she lived the entire summer with a girlfriend and later told me that she never had such a good time in her life. Nobody to tell her when to come and go. Nobody to tell her when to drink and not drink. Nobody to tell her when to get up and nobody to tell her when to go to bed. Just send money. I had a great summer too. I got custody of the house and a crabgrass.
You got crabgrass in Minnesota? Oh, it's terrible. And I learned all about dirty ovens and dirty kitchen floors. I was miserable. Long about fall, we were in touch with each other and we got honest with each other. And we admitted as how we were just as miserable and maybe even more so apart than we had been together. We talked a little while and I sensed that she wanted to come back home and I knew that I wanted her back home.
And so I said to her, would you like to come back? And she says, yeah, I'd like to come back. And I thought to myself, that's it. She wants to come back. I got the solution. I got her. And so I said, well, you know what the problem was before, don't you? And she said, yeah, I know what the problem was. I said, the problem was booze, right? She said, the problem was booze. And we're not going to have that problem anymore, are we?
I said, nope, we're not going to have that problem anymore. Do you see how simple it is to deal with the problem of alcoholism? And I thought, she loves me so much that she has to be serious. We will not have these problems anymore. And I said, gee, that's great. Come on back. And she said, okay. She said, I'm going to go right home and I'm going to cook you just the greatest dinner you ever had. I'll be there when you get home.
I said, okay. I spent the rest of the day at my desk, you know, kind of bouncing around with ants in my pants. And it was a long drive for me to get home, long by the standards of someone who lives in New Jersey at any rate. The Canadians tell me that, you know, what are you talking about it's 40 miles to get to a meeting? You know, that's nothing. In New Jersey, that's unheard of. You find another group or start one.
But at any rate, there I was bouncing around, waiting for the time to come. Five o'clock, out of the desk, into the car, down at Parkway. Finally made it home, into the development, down our little street, up the driveway, out of the car, across the lawn, up the stairs, open the door, and smelt the burnt offering coming out of the kitchen. She bought a six-pack before she left for the house, took care of that, and who knows how much else.
But by the time I got home, she and Emile were a disaster. And we had seven more years of our own personal hell, living in the abyss of alcoholism, not knowing how we got there, not knowing how to get out, destroying each other a day at a time, completely convinced that God and the world had deserted us and that we were two of the most lost people in the world. There's one more story that I want to tell you about what it was like before we get on to the what happened.
This was not too long before we found our way into this program of recovery. I had gone back to night school. I felt compelled to wrap up that bit of unfinished business. And I was spending a lot of nights at school and getting home late, and we weren't seeing much of each other. And Claire was drinking heavier than ever. We had sold the little house and moved back to the city. We were back in the high rise.
Now we were in a larger apartment, and we were up on the tenth floor.
[00:40:04]
I came home from school, and it was sometime between ten and eleven o'clock in the evening, and she was not in the living room as I would have expected to find her watching television. And I walked through the apartment and was shocked to find her in the bedroom, ten stories up, with the bedroom window open, sitting with one foot in and one foot out of the window. And I looked at her, as they say, in shock, and I asked her, what was this all about?
And she told me, and she had been drinking, and she told me, she said, I am so sick of the way I feel, and of my life, and of our life, and of you, and of everything. She said, I am just sick to death. She said, I'm going to jump, and it's going to be all over for me, and I won't have to worry about it anymore. She was that miserable. We talked for a little while, and finally I was able to walk over to the window, and I held out my hand, and I said, come on, let me help you in.
And she put her little hand in mine, and I closed my hand around hers, and for one fleeting moment, I really wasn't sure whether I wanted to push or pull. I tell you this story with a purpose. Frequently I encounter people in the Al-Anon program who, in dealing with the second step wherein we have come to believe that a power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity, I frequently find people who have enormous difficulty dealing with the suggestion that their behavior as family members has approached or indeed crossed over into the area that can be categorized as insanity.
Too frequently, I think, many of us in Al-Anon are quite willing to accept the notion that the alcoholic who continues drinking is indeed insane, and he would have to be insane to allow himself to have reached even the point that he's at. And we grant the alcoholics the privilege of being the ones who required divine intervention in their life to restore them to sanity, but we deny our own need for a return to sanity.
I tell you this story because I blocked it from my memory after it happened, and I had not been in Al-Anon—well, I had been for at least a year before the memory of that night and of those feelings and emotions before it returned to me. And I tell you this story to suggest to you that I had stood with a human life in the palm of my hand and I didn't know what to do with it. And I ask you, to what further extent can a person go and not have his behavior defined as insanity?
That was pure insanity, to hold a human life in your hand and not know what to do with it. And I suggest to every one of you that you have been there, too. And usually there are heads that go no. There are heads that go yes, but many say no. And they will say to me, Ted, no, I never experienced that sort of thing. Maybe I would have if I had had the opportunity, and my response is simple. Maybe it wasn't as real, and maybe it wasn't as graphic.
But come on, baby, get honest. How many nights did you walk up and down in the living room, wringing your hands, having visions of either the perfect murder or the perfect suicide? Now I've got a few more heads going like this. But there's still a few of these. Let me ask you, how many times have you sat, male or female, and cried into your pillow because of your alcoholic, and seen visions of yourself in your coffin, and your loving family marching by?
gotten sober his life would have been so much better. The poor thing. Any of you
[00:45:05]
been there? Yeah. If we haven't been there in fact we've been there in fantasy. I suggest that every one of us indeed should remember our imperative need for a higher power to restore us and to sustain us in sanity. To restore us from insanity and to sustain us in sanity. That's what it was like. What happened? She screwed up my whole life and got sober. She called me home one day and told me, she said, Ted, I have a problem with my drinking.
Will you take me to see a priest? That floored me. For ten years she'd been telling me that I had a problem with my drinking, that if I would only learn to drink the way she did our problems would disappear. Take her to see a priest. I'm a Protestant, okay? We had avoided the question of religion like the plague ever since we had been married. Neither one of us had been to church. I wasn't sure that there was a Catholic church in our town. I was very much surprised to find out there was a very big one there. I took her over to the rectory. I got called and asked for an appointment. And, you know, I envisioned some little guy in one of those crazy gowns coming downstairs and taking her by the hand.
Well, you know, I went prepared. You've got to give me credit for this. I went prepared. I had watched her father and her uncle take one pledge after the other. I said, then I am not going to hook me with that garbage. I took everything but five dollars out of my wallet. But I want to tell you, I wasn't prepared for what happened when we arrived at that rectory. I announced to the person that was sitting at the desk that I was Mr. K. who had called for an appointment for his wife. And was that appointment ready and would he come down and speak with us, please? And the appointment, who was supposed to be a little old man in some kind of black skirt, came walking down the stairs. I wasn't so sure I wanted my wife talking to that young fellow in that good-looking sport jacket. Who said to me, you sit here and we'll go in there. I said, you will not. He said, you sit here. And so he and my wife went into the office and they chatted. It only took them four days to complete their business. It seemed like every bit of that, they tell me, that it was really only about twenty minutes. But Father Henry came out and said to me, Ted, would you come in and join us? Now I was very sensitive on the subject of my wife's drinking. And he made a big mistake. He almost blew God's first miracle for us in the program. Because just as I was about to sit down in the chair that he had pointed to, he said to me, I've just told Claire that I think she's an alcoholic and that she should probably be calling AA. And as I was going down in that chair, I changed direction and started to come right back up. I was ready to go for the throat, because I don't care if you're a priest or not, nobody's going to call my wife an alcoholic.
A drunk, a lush, anything. But an alcoholic? No, sir. I had my pride. But not for long. He gave Claire the phone, he gave her the number, she called the information service. There was a gal there that talked to her and said, do you want me to come out, or do you want to come to a meeting tonight, or how would you like to handle it? And we kind of decided that we would go to the meeting and that she would meet us. And so we went.
We went to an AA clubhouse in Newark, New Jersey, and there were four lovely women sitting there waiting for us to arrive. They invited me to sit and chat with them. They did it one at a time. Each one said, if you would like to come and sit with us and listen, you're welcome. And I heard this like three times, and finally the fourth one started to say it again. And I guess I had a strained or a puzzled look on my face, because she said, really, what we're trying to say is it's okay for you to come if you sit, but remember, keep your mouth shut. I guess they had dealt with a husband before, I'm not sure.
[00:50:02]
We sat and we listened to the girls talk to Claire. We got off to a very auspicious beginning. And as we got up from about an hour of that chatting and my listening, we started in to hear the speakers, and one of the ladies turned to me and said, Ted, this meeting is quite a ways from where you live. There's another meeting on Monday night that maybe you and Claire would like better, she said, and especially you, she said, because they have a family group there. Well, my heart began to pound with joy. Now, I knew precious little about Alcoholics Anonymous when we attended that first meeting. I knew absolutely nothing about Al-Anon. I had never heard of it. And if you listen closely to the date that I gave you earlier, the 31st of October, 1961, that's the date that we went to this first meeting, because I date my entry into the program to the time that I made my first contact with Al-Anon and I consider that my first contact. I have always thought there was something either symbolic or ludicrous about the fact that we went to our first meeting on Halloween.
I haven't put it together yet. I'm still working on that. Thank you. But this very nice lady suggested that we go to a different meeting on a Monday night where they had a family group. And I went home with my heart pounding for joy, because I had found a family group. And on the following Monday night, I was going to take Claire, her mother, her father, her The whole week I had visions of having my picture taken as the A.A. recruiter of the month. Linda, I told you I got there by accident, and that's the truth. That's the way it happened.
And I got in and I said, I'd like seven applications, please. But they were very patient, and they explained to me that the program of Al-Anon was for me, that I had been deeply affected by close personal contact with a problem drinker, and that if I would like a program of recovery and I was willing to stick around for a few 24 hours, they would be pleased to give me all that they had. And so I stuck around for a few 24 hours. I went to those lousy meetings every Monday night with resentment building in my heart with everyone. Oh, I learned very quickly, being a lone male in Al-Anon nearly 20 years ago, that the ladies will be nice to you if you say the right things. And if you tell them, oh yeah, boy, have I let go and let God, they'll pat you on the back and tell you, hey, you're really growing. It makes you feel good. If you want to get mothered, go to an Al-Anon meeting. The problem is, you're only going to get smothered. The theme of this program, of this whole roundup, is I Am Responsible. And I told you, I always create problems for the committee, and one of the things I never do is I never try to tie my talk into the theme, no matter what the charge is. But I have to say that for me, I Am Responsible has a lot of meanings, a lot of meanings. And one of the things that it has taken me an awful lot of years to learn is that I Am Responsible for my own recovery. You know, there are people in the program who are responsible for providing a program of recovery for me, but that's as much as they can do. They can't give it to me if I won't take it. They can't make it work if I won't work it. And boy, did I have problems, because I figured maybe, you know, I just hang around and everything will be all right. But I went to those lousy meetings, week after week after week, for one reason. The AA meeting was upstairs, and as soon as the Al-Anon meeting was over, I excused myself, because the coffee was better upstairs, okay?
You believe that? I'll tell you a couple of more. I ran upstairs for one reason. The AA meeting was over, too. Somebody had to take charge of her program and find out who she was hanging around with. You know, God forbid, she should get mixed up with a drunk or something. There were always new pieces of literature that you had to look over to see whether she should be reading them or not. I screened them all. I held three very quiet, under-the-table
[00:55:05]
interviews, trying to find a sponsor for her. It didn't work. A little dummy went out and found her own. Awfully good one. I said to her one night, would you like me to buy you the big book? She said, well, this was very early in our program, and she said, gee, I don't know whether I'm even ready for that yet. I bought the book anyhow. We got home that night, and she says, can I see it? And I said, no, I haven't read it yet. And this went on for quite a while. And I would not want you to make, seriously, I would not want you to make a correlation between the things I have just told you and what then happened, because I don't think there's a great deal of relationship between them. But after several months in the program, of her loving it and me hating it, she celebrated by getting drunk.
Wow, did she get drunk. Oh, boy. And I couldn't understand it. And she went back to her sponsor. She went back to Ray. Ray? That was my reaction when she told me she had found a sponsor. She went to Ray, and she told him what happened. He looked down at her, patted her on the head. He says, honey, did you learn anything? She says, I think I learned that I can't take the first drink. He says, you're growing. She was fine. That was it. Never had a bit of trouble. From that point on, she grew from four foot eleven to nine foot fourteen. She grew like that. Old Ted, by the way, up to that point in the program, had grown from six foot one and a half to about three foot two. Never quite understood the justice of all of this, you know, after all we put up with.
But after Claire slipped, I went back to my group. I didn't have a sponsor, so I just went back to the whole group. And I felt inclined to explain some very simple facts to them, namely that their damn program don't work. And we spent just about a whole meeting on that subject as I tried to explain to them that I had come and my wife got drunk, and they said, yeah, but, you know, one don't mean the other. And we kept going over and over and over it. And finally, one of them said to me, you know, Ted, I think you missed something along the way. And I allowed us how maybe that had happened. They were very patient. They were very loving. And with the passage of time, and I believe in the osmosis part of the program, that if you bring the body, something's going to happen. Because for me, the light began to go on, slowly but surely. I had to go all the way back to step number one. And step number one finally came to mean for me then what it means pretty much today. That I was powerless over the fact of my wife's alcoholism, and I had let my whole life become unmanageable because I was unwilling to accept that fact. The fact of her alcoholism, that's all. Nothing more, nothing less. I learned that I had to release her with or without love, with or without resentment. Those things I could address later, but the release had to come. I had to release her to her program of recovery, which she would work with the people of her choice, as frequently or as infrequently as she chose, and in the places that she chose. And none of this had anything to do with my recovery, and I had to learn it and accept it. And when I could finally look at it and realize that her decision to drink or not to drink was strictly between her and her higher power, it was only then that I could turn to my higher power and say, God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.
Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. Grant me the serenity to live in the knowledge that she must choose every day whether or not to take a drink.
[01:00:02]
God grant me the peace to live with that. And he did. I'm not back to six foot one and a half but I'm still working on it. My life changed. My understanding of the program changed. And things began to look good. Claire and I had ten years in this program of sobriety which today I look back at and say it certainly offset the ten years of alcoholism. The ten years of sobriety were far better than the ten years of alcoholism were bad.
We used to laugh about it. We used to laugh about how good things were. We used to say, boy, if it gets any better we can't stand it. And I guess somebody might have been listening because in the fall of 1971 on Labor Day to be precise I awoke in the morning and found that my child bride of twenty years had died suddenly and unaccountably in her sleep. She had had a heart attack and her higher power had taken her from me.
And with all that I had been building within this program I stood in my kitchen alone that morning and denied everything that I had gained in the ten years that had gone before. I repudiated God. I repudiated people. I didn't need the Al-Anon program. I didn't need nothing. No God who loved me would have let a thing like this happen to the woman that I love so much. But I had been around the program long enough to realize that when the stinking thinking sets in somebody will love you enough to pull the rug and help you back to earth.
And it happened. My eyes fell on a little plaque that was in the kitchen and the words on that plaque are as known to you as they are to me and just as bit as familiar. I stood in the kitchen that morning and read aloud to myself God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. And to this day I remember not one more event of that day. It is mercifully blocked from my mind. I cannot recall another thing after reading the words on that plaque.
But I can tell you what happened in the days that followed. In the days that followed I became acutely aware of what Bill Wilson in his very last days referred to as the community of Alcoholics Anonymous. He was referring to this. The members of AA and of Al-Anon and of Al-Ateen who had come of age enough that they could meet together under certain conditions outside of their regular meeting places and outside of their regular purposes.
But they could come together and share and each would know what the other was talking about because indeed we are working programs that are based on the same twelve steps. And it was the community of Alcoholics Anonymous that came to me in the days that followed. The near ones came in person, some wrote, some called, some prayed and all of them conveyed to me just in their eyes and in their voices they conveyed to me the words that came in a short note from a couple that was very close and very dear to Claire and I who were so far that they couldn't come and the words said simply, Dear Ted, we care and we share.
And the community of Alcoholics Anonymous showed me how much it cared that I heard and they shared with me their strength until I was able to walk alone and they put me back on my feet and I re-entered the world and I got more active in service than I had ever been in the past. Through a number of you can call them coincidences, I'm sure they are not, greater demands were placed upon me in the area of service and I was able to respond to them at a time when I needed to respond to something.
[01:05:04]
I re-entered the world, I re-entered the Al-Anon program, I re-entered life and it began to pick up and after a couple of years I thought I'm okay. What I didn't realize is there was a piece of me that I hadn't come to grips with and I said earlier, don't settle back and listen for a success story. We've had a couple of laughs together, maybe a tear or two. I hope you have not gotten the impression that I have been a super program type that came in and rode the crest of the wave.
I've been anything but. I've had to work hard for some of the things that I have taken from the program because I didn't know for the longest time that I was responsible for my program. I just had the feeling that I was there and everything was all right and there were parts of me that went unattended and that I overlooked and there were signs and signals that I didn't listen to. I probably seemed like I was riding a crest but I wasn't and I have just a very short message before I'm through for just a few people because you know just as I got it all mixed up in the beginning of the program I had it all mixed up for a whole lot of years because somewhere in the early days I had heard somebody say or at least I thought I heard them say this program works for anything and I went around carrying that message along with a few other messages.
But folks from my perspective that ain't true. This program helps for everything. This program works for alcoholism and let's make no mistake about it. Take a look. Count yourself. How many are you out there? Healthy, happy people. Every one of you is living testimony to the fact that this program works for alcoholism and it helps for a lot of other things but it isn't always the final answer. But I told myself this program works for everything and just a few years ago when my life started coming apart at the seams and everything that I seemed to hold of special value turned to ashes in my hand I began making more meetings than I had ever made in my life and I was not married to an alcoholic. The years of living with a problem drinker were long behind me but I had confidence in this program and I still do.
This program did lead me to understand what it was that I needed but I crashed. I crashed emotionally and mentally and just fell apart in spite of the program and I had to find my way to some other kind of help and I found my way to a super guy who understood where I was coming from and I kept going to my meetings and I kept going in service for as long as I could until I reached a point where I absolutely had to bail out for a while while I was putting it back together again.
I got it going but I couldn't tell anybody about it. I couldn't tell anybody that that this guy who had this great program of recovery had to step outside the bounds of that program in order to get whole. I guess I couldn't admit that this program didn't work for everything. I guess I couldn't face the people who still stand up and say this program works for everything. I guess I had a few things mixed up about the jokes that we make about the shrinks who louse up the alcoholics because they don't know how to handle them.
That's a different ballgame. That's before recovery. That's another bag. This is after recovery. It's a different kind of relationship.
[01:10:00]
But I found my way back to being a whole person and it was outside of this program. Believe it or not. In spite of the fact that probably five hundred of you there have known it since the day you walked through the door that you are responsible for your program that you can only only you can take it. Anybody can show it to you but only you can take it. I had to learn that outside the program. I had to learn that basically I travel alone.
I really do. With God's help I travel alone. I can't expect any one of you to keep me safe all the time. I'm responsible for my own well-being. I cannot vest in you the responsibility for my safety and I think it's a mistake to let anybody fall into that belief. I think it's a mistake not to be just a little bit more vocal about the fact that some of us can't get it all just in the program. And I don't know how to do it, okay?
And I'm not suggesting that we change the program or rewrite the literature or add new slogans. I'm not suggesting any of those things. I like the program just the way it is. But I think we have to find a way to help a few people who are maybe just a little sicker and a little thicker to get them off to another place not where they're going to get help instead of Al-Anon but where they're going to get the additional help that they need so that they can make the most of Al-Anon.
But I'm back. I don't know how whole I am. I don't know how well I am. We've got a friend, all of us, down in Odessa, Texas a gal named Blanche who I'm sure a lot of you have heard. Schoolteacher insists on impeccable grammar who will tell you that she ain't well but she's getting weller. That's about the way I feel. Incidentally, she knows I'm up here today and she sends her love. I talk to her all the time.
Matter of fact, she sent a representative. He's sitting right down there in the front row. He just came up because he wanted to be at Gopher State and I think that's swell. That's my story. That's where I've been. Program of recovery isn't easy. I thought it was. I deluded myself. It's not. It isn't easy but it's beautiful. I wouldn't have it any other way. I came into this program with three lousy attitudes and as the result of these steps those attitudes are all changed.
I am nearer my God today and He exists in a form that I could not describe to you in any way, shape or matter. I am nearer to Him today than at any time when I thought I would serve Him through the ministry. I have a feeling, an affinity and an affection for people that I did not think was possible. I love every man as my brother, every man and a few ladies too. And the state of Minnesota has changed my whole attitude toward alcohol.
For me it has been a miracle the change in my life because I married a lady who drank who is responsible for me coming to a program of recovery that is responsible for putting me in constant touch with people like yourselves. It's made all the difference. I would like to close by sharing with you a prayer that I carry on my heart every waking hour. With a very simple wish that your higher power will continue to keep you safe in this program one day at a time because nobody deserves it more.
Thank you and God bless.