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Source: Keith F – 26th International Harvest of Hope 2012 – Speaker Talk – Date Unknown.mp3 File: keith-f-26th-international-harvest-of-hope-2012-speaker-talk-date-unknown.mp3 Duration: 01:05:14
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And he asked me to say something nice about him. He's older than me. Mary told me a story, told Patty a story once, which I won't repeat from the podium tonight, about Keith. No, I can't remember the whole thing, but outside of that, it was a lot of fun. Keith was one of those people I met in 1986. We got sober in November of 1985, and in February of 1986, we ran into Keith and Mary at a place called Kingston, Ontario.
I couldn't even spell AA then. I was really messed up. I met these people, and who would have thought that here we are, 26 and a half years later, and we have the friendship that's developed the way it has. I don't have any brothers, but if I were ever to want to have one, I can tell you right now that I'd be very proud to have Keith as one of my brothers. We consider each other our international brothers as such, and I love him from the bottom of my heart.
I've heard him many times, and I'm going to shut up because what he has to say is just, to me, I think he's the best, but then I'm a little bit prejudiced. So at this time, I'm going to shut up, and I'm going to turn this over to my friend, and soon to be yours if you don't know him already, my friend and yours, Keith. Older than dirt, that's what I am. I'll be 76 tomorrow. My name is Keith, and I'm an alcoholic.
My last name is fun. Mary told you that today. It's kind of funny. First of all, I, too, I'm like Ron. I want to thank the committee. I want to thank those, especially Ken, for inviting Mary and I down here, and all the people that took part in this thing today. I know what kind of goes on in something like this. It takes a lot of work, dedicated people, you know, and people to show up, and so this is the reason why we have these things in AA, and I love them.
I go to quite a few of them, and yeah, it's a big deal. I was listening to Mary today, and you always seem to know somebody else, the progress they've made in their life. It's very hard sometimes not to notice the progress in your own life. I, just to give you kind of a little bit of a rundown, I belong to a group, and it's called Kingston Young Peoples, and mind-wise, sometimes at our business meetings, I'm probably the youngest one there, and actually, we had our business meeting last night, and my group meets Friday nights, and we started this group in 1967, and I'll just give you a little bit, just a couple of minutes of rundown of how we started our group.
I don't know how you guys all started yours, but Dennis, my buddy, who started that group with me, he came down from a place called Petawawa, which was an Army base, which is an Army base, and Dennis came to Kingston, and there weren't any young people back when I came in, back in the early 60s, and anyway, Dennis came in, and him and I, we talked about, we'd seen some young people come in, and they automatically took off again, and probably the young, you know, there were guys that were 45, 50, 55 years old back in those days in the AA, so Dennis and I, we decided to start a young people's group, and we got in touch with Montreal, and we got in touch with New York City, and we got in touch with Toronto to give us a hand on how to start this, so it was at the Army base in Kingston, that's where we had our first meeting in the library, and I'll tell you exactly how our meetings went for six months, there was just Dennis and I, so, Dennis would chair that week, he would give me the steps, and I would read them, Dennis would read the traditions, Dennis would introduce me, I would speak,
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Dennis would thank me, we closed the meeting off with the Lord's Prayer, and we would go either to his place or my place to play cribbage all night, until the sun would come up in the morning, and normally we would get a 12-step call at the same time, back in those days, there was lots of 12-step calls, and I miss them today, and you know, I'm not knocking anything else, but I think it kept a lot of people sober, a lot of people that were sober went on those 12-step calls, and anyway, the following week, I would chair, I would get Dennis to read the steps, I would read the traditions, introduce Dennis, Dennis would speak, we would close the meeting off and go to my place and play cribbage all night, six months like that, neither one of us killed each other, as you can see, and finally one night, a bunch of these old-timers came in, and the rest is history, and now we probably are the biggest group in the city of Kingston, we normally have 100, well over 100 people every Friday night, and we have people coming in and staying sober, and I'm talking about 16, 17-year-old kids, and they are doing something with their life that is unbelievable.
Mary sponsored a girl, and she came off Skid Row, she went to Queen's University in Kingston, took a master's degree, became a lawyer, and she is one today in Ottawa. So you see, you know, my dry date, I will tell you what that is also, because I think sometimes it's very important, I sobered up on the 12th of February 1972, and I just celebrated 40 years last February. And I'll tell you what 40 years will do in a little bit.
I'll tell you that. My life, it tells me in a big book, Alcohol Synonymous, which is the book that is a part of my life, and I hope it is yours too, and it tells me to tell you in a general way what happened. I'm not up here to do a fourth and fifth step, by the way, but it tells me in a general way what I'm supposed to do, and I will go by that. Those are the directions that they've given me, how to stay sober one day at a time.
I came from a family with a couple of brothers and a sister, and my dad, it seemed to me, him and I never seemed to click. Never. From the day I was born, it seemed to me that way. I was running away from home at the age of 6 and 7 years old. And I know that Mary worked in detox for about 15 years. And we all hear people up here sometimes talking about the abuse that they go through sometimes, you know, in growing up.
Well, this doesn't always happen to women. It also happens to men. And from the age of 6 years old, 7 years old, I blamed me for things that someone else was doing to me for many years until after, way after I came into AA. Way after I came into AA. And so I would tell my mom about this, and I'm not here to take their inventory, but I would tell my mom about this, and the following week my dad would send me with the same guy.
They did not believe what was happening. And at the age of 6 and 7, I shut down. And I did not trust anybody. And I went that way until I was 14 and my old man threw me out of the house. And back in those days, that didn't happen very often. And I ran around on the streets of my hometown with a bunch of older guys. And at the age of 13, I started drinking. And by the age of 14, I was already drinking across Niagara Falls, New York, because I lived about 18 miles away from the falls in a place called St. Catharines, Ontario.
And so I was already drinking at that time.
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And so at the age of 14, like I said, my dad threw me out. And I started hanging around with an older crew back in those days. And they were taking me across the border, and I would sit in the back of a bar, and the place was dark and dingy, and they would serve me. Most of the time, I was coming back to Canada, and I'd be hammered and passed out in the back seat of a car. At the age of 15, I got myself into trouble for the first real bad time with the police.
I pulled an armed robbery in my hometown. I was drunk when it happened. And a few days later, I stood up in front of a judge in my hometown, and the guy sentenced me to over two and a half years in state reformatory. It was called Guelph Reformatory. Never learned enough, and I can pretty well finish up my whole talk from there until I came to AA at 28 years old. And by that time, I had spent 11 years inside.
11 productive years that most people wind up doing something about their life. In the meantime, here I was. Between the age of 15 and 28, I spent about 10 months on the street during that time. And each and every time I came out, I would go out and start drinking again and get hammered and do something goofy and wind up back in jail again. I got caught. I had just gotten out of one place, and I wound up in Buffalo, New York.
I had an addiction to finance companies. Somebody said something to me today about beneficial. And I had an addiction against those people because they were the ones I was sticking up. And nobody has too much of a sense of humor when you do that stuff. Anyway, I did one in Buffalo, apparently. I tried to get back to Canada on the Rainbow Bridge, and they grabbed me trying to get back to the Canadian side.
I don't remember this, but I woke up in a place called Tannawanda, New York, the next morning. And I was, of course, there again, back in jail. And I asked the guy what I was in there for, and he told me that I had pulled an armed robbery the day before in Buffalo. He could have told me that I killed somebody. This is easy. Witches happen. Witches happen. Mary, one time, she was a GSR of the Prison for Women in Kingston, the only federal prison for women in Canada.
There was a girl in there, 17 years old, that had picked a guy up at nighttime. The door of the motel room was wide open in the morning, and the guy was laying in bed with a knife stuck at his back. And at 17 years old, she was doing life. Anyway, I went to court a few days later, and I got from 1 to 14 in Attica. I did a year and a day. I was on a deportation wing with some other guys, a couple of guys.
They were mob guys, and they were sending them back to Italy. And in the daytime, they would put us in main population. And C was a big place, let me tell you, back in those days. I imagine it still is today. And I come out of that place. They took me in handcuffs into the city of Buffalo in front of the Canadian Consul. And I'll tell you, the book talks all about insanity. And the guy, I went up in front of this guy, and this is what he said to me.
He says, Keith, I'm telling you right now, do not come back to the United States. You do, and we will give you that 13 years that you have sitting over your head. And I promised this guy that I would not come back. I said, no, no, I will not be back. Three weeks later, three weeks later, I'm sitting in the King Eddie Hotel in Niagara Falls, Canada, with a couple of other guys, and of course, half in the bag.
And the guy said, maybe we should go to the John's Club out in Niagara Falls, New York. And I was the first guy in the car. And if I had have gotten picked up, this is where I would have been, back in jail. But they might just as well have put me back in, because it was very shortly after that I was back in again anyway. I'd gotten married through one of these so-called stays on the outside. through one of these so-called stays on the outside. That's what I called it. And she
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was a real, real good lady, let me tell you. You know, a lot of us guys have really been blessed by good women, one way or another, you know, whether they stuck with us or not. And as it turned out, if I had done, if she had done to me half of the stuff that I wound up doing to her, I'd have left her a long time before. But she hung in there with me, you know, all the way along. You know, I'd get pinched and go to jail for a few, a couple, two or three weeks. We were married for seven years, and one of the hardest things I had when I came to AA, and I finally came to that part where, you know, we make amends, was the fact that I had been married to that lady for seven years and I never once ever told her that I loved her. And that's pretty sad, you know, when you stop to think about it.
And I cared, I cared, I cared about you, you know, but I couldn't, I just couldn't do that. The feeling I always had was that if I told you how I felt, you'd have something to get back at. And I wasn't going to allow that to happen. So I shut down, once again, I shut down. I got picked up again, and this time I was coming out of Welland, Ontario. I had just finished doing a job in Welland, and I got picked up in a place called Turner's Corners, number eight highway. A few days later, I stood in that courtroom, and I was acquitted. I had three people left in my life. I don't know about you guys, but I had three people left in my life. My mother-in-law, my mom and dad, by the way, and my two brothers and my sister. They had moved to the United States. They moved to New Jersey, because we had family there. And my old man always said that the only reason why they did that was because of me. It seemed my name was in the paper all the time. And they moved.
They moved to the States. And so here I am, standing in that courtroom, and there's my mother-in-law, a friend of the family, and my ex-wife. Well, not done yet, but. And this judge, he called her up to those two little doors in that courtroom. And this is what he said to her. He said, Mrs. Funn, if I were you, I would get as far away from that guy as I possibly can. He's never been any good. He never will be any good, and he isn't any good now. And he turned around, and he looked at me, and he said, you know, you're not even 22 years old yet. And if I could, he said, I'd sentence you to life, and you'd never get out again. But he said, I can't do that. He said, so what I'm going to do, he said, I'm going to take you off the street for the next five years, and I'll know where you are.
I will know where you are. And it's kind of funny. I spent time all day today with a buddy of mine that I really hadn't seen in about 50 years. And that was Curly. And because of Patty, I got to meet Curly. And Curly and I, we both worked and came to work together. He was a plumber. I was a welder. And we worked together in that place. The first time I've seen him since Kingston Penitentiary, since the early 60s, he was right here today. Here today. We're the only two guys that are still alive from that whole group, the Liberty Group of Joyceville. We're the only two guys still alive. And he was doing a life bet. He'd been sentenced to hang in Canada back in those days. And he got commuted to life. Good friend of mine. And we touched on a lot of stuff today. And that's because we're both in AA.
And we touched on good stuff, not the crap. We touched on a lot of good stuff. Some guys, we talked about guys that stayed sober, that used to come into the institution all the time. And talked about how you could stay out. Stay out. And be productive on the outside. When this judge said that to me about me doing a life bet, he would sooner do that to me than give me the five years. And he sentenced me to Kingston. And a couple of days later,
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I'll tell you on that little trip that I took that afternoon or that morning, they come down and pick me up, probably about 6 o'clock in the morning, a sheriff and a deputy. And I walked into the office. And the guy threw my clothes at me to get dressed. And then he walked over to me with a doctor bag, one of those black doctor bags. And the guy sat in front of me. And he took out a set of handcuffs. And that was nothing new. And he took out a set of leg irons, put the leg irons out at me. And he took a dog chain. And he put the dog chain between the leg irons and the handcuffs. And that's how they shuffled me out of that place. We hit the Queen Elizabeth Highway, just like number 90. And we got to a place called Port Hope, the other side of Oshawa, Ontario. And the one guy said to the other, these guys are not talking to me. Them guys and I, we're in two different worlds.
And the one guy said to the other guy, maybe we should have breakfast here this morning. They didn't ask me if I wanted any. They just said, let's have breakfast this morning. And so the only thing that I could think about when they come off the highway, I said to myself, there's no way that these guys are taking me anywhere looking like this. And you got to imagine. It wasn't the hate for society as a whole. You know, it wasn't the hate more than anything for me. It took me a long time to figure out in the AA who put those handcuffs on me. And it was not those guys. I come to find out that it was me.
But they drove down that main drag. And there was a restaurant there. And I happened to glance in the place. And a whole bunch of guys in there. And they were going to work that morning. So they were having breakfast. And the guy drove down the block, maybe half a block, and finally pulled into a parking spot. And the guy got out of the front seat of the car, opened up the back door for the two of us. And when the guy came out of that back seat, he grabbed ahold of that dog chain. And that's how they shuffled me down that street. We got into this restaurant. And there was four guys sitting on the table having breakfast. And I threw the table up in the air. And the only thing that I remember about that is the girl, the waitress, she was hollering like, get that creep out of here. And they drug me out of there, threw me in the back of that cruiser. And we headed for Kingston.
Now I've always felt good about one thing since I've been in AA. And that is that I didn't have breakfast that morning. And those pair of bachelors didn't have breakfast either. And I've always felt good about that. And hopefully if I stay sober another 40 years, I will still feel good about that. So, you know, some things are hard to let go of. Let me tell you. Anyway, we, you know, cut this thing short. They took me to KP, the Kingston Penitentiary, and nothing changed. I ran into some guys that, you know, like going to jail is like AA. You run into people all over the country. The same thing there. You go from one place to the next and you run into these people. And so I knew some guys. And, you know, I worked in the kitchen for a while where the homemade brew was, you know, in the bake shop. And it wasn't like you got drunk every day or every week or whatever, you know. But periodically, every now and then, you got into a homemade brew. And eventually I was in there at one of the oldest penitentiaries in Canada, Kingston Penitentiary. It was built in 1835. So the cells, I'll explain to you what the cells looked like. They were four by eight. You had a little table and a chair. And, of course, you had a sink with cold water only. Cold water only. And you had a toilet. And you had a set of earphones. And the only link you had outside was the earphones inside the institution itself. So very seldom, unless you went to the TV room or something, and you only got a chance to go there every two days. This is when you found out what was going on on the outside. And most of the time
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I didn't even bother doing that because, you know, it's a different world. It's a different world. You don't want to be thinking about the outside and what's going on out there. You don't want to do that. Anyway, my ex-wife and I, we continued waiting back and forth to each other. And after 18 months being in Kingston, I was shipped out to an institution called Joyceville Penitentiary, just outside of Kingston, on Highway 15 on the way to Ottawa.
And I went in there. And the same thing again. I had, and I'll tell you, when I came to AA, I had grade four education. That's all I ever had. And I could have gone to school. I never did anything. You know, I was doing dead time, waiting to get out so I could do something again and go back to prison again. That's about the way my life was going. In 1965, I'll tell you where that led me. 1965, I had about six or seven months left to go. And I got that letter from my ex-wife. And this is what she said to me. She said, you're getting down to short time. She said, and I'm afraid you're coming home. It seemed to me you haven't changed at all. You're still the same kind of guy you always were before. She says, you still haven't done anything about your drinking. She says, and I got a better life waiting for me out here, and you're not any part of that no more. And she was the only link I had to any kind of sanity in my life at all. And I ran around that institution for about three weeks, and if it hadn't been for some guys looking after me, I'd have probably wound up in a mental hospital. I probably, I went pretty well right out of it. And these guys looked after me, and after three weeks, I was sitting in my cell reading the newspaper, and a guy walked in, and his name was Noriam, and he had a big book of Alcoholics Anonymous in his arm. And this is what he said to me. He said, Keith, he said, I don't want to listen to any kind of stuff that's going on in the outside. He said, but how often? He said, have you ever gotten in trouble where you hadn't been drinking? And I'd have been interviewed by wardens, psychiatry, classification people, and I said to Noriam, I said, you know, I said, I can't ever remember having gotten into trouble where I hadn't been drinking.
And he said to me, he said, do you think you're an alcoholic? And I said, no. Twenty-eight. My conception was a guy with a brown paper bag and a raincoat, probably around my age, you know, today. And that's what I thought, what an alcoholic looked like. But he said something to me that kind of made a lot of sense. He said, maybe, he said, if you wrote her and told that wife of yours that you were going to go to AA, she may come back to you.
So I was caught between the rock and the hard place. Come Saturday afternoon, we had two meetings, Saturday and Wednesdays. The meeting started at 1 o'clock, the Liberty Group. Noriam came to pick me up. He slept three cells away from me. Noriam was the secretary of the Liberty Group. Him and I worked in the same shop together. And he walked in, and I'll tell you how I looked at my first meeting. It was in July, probably 150 in the shade. We used to have what they give you in November, what they call Jo-Jo's. And they're three-quarter lint coats. And they're an orange color, that's what they were. And I guess the color was because if you ever decided to go over the fence, they knew where to shoot you. You know.
So here I am, Noriam came to pick me up, three cells away from me. And he walked into the doorway of my cell. And here I am, standing there with this Jo-Jo coat on that I should have been wearing at 40 below zero. My collar turned up and a pair of sunglasses on. Noriam said to me, he said, where are you going? And I said, I'm going to that AA meeting. And he said, why do you look like that? And I said, I don't want any of my friends to see me. Noriam told me I didn't have any friends. He said, you know where the school room is?
He said, where they have the meetings. And I said, I sure do. He said, I'll see you there. He didn't even want to walk with me. And there was about 300 guys sunbathing in the yard. And this idiot had to go through all these guys to go to that meeting. I had to go through all these guys to go to that meeting. And so I get in there and there was two poles in the back of the room and I got behind one
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and there's another guy sitting behind the other one and his eyes were kind of flipping back and forth. So like Jimmy Cagney, I said to the guy, what's happening? And he said, oh man, he said, people come in from the outside, they leave their cigarettes, he says, and we get donuts here and coffee. And he said, the women come in. And I thought that was pretty good, the women coming in. I wasn't too interested in the donuts or the coffee or the cigarettes but, and as luck would have it, thank God, thank God, women didn't come in, there was two guys come in.
And the one guy, his name was Davey T and he was out of Oshawa and another guy by the name of Pappy M. And I had drank with this Pappy M and he had done 28 solid years in jail. And this guy was out for four years and Pappy was the speaker that Saturday afternoon. And I don't really remember too much about what he said. But somewhere through that meeting, he mentioned something that made a lot of sense to me.
And after all these years, it certainly does more than that. And this is what he said, he said, freedom is an inside job. He says, everybody in here one day will eventually get out. But how do you stay out? And for the first time in my life, I started realizing what I had done with the last 28 years of my life. I went up to him after the meeting and I asked him how he had done it, how he had stayed out for four years.
And he said to me, he said, Keith, there's certain things that I do every day. I get up in the morning and I ask for help. And that was long gone. That was for kids and old people. I did not believe in that. And then he said he grabbed a lunch bucket and he went to work and he gave the guy the best eight hours that he could. And he said, then I come home that night, have something to eat, make some phone calls and I go to an AA meeting.
And he said, you know, Keith, he said, I haven't had to come back here for four years. And this thing works. I went with Pappy to the Lemon Davey, to the last door that I could go to. And Pappy put his arm around my neck and he said to me, Keith, he said, I'll pray for you. I'll pray for you. On the 30th of December of that year, I was released. It was the worst day of my life. And I say that because I had to leave my friends behind.
They were the only people that I knew anymore. This was my family. My own family had thrown me out. These guys became my family. And I was scared to death to hit the street. But they threw me out that morning, took me up to the bus terminal and the last thing the guy said to me when he was diving away, he said, fun, he said, we'll see you. And I never said anything back to that guy. And they drove away in a station wagon.
I walked in, my wife at this particular time, I should say my ex-wife at this particular time, she'd already had a baby and it was not mine. And she was already living with somebody. And I went into that bus terminal and it's only been probably in the last couple of years that I've started talking about this. And because I was so afraid, so scared, I walked into that bus terminal and I picked up the phone and I called that hometown of mine and I got my mother-in-law on the phone.
And I asked her if I could come home. And she said no. You cannot come home. There's nothing here for you. Nothing here for you. And I grabbed a cab and I checked into the hotel and went out and got a bottle of whiskey and went to the train station and my ex-wife had sent up all my stuff, all my stuff. I don't know what you came to AA with, but I came to AA with a box about this long and about this high and about that wide.
And I walked up to the guy at the train depot and I told him my name and I handed him the piece of paper because he had sent up a telegram to the institution. I told him who I was and he went out to the back and he come back with that lousy box and I remember signing for it and saying to the guy, where's the rest of my stuff?
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I had more than this when I went to jail at 22. He said to me, he said, Keith, you got nothing. This is it. This is all you got. And I picked that thing up and I walked halfway through the door and for the first time it hit me, what had I done with the last 28 years of my life? I could have dropped dead right then and there and it wouldn't have made a bit of difference to anybody on the face of the earth.
That night we have a picture in AA and it's about the two guys 12-step and somebody. And I have it in my bedroom. That's how much that means to me. What kind of a remember when that is. But I sat on the end of the bed that night and I had an old Coke glass in my hand and I filled this thing up and I drank it down and I walked over to the sink and I threw the rest of the bottle of booze down the drain.
We had people that used to come in to the institution all the time from the outside. And this one particular guy was a pace sergeant at the armed forces base. And on Wednesday night, the last meeting that I went to, he said to me, he said, Keith, he said, give yourself a break and give me a phone call when you get out. And the following day, on the 31st of December, I'm walking up Princeton Street, main drag in Kingston, and it was snowing and it was cold.
I ran into two guys that I had done time with and they had asked me if I would come in to the hotel for a few beers. I hadn't been alone on New Year's Eve in jail in a long, long time. These were the times when they used to keep you out for an extra hour or two hours out of your cell. And you could kind of mingle with each other out in the gymnasium or something, you know. And I said to these two guys, yeah, yeah, I'll meet you there.
And they walked into a store to do something, I don't know. But anyhow, I found myself across the street sitting in a United Cigar store and I got a phone book in my lap and a telephone in my hand and I'm crying like a two-year-old kid. And I have no idea where my life is going, no idea. I know one thing for a fact, that if I go with those two guys into that Ford Hotel, that I might just as well go back up to Kingston Penitentiary and put my name back into the blotter because eventually I'll be back anyway.
And way back in the back of the ground, I hear this woman saying to me, can we help you? This is Alcoholics Anonymous. And I said, yeah, I know a guy on the base and his name is Charlie. And he asked me, you know, if I would call him when I get out of prison. She said to me, she says, Keith, he's on the answering service and I'll get him for you. And Charlie was just getting ready to sit down for supper on New Year's Eve and Charlie picked up the phone and he asked me where I was and I told him.
And he drove in from PMQs, the Armed Forces Base outside of Kingston and he came into town to pick this piece of garbage up. That's what I felt about me. And he had a Wildcat Buick, I'll never forget that. And I sat beside him in the car and he grabbed a hold of my hand and he started to squeeze my wrist and his life and my life were poles apart. And he said to me, he said, Keith, I understand exactly how you feel.
And for the first time in my life, I felt that somebody else really knew. Charlie took me home with him, put an extra plate on the table and I sat down with three kids and a woman and Charlie and I ate a meal with them people. And I sat with him on a sofa after that meal and he was sober five years at that particular time. And Charlie became my sponsor but I asked him that night, I said, do you think it's possible one day that I could have something like you got?
And Charlie told me that I could have anything I wanted, all I had to do was stay sober. And looking back today, Charlie's died, he passed away of cancer. He moved to Kitchener, Ontario, that's where he moved to. And I called Charlie up from that day until the day he died, I called him up every New
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Year's Eve on 7 o'clock at night. In the last few years, as soon as Charlie knew that the phone rang and he picked it up, he started crying and all he ever said to me, and I would say to him, Charlie, you saved my life and I want to thank you. And he would cry and he'd say to me, each and every time he would say to me, just give it away to somebody else. As we would say today, pass it on. And so, I started going to meetings.
Met Mary, like I said, she had two little girls, I had the opportunity to adopt them, they became my kids, they are my kids today, and things went along pretty good. We moved out to Edmonton, Alberta, got a job down there working for Gulf Oil, and I was working on a tank farm down there. And I stopped going, most of the time I stopped going to meetings. And I started hanging around with a bunch of guys from work and I'd go with them into the bar and I'd have a ginger ale and it's like the old saying, you sit in the barbershop long enough and you're going to need a haircut.
One night I'm sitting there and Mary and I had all the goodies by this time, all the goodies, a nice car, nice clothes that became so important, all those niceties, all the stuff that you can't hug, you know, can't hug a fridge, won't hug back, can't do it to those new set of wheels, you know, can't do any of that kind of stuff. And one night I'm sitting in this bar with these guys and one guy said to me, you've been off that stuff for four and a half years, there's no reason why you can't pick up a drink.
I picked up a drink that night and I stayed drunk for the next five months. Mary told me to leave, I could not hang around there. So again I picked up those green garbage bags and I moved into a motel, lost that job for golf oil, of course, and I started hanging around with a bunch of guys that were doing some stuff to track the trailers on the Trans-Canada Highway. And I got picked up and I got ten years in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, penitentiary.
I was locked up for two hours, a policeman came down and got me and he said, that judge that just sentenced you, he wants to see you. At three o'clock that afternoon I stood up in front of this guy and this is what he said to me. He says, Keith, he said, for guys like you, he said, the handwriting is on the wall. Somebody will either shoot you to death or you'll do time for the rest of your life. He says, I'm going to tell you what I'm going to do.
He says, I'm going to give you a break, he says, and I'm going to suspend that ten years. And I walked out of that county court and I drank for three more solid weeks. If I'd have gotten caught during that time, I'd have been doing that ten years. I woke up on the 12th of February in 1972 in a little place called Hudson Hole, British Columbia. Haven't got a clue how I got there, haven't got a clue.
I was sick. I'm not talking about, you know, the sick from drinking. I was, like we've heard around sometimes, I was soul sick. I could feel it, like I knew where my body was going and I knew what was happening. I knew, you know. I was going to meetings periodically and I'd be half drunk and I'd see Mary sitting there and I'd take off before the meeting was over and it was almost like I knew where the light switch was, I just didn't know how to turn it on anymore, you know.
And I did that time after time after time. She'd be sitting there with her sponsor and I'd walk in and, you know. I knew, I knew what my life could be.
[00:45:01]
So I wind up in Hudson Hope in a motel and I decided one more time, one more shot at this thing and I made a phone call and I called Mary up in Edmonton. There was a time, just to go back just a second, Mary had decided to go back down east. She has family in Kingston and that's what she was going to go back to. And she decided to go back and she had all those boxes, those cardboard boxes, and she had them all sitting at the train station in Edmonton.
And her and the kids, they were waiting to take the train out of there. And the next door neighbor told me that she was going back down east and she was at the train depot. I made a beeline for that train station and her and the kids were sitting on those cardboard boxes. And I asked her if she could give me one, one more chance, one more shot at this thing. Didn't mean to say I stayed sober but I promised I would try.
And she decided that, must have felt something for me because she decided that yes, she was going to do this one more shot. And we moved all those boxes back to that apartment. And like I said, I made that phone call from Hudson Hope and I got Mary on the phone. And we always, we always, like we do today, in fact I brought one with us this time, I brought a directory with me for Ohio and all over. And I said to Mary, is there anybody in Hudson Hope that's in AA?
And she got the Canadian directory and sure enough there was one guy in that town. And I phoned that guy up and he 12-stepped me. And as it turned out, there were eight guys in that whole district that were in AA. And for the next seven days, these guys rotated on each other and they stayed with me and they 12-stepped me. And I stayed sober. And I went back to Edmonton and I stayed sober, went to meetings.
Well, the only way that I could take Mary out anywhere is I had to go to an AA meeting. Well, and eventually I was invited to come in the house, sleep on the sofa. So it took me a little while to, you know, to move up, move up. Well, that's all I'm going to tell you. One of the best things that ever happened to me. One of the best things that ever happened to me. Her giving me that one more chance.
We came back to Kingston shortly after that. I sobered up and stayed sober. Like I said, that was on the 12th of February, 1972. We went back to Kingston and got back to my own home group again, back to Young Peoples. And by this time, my friend Dennis went back out drinking. And he was sober around 12 years when he went back out again. And Dennis was out there for 28 years. Yeah. On Mary's 23rd birthday, he showed up at our house.
And he told me that he was drinking. And I said, Dennis, doesn't matter. Come on down, because I love you anyway. And Dennis come over to our place. And as it turned out that night, it was on a Thursday night, and Mary had joined for a while a big book meeting. And he decided to go with us to Mary's birthday. And she asked him to read the steps. And Dennis couldn't finish it. He started crying. And he's been sober ever since.
So that's 13 years he's got now. I talk to him on a regular basis. And he's down on the East Coast, Nova Scotia. And I'm so happy that he's back.
[00:50:03]
We have a granddaughter. I'll tell you exactly what 40 years, what I told you before about what 40 years will get you. My brother-in-law, the guy that's married to Mary's sister, Suzanne, his name is Donnie, hated me with a passion when I first came around. I don't know why. Mary and I, we were living together for a little while. That wasn't exactly what he wanted to see, that his sister-in-law, she was living with an ex-con.
And so Donnie didn't like me. And every now and then he would walk by me and kind of grunt all the time. I'd kind of chuckle and let it go at that. I'm the only guy today in the family that Donnie hugs. It's a long ways. It's a long ways from grunting at a guy. Melissa, my granddaughter. Julie, my daughter, couldn't look after her. So Mary and I, we wound up with her. And we had people in AA tell us that we were crazy to get saddled with another kid.
You know, we weren't exactly young anymore. And blood is blood, so in my belief, it was our responsibility to look after her. And so we did. Mary and I took her on. And we had her for 19 years. Melissa got married. She was probably around 27, 28. She went back to school and she's a lab technician today at the hospital in Kingston. But anyway, she was getting ready to get married to this guy up on Highway 15 on the way to Ottawa.
And this guy's a farmer. And see, Mary said to her, your dad is coming down from the East Coast. And I'm positive that you're probably going to get him to give you away. And she said to Mary, she said, Nanny, she said, I've ever only known one father, and that's Grampy. And he'll be the one to give me away. And that day on a Saturday, it was a beautiful, beautiful day. They had the wedding on the farm.
And her and her bridesmaids were coming down in this wagon with four white horses. And I went down and I got her. And her and I, we walked over. And I was going to give her to Ben. I don't remember too much about that walk. I did a lot of crying. Five miles away was Joyceville Penitentiary, the place that I walked out of. And I felt to myself, the distance between Joyceville and where I was that day of giving her away was a million miles.
Yeah, it was a million miles. I have a brother of mine, also what 40 years will give you. I got a brother of mine that used to call Mary and I up from New Jersey. Had a drinking problem. So he would phone us up, wanted to come to Canada and talk to Mary and I about this thing called AA. That never really happened. He had a wife. He had a kid. Had a 20-year job. Walked into a bar on a Saturday. Got drunk that day.
Shot two people to death that night. And he's doing 67 to life in Trenton State Prison. Doesn't get no visits. Doesn't know where his wife, doesn't know where his kid is. He's been locked up for the last 30 years. He was 10 years younger than me. This is how the phone calls go. And I will tell you about that. The institution will call up and they'll tell me that that phone call comes out of a state penitentiary in New Jersey and will I accept the charges?
And I will tell them that yes, I do. And Mary, my brother, will get on the phone.
[00:55:00]
And this is what will happen. He and I will talk for a little bit about the institution, about his life. And finally he'll say to me, listen, I gotta go because there's some guys behind me that need to use the phone too. He'll say, I gotta know something. And I'll say, what's that, Erie? He'll say, do you care about me? And I'll say, yes, Erie, I care about you. And he'll say to me, listen. And I'll say, what?
And he'll say, do you love me? I'll say, Erie, I love you. If it hadn't have been for this program, there's a good possibility that I'd be one of those places next door to his place. That's what 40 years has given me. I had some fantastic jobs. I worked for Al-Kanloom Company in Canada. They were getting to the stage of starting to lay people off. And finally they called me in the office and they said to me, listen.
You're probably going to be one of those guys. You got no education. All you have is grade four. I said, yeah. And they said, we'll give you a chance to go to school and we'll pay for it. So they brought this guy in and he talked to me for a little bit. And he told me it would take five years to get my grade 12. So I went home and I said to Mary, I said, geez, I'm 43 now. I said, in five years I'll be 48.
She says, yeah, so what? She says, whether you go to school or not, in five years from now you'll be 48 anyway. Never talk to another alcoholic about stuff like that. I went back to school and five years later, sure enough, I got my grade 12. I didn't even know how to work a calculator. My boss would say to some of these guys, why don't you take Keith up to the lunchroom and show him how to work one of those things.
That's how they treated me. They knew when I got hired at that Al-Kanloom Company, the guy said to me, on your application here, you've got a lot of years that don't really make much sense because there's nothing there. And I said, yeah, I know. And then I told them what had happened and they said, you've got the job, but we already knew all about you anyway. Anyway, this has been a great journey, I'll tell you.
This has been a great journey. Just to brag for a minute, just for a second. The year 2005, I got a letter from New York and they asked me to speak at the World Conference in Toronto. When the guy introduced me and I got up off the chair and I walked over to the podium, I haven't got a clue. The only thing I thought about was all those guys that are still sitting in lots of these jails, and not only that, but lots of these gals, the same thing, that have the opportunity, just like I did, to get out of there and stay out of there.
And I had people that came in and they told me that I never, never would ever have to go back. And they never lied to me. You have never, never, never, ever lied to me. You never lied to me. I've had the opportunity to do a lot of traveling. I have yet never, ever walked into a meeting where it hasn't automatically become family. Automatically. I was asked, and I'm going to close with this, I was asked to speak at WAFER, which was the institution where they executed Bunty in Florida.
And a guy by the name of Jack Eckert, who was the institutional chairman for that district at that time, had asked me if I would speak at the anniversary meeting. And he picked me up at the motel. And I drove into the, or he took me into this place. And it was huge. Huge place. And we walked into it. Speechless. And we walked into a gymnasium, and there was probably six or seven hundred guys sitting out in the audience. And probably three-quarters of these guys were black. Three-quarters.
[01:00:03]
And I did my thing that night, just, I don't know what else to do. I have no idea. I asked for a lot of help, because I don't have the capability to do something like this on my own. So during that moment of silence that we have, and I normally like to spend a little bit of extra time on my own before this thing. And so, I asked for a lot of help, so, you know. And I finished up my talk by saying that if nobody today told you that they love you, I want to be the first one. And after the meeting, there were a whole bunch of guys that were hanging around my table and asking me about Canada. And way out of the background, this great big black dude come in right in front of me. He come right up to the table, and he stuck out his hand and he said to me, Keith, he said, did you mean what you said?
And again, like I said, I'm not doing this on my own. So I said to him, what did I say? And he said about loving us. I said, yes, I do. I do. He said, my name is Willie, and I'm doing 99 and change, and I will never see daylight again. My dad is doing time in one of these prisons in Florida, and he said, my mother's a hooker out in the street, and nobody in 23 years has ever told me that they love me. I get a letter every now and then from Willie, and on the bottom of the letter, he always says the same thing. Keith, if nobody today told you that they love you, I want to be the first one. So you see how this thing has gone. It went from guys like you to a character like me. And you allowed me, you allowed me to carry that message into an institution somewhere. And somehow or another, there's one guy in Florida that knows that he's loved by all of us, because I always tell him the same thing. Yes, we love you. So that's my life story. I've been truly blessed. We talk about this all the time, but I couldn't possibly, if I was to die tonight, my life has been rich and full. And I could never, never, never ask for anything more than I would ever want. Never anything ever more. I have been blessed with some of the richest things in my life. My daughter, Julie, as Mary told you this afternoon, she's still out there doing her thing. But each and every day when I talk to her, I tell Julie that I love her. And I do that not only because I believe that, but I always think that it might be the last time that I will ever do that. So, this is what you have given me.
I hope and I pray that I haven't been too long again. I have a habit of doing that sometimes. And that's because, you know, my life, my life is here. My life is here. I hear periodically people talking about the steps all the time when they're speaking. And I say to myself sometimes, they're to be lived. They are to be lived. They are to be lived. Anyway, once again, I want to thank Ken, thank the committee, thank the people that gave me one of those great hot dogs today. I want to thank everybody. I surely want to thank Patty and Ron. Ron, we call him the sheriff. And everybody in Kingston knows the sheriff, him and Patty.
When we come to their house, their home is our home. And that's something, let me tell you. In closing, in closing, I just want to say one thing. That if nobody today told you that they love you, I want to be the first one. Thanks a lot and God bless.