Audio
Transcript
Source: Lyle P – Erie Spring Conference 2011 – Speaker Talk – Date Unknown.mp3 File: lyle-p-erie-spring-conference-2011-speaker-talk-date-unknown.mp3 Duration: 01:08:45
============================================================
Privilege to do anything in Alcoholics Anonymous, like people have said throughout this weekend, and I am humbled to be your chairperson tonight, and be able to introduce our speaker tonight. I talked to him through the dinner here, and you know, it never ceases to amaze me how you can run into another alcoholic and may have never met him at all. It's the first time we've ever met, and how many things we have in common, and how many things that bind us in the program and the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous. You know, the program is the twelve steps and the traditions, the fellowship is what we're doing here tonight. I'm sure you're going to be able to enjoy Lyle P. from Stockton, Georgia.
Hi, folks. My name is Lyle, and I'm an alcoholic. Actually, I'm from Stockbridge, Georgia, not Stockton. That's okay. I was over in England a couple of years ago, and they listed me on the program as being from Stocking Bridge, Georgia. So I wanted to tell them I was just across the state line from Pantyhose, Alabama. I want to thank the committee for having me here, for John and Tom for picking me up at the airport, and for Pat taking me home back there tomorrow. I also want to express a tender apology to Linda. I'm going to have to miss her tomorrow. I typically don't do that, but the flexibility of flight schedules forced me to kind of have to leave here before she's done. I really appreciate being asked to come here and do this. I also want to thank you for that nice basket that was in my room.
Very nice and very appreciated. I did this a couple of years ago, and spent about a minute thanking the committee for this beautiful, large basket, gorgeously wrapped and in my room. The only problem was there wasn't a basket in there. I did it because all the speakers were sitting on the front row, and I could see them going, I didn't get a basket. Did you get a basket? Why did he get a basket? So it was worth it just for the comic relief.
There were 14 names of the committee that I saw on the program, and my thanks go out to each one of them. As a speaker, I think that I have a minimal role in what takes place here, because all I have to do is show up here and do this. I need to, I guess, get into this thing and start telling you that my sobriety date is March 7, 1990. I have a sponsor, I sponsor people, I have a home group, and I love the AA Fellowship, as many of the speakers have already said. I also need to tell you that I'm especially glad to be here, because I have an extremely sad event that's going to take place next Friday, very painful, very sad, and I need to be here in my AA family. Native Americans have a thing called the circle. It means a lot of things, so let me touch on that a little bit. As we come into this world, we start that circle and we move around it, and that circle closes when we cross over into the spirit world. I have a loved one who's going to cross over next Friday. I am grateful that I'm a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, and that even though this is painful and heartbreaking, what AA allows me to do is to cover it all with an umbrella of gratitude, that I have had this experience for 14 years, that I have been sober, I've been able to love and experience love, and I'm grateful for that. So I can't think of a better place for me to be tonight than right here among you folks. I want to get into this story. I have a timer up here. I told Bill, don't pull the plug. One of the things that I did was struck on, as everybody's come up here and talked, is I thought, you guys have a built-in sobriety field test for anybody that comes to the podium. Anybody that can come up here and say, the eerie aerial 36th, you know, I'm sure they'd pull the plug on me if I said, I'm glad to be the aerial AA. Anybody that can come up here and say the eerie area has got to be sober. I'm going to do what I can to get through this
[00:05:04]
story and the time allotted. I'm not going to do a big drunk-a-log. I just simply don't have time. I think it's important for identification purposes. But I just really can't get into it a whole lot. One of the speakers earlier said that, and I thought that's good that he said it, because I'm going to follow him on that. I drank pretty much like everybody else did. I drank too much for too long. I had blackouts. I lost cars. I woke up in places I didn't know where I was at with and didn't know how I'd gotten there or how I was going to get back and got into some trouble and some fights in bars and some other stuff.
It's all the things that happen to other people that happen to me. I had two DWIs. They were separated by about six years. I was absolutely convinced it was just coincidence and it could have happened to anybody. I've got a good Indian buddy that talks about DWIs. He said he was in court for his sixth DWI before he learned that that did not stand for drinking with Indians. See, one of the things I love about Alcoholics Anonymous is I can come up here and I can get very naked in front of you emotionally, and I can get choked up, and yet we can laugh. It's a whole, healthy, healing laughter. And I think that's the greatest gift that we ever run. I don't know if anybody shows up to their first AA meeting just doing much laughing. I've never seen it. I certainly wasn't. I'm supposed to talk in a general way about what we were like, what happened, and what we're like now. I used to say what it was like.
I didn't think it was a big deal, really. It was just something that came out of my mouth. Then I was accosted a few years ago by some old-timer in southwest Georgia, and he said, you're misquoting the big book. And he said, I was listening to your CDs with some newcomers here, and you're saying what it was like instead of what we were like. And I tried to put on my best AA face, and I sent him back another email and said, well, I'm very sorry. And apparently didn't have the ring of sincerity to it, and he followed it up with some more stuff. Well, you know, it's really important. If an old-timer, if you were down here and you said that, and we were sitting in the front row, we'd probably just get up and leave because thinking if you're going to misquote to begin with, the message can't be that good. So now he's kind of perked my competitive spirit at this point. And I said, well, if that happened, I said, I don't think I would burst into tears at the podium, nor would I rush out to get a drink. I said, as long as we're pursuing this a little bit, I said, let me point out to you that when we read How It Works, it does not say, rarely have we seen a person fail who's thoroughly memorized this book. He and I later became pretty good friends. I was down there at a conference. I can tell you that stopped the emails. But he also made his point. I always say we anymore, so he made his point. I'm going to mix the order up a little bit. I'm going to start with what happened because it was a national, international attention getter. I had my last drinks in a place in Fargo, North Dakota called the Speakeasy Restaurant Lounge. Didn't know that at the time I went in there that those were going to be my last drinks, at least up to this point. The following morning, an incident occurred that reached the public's attention and swept all over the United States for a long time and the world. There were three airline pilots who were arrested for flying drunk that left from Fargo, North Dakota and landed at the Twin Cities, Minneapolis, St. Paul International Airport. I was the captain of that crew. That's happened a number of times since then. I've noticed that they don't get quite the publicity that I got since I was the first one. And I thought I was never going to leave the news. I couldn't stand to see it. I got almost physically ill when I saw it. There were times when I thought I don't think Pearl Harbor got this kind of coverage. And I can tell you that the first thing I experienced that day as I walked off the airplane and I saw what was getting ready to happen was shame. I used to try to paint a good picture of what that shame was like. And I quit because the big book says it much better than I'll ever say it. Pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization. And the shame and the disgrace went clear to my bone marrow the first instant that I had this encounter. And it got worse, exponentially worse as the days ahead unfolded. I think one of the reasons I had that problem was because I hadn't lived my life, I didn't think in a way that the trajectory of my life would take me to this point in this place. I didn't think I lived like that. It wasn't my goal, wasn't my purpose. I had been the standard bearer in my family as my kids grew up for things like
[00:10:01]
duty, honor, country. Character, honesty, integrity. Do the right thing. And in the aftermath of this incident, when my alcoholism finally caught up with me, I was on my way to becoming a national disgrace and a national pariah. And it made everything that I had ever said to my children seem very hollow and very meaningless. And I was very aware of that. We were detained for 12 hours that day and it was a surreal experience. I felt at times that I was watching this happen to somebody else. This absolutely could not be happening to me. And yet it was. And I would have those other moments where I would almost just get sick. I got back to a commuter apartment that night and it dawned on me for the first time that day, I was supposed to have been home that evening.
I was supposed to have landed in Atlanta. And I called my house and my wife had waited for four hours for me to come in. And I heard my voice on the answering machine and didn't know how to get a message out. I just said, there's been a disaster. I think I've lost my job and I'll be in on the first flight in the morning. Now, I also want to say something I normally do at the beginning and that is that when I talk about being an airline pilot, most of the time what we did for a living isn't mentioned. Nor should it be. It has nothing to do with recovery. I talk about it because it's a core central part of the story. And if I had been anything else, the fallout, the consequences, federal felony conviction, none of that would have occurred. If I had been a doctor, a lawyer, construction worker, plumber, engineer, none of that stuff would have happened. Nor would the media have been interested in it. So I talk about being an airline pilot in that context only. I believe we have zero status in this fellowship. My feeling is at the highest level of prestige and status we arise to in this fellowship is a thing called sobriety. We have no celebrities and I've seen places where they don't necessarily subscribe to that. But I find it distasteful and I refuse to be part of it and I think that it doesn't make any difference if you were living under a bridge two weeks ago or you own the finest home on the hill here in Erie. We're all the same if we're sober. That's my distinct, absolute belief. And until I get an email saying that we've just broken hall on the AA Hall of Fame, I will continue to think like that. I got home the next morning. I knew it was the last time I'd ever wear a uniform. Northwest Airlines at that time was the only major carrier that did not have a program for alcoholic pilots. The other major carriers had programs that dated back to the mid-70s, but Northwest had refused. And every four to six years I would watch a pilot get in trouble for alcohol. It reached the company's attention and they were summarily fired immediately and they never, ever returned. Ever. And the rest of us knew those names. And we had those names up here on our little personal hall of shame. I knew the names, I knew the places, and I knew the details of the situation. And in the tumbling thoughts that I had, that added to all the shame was that's where my name goes. That was not the legacy I was supposed to leave. Not it at all. That was quite hurtful and painful. I got home. I've never told the story, but what I haven't said is that I exited the airport as quickly as I could. I didn't want anybody to speak to me or say anything. I saw my wife parked over to the right and I felt like I had to climb over the curb to get in the car with her. I was so ashamed. She and I had been married a long time and I could not even look at my wife.
And I said in a very defeated way, honey, I'm so sorry. She got a very soft South Texas voice. She pulled away from the curb and she said, who better than I could possibly understand how you feel right now. And it was a gift that she never pressed me on the issue. I was so sick I just couldn't talk about it. She had every right to say, why were you there? You knew the rules. You knew how Northwest was. You knew what had happened to the other guys. Why did you stay? And she never said a word. Later, I looked back and recognized that and thought what a gift that was. She never asked me. I don't know why she didn't. She brought me home. She went to work. I went inside. It was very still, very quiet. I didn't want to be in my own skin. Shortly after I was in there, I was moving about. I couldn't stay still. I called a doctor who was a Ph.D. family therapist who gets involved in the story here shortly. Could I have my water, please? Thank you.
Thank you. And I didn't know anybody else to call. And I said, there's been an emergency
[00:15:08]
and I need to declare an emergency and I need to come right and see you. He said, I'll clear the calendar and come straight in. So I went in and this could have happened five minutes ago because I can still see everything just like it was that recent. And the good thing about this was I was done. I was completely done at this point. I was through. And so I walked in and I told him what had happened. And he had a shocked, stunned look on his face and he said, God, Lyle. He said, this is just horrible. He said, this is absolutely horrible. It was now Friday, March the 9th. And I was going to hear two statements that day that I could not simply begin to process or fathom or understand. And I now heard the first one. As he started around his desk and he stopped and looked at me, he said, maybe this is what had to happen. I had no idea why he would say that to me. I had no idea why he would say something like that to me. He left and came back. He said, I've got an appointment set up for you tonight at 6 o'clock. Now that struck me, 6 o'clock on a Friday night. He said, this is a very prominent doctor here in Atlanta. He's a psychiatrist.
He's a recovering alcoholic and cocaine addict. He's certified in addiction medicine. I'd never heard of addiction medicine. I didn't know such a thing existed. He said he wants to see you. I mean, even though I was completely shredded, that registered, that time registered. He told me later, he said, based on your appearance, I was afraid you were a suicide and we needed to get you in right away. Barbara and I drove over to this doctor's office clear on the other side of Atlanta following a set of instructions. We went in. Barbara waited outside, went into a room, and that entire meeting with that doctor is like a blackout. I have absolutely no recall or recollection of that meeting. I hadn't had anything to eat or drink for two days. I couldn't get anything down. I simply do not remember the meeting except to know that I was there. I also know that whatever he asked me, I told him the truth as best I knew it at that moment, that I didn't get cute. I didn't try to minimize anything.
I just told him the answer. At some point, whether it was ten minutes or an hour, I have no idea, he looked at me and he said, Loyal, you're an alcoholic. You need to get into treatment tonight. I remember having no reaction, and that was important because I've hated alcoholics my entire life. I saw two parents die from this. I saw it in my native community. I've seen it everywhere, and I had nothing but repulsion and disgust any time an alcoholic was involved, and I had no reaction. I think at some level, in a way that I'll never understand, in the 24 hours since the arrest, I knew that I had lost an entire life because my alcoholism caught up with me, and when I start to drink, I don't quit. I don't know how to quit, and I knew I was an alcoholic. I said to him, I thought you would probably tell me that, and I'm okay with going into treatment, but I said, I just got home tonight. I said, please, let me go home and let Barbara just hold on to me and let my mind uncoil and let me absorb what's happened to me, and I said, and then I'll go into treatment. He said, you need to go into treatment tonight, and I took a breath, and I said, okay, and so we left his place following another set of instructions back across Atlanta to a place I'd never heard of or knew anything about located two and a half miles from the Atlanta International Airport called Anchor Hospital. As I made the final turn, the headlights swept the sign.
It was close by, right on the corner. I hit the brakes, and I stopped with the lights on the sign, and it said Anchor Hospital, Hospital for Alcoholism and Other Chemical Dependencies, and as I sat there and looked at that sign, I felt like somebody kicked me right in the gut. I thought, how could I end up here? My life ends in a treatment center for alcoholics. How did this happen? How did this happen to me? And for just a very few moments, I had a little quick flashback of the trophy moments in my life, the things, achievements, accomplishments, big ones that were done against the odds that I was really proud of that I thought so defined me and made me who I was and gave me the reputation that I'd been so proud of over the many years, and it was almost like somebody with a giant eraser took a swipe across the board, and they were gone. I wasn't even sure if that actually existed at that point, and I remember sitting there completely devoid of any sense of self-worth. I had no value as a human being, none. I started down the hill. At that time,
[00:20:03]
this was a little bit after 8 o'clock, it suddenly occurred to me, this is March 9th. This is my wedding anniversary, my 27th wedding anniversary, first time that day that I'd had a chance to think about that, and so I said to Barbara in a very defeated way, hell of a way to spend an anniversary, huh? I heard the second comment that I could not process or fathom. Very softly, she said it might be the best one we ever had, and I thought who could think that right now? Who could form that thought at this moment? And I didn't respond. We started down the hill, and I want to stop here because we need to lighten this up a little bit. A couple of years ago, March 9th rolled around. One of my sponsees showed up unexpectedly at the house. He said, I've heard the story I know about March 9th, it's your anniversary. So I said, well, come on in, let's have some coffee. Barbara was in there. She's a beautiful woman, beautiful. She made some coffee, and we sat down, and he was all bubbly, and he said, well, what's the secret to having stayed married so long?
I didn't get a chance to say anything. Barbara said, it's due mostly to the fact that I can never stand to admit I made a mistake. She knows enough about this program to know it's supposed to be ego deflating, and that's her job, and she does it well. I'm going to stop and go back and try to catch up, come back. I'll tell you that I was born in Wichita, Kansas, September of 1938, so I'm 72 and a half. I don't really feel that old. It's a big number. I got here too fast. I feel like I'm about half that age, really, and most of my friends have got knee replacements and hip replacements and back surgeries and other parts that are medicated or modified. I always like to stand up and say, I've got all my parts, and they all work. If Barbara was here, she would say, yeah, well, most of the time. The other thing is, I tell you my age because I don't know. I know I'm not the only one that sits out there and tries to figure out how old the speaker is. I usually get it done before their talk is over, but the ones that are the most devious are the women AA speakers. I don't know if they go to school for this or it's just natural, but very seldom will I hear one of them actually state her age. They throw these little cookie crumb hints out, like, I got out of college, and I'm thinking that's age 22, about two years before the Kennedy assassination. I'm going, when the hell was that? 63? I had my first job when I was 27, the year after Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. 68 or 69? I'm doing the up and down and the back and forth, and I'm listening for the clues. By the time she's done, I go, well, she's either 43 or 68, I'm not sure. So I just get it all out of the way. I grew up in a very blue-collar community on the southeast edge of Wichita.
It's a World War II housing project called Plainview. It was a temporary housing quarter, still there today. It was an economically depressed area, and it's where the people that didn't have much lived. But I was a happy kid there. It was before the days of drugs, happy days in the 50s for me, and no drive-by shootings, no gangs, and a very diverse community. Blacks, whites, Hispanics, small Native American segment. I'm part of the Native American segment. I'm an ethnic mix of several things, the two that do the damage when I'm drinking are the Irish and Comanche parts. I never seem to be able to leave them in the room.
They follow me to the bar every time. Actually, I thought it was a good combination. My Comanche name is Yat-sat-da-na-pa, which means Flying Man. It was a good combination, I thought. I loved the Irish music. I had all the albums and loved the freedom songs and drinking songs and rebel songs. I knew where those places were around the country when I traveled, whether I was in Washington or Chicago or Boston or wherever it was. Boy, I would make a beeline, change clothes and head for those places. I'd literally be the last one out the door when the live Irish band ceased singing. I loved that stuff. There were other times when that wasn't available and or maybe the other side kicked in. I would get there and think, you know, it would be a good night to have a couple of drinks and just go out and kill some white people. I want to make a comment that
[00:25:12]
I wasn't going to make, but in the interest of rigorous honesty, I'm going to make it. I very seldom ever get out of the experience, strength and hope thing, but I feel really compelled to say something about this. I think we need to be careful from the podium how we choose our words and the phrases and expressions we use. Not long ago, I was at my home group and there's a gent there who is very gay, very open about it, very obvious. He's a wonderful guy named Ted. I like Ted a lot. We had an outside speaker in there, didn't know about Ted, but he's describing an incident and he says, so I said to the guy, what do you think I am, some faggot? And my heart hurt for Ted, as did many of us in that group. It wasn't said with malice aforethought, but it hurt.
I'm Native American and I am not offended easily, but I heard an expression last night, they were an Indian giver, and I react to that. It was not said there's not an ounce, I have zero doubt that that was not simply an offhanded remark, that was innocently made, that was not meant to be mean-spirited or racist, but I react to that. Because it infers that Indian people were the ones who always betrayed the treaties, who betrayed the trust, who took and who gave and then took back. 500 years of historical data, in fact, says that we were on the receiving end of that. So I don't know how that got into the English jargon, but I can tell you, as a Native person, I hear it and I feel it. So I think we need to be careful how we choose our words sometimes, because unintendedly we can create some pain. I grew up in this World War II housing project, my parents were both alcoholics, they were very blue-collar workers, and I remember having some good days before the alcoholism killed the family. I remember being happy. I never go to the podium without thanking my parents, both of whom died from this disease, and some horrible things happened, but they weren't drunk all the time. And in the times that they weren't drunk, they gave me many good things, and I owe them and I am indebted to them, and I make that clear. They had an incredible work ethic that they displayed by their own personal example, and I have that.
They taught me right from wrong, until they got to the point where the alcoholism took all that away. And I graduated from high school when I was 17, my parents got their first divorce when I was 14, it really impacted me and hit me hard. And by the time I graduated high school, or within a very short time thereafter, each one of them had been married two more times. I'd had four sets of step-parents and step-siblings, none of whom I remember. I don't remember any of them, they could be in the room tonight, I wouldn't know it. But I didn't like them. I remember having basically two emotions as a kid, I never thought about it until I looked back. I was either angry, or I was really happy. I laughed a lot, but when I got angry, I was really angry. And so I would get in clashes, and I would be asked to go to the other family and live there for a while, and I did. And something would happen over there, and I would traverse back to the other side, maybe the faces had changed, names had changed. And that's kind of the way I made my journey through high school. I graduated, as I said, when I was 17. Most of the people from my part of the country, the city, did not go to college, and I was going to join the service. And I didn't know what exactly. One of my buddies came back from the Marine Corps about that time, and he looked really sharp. And he and I sat in a bar for about three or four hours. He was right back home from boot camp, and I listened. I hung on every word he was telling me about these cruel, sad, sadistic stories of what Marine drill instructors do to their recruits. It was probably an early symptom of flawed thinking, because I was hanging on that and thinking, man, I just can't wait to go do that. And I was 18 at that time, I, within a day or two, found a Marine recruiter, and off I went. My story will be different in some respects. There's a common theme to the folks who come up here that they didn't fit in, and that's true for them. It's absolutely true for the folks who tell you that. It's not true for me. There's also a generally widely held thing that when we had our first drink, we really discovered what we were looking for. That's not true for me either. I didn't like the taste of the first drink, didn't like the taste of the last drink, I did like what it did for me. But it took a while before I actually got into the alcoholism.
Actually got into the alcoholism. You know, this is a progressive disease. We don't all progress at the same rate. Some fast, some slow. Women faster than men for certain reasons.
[00:30:05]
But it took a while for me. And plus that, I was always in a hard-drinking environment. I was in a place where everybody drank hard. I was going to be in a Marine. Later, I was a fighter pilot. Then I was in the airlines. And there's heavy drinking everywhere, so it was hard to pull me away from the crowd. Eventually, I did pull away from the crowd, but not for a long while. I went to boot camp, Marine boot camp. Once I got over the initial shock of it, I knew where I belonged. That was where I wanted to be. Anybody who has been to Marine boot camp knows what I'm talking about. It was extreme. It was intense. The camaraderie was something I had never seen or experienced before, very competitive. I've never had an experience like that before or since. And I loved it. I wanted so much to do well and to complete and to be a Marine. I found where I wanted to be. At the end of the 13 weeks, there were 70 of us, the drill instructor called out three names of the three top people in the platoon. I was the second name call. I was astounded. I'd never done anything like that before in my life. And I got a PFC stripe, one stripe, one stripe, private first class prowse. And I could not take my eyes off of that red-bordered stripe.
I would look at that and go, my God. And comparatively speaking, with my private buddies who were all slick sleeves, I did have some heavy rank. The Marine Corps is very structured that way. We went to Camp Pendleton. And it was raining one night. We had guard duty. All my buddies were outside walking post in the rain. But because of my heavy rank, I'm on the inside acting as corporal of the guard. I remember putting my feet up and looking over in the corner. There's a First Lieutenant's uniform over there, a silver bar on it. And I looked at that and I thought, my God, you know, the rate I'm moving up, General can't be too far away. And this is where I'm going to stay. I will stay here. Four and a half years later, I did well, always did well. That's what I'm supposed to do. Four and a half years later, I came walking in. My commanding officer took me into his office. And he said, Lyle, there's a new program out called Marine Aviation Cadet. And he said, you're the only guy in the unit who has entry scores high enough to test for that. I don't know how those scores got there.
I knew I had them. And I'd always wanted to fly. But I'd never considered that realistically because the people I knew who were pilots who got to fly didn't come from Plainview. They didn't come from my part of the city. Nor did they come out of an alcoholic home or a native community. They were the people who lived in Eastboro, the ritzy part of Wichita, or the other parts. They were the people who had college educations and families who were whole and healthy and had some status and prestige. And he's telling me that I have an opportunity to go test. And so I opted for that. And I went over, and it was an all-day test. And I came back. I passed. He said, I also have to tell you, though, that roughly half the people who go into this very intense 18-month program will wash out. They will not make it. And that you're one of a very, very, very few coming in from the enlisted side. And all of the rest, 98, 99 percent of the people coming into this program will do so from the civilian side. They must all have a minimum of two years college education.
And most of them will have more than that. And so I could do the thinking. I knew that if half didn't make it, I was on the high probability and statistically of being one of those half that didn't make it because I was starting off way behind the curve educationally. But I wanted to fly. And I said, okay, I want to do it. And I went home to Wichita. And they were having a powwow. And I went out and danced. I was a dancer. I grew up in the songs and the traditions and was always a dancer. And I went out and danced. I led what they call a special around the arena. Friends came out in the arena, tailed in, shook my hand, and tailed in behind the procession to say goodbye to me because I was leaving the next day for Pensacola. All the way to Pensacola, I couldn't get that dance off my mind. It was a routine thing we do, an honoring thing that we do. But I thought, I'm the only one in this community that's having this opportunity. I cannot, I absolutely cannot come back as a failure. I can't face these people if I come home because I'm the only one who's got this opportunity to do this. And so for 14 months and four phases of training, I was driven by that idea and that thought. And it served a good purpose. There were four phases to flight training at that time, and in every one of those phases, I ended up as the number two man. I never gathered any cocky confidence, complacency about anything. I never believed that I was as good as my grades seemed to indicate I was. I was watching my friends wash out every week, sometimes every day. And I'll never forget the looks on their
[00:35:03]
faces when they came to say goodbye to me, their seat back over their shoulder. I don't remember any of them ever looking me in the eye. Because their dreams were over, they were gone, I would never see them again and they would not fly. And I thought one of these days they will get me. That will happen to me sooner or later. And so I never lessened my effort. The final six months of flight training, I left Florida and I went to a place called Beeville, Texas for advanced jet flight training. And on the night I got in there, which was a Friday night, mid-August, I hooked up with a bunch of my buddies. We got separated along the way. We all got drunk at the Officer's Club. And they said, let's make a run into town. There's a place in here called Kane's Drive-In, an old-fashioned drive-in. That's where all the good-looking South Texas girls hang out. And there are some good-looking South Texas girls. And I have never been very gutsy or aggressive with the gals, but I had a lot to drink and I said, okay, let's go. So we went in there and they immediately went after a carload of girls. I thought I better stand back and drink a little bit more because I don't know about you, but wondrous things happen to me when I do that. I got several inches taller, a little bit better looking. And I rehearsed about three things that I thought were absolutely deadly because the driver wasn't talking to anybody and I thought I'm going to spring these on her and I wouldn't be surprised if she doesn't take her clothes off sitting there. And I walked up to the car and she looked at me and she was good-looking.
And the minute she looked at me, every thought left my mind. I could not remember what I was going to say. And I'm standing there flat-footed and blank and she's got this look of expectation. And the one thing I remembered was that she had the prettiest brown eyes I'd ever seen. And so that's what I said, except it had been late in the evening and it kind of came out like, I've got brown eyes. And I knew that I wasn't doing well. And she looked at me and recoiled a little bit and I turned around and walked away. And I thought, you know, what a double curse that is. First of all, there have been very few times in my life when I was drunk, so drunk that I knew I couldn't talk. I've had a few, but not many. And I knew that I couldn't talk and that night was one of them. And I thought the other thing that goes with that is by the time you're that drunk, you should be incapable of being embarrassed. And I was embarrassed. And I walked back there and I thought, that's it, I'm not going back anymore. I'm simply just going to stand here and drink. A little while later, she got out to go in the ladies' room and I got a good look at her, a real good look.
And I had an A thought. Now, I didn't know it was an A thought. I wouldn't recognize it for about 29 more years. But I looked at her very slowly as she walked in and I thought, my God almighty, she's got turquoise shorts on, a cute rear end and nice legs. And I thought, man, I want what she has and I'm willing to go to any lengths to get that. And I did. I did. I had a chance encounter with her the next day. I was with a cadet buddy. I was sober. I was scared. But she let me sit down. She gave me her name, let us buy her some coffee and I began to date that girl. And on February 25th, 1963, her 20th birthday, she pinned a set of gold wings over my heart. She pinned my two second lieutenant gold bars on me. Hollywood couldn't have scripted a better day. Life was perfect. I had completed and I had this good looking girl who thought I was okay. We went home to Wichita for three weeks and she stayed with my sister and I stayed with my dad. My dad was doing very poorly at that point. And as our leave was drawing to an end, I called her and I said, I don't want to lose you. I said, let's run down to Newkirk, Oklahoma and get married.
So another buddy and his wife, high school friends, went down with us. They took the rings off, loaned them to Barbara and me, and we stood in front of a Justice for Peace and got married. And that was a little over 48 years ago. She's chosen for whatever reason to stay with me because I guess she couldn't stand to admit she made that mistake. She immediately joined me out in California where I joined one of the finest Marine squadrons ever put together, I think, ever in the Marine Corps. I just came back April the 7th from a three day reunion with my friends. We're the only squadron in the Marine Corps I know that does this every two years. And we are a band of brothers and I love those guys.
There were 28 of the finest pilots I have ever been privileged and honored to fly with. I will never see that again. And I'm so honored to have been one of them in their midst, the ones who are still alive and the ones who could make the reunion. Barbara was, this will come as a surprise, Barbara was immediately pregnant. And we had a little boy and eight days less than a year later we had another little boy. And I used to get tired of people coming up and going, you guys Catholic. Finally I'd say, no, we're
[00:40:02]
just horny Protestants and we don't have any problem with this birth control thing. I left to go to Vietnam, left Barbara with these two little babies, and we went over there to a very primitive combat setting, first time it had ever been used in combat. Living in sand tents, sea rations, and flying off a little airstrip that was half of what we needed. We were all carrier qualified, the carriers were all carrier landings, jet assist takeoffs. We were flying very challenging missions over there. One of the first squadrons into Vietnam and we acquitted ourselves very well over there.
While I was there an opportunity came to apply for a regular commission, which would guarantee me a career in the Marine Corps. I had a reserve commission. And they were very competitive at that time and I thought there is no way, it's simply impossible that the Marine Corps will give a regular commission to an officer with a high school education. And yet I put in for it and I got it. My whole trek has been one in which I was supposed to work, I was supposed to exert the effort, and I was supposed to do well. I wasn't supposed to do what I did in Fargo that night. I wasn't supposed to become an alcoholic, but it happened.
I came back from Vietnam, I had some personal decorations and a great reputation, and I finally decided to get out of the Marine Corps because I was going to be gone from my kids for four to six years. And I promised Barbara we'll never have a family that's not safe and stable and secure. Barbara had not pushed me to get out of the Marine Corps. She was a great Marine wife. And I sat down and very painfully wrote that letter of resignation.
A year later it became effective. And three weeks later I was in class at Northwest Airlines. For nearly 22 years at Northwest I had the same reputation and the same joy of the job and of the people that I'd had in the Marine Corps. I loved the people I flew with, both in the front and the back. I loved what I did. I couldn't wait to go to work. Barbara and I had talked about adopting a child even before we got married. And I said let's either do it or quit talking about it. And we had the two boys, so we decided to adopt a little Indian girl. We spent 14 months in a fierce battle to get this little girl because we now had the two biological kids and it became a challenge. We brought this little girl home.
She was 17 days old and she was the most beautiful girl I have ever seen. She could not walk past me without me saying, Don, come here. And I would pick that little girl up and I'd look in that beautiful little face and I'd say thank you for being my girl. And she'd say thanks for being my dad. I thought we had the perfect everything, the perfect career, the perfect home, the perfect family. My drinking was picking up a lot, but I was escaping consequences until I did the first step work in treatment. The things I was escaping were the physical consequences. I wasn't killing people in car accidents. I wasn't the guy who was having legal problems. I wasn't the guy who was getting divorces. Almost all my buddies were getting divorces. I wasn't the guy who couldn't make a check ride. I was excelling. I wasn't the one in that crowd. If you had to ask me who is the alcoholic, it would not have been me. And yet it was. When Dawn was 17, she ran away from home.
I had passed up being a captain for two years because I wanted to be home with my girl. And I would have been a junior captain, I would have been gone. So it was a sacrifice I made for Dawn. I went to Chicago as she approached graduation to take a special written test to become a captain, thinking it's now my time. She knew Barbara was taking me to the airport that afternoon. She and some of her friends got what they wanted and left Barbara a note that she didn't see until about 11 o'clock that night. Barbara couldn't call me. She was afraid I'd flunk the test. I called home the next day. Instantly I knew something was wrong. Barbara told me Dawn had ran away. I panicked. I panicked. My little girl was gone. And I blurted out where to go, where to look, who to contact. I got on the airplane to Chicago and two hours later I was home in Atlanta. Something happened to me along the way. I don't know when, why, where, or how. I am not aware of it. But when I got off the airplane, I hated her. I hated her with an intensity that I didn't know I possessed.
I hated her more than I hated anyone or anything on the face of this planet. And I announced to Barbara I didn't care if she died in the streets, she would never come back to my home. And not only that, I never wanted her name mentioned ever in my presence. And I informed the rest of the family. Within two days, everything she'd ever touched her own in that home was gone. I'd given it all away. I smashed and broke up little things that I'd cherished and treasured and valued that she'd made for me through the years as a little girl. I broke The years as a little girl that I kept, I broke them, threw them away.
I went to the bank and I ripped up her adoption papers. I went to an attorney and gave him $500 and disowned her.
[00:45:00]
I tried to annul the adoption, I couldn't, and in a way that's only insanely amusing. As I went through this and I looked at this situation, I thought, you know, I don't think Barbara's handling this real well. She probably needs a therapist. So I plucked a name out of the yellow pages. By the luck of the draw, I got a good doctor, PhD family therapist. He saw us two times a month for almost two years and he was excellent, just excellent.
I didn't like talking about my daughter and one time something came up and he was trying to get me to talk and I said to him, I made a statement that just absolutely pained me. Now, I'd never formed this thought consciously ever in my mind that I'm aware of, but as he said something to me about my daughter, I looked at him and I said, I'm going to tell you something, doctor. I said, I would rather hate than hurt and that's what I did and he said, Lyle, you survived a childhood doing that and if you continue, it will destroy you and he was right.
He said, every time you had a shift in your family, what you fought and what you felt was abandonment and betrayal. I had never considered that and the minute he said it, I thought that's exactly what I thought and he said, now comes this daughter that you love more than anything and she does it and he said, it's going to take a lot of hatred and I thought, I didn't say anything, I just thought, that's okay, I'll do the work.
I can do that work because my way of dealing with things and I don't know when it came into play, it was when I was young, is to get angry and I throw a wall up there and through that wall cannot pass pain. You can't get through it, you can't hurt me. By the same token, I can't get past it either. It keeps me inside and it keeps you out and so I will not hurt and Barbara and I had a few arguments over the years and I told her, if I have to, I'll go live in a cave in the hills and I'll be just fine, I'll be alone, I'll be okay.
I do not need you, I do not need the kids. That was an amendment I had to make because it broke her heart every time I said that. I looked back and I thought, how could I treat her that way? How could I possibly say that to my wife? I've never said it since. That's what I did and that's pretty much where we were when this arrest took place. The booze quit working for me. I became a solitary drinker.
Barbara told me she didn't want me drinking at home, I said, that's okay. So I'd get to a hotel, I knew where every liquor store was, I knew how long it took me to change clothes, I knew how long it took me to get there, which ones were open on Saturday, which ones were open on Sunday, which ones closed at eight, which ones closed at nine. I knew it all. And I'd go get a quart of booze, I'd come back, turn the TV on so there'd be some noise in my room, I'd lock the door, I would not answer the door if a crew member knocked, I wouldn't answer the phone if they called.
I sat in there and drank and I'd go through a quart of booze pretty fast. But it quit working. I wanted what I always had chased and I well remember that warm feeling. When I mix, I mix drinks really stiff and I sometimes have to choke to get the first one down but that's okay, it goes down. And I feel that warmth, I can just feel it spread completely throughout me and everything lessens and I don't care anymore and it's okay and it's not as bad as it was.
And that's what I wanted and I never got it. It quit working. And it was just, I might as well have had gasoline in the bottle of booze and poured it right on the fire because here came the resentments, the self-pity, the martyrdom over and over and over and over. And I was exhausted. I was exhausted by the time I got to the arrest point. And that's where we were. I went into treatment, I didn't want anybody to know who I was or what I was.
I was so ashamed. And within a day or two, it's all over the news, now everybody knows. Nobody knew the color of my eyes for the first week because I could not look up, I would not look up. I sat in the groups with my head down, I walked to chow with my head down, I talked to people with my head down. But wonderful things happened to me in there because I was done, I was beat. I didn't know anything about this 12-step stuff, I didn't know about this AA program, but they were devoutly 12-step AA oriented.
And so I made a decision to bet on this only because I had nothing else available. And I invested heavily in it. And in the first week of treatment, I walked into a group therapy room, they closed the door, there were eight or ten of us in there. And I didn't intend to talk, didn't intend not to talk. But for some reason, I began to talk, and that's counter-intuitive for me. And I talked about my daughter, and for the first time in my life, I didn't have that wall of anger, and I cried.
I hadn't cried at my parents' funerals, and cry. And I sobbed, and it hurt, but I took it as I was supposed to for the first time ever in my life. I let the pain hit. And I began to heal that day. It has nothing to do with how tough I am or how tough I'm not.
[00:50:03]
Thank God I've learned how to cry. Thank God I've learned how to feel what I'm supposed to feel as a human being. And I have that full range of feeling back today. I got a hold of Barbara. It's like Lansing, this boil inside of me. I got a hold of Barbara, and I said, get a hold of Don, let's put the family back together again. There were no visitors, no phone calls in this treatment center, but the staff said to me, that's such an impossible breakthrough for you.
We'll give you a day room if you can make that happen. A few days later, Don came up, and I saw him, walked into the day room. My two boys were there. The two doctors had heard about it and said, could we please come watch? And I saw them as I walked through the door, standing to the left against the wall. I looked at my little girl, and I thought, she's so much smaller than I remembered. I don't remember her being that small.
I walked over. I wish I could find the words to tell you what it felt like for me to put my arms around her for the first time in two years and tell her how much I loved her instead of how much I hated her. And in her arms is a five-month-old granddaughter who took my heart as quickly as my daughter had. My daughter got married, and I didn't even know her last name. We healed that relationship. She's 40 today, and she's still my little girl.
She looks like she's about 27, and every time she calls and says, hi, daddy, I just melt my shoes. One of the promises was coming true really in the second week of my treatment, and I didn't know that yet. Barbara was elated. Her family was back together again. A week to the day that I entered treatment, I wouldn't go near the TV sets. There were two of them there, but the page there, you know, there's always some patients whose designated duties come report, and so they told me that I had been terminated by Northwest Airlines.
FAA had performed an emergency revocation of all my flight certificates, and I lost my FAA medical certificate because of my alcoholism. I was all done. I went broke in the first 30 days. I was right back where I was when I began. I had nothing. I deserved it. But the sad, tragic fact of this disease is that we bring our consequences to everyone who loves us, and my family and my kids didn't deserve it, but I brought it to them.
I had amazing experiences there in treatment, life-changing experiences. I worked as hard in treatment to get sober, probably as I did to get my wings, because I thought, I have nothing else to count on, that I've got to have something. Then we began to get word of legal consequences. Now nobody knew about those on the day of the arrest, none of the attorneys even, and now they're coming and telling me legal consequences are in play.
I went through six of these crises where they would take me out of a group and give me the latest bad news. The only time I thought I would ever be locked up was as a POW in Vietnam. I wasn't supposed to go to jail. Every time they take me out, the penalties have doubled, and it's like I can't breathe for two or three days. The air is just sucked out of the room. I can't breathe. It takes me two or three days to settle in, working on this thing called acceptance.
They bring me out, and they do it again and again and again and again, and finally the last time I step out, there was a doctor there, and I thought, oh God, there's never been a doctor before. We went down to his office. He said, you must sit down. I have to tell you something. Federal Grand Jury. Now, so far it had been Minnesota and North Dakota bouncing back and forth, along with some federal marshals who were going to come take me out of the treatment center.
But he said, I have to tell you, the Federal Grand Jury has just indicted you. You're looking at 15 years in federal prison, a $250,000 fine, and an attorney is coming in Sunday and wants $50,000, which I didn't have. I went numb. It was like every nerve in my body just shorted out. He said, I have to ask if you're going to hurt yourself, and I said no. I went back to my room. I don't remember collapsing, but I remember lying on the carpet, and I was crying a second time in treatment.
And I said, God, please help me. I said, I can't do this anymore. I said, I can't do it even one more time. I have nothing left. Please help me. I remember sleeping that night. I was suicidal in there in the first week, and I almost did it. I wasn't just thinking about it. I was an eyelash away from executing it. Some years later, I looked at that, and I thought that had to be the greatest act of love that God could have bestowed on me, because he knew if he left me with anything, a quarter of an ounce of anything to fight and resist with, I would fight to the death with.
That's in my DNA. And he took it all away. And I became grateful later that he had done so, because I wouldn't be sober today had that not occurred. I got out of treatment. Many, many experiences in there that I don't have time to share changed my life. Everything changed my life. I went to Minnesota. I was quickly arraigned in a very heavily public three-week trial. Consistent with my luck throughout, we drew the toughest judge in the entire Minnesota
[00:55:02]
federal district, and never got a break anywhere along the way. Nothing ever broke our way. Not one thing. Not ever. And I'm in a trial, and I'm going back at night, and I'm seeing my picture sketched on the 6 o'clock news. Prosecutors painting me as the most worthless, sordid piece of crap on the face of the planet. It's being picked up by the TV, the late-night comics are having a great time with it.
Jay Leno called me in June of 1996 with an apology. That surprised me. It's another story I don't have time to go into. But I'm suffering from all of this. People are buying it, believing it, seeing it. It's a painful, indescribable experience going through a criminal trial like that. I would look across the courtroom sometimes at Barbara, and our eyes would meet, and she would mouth the words, I love you.
And I would nod, and I'd be okay. I had an advantage over the other two guys because I was the alcoholic. So I went to meetings at night. And at first it was scary because they recognized me, and it would take me a moment to settle in and understand that I'm in a safe place. This is where I need to be, and I never shared in there. I sat and I listened to you, and I left and I went back, and I got through the next day in the trial.
But it was a blessing. I could do that, and they couldn't. I had an experience with an attorney I'd love to tell you about, but I can't in the interest of time. I said, I'll be found guilty, Peter, I know I will be, and it's okay. We went back in, jury went out, came back very quickly, I knew what that meant. I was the captain, so everything came to me first, and they announced the finding of guilty.
He stiffened, and I reached over and patted him, and I said, it's okay, Peter, it's okay. We went back for the sentencing. Sentencing guidelines were in place at the time, 12 months minimum, 18 months maximum. I knew I was going to get 18 months because I was a captain. I'd been in treatment with a federal judge who told me everything, he cornered me every time he could. He said, you need to understand, the sentencing is a charade.
Judges and attorneys around the country have corroborated that and told me that's true. And when they come through the door, the sentence is set. It makes no difference what I say, my attorney says, or what witnesses say. The sentence is set. And I knew that. The other two guys did not know that. A day and a half before sentencing, I went to my attorney's office, come up from Georgia, and he said, I got bad news.
He said, the judge has just notified the other two attorneys and the press he's going to depart upward from the sentencing guidelines, and the prosecutor has not asked for this. I'd watched the judge for three weeks. I knew the judge had strong feelings about this, and I didn't begrudge those to him. He had every right to feel the way he did, because based on what I had done, he had every right to those feelings.
But I knew this was going to be big, and it was going to be serious. And I walked out of there terrified all over again. I said, this is step one. I'm powerless. This is about acceptance. I can't change what's going to happen. The next day, as he began to impose a sentence, I stood to speak. I was so scared I didn't know what I was going to say. My prayer had been, just let me say something from the heart and get it out.
I mean, everything around me is hostile. I talked about being grateful to be sober. I was grateful for what had happened inside my family. I had accepted responsibility for this thing from day one, and I couldn't change what had happened yesterday, much less what had happened a few months before. To everyone's absolute, complete, total dismay, he announced a sentence on me of 16 months, two months less under the guidelines.
A couple of years later, he told my attorney in chambers, he said I was going to sentence him to four years in prison that day. Until he said what he said, and I looked down on him as a human being, I thought about his service in Vietnam, and I changed from the bench. That does not happen. I'm experiencing miracles all along the way, some of which I'm not aware of. I knew something had happened that morning.
The other thing he did, and I'd given all my effects to Barbara, I said, I think for the TV cameras, they'll have us led away in handcuffs. So here are my personal effects. He said, this is a very complex law, only came out in the books a couple of years ago. It's never been used before. It was not designed for pilots. I know there will be complex legal issues and appeals. He said, you three people can stay free until all those appeals are exhausted.
The other two guys said they would do it. I said, no, I will not. I'll go to prison now. Because I learned in here that I deal with life on life's terms. Whistling in the dark wasn't going to do anything for me, and I told my kids, I said, I can't come out the back until I go in the front. I was terrified. But I also learned in the Marine Corps that courage is not the absence of fear. It's the ability to continue in the face of it.
And that was now my job. Later, he told my attorney. Go to Prison While He Had an Appeal Pending, On December 5, 1990, 34 years to the day that
[01:00:09]
I walked into Marine Boot Camp, I walked into the Atlanta Federal Prison System as Inmate 04478-041. Many experiences in there, I never talk about them from the podium. Audiences loved to hear that stuff. Hadn't got anything to do with my recovery. My recovery has everything to do with how I dealt with prison and the people in it. It has virtually everything to do. Inmates used to come up to me from time to time and say, how do you do what you do in here? How come they can't get to you? How can you maintain like this? And it was all because of this program and the steps that I had learned to work and the power of each of those steps as I invoked them at the appropriate time and place. And that was exactly what I did. I served 424 days, one day at a time, shorter when necessary. I came out, I was broke, I was the most notorious pariah in all of commercial aviation. Oh, I meant to tell you, the judge put sanctions on me that was an extra layer of concrete over the top of my coffin on top of what the FAA had done. He made sure that I never, ever, ever flew again. A couple of years later, he lifted those sanctions. Another act of impossibility that no one thought could possibly occur. All I did was take one of the S's out of the word impossible. You know, one time I was talking, I said, I served 424 days in prison.
A guy came up to me afterwards. He said, gee, he said, that ain't nothing. He said, I was out there 18 years. I looked at him and smiled and said, I guess you win. It was a long time for me. I'm not used to being locked up. I came out, I was never to fly again. The judge lifted the sanctions on me in a miracle. It's another worthy story that I don't have time to go into. And the FAA said, if you're going to fly again, you'll start with a private license, literally from the ground up. Not any of my buddies thought that was possible, nor did I for several days. There were many times along the way that I sat, and I sat still, and I just breathed in and breathed out. I talked to my sponsor. I went to the meetings. I stayed in the middle of you guys, and I just breathed in and breathed out. And I thought, okay, I stay sober one day at a time. How about I do the licenses one license at a time? Ten and a half months later, I had four licenses in my pocket, the written portions. It was just nothing but gut hard work, just hard work. But I've never been averse to that. There's a flying part that has to go into that, and it was going to cost $10,000 to $20,000, and we didn't have it. I was working in the treatment center the same one I'd gone through in the counseling department with Alcoholics and Addicts, and I was making $14,000 a year. I loved what I was doing. I loved the place I was working in. I loved the people I was working with, but I couldn't financially afford that. I get a letter and a phone call the same day from a pilot, a friend of mine, but I didn't know he had a flight school. And he said, I've got a flight school. I want you to come up here and live with me and my family and go through the flight school free and get your licenses back. So I went up to Buffalo, Minnesota, checked in with the Minnesota Department of Corrections, because I'm still under 13 conditions of probation. Spent 44 days there, man, and his family. Ranged out 14 days. I never quit studying, because I know how to work. 30 days, I flew 78 hours, and I got four licenses back. I had two in one morning by 11.15. I don't think that's ever been done before. In any story that comes up from the podium, you hear a lot of I and me. It's not about I and me. It's not about me at all. It's about us. It's about what you taught me and how I put it to work. And I get no credit for anything except suiting up and showing up. I take credit for that, but that's all. I came home with those four licenses in my pocket, and I thought, that's great. But who's going to hire me? Nobody. Nobody. And rightfully so. A month later, the licenses physically arrived in the mail, and I got a phone call from the head of the pilot union at Northwest. Their grievance had been automatically filed. I had not sought it and activated it, because I thought they were fair in firing me. They were justified in firing me for what I did. He said, that's the best phone call I've ever made, because he said three hours ago, John Dasburg, who's the president and CEO of Northwest Airlines, made a personal decision to bring you back and reinstate you to full flight status at Northwest. I sat there with tears streaming down my face. I couldn't stop him. I didn't try to stop him. I thought, that is a level of courage that so far transcends the word extraordinary. I don't know how to put it in place. What happened if I relapsed? He sacrificed his career. What happened if I had a flying incident? He's giving up his career. He's gambling on a very high risk thing, and he did it. And I don't know why to this day. I told him one time, if I'd been officer in charge of risk assessment, I'd have never done that. I went back November 1st of 1993, not quite four years after the arrest. I signed a back to work agreement, never to be a captain again. I said, that's okay. I've been a captain. I couldn't believe that I was going to get back part of a retirement.
[01:05:00]
The thing that pained me more than anything was to take my wife to a zero dead end. That hurt me more than anything else along the way. And now I'm being taken back. I was overwhelmingly welcomed back. Everywhere I went, people came up and said, I'm glad you're back. Now, not everybody supported that, obviously. There are people who never want to see us get up, never want us to do that again. But I had these amazing experiences, and all I did was stay sober. And they were trying to, Northwest now had a program, and I'm part of that program.
And as I'm approaching my final year, the miracles just keep coming. I'm trying to be the best pilot, the best employee that ever walked that property, because I want no one ever to have an ounce of regret about bringing me back. And I think I did a good job. And I was speaking at United Airlines. They get a phone call. I said, guess what? John Dasburg changed his mind. He thinks you should be a captain when you come home. I went back and I spent my final year at Northwest in the left seat of a 747, fully trusted. I was with a mega-million-dollar airplane, a crew of 18, flying all over the world with 400 passengers. Because I'm a sober member of Alcoholics Anonymous, and I can be trusted.
I was just asked to fly a live eagle back to my Comanche people by a man who made it his dying wish. He did it with me because he trusted me, because I'm sober. These are things that, these are gifts that we get. I retired honorably September of 98, the mandatory then mandatory retirement age of 60, and I felt good about what I had done. Within a couple of days, I get a phone call from my attorney, and he says, Judge Rosenbaum just notified me that in 16 years, he's never, he's never supported a petition for pardon, but he'll support yours. Eight years after the trial. I thought, what are the chances?
I'd never considered that. I put in the paperwork. The judge wrote an emotionally chokingly powerful three-page affidavit that I cannot read without tearing up. I can't. This is what the man says, who tried me, sentenced me, and sent me to prison. Two years later, I came walking in, and there were eight phone messages telling me I just received a presidential pardon. That is a life-changing, life-altering, all-time big deal if you've got a federal felony conviction.
The miracles in this program. Second day in treatment, I sat with my head down, and I listened to them read the promises. I hoped there was something to that, and then I quit listening when they said, no matter how far down the scale. I thought, no, that's, I'm going down too far. And I've had a story here. You haven't heard 70% of it tonight in the time that I've tried to get through this. Let me close with something I heard Father Martin say one time. I got to spend some time with him on several occasions, and I loved it. He took it from some gal who'd sent it to him in a card, so I don't think he would mind. But it speaks to life as I know it. I do not wish you joys without a sorrow, nor endless day without the healing dark, nor brilliant sun without the restful shadow, nor tides that never turn against your bark. I wish you faith and strength and love and wisdom and goods, gold enough to help some needy one. I wish you songs, but also blessed silence and God's sweet peace when every day is done. My name is Lyle, and I'm an alcoholic, and I thank you for my sobriety.
Thank you.