Before the meeting started this morning, my sponsor, who is known in some circles as Oregon’s only stuttering real estate salesman, informed me that speakers speak and leaders lead. And with that in mind, it’s my pleasure to introduce this morning’s speaker and my friend, the good old boy from Anaheim, California, Bob L. Thank you. Thank you very much. Good morning, friends. I am Bob L. and I’m an alcoholic. Hi, Bob. I have a few things I would like to share with you before starting into my pitch. I want to, and how can I muster words that will convey my feelings, the opportunity to be able to come up here and share in your, uh, Summerfest. It’s really, I have no words to explain my deep gratitude, and I would like to take this opportunity to say thanks to the committee for the wonderful job you’ve done in preparing this. Thanks to each and every one of you for the part you played. I’m sure there was an awful lot of things and an awful lot of preparations went into this.

And I’m sure that I can express or try to express the gratitude of my traveling companion that I had the great pleasure to come up with yesterday and, uh, try to convey to you our deep gratitude for being offered the opportunity to come up with you people. We were talking a little while ago, he and I, and, uh, we were discussing the wonderful freedom to move about, and the companionship, and the friendship, and the fellowship, and the quietness of the hearts of the people here in this group. Now, if you have the opportunity to come down to Los Angeles, to our Southern California District Convention this coming fall, I’ll assure you, you will be caught up into one of the worst male streams of life you was ever in. That there will be a strict and rigid schedule to every minute of your life while you’re there. And there will be meetings that you’ll be asked to attend, and you be there, and you will allo- be allotted a certain length of time to do this and do that.

None of those things exist here in this feeling of freedom a- and of fellowship in this beautiful city of Oregon, and I wish to say thank you from the bottom of my heart. Now, in getting into my pitch, I would like to say first, I’m gra- gratefully thankful for my members of my family that came down from up in Washington to see and meet with us, and this is probably the first time they’ve ever been to a conference of this magnitude. And, uh, I’m sure that they really would like to say thank you from their bottom of their heart also. Now, it hasn’t always been that way throughout my life. This daughter that I have sitting here remembers some of the terrible things that I did while drinking and some of the terrible things that I did while not drinking. Now, I, uh, would like to say that all my troubles were, I could blame on alcohol, but I didn’t come up here to lie to you people, and I would be lying if I said that.