Today is February the 16th, 1985, and this interview is, uh.. My name is Sally Darby, and we’re gonna just talk about the beginnings of AA and peer membership in West Palm Beach. Eddie, is it all right with you, uh, would you like to use your last name in this interview? Yes. Okay. How did you yourself get into AA? Well, first of all, I, I say I’m an alcoholic. My name is Eddie Yoke, and a member of the Lakewood Group. Whether I like it or not, I happen to be the oldest member of the Lakewood Group. And when I say that, I don’t mean in years of sobriety or years in age. I have been coming to the Lakewood Group since October 1953, and been there ever since. Now, I know there are men in Lakewood Group who are far more sobriety than I do, and, uh, they are older than I am. Maybe in 10 years, I will attain all three categories. Uh, my drinking, most of it took place up in Northeastern Ohio, byproduct of two alcoholic parents.

You know, I’ve heard many testimonies, many from alcoholics, and, uh, it’s bad enough to have one alcoholic parent. When you have two alcoholic parents, it’s, it’s left me, I’m not sure about my two brothers and sister, but it left me with a traumatic experience in my, uh, background, in my youth, my teenage years. Now, whether that had any bearing on my own alcoholism, I do not know. I, I’m not a psychiatrist nor a psychologist. You know, I still feel I became an alcoholic because I drank too much. Now, the emotional factor may have had some bearing on my own alcoholism and, uh, my emotional makeup. But whatever the case may be, I started drinking at 18, fully realizing that in the back of my mind that somewhere that I felt that perhaps I could become an alcoholic because of the hereditary reason. But then there again, I’ve listened to many AA speakers say that they don’t know whether it was inherited or what, so they could care less.

But I had only primarily 12 years of drinking, which in those 12 years, I compiled, compounded with quite a bit of tragedy, troubles, uh, many a lost, uh, effort to, uh, gain anything in life. And to me, looking back in retrospect, they were wasted years. I’ve since made those up since I’ve been in Alcoholics Anonymous. But at the age of 30, I had to throw in the towel, so to speak. I’d had it. And when they say three aspects of our disease, physical, mental, and spiritual, I had all three. I was bankrupt in all categories, and I was desperate. I didn’t want to become a skid row bum. I had, in my youth, higher ideals set for myself, higher goals. However, alcohol intervened, and all those goals went down the drain. And, uh, I finally figured that at the age of 30, I had to do something. And ironically, I knew about AA since 1948, and I’d seen some of my friends go there.