Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Ollie Martin, and I’m an alcoholic. Hi, Ollie. He’s just trying to tell you how old I am. See, I know. I know what he’s up to. Yes, I may be two days older than rain. I happen to be in the last half of the ninth inning, but I’m still up at bat. See? First, I want to thank you for, uh, inviting me here. It’s been very pleasant. Everybody’s been very sweet to me, very nice. It’s good to be back here again. I don’t know, I must be getting senile. I couldn’t remember I’d been here before. Until a lovely lady this afternoon took me over to see the, well, the sleeping giant there. And once I saw the sleeping giant, it all come back to me. I remember, I remember the whole thing. I love to talk on Saturday nights, and I’ll tell you why. Because 29 and a half years ago, on Saturday night, I found sobriety. You don’t need to give me the claps. I deserve this. Thanks. Anyway, I’ll put it this way.

I was introduced to sobriety for the simple reason is this: I had heard about AA, something about it, you know. Not too much. I heard them.. Uh, you know, they’ll give you a drink if you need one. I’d heard remarks like that, see. And then, you know, a- another thing that I heard, but I, you know, and, and I’ve heard speakers say it since, but, uh, when I was new in the fellowship, I didn’t run into too much of it about, oh, those people, they speak the language of love. They speak from their hearts. They’re full of love. Yeah. They speak the language of love, sometimes very roughly to you when you’re new. And they certainly speak from their hearts. You know, it went, it went something like this, and it had been going something like this for me, and I suppose it’s, this, this was the language of love and, uh, which could be brutally frank at times.

But it seems to me, the way it came to me, it was like this little boy whose mother had taken him one time into a department store, and, uh, she told him in the very beginning, “Now, son, don’t ask for anything because I cannot afford it.” Well, immediately, he fell madly in love with a little red wagon there, and she told him she couldn’t afford this wagon, and would he please get his self out of it, and he refused to. And, uh, the store manager saw the confusion or commotion going on over there, and he said, “Now, madam, don’t worry. We have a lovely child psychiatrist in the, on the floor, and he knows just exactly what to say to this youngster, and he’ll get him out.” So the psychiatrist came over, and he handed this child some gibberish that psychiatrists are known to handle people, present company excepted. Uh, And, uh, but the child, he sat right there. He, he didn’t move.