Thanks, Gloria. My name is Jack Bowlin, and I’m an alcoholic. Hi, Jack. And through an incredibly intelligent and loving power working in my life through the program of Alcoholics Anonymous, I haven’t had a drink or a sedating or tranquilizing drug since July the tenth, nineteen fifty-three, and that is some kind of a miracle. You know, I was sitting in the back of the room, Gloria, and looking at this group. When I came in AA in the Valley in nineteen fifty-three, and you came back in the program the following year.. Incidentally, when I came in AA, um, I heard about all the people that went there. You know, the ones that had come in and gone back out on the street. And one of the people I’d heard about was this gorgeous, young, twenty-two, twenty, twenty-two, twenty-one-year-old person who came in and really wasn’t an alcoholic at all. But she sort of pretended that she was for a year and was the secretary of a group.

And then gradually went back out on the street, and her name was Gloria Baltus. And I heard about Gloria Baltus when I was beginning to recover my sanity. And about a year later, Gloria came back. In this whole valley, there were not as many sober people in the program as there are in this room tonight. Not nearly that many. So when I come back to my hometown and attend two or three meetings and only see a half a dozen people that I know, you can bet that I marvel, and I rejoice at the fact that so many more of us are coming to see the nature of our problem, and that we’re beginning to do something about it. So I want you to know that I really salute you, those of you who are here tonight. Those of you who– Some of you who are pretty new at all of this, you’ve taken the first giant step back into sanity. And I don’t mean your sanity, ’cause I don’t think anybody in this room ever had any. The Ninth Step says, “Restored us to sanity.” I’ll get to that in a few minutes.

It was not yours and mine that I was being restored to or that you were being restored to. It was just wonderful for me to come back this week and drive around the city. It’s not nearly as large as I thought it was when I lived here, when I was a child, especially. Most of my alcoholism took place in this valley. I was born and bred here to two alcoholics. My mother and my father died from their alcoholism within two months of each other before I was seven years of age. So I was an adult child of two alcoholics. My maternal grandmother took my sister and me to raise, and that precious woman had never had a drink in her life. As a matter of fact, she had run her sons and her brother away from her house for opening a bottle of home brew. But her doctor prescribed a, a little potty for her due to the trauma of my mother’s death. She’d been through a, a lot, as you can imagine, with my mother. She was an instant alcoholic. I mean, like, zap. Pow. And almost overnight, my grandmother..