Hi. I’m still Mel B, Mel Berger. I’m still an alcoholic. And, uh, I’m really out- almost out of gas. But, uh, I d- they did want me to tell some of my personal story. Today, I talked mostly about the, the PowerPoint there, which I hadn’t seen and– but, uh, I knew most of the things that were up there. Well, I’m, uh, eighty-five years old. I’ve been sober since, uh, April 15th of 1950. And I’ve been- Uh, thank you. Uh, I, I went to my first AA meeting, though, in early October of 1948 out in Ventura Cal- in the Ventura, California area. But I was born in Nebraska at a very early age. And, uh, grew up there during what is called the Great, Great American Depression. And I used to blame most of my troubles on my parents and my family situation when I grew up. Uh, my parents divorced in the middle, mid-thirties, and I seem to have had, uh, been the kind of the bad guy in the family. If anything went wrong, why, I was the one responsible for it, even if I wasn’t there.

At least, that’s what I thought. I didn’t get along well in school. I, um, I m- know now that I had a lot of resentments and self-pity and that kind of thing. I had an older sister who did very well in everything, and I was always compared unfavorably with my older sister, and a younger brother who came along and did everything well, too. He just passed away a couple weeks ago. He was six years younger than I. And, uh, then, uh, my parents divorced, and my dad remarried, and I never really had a very good re-relationship with my stepmother. There was always some- something bad or, or nothing bad, but it was just maybe my resentment over what had happened. Well, I discovered alcohol. Uh, well, my dad always let me have a sip of, um, beer or whiskey or something like that. In fact, his theory was that if you let people drink moderately, they’ll never become drunks. Well, I shot that theory to heck.

And, uh, the first time I remember really getting drunk, I was home in my dad’s house, and he and my stepmother were gone, and I was working on a bicycle. I was maybe thirteen or fourteen years old, and I started drinking some of his white wine, and I got smashed. And I knew right then what alcohol would do for you. And so ever after that, whenever alcohol was around, I usually overdid it. I went fishing with an uncle, drank all his beer and that kind of thing. I dropped out of school in, uh, just before World War II started in, uh, uh, 1941, and I’d been failing in many of my classes. I actually had only about a year’s high school credit. I didn’t get a high school diploma, a real high school diploma till I was forty-one years old, and I finally got a college degree when I was fifty, and– but I found out that a fifty-year-old college graduate is like a thirty-five-year-old virgin. Nobody cares anymore.