Thank you very much. This is.. I’m Mel Barger, an alcoholic. Hi, Mel. And, uh, really, I’m terribly nervous tonight. The, uh, the– I’ve been getting a great buildup out here. And I, I think, uh, I think I’ve been oversold a little bit here. But, um, this is really a nice, just a nice group here tonight. I’ve been to three AA meetings since we got here Thursday, and this is just great. This is the my– the day I would have my regular meeting back in Toledo at two o’clock in the afternoon. I l- I belong to the Rab Road group out there. It’s about 10 miles west of town out in the country. And I told them this morning at the meeting, when I’m driving out there for our two o’clock Saturday afternoon meeting, there’s no place in the world I’d rather be than right there. That’s, uh, just something I feel. Well, I’ve, uh.. I guess we start out by saying– giving our sobriety date.

My sobriety date is April 15th, 1950, and I tell people that I have 55 years of alcohol sobriety and 45 years of cigarette sobriety and ten minutes of emotional sobriety. That’s, uh, I got it. Uh, I, I got to be 80 years old somehow. I’m 80 years old. I’m– I t- also say I’m so old that I can remember when a gay bachelor was a guy who chased women. But, uh.. I, I wanna thank you for this podium. I like a podium that covers me up in c- in case I forget to zip up. Uh, at, at my age, I sometimes forget to zip down. I, I asked somebody, “What do you do about that?” And they said, “Well, it depends.” Then, well, you’ve, you’ve met my wife, Laurie, there. And we’ve, we’ve been married 45 years. And I s- also tell people she’s probably the only woman in the country that could put up with me for 45 years, although many of them would like me for one night. Uh.

Well, well anyway, I, I would like to– tonight I would like to, um, tell my personal story and then, uh, just a few things about AA history that I learned. Uh, as, uh, Chad said, I, I did know Bill Wilson. I didn’t have a long friendship with him like that little blurb implied. I did just– I heard him speak for the first time in ’51, and I think the last time I talked with Bill briefly was in ’64. But over the years, I met him a few times in the New York office and also heard him speak several times. And I took some pictures of him in 1958 at Dr. Bob’s gravesite in Akron. And those pictures, uh, the one picture has been used in several books now. And I knew at the time that I took it that that’s what was gonna happen to it. You know, you– certain things you feel in the program. They just, they just work out that way. But I had covered my story in a– I write limericks once in a while, and, uh, I got a little bit of Irish background. I have two Irish great-grandmothers.