Romeo of AA. We have some men in Toledo that have lunch once a week, and they call themselves Romeos. It stands for Retired Old Men Eating Out. Yeah. Yeah. When the, when the sexual reso- revolution came about, I had run out of ammunition. So this is, uh.. Well, hey, I’m really glad to be here tonight. And, and, uh, I understand that, that I’m supposed to keep my talk about history and what I knew about Bill Wilson and some of the older people in the program. I would like to cover very briefly what happened to me that got me in the, in the fellowship. I, uh, grew up in Nebraska during the Depression and discovered alcohol when I was about 14. And probably by the time I was 17 or 18, I was into it so deeply that probably I was an alcoholic and didn’t even know it. I was taking a drink the next morning before I learned that that was a bad sign. And I spent three and a half years in the Navy during World War II and, uh, got in a little trouble, but none of it ever got on the record.

And, uh, when I was discharged, I had a good conduct medal. But then briefly in 1949, I spent seven months in the Army, and the picture was entirely different. I got kicked out of the Army, and, uh, the town I was discharged in, I even woke up the next morning at three o’clock on the edge of town. I got an undesirable discharge. And, uh, my money was gone, my railroad ticket, my belt, and my tie, and even my undesirable discharge. Somebody in New Brunswick, New Jersey, has an undesirable discharge he didn’t earn. And, uh, and I got that upgraded 16 years later to a, a general discharge, so the record doesn’t show all of these bad things that happened. But I tell about that at every AA meeting. I made some jails, and, uh, I finally wound up in a state hospital in my hometown in Nebraska, northeast Nebraska, Norfolk, Nebraska, and, uh, spent seven weeks there. That was my treatment center, I guess. And they, they didn’t really have many treatment centers of any importance then.

And I think many of these treatment centers are pretty plush, that, that it’s much better to be in a state hospital like I was, which was just almost a prison in a way. But, uh, that was a good thing because it was the turning point for me. I had had some exposure to AA before. In fact, I went to my first meeting in October of 1948 in Santa Paula, California. I was living in Ventura then. And, uh, right away got interested in AA history before I ever got sober, really. But, um, that’s, uh, anyway, that’s kind of, um, is my story of, about kind of what happened to me and qualified me for AA. I just had to learn that even though I was only 24 years old, I was as much of an alcoholic as those old people, 30 and 40 and so on. And somehow I got to be 79. And I tell people that I have 54 years of alcohol sobriety and 44 years of cigarette sobriety and about 10 minutes of emotional sobriety.