Hi, I’m Mel Barger, an alcoholic. Hello, Mel. Oh, boy. What, what a place to be. 14th meeting. Uh, we went to the first one over in Akron about 14 years ago, and it was held in the Mayflower Hotel. And the, um.. That’s where Bill Wilson was staying in 1935 when he made the f-his historic call that led him to Dr. Bob. Calls, I should say. And, uh, I think I’ve been back there once or twice to that. It’s now an old folks’ home, the Mayflower, so I don’t go there anymore or they might keep me. And, uh, but, um, oh, gosh, um, I like this podium here. I always like a podium that covers me up in case I forgot to zip up. At my age, I sometimes forget to zip down. And, uh, I asked one buddy, somebody one day, “What can I do about that?” And they said, “Well, it depends.” Uh, now, now this is serious business. We gotta quit laughing about this. Uh, well, I went to my first meeting, AA meeting 62 years ago, early next month.

And, uh, I suppose I should have 62 years sobriety, but I have 60 because I, I had to have a 18 months of road testing. And I say today that I have 60 years of alcohol sobriety and 49 years of cigarette sobriety and 10 minutes of emotional sobriety. Something like that. Uh, I went to my first AA meeting in Santa Paula, California, and I remember it was in a church, a Universalist church. And, uh, I’d only been over to Santa Paula. I was living in Ventura, which is about 10 miles away, and I’d only been over there once or twice. But when they took me in, I looked up and down the street because I was so ashamed to be seen going into a church. And that first me- uh, meeting, uh, that was either October 5th or October 7th of 1948, really was an eye-opener for me. Uh, there, there were about 10 or 12 guys, no women at the meeting. And, uh, a guy came in quite drunk, a guy who had been a me- a member of their group. And gosh, the beautiful way these guys handled this fellow.

Now, all the hundreds, thousands of AA meetings I’ve gone to since, I’ve hardly ever seen anybody come in drunk. Sometimes they come in kind of reeking a little bit, you know, but not the way this guy was. He was just kind of carrying on and, and everything, and they just took care of him beautifully, and that was my first impression of AA. And I think, uh, I never knew that someday I would be interested in AA archives or history or anything like that. But going to AA for the first time, uh, in, in Ventura, uh, in Santa Paula, the, the first, uh, the second member I met was the one of the first 2,000 members of AA, moved out there from Akron. And then a few minutes later, I met his son-in-law, who was one of the first 200 members of AA, also from Akron. And these folks took me to meetings for about five weeks, and they would talk about people they knew at Akron. They mentioned Bill Dodson, who was AA number three, and they called him the guinea pig.