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Source: Watt – Vicksburg Final Session Opening Remarks (1962).mp3 File: watt-vicksburg-final-session-opening-remarks-1962.mp3 Duration: 00:07:40
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An announcement or two out of the way, Carl, from down in Houston, Texas, wants me to announce to you the first Southeast Conference, AA Conference, to be held in Houston, Texas, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday as November the 30th and December the 1st and 2nd, the Rice Hotel. Everyone's invited. As Dick, the chairman before me, announced, we will have our fifth Louisiana State Conference. It will be in our beautiful Capitol House Hotel, everything under one roof.
We have a ballroom that will seat some 2,000 people with perfect acoustics, air-conditioned, and a banquet they can set up for some 1,500 people. We solicit all of you AAs and your friends to come and help us to make the fifth annual Louisiana State Convention a success. As any other announcements, now, I know that we all who are selected to be on a program such as this pay our dear respects to the host group, which is Vicksburg.
I think Vicksburg has done a remarkable and outstanding job in bringing this convention to us. Now, I have heard your Speaker before. I have heard him many times before. They give me a spot on this program to introduce him, and I have never quite figured it out because he always gets up and introduces himself right over again. But they want to give me a spot. I don't know. When we have been in the air a while, they give us something to do.
So they let you be chairman. So I am Watt, and I am your chairman for this final session. I am an alcoholic. By God's grace, I am sober today. By your help and the help of Alcoholics Anonymous, I have not had a drink in 16 years, 1 month, and 10 days on a day-to-day basis. For that, I am eternally grateful. I like to put it better than that. Like one old boy over in East Texas said, he said he had been sober ever since he learned how.
And I think that is the way you and I do it, too. We have been sober ever since we know how. I was one of those drunks, and don't you think that I am going to miss this opportunity not to tell my story while I am up here, because I am. And you are here to hear Dr. Tom and not me, but you have to wait to hear him. But you know, I went to a meeting over there in Texas, and there was one of these great big huge auditoriums like this, a whole 2,000 or 3,000 people.
And this fellow walked in this room, and the speaker was speaking, and the chairman was there, and there was just one man listening to him. And a whole 2,000 or 3,000 people, and this man, new man, went in, sat down by this one man that was listening, and said, where is everybody? He said, well, this speaker up here just keeps going on and on, and so monotonous, repeating himself, and people got disgusted and discouraged, and one by one, they got up and walked out.
He said, well, do you like him? Oh, gosh, no. He is boring me to death. He said, why don't you leave? He said, hell, I can't leave. I am the next speaker. So you see, I kind of got you in a trap there, and so I have to tell, you know, one or two jokes. Now, I come in there because there is no place else left for me to go. And I laugh at my beautiful wife, Lucille, I say, when she says she hit bottom, you know, I can just see her reaching down and pulling up the emergency brake on her air-conditioned Cadillac and opening up her next to the last case of scotch.
That was her bottom. And so I get the kid in there about it, and Dr. Earl M. from San Francisco, we were having a little bull session one day, and I was running her down, and boy, he really got me categorized. He said, Lucille, your husband is nothing but a low-bottom snob. So I guess that's me. I'm just a common garden variety, but I sure love being in the A.
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Now, you know, we get doctors on here, and we get mayors, and we get ministers' wives, and we get fellows that wrote books, and I never wrote a book, and I'm not a doctor, and I'm not even a minister's wife. But in the doctor's field, you know, we have psychiatrists that are just working like the devil to help us. And down here at the Mississippi Medical School, they had a bunch of young doctors learning to be psychiatrists.
And at the graduation exercises, at the final talk or whatever you call it, this old professor of psychiatry was telling these little budding psychiatrists at their final talk, and he said, now, all of you are going to go out and hang your shingles up and going to practice this psychiatry. And I want you to remember one thing, you 999,000 people out of every 10,000 is a neurotic. They're not normal.
And I just want you to bear that in mind when you go forth to practice. And one of them raised a hand, he said, any questions, and one of them raised a hand in the back here from Delta, part of Mississippi, and he said, just suppose by accident we just happen to run across a normal person. What do we do? He said, hell, [unclear] him. So we make a lot of fun of psychiatrists, but they have been a big help.
And, of course, Dr. Harry Tiebout has been one of the great men in the history of Alcoholics Anonymous, as we all know. I like to think of that psychiatrist, too, that was teaching that class down in the lower part of Mississippi, and he was telling these young intern psychiatrists, he says, now, you know, if you drop a worm in a glass of water, he swims around in ecstasy. You drop him in that other clear fluid of alcohol, he turns over on his belly and dies.
He said, we all know that. He said, now, even if you have a mule out there working in the hot sun all day long, plowing that cotton, and you bring this mule in and he's all tired and sweaty and hot, and you put a bucket of alcohol there and a bucket of water there, now, which one would that mule drink? And the old boy in the back raised his hand, and he said, well, he would drink the water, of course.
And he said, the professor just beamed, and he says, you know, that's right, and why would he drink the water? He said, because he's a jackass. So I guess I was a jackass for about 22 years until I found AA.