31st Anniversary Dinner — Oct 2, 1965

Thank you so very much, Mark, and who says we alcoholics aren’t happy people? Friends, now it’s my privilege to introduce someone to you, and I don’t have any introduction other than to say, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, and a man whose 31st anniversary we’re celebrating tonight, Bill W. Thank you. Gracious, what a wonderful, wonderful meeting. It’s been grim, but it’s also been gay. And the great undercurrent of it all boils to the surface in gratitude beyond expression. For this wondrous and vast miracle of recovery that is now encircling the earth. We have quite a parcel of drunks and friends here, but to help our friends stretch their imaginations, it may be that only one out of 300 of us counting worldwide is present. But I know that those 299 who are not here and their wives and their families are thinking of this anniversary time and offering up their gratitude. It’s wonderful, it’s inexplicable how our friends have given to us. And in the days of the blight and darkness, how they stood by us. Even more, our relatives. And still more, our wives and our husbands. So, before getting on with my speech, I’d like to present my partner, one who stood by when all others dissolved. Who, after AA began, filled her house on Euclid Street in Brooklyn. She was drunk, none of whom recovered, but there was perhaps the first laboratory. One who since has had 7,000 visitors at the house in Bedford Hill. And one who since has helped to spirit this wonderful society. Now sprung up in our midst, growing faster than AA ever did. Well, here’s Lois. Good evening, everybody. Each one of these dinners, these anniversaries, I think is the very best. And this one, I’m sure, couldn’t possibly be any better than this. Just simply wonderful. And I want to thank you all for coming to this wonderful anniversary of Bill’s surprise. And there are many, many other things I’d like to thank you all for. And thank the AAs particularly for this wonderful program that they’ve given to us, the families of AAs. Martin was certainly right. Before our alarm, we wives used to go to meetings and be so restless and nervous. But that isn’t quite so now because we have a program of our own, so many of us have. And after the wonderful miracle of AA in the early days, of course we families of the alcoholics were very, very grateful. A wonderful, wonderful thing has happened that we’ve been hoping for and working for for so long. And we were just on cloud nine all the time. But then by degrees, things began to get a little bit rougher. And we couldn’t understand why with this marvelous AA program that our husbands had, we were mostly all wives then in those early days, why things weren’t perfect all the time at home. Our husbands, the alcoholics, were living this wonderful way of life. They were trying to practice it as well as they could at home. But there seemed to be quite a few ups and downs, mostly downs some of the time. And Bill and I considered this thing and we thought it was, we couldn’t understand why it was. We thought it was very sad and we were puzzled by it. But by degrees, the truth began to sink in, just the way the truth that an alcoholic is an alcoholic begins to finally sink into the alcoholic. Families began to see that perhaps what was wrong with the home situation was that it was all, the living was all one-sided, that the alcoholic was living this wonderful way of life and the wife was the same old stick in the mud that she’d always been. So by degrees, all over the country where there were AA groups, the wives began to get this notion that they too better try to practice the 12 steps of AA. And that really was the beginning of what we now call Al-Aman, the Al-Aman family groups. And since those early days, the groups have been unified and they’re growing all over the country and all over the world. There are groups in 35 foreign countries. We have nearly 3,000 Al-Aman groups all over the world. And it really is a tremendous, tremendous thing because you know for every alcoholic, there are about five people that are affected. So the potential of Al-Aman is about five times greater than AA. And we’ve just made just a tiny little beginning. But we want to thank you, AAs, for showing us the way with the following in your footsteps and trying to catch up a little. Thank you so much. Thank you. Let us continue a little on the theme of gratitude. Nobody invented Alcoholics Anonymous. We think we know that God found it. A couple of us have been given that title, but it’s much overrated. And I’ll tell you why. Before AA began, there were people of great inspiration and wisdom who placed the original candles on the table. It is now spread worldwide, the table at which we partake. The first one of these, strangely enough, was a psychiatrist, Dr. Carl Jung, the famous Swiss, one of the triumvirates who founded this modern art. One day, probably around 1930, he was talking to a chap called Rowland. Rowland had tried all of the drunk cures in this country. He was notable in the world of business. He’d gone completely to pieces. Jung had treated him for a year. And he thought that the hidden springs of his motivation stood revealed, and now, as we say, he’d make it. Leaving Jung, he was back in a matter of weeks in horrible shape. And he said to this doctor, Carl, you are my court of last resort. Is there no place for me to go? So here came the words of a great human being, who in deep humility said, Rowland, I thought you might be one of those fortunate ones. One of the few that my art can very occasionally help. But I’m sorry to say you are none. So said the patient, is there no other recourse? And Jung said, yes, time out of mind. Here and there, alcoholics have recovered through spiritual experiences. Call it a conversion, if you like. And all that I can say to you is that you place yourself in some religious atmosphere and hope that this benign lightning of grace will hit you. But it’s only a case itself. Rowland did that. He came to the so-called Oxford groups of that era. And these were people of many denominations, few drunks. They were urging very simple common denominators of morality and religion. In effect, they were carrying the message to each other, as we have since done, saying, admit that life is unmanageable just on your own resources. Make a survey of your faults, a confession, if you like. Stop this cursed business of living alone. Share these defects with others. Make restitution for harms you have done. So sweeping away what debris of the past you can’t. And then let us acquaint you with the kind of giving that asks no reward in money or prestige. And quite accountably and mysteriously, and I remind you that at depth what goes on among us is a mystery. Rowland found himself sober. He came to America. And in the Oxford groups here, under the tutelage of our great and dear friend, Dr. Sam Shoemaker, Rowland continued his sobriety. He pitched into the movement. Occasionally he helped an alcoholic. And one of these happened to be an old schoolmate of mine, so dearly known to us as Ebby. Ebby had been about to be locked up in a mental institution. They took him out. And he, too, sobered. Meanwhile, one summer evening in 1934, I lay in Towns Hospital up here on Central Park West. And like Rowland and Ebby, I had seemingly reached the end of the road. Life had been good. Yet unaccountably, I was destroying my own. And what the ravages were upon Lois and my friends, only they know. It was the old story. I won’t repeat it. And on this summer’s evening, while I lay upstairs, Lois made her plea to the doctor, as Rowland had made his to Carl Jung. And said she, doctor, what is his goal? Why can’t Bill get well? For years now, he has wanted to get well. He has desperately tried to get well. She was talking to a little man with marvelous blue eyes, as the old-timers can remember. For those eyes in his lifetime looked into the eyes of some 40,000 alcoholics. Ten of them in AA, in his early and middle age. Ever so kind, he said, I have to tell you the truth. Bill was one of those rare people I thought could be educated out of this thing. But Lois, I have to tell you that he has a compulsion that condemns him to drink against his will. Almost an insanity, if you like. And he also has some strange sensitivity to the body, which I will call an allergy. That ensures that unless you confine him somewhere, he may be mad or dead within a year. That was the sentence passed upon me and upon Lois in the summer of 1934. I learned what it was. I had already guessed. It wasn’t news. Somehow, though, the shock of it kept me sober a few months. And then this marvelous chain of circumstance. Having two branches began to come into one. A few months after the hospital, I was, as we say, taken drunk again. I couldn’t say why or just how at once. And Lois found me the next morning, dragging a golf bag, lying in the areaway at 182 Clinton Street, having gashed my head badly on the grate. Shortly after this, the phone rang. Lois was working in that celebrated department store, keeping the house together. I was home, as usual, drinking. At this point, two and three bottles of bathtub gin a day. And the phone rang, and here was the voice of Abby. Clearly enough, he was sober. Abby in New York, sober impossible. And I thought right away, well, let’s get him over. We’ll talk about the good old days. And we’ll have a drink, and that will help recall. And Abby soon stood at that areaway against which I had recently fallen, and I looked out the grating. And I could see at once that he had something more than water wagon surprise. There was something indefinable about it. And he came in, and he sat at the kitchen table, and there was the pitcher of gin with a little orange juice in it, just to call it a cocktail. And I pushed him over a glass and started to pour. Abby said, no thanks. I said, what’s got into you? Well, he said, I’m not drinking today. Yes, but what’s got into you? And even through the haze of the gin, I’ll never forget his face when he said, I’ve got religion. I almost exclaimed, my God. One had to be polite, one frank. And then he recounted this little formula I have just described to you as issuing out a damn shoemaker. None of the principles were exactly new. But the program did call for a prayer to God as you understand it. And there I bought. Anyhow, no evangelist, Abby. He merely told me his story. And how he too, unaccountable, had had that desire to drink banished. The moment he became willing to be honest enough with himself and other people, to try to square things away, to carry a message of hope to others, no gimmicks, and to pray to whatever God he thought there was, even if it was just an experiment. So we did talk about the old times. He was sober. I was getting drunker. And he went away. I found that though I continued to drink in no waking hour, with the memory of that face and the feel of that indefinable something in that personality, I couldn’t duck it. So I thought to myself, my God, I don’t believe I could ever be converted. But this is the last chance. And I’m going up to see that little man with the blue eyes. On the way I bought a bag of beer, which I tried to share with people in the subway. I arrived at towns waving the last bottle, shouting, hey doctor, this time I got something. And the old man who loved me, as he did all drunks, in AA, dear friend, we call him the little man who loved drunks. He looked at me sadly. He said, I’m afraid you have got something. You better go upstairs and get to bed. Well, I’d come early, well before the DTs, this trip. I did just this. In two or three days I was pretty well straightened out. No more liquor, no sedatives. And I kept thinking about Ebby and what had happened to him. And getting on this idea that I had to depend on some higher power. God knows, my life had been a struggle for self-sufficiency, but it hadn’t worked. But a higher power. So I became very depressed. I said I am caught in the jaws of a vice. One is my inability to believe in this thing, this higher power. And the other is that I have tagged myself an alcoholic. The victim of this malignancy, this compulsion, which coupled to my sensitivity means madness or death. So I’m caught between disbelief and this specter. My depression deepened. All of a sudden, in the door stood Ebby. And I thought, gee, he practices what he preaches. Isn’t it nice he came up to see me. And not suspicious like, like a drunk. I said, well, he’s going to evangelize. And oh boy, how I hated evangelism. Well, he had the great Christian virtue of prudence. So, he said I thought I’d look you up. He began to talk about other times and other things. I was waiting for the blow to strike and it never came. And I found myself asking him. See, attraction rather than compulsion was already the formula. Ebby, watch this nice little bunch of cliches hitched to the higher power job you were telling me about. So he repeated them. Get honest with yourself, with somebody else, make restitution. Give without demand. Play to any power you think there is. Simple as that. Ebby said, aye, I can do any and all of this gladly. But please not the godforsaken. So Ebby said, well, that’s how I felt. I’ll be around pretty soon again. And when he left, I crashed into the worst depression that I’d ever known in my life. And some place down in the abyss, for such it was, the last vestige of my prideful obstinacy was rubbed out, at least for the moment. And I cried as a child in the dark. And I said, if there is a god, will he show himself? And then I was given a spiritual experience. Every AA gets it. Some of us very gradually. In my case, it was a thunder storm. It seemed to me that the room lit up. I was filled with a sense of presence. I felt suddenly transported in the mind’s eye to a mountaintop and a great clean wind was blowing. And I perceived at once that it was not of air, it was of spirit. And my first conscious thought in this sublime ecstasy was this. This is the god of the preacher. How long this took, I don’t know. It subsided. I lay on the bed. But I am now in a new world of consciousness. I seem to be a part of life and living. I was at once with the cosmos, if you like. And I revel in this peace and this presence and in this sudden gift of faith. And let me interject here once more. We all get this. Mine was six minutes instead of six days or six months. That’s the only difference. And then I began to be fearful. And I thought, hallucination. Better call dear old Silky. So he came and beside me stood this great human being. The person of this little man with the blue eyes. How many men of science might have said, Bill, I’ll give you a sedative and you’ll feel better in the morning. No. He listened very carefully. And at length he said, Bill, he said, you are not insane. This is not a hallucination. I can’t describe it. But there has been some great psychic event. He said, you read in the book of these occurrences, sometimes within the precinct of religion, sometimes they’re spontaneously, and an enormous re-motivation takes place. You have something like that and whatever it is, you’d better hang on to it. Now you see, that experience has been preceded by the ministration of people absolutely critical to the formation of AA. And as I recite this, I’m merely telling you that it happened to channel through me. One of the Earth’s most fortunate people. Well, this was a great reassurance. And my mind began to race. And I began to ask myself, what was the machinery of this thing? Why was this precipitated? And again, the hand of providence reached into our midst. And again, it was my friend, Abby, who came bringing a book written by still another founder of AA, long since in his grave, even dead. William James, on Varieties of Religious Experience. And the book was an eye-opener, at least to a stockbroker like me, and not even a very good broker. It was kind of hard reading. But as I looked through these great varieties of religious experience, I found that they all had certain likenesses. Nearly every one of these had stemmed from calamity as the foundation on which they rested. That’s right. Calamity. The next thing about them was that they transformed people all out of proportion to any discipline, any association, any faith. They changed motivation. Mysterious. Not always desirable, desirably in some cases, but most of them were. It made human-going concerns where there hadn’t been any before. Still, their common denominator was deflation of those undesirable things in the ego that set us against ourselves, and thus against the world around us, against even God himself. So this was deflation. Okay, what had deflated me? In the first place, it was one drunk talking to the next. He could reach me at depth, exactly what the psychiatrist so often tried to do with us. But with this identification, my friend Debbie could do with me at depth what the psychiatrist tries so hard to do with complicated mechanisms where you don’t get this kind of identification. So I had been deflated by depth. Moreover, science had deflated me, and science had been my God. Because Carl Jung, one of the founders of the psychiatry, had said, no, my heart can’t do it. Silkworth, already having seen thousands of drunks, said, no, my heart can’t do it. You are in the toils, Bill, and there is no escape on your own resource. So that in that early time, one drunk began to pitch it thusly to the other. Deflation at depth. Then a housecleaning, then an appeal to a higher power, and if the deflation was enough, perhaps, chain reaction like this great would be open to alcoholics. One alcoholic talking to another with this simple formula. Such was the dream, but one soon shattered. I thought that because my experience was on the spectacular stuff that I was sort of picked out to fix all the drunks in the world. In fact, my paranoia set in, and I say so. Well, they fixed so slowly that at the end of six months, nobody was fixed. And I was only half fixed, but still sober. All right, the chain of events runs on. I find myself inaccurate. Some of my friends have said, when the hell are you going to get over being a missionary? You’re going broke. So I kind of got with it and scraped an acquaintance in the brokerage shop, and all of a sudden I’m in a proxy fight out of the control of a little machine tool company. And I said, well, after I get rich, I’ll go on with this business. Providence apparently had other plans. I got a great shellac. My newly made associates went home. I had ten bucks in my pocket. For the first time, I was alone. See, we’d been with the group. All of a sudden, I found myself walking up and down in the hotel in Mayflower, Akron. One end a bar room, other end a church directory. For the first time in these months, I began to think about a drink, or maybe going in there and getting a bottle of ginger ale, you know, and scraping an acquaintance. This time I’m restored to sanity. I said, here comes the spectre. And then I realized suddenly how much it had meant to me, though there had been no success whatever, trying to help alcoholics had maintained my sobriety, had helped me grow a little. I had only just been reformed. And I thought I must find another drunk in this town mighty soon. Got on the phone. Called up a preacher. Told him I was looking for a drunk to work on, dear old Walter Thompson Akron. Walter said, well, one drunk at a time. You get two together, what happens? So he gave me a list of people, Oxford group people out there who might know a drunk. Well, they’d see me in church on Sunday and so on. Finally, I came to the end of the list. One name, Henrietta Seibling. I said, good grief, is that Frank Seibling’s wife I once met him on a deal. She wouldn’t want to see me on a Saturday afternoon looking for a drunk to work on. Almost went back downstairs and something said, you’d better call. A lovely southern voice came over the wire. She said, I’m no alcoholic, but I know somebody who is. And I guess I understand I’ve had my troubles too. So I go out here and it’s the gatehouse of Seibling’s estate. Here was Henrietta and the dog. I told her the story. She said, I think I know exactly the man. It’s Dr. Bob Smith. He’s tried in the groups here. He can’t make it. Used to be a well-known surgeon in town. All gone to pieces. Wife almost broken down. Kids a mess. About to be foreclosed. How would that do? I said, that’s fine. She called up dear Ann Smith. Said, Ann, there’s a man here from New York who thinks he can help Bob. Can’t you come over? Ann said, well, not at the minute. Henrietta says, so why not? Well, it’s Mother’s Day and he’s, you know, he’s thoughtful of me. He brought home a potted plant. He’s on the table, but he’s under the table and he can’t get out. We’ll try to make it tomorrow. So, next day, about 5 o’clock, Henrietta has me back out. And here stands Dr. Bob and Ann. Bob didn’t look a damn bit like a founder, I’m telling you. Take it. He said he couldn’t stay only a couple of minutes. Yeah, I said, I know how it is you’re thirsty, huh? Henrietta put us in the library. We talked for hours. And if in the big book you will read his story, again that same identification. He said this was the first man, despite my medical training, that made any sense about this malady of alcoholism. Thus the identification. I went to live with the Smiths, fooling with the proxy fight, but mostly fussing with drunks. Stayed there about three months. And the net of it was that we sobered up just once. A lawyer who came into the Akron City Hospital. Been there four times in six months. Couldn’t even get from the hospital home, so. The first man on the bed. When we told our story, he shook his head and said, well, I’m a man of religion, but this has got me. Well, why don’t you come back? We came back the next day, and during the night, I guess that old deflation of debt had been working. And at some point, if they can do it, I can. And so we had old Bill Dutch. This was the genesis of the first AA group. We didn’t know it then. We were still in the blind period. This was the benign conspiracy of profit. These were gifts. We were not founders. That all went further back than much higher up. As you know, a group started in New York. We came out with the book Alcoholics Anonymous four years later. Hardly 100 members after all this time. But you could feel that you were on the center stage. Besides, we had to work to stay alive ourselves. Evangelism in reverse, if you like. Then it sparked over into Cleveland. The plane dealer ran a series of pieces written by a drunk who unhappily never got well, but he had the picture all right. And these pieces were so powerful, backed up by the plane dealer, that the small group of 20 there in 1939 were besieged with something like 600 drunks and their families. And for the first time, the book having just come out, in which we ventured to state our method and back it up by case history, we had a tool. Lo and behold, this town inside of a year had about 30 AA groups. And the vast miracle was under momentum, culminating in this small sample we have here tonight. Now then, I’ve talked too much about my part in this after all. You know, we had a convention at Toronto in July, an international. People came by plane loads from the greater reaches. Up and down this land, 11,000 of us. And there, we thought that the theme should be responsibility. In other words, progress in spiritual things. Genuine progress meant an increasing ability and willingness to become more responsible. It was something more than just sobriety. It was supposed, if we used it rightly, to make us going human concerns. And up there, we took a great look at the future. None were prophets. But we did feel that the destiny of AA in all the years to come would be actually determined both by individual and collective responsibility to share this message and to grow into the citizenry of the world and bear our part of its responsibilities. So, maybe some of you would think this is Sunday school play, but this is what we said to each other. I have to close that gap. I am responsible. When anyone, anywhere, reaches out for help, I want the hand of AA always to be there. And for that, I am responsible. In conclusion, I would like to tell you a story about the responsibility of two people, and the beauty and the magnitude of this story will soon be over. You know, as people pass off the scene, it’s sometimes easy to forget. I’m ashamed to say I find myself forgetting sometimes. But after that outburst in the plain deal, and we saw that we could go into mass production, Dr. Bob began to take an interest in alcoholics, and in their health and in their care, which I think will probably never again be matched in AA history. Already hospitalizing folks at the city institutions, he one day couldn’t get somebody in, and he went over to St. Thomas, the Catholic hospital there. And he had a trembling victim with him, and the nurse on reception was one so beloved to us as Sister Ignatius. She was dubious, however, about the trustees, maybe even the superior. And she said, Dr. Smith, if you don’t mind, shan’t we say that this man has a bad case of nerves or something, and I will put him in the flower room. Quite significant, wasn’t it, the flower? And so Dr. Bob and this marvelous sister began to minister to us way back in 1904. The atmosphere of that place, absolutely ideal for us. No proselyting, anybody received. The sister asked them to pay what they could, and she finally put so much on the cuff, the trustees did object. But do you know that these people ministered to 5,000 drunks between 1940 and 1950 when Dr. Bob died? That made him the prince of the Twelve Steps, and I guess Sister Ignatius the princess. Moreover, Dr. Bob had medically treated all of these people for nothing. And when Dr. Bob took his leave of us, the last time we saw him was at the Cleveland International in 1950. That had been the sum of the responsibilities which he and Sister had assumed, and so wonderfully discharged. God knows how many of those they sobered up, and they were a good 60%. How many of them are lineal ancestors of many in this room, because the culture implanted in them began to make them so. And the story isn’t quite true. Though Dr. Bob is gone, in 1950, Sister was moved to Cherry Hospital in Cleveland. And our love was with her. And AAs who could do plumbing and wiring or give money, and were not poor, refurbished the whole wing of this hospital and said, Sister, this is the Rosary Hall that you’ve been thinking about. This is the new flower room. So Sister, with wonderful sponsors in the surrounding country, has since looked after 10,000 more. So, dear folks, what is our responsibility to the future going to be? We must invoke God’s blessing and guidance. May he bless you and me and Alcoholics Anonymous forever. Thank you. Thank you, Bill. And in closing, I know I speak for everyone. I know I speak for myself. Our deepest gratitude to you. May you have many blessed 24 hours.