Akron Founders Day — June 1954

Well, following is I think one of the original recordings I made under adverse conditions and everything. I didn’t know much about what I was doing. It was the 19th anniversary of Founders Day at Akron, Ohio, and this was in the early 50s. I didn’t have to figure it out exactly. You’ll notice that I did make a small, short introduction here. My voice sounded the same then, I guess, as it does now, and the recording is Bill Wilson at Akron, Ohio, and I would guess about 1953 or 54, 54, I believe. The quality’s poor, but it is another one of your old-time collections, Bill. This is a recording of Bill Wilson at Founders Day in Akron, Ohio, on the 19th anniversary of Alcoholics Anonymous. Dear and precious friends, from the four corners of our alien world, I bring the greetings and love of every member of our society. We are gathered here today, as Ethel so well said, in gratitude, in gratitude for our living and loving God, who threw life in upon our dark world and has permitted so many of us to issue from our caves. We are gathered here to commemorate the striking of a spark, a spark that was to light a candle, a candle which at first flickered fitfully and at times nearly went out, but which was then passed from hand to hand until it has reached nearly every distant shore of the world. I suppose an occasion of this sort would best be served by showing some love. Perhaps we would like to think again together about the change of providential events that led to the striking of the spark over in Henrietta Sarbeling’s living room 19 years ago. We then might witness together, and many of you indeed can relive the experience when the spark lit the candle, and we can remember together with gratitude and joy the flying blind period of our pioneering son. And when we have dwelled on this at good length, because this is the thing that concerns us most, we might get on the magic carpet, so to speak, and travel worldwide and see how the candle has gone from hand to hand, and then we might presume to lift the veil that obscures our future and wonder what destiny God may have in store for us. Relative to the events that led up to the striking of the spark, I suppose that humanly speaking, the first man who had anything to do with this society is one who still does not know that he did. He is none other than Carl Jung, the great pioneer of psychiatry at George Switzerland. And there probably in the very early thirties, he had treated the drunk for a year. The man had great hope, earnestly wished to get well, thought he had got well, and then as we so well understood, found himself, in spite of all these resources, drunk again. So he goes back to the doctor and says, how bad is this doctor in my case? And that very great and humble man, this man of the science of the mind, replied, well Jung, I have never seen one single case of alcoholism. So grave is yours that has ever recovered, excepting through a religious conversion experience. These experiences indeed take on many forms, but they all have the same substance. They enable people to do, as by a gift from somewhere, the things that they could not do before. But these events in the world of the alcoholic are only very occasional. The lightning strikes here, it strikes there, we don’t know just why. So our friend Rowan began to search for such an experience, and he found it in the Oxford Roofs, then flourishing in the United States, and even more so in Europe. He had a summer place near Bennington, Vermont. He heard of the dilemma of a friend of mine, to be brought before a judge, to be committed to an asylum. An old school friend that I hadn’t seen in years. He and others of the Oxford group went to my friend, and told him of their own release from drinking. You see here that early, alcoholics were talking to other alcoholics. It so fell out that my old friend never quite made the grade, until very recently by the way, that the essential ideas were beginning to fall into place. And that friend came to New York City, and hearing of my plight, that a good doctor had said I couldn’t live another year, came to see me at 182 Clinton Street, Brooklyn. And across the kitchen table, he presented me what are the essential legacies that we now enjoy in this society. He presented me an opportunity to be sober if I would. He presented me much more. He presented me an opportunity to be whole, and to be a growing human being. He presented me, who had then begun to live on borrowed time, an opportunity to serve for many years, to carry this message to others. So the elements of recovery, unity, and service were all contained in that little conversation across the kitchen table. It is the essence of our inheritance. Well, I won’t go into my own experience, most here know it, how I was released from alcoholism in Town Hospital in December 1934. I became possessed of a desire to work with other alcoholics, worked like the Dickens for six months, nothing happened. People began to say, well, when is this guy going to quit being a missionary? I tried to get into a business deal, finally fall into a rather lame one. It takes me here to Akron, and then the deal falls through, and I’m walking up and down the morning after, a Saturday. My friends are gone, myself, no car fare home. For the first time since my experience in the six months before, I began to be frightened I would get drunk. I looked in the bar down there, and then I walked to the other end of the lobby, and I saw a board on which were the names of churches and preachers. And by now I said, well, I must find another drunk. Not this time to preach to him, not this time to teach him, but because I need his company to keep me sober, which was a marked step in humility for me. I need another drunk by whom I can stay alive myself, for I had found that in working the six months before with a great many alcoholics and deans, that though none of them had dried up, it had a tremendous effect and helpfulness in keeping me sober. So now the temptation was upon me. I must lose my life to find it in working with somebody else. So I call up a well-loved preacher in this town, Dr. Tunk. I asked for him today. I said I’d written him a letter to his former church. I wondered if it would reach him. And the good clergyman who said to me, reach him. All you’ve got to do is write a letter to Waller Tunk’s Ohio and it’ll get him. Anyhow, I announced to the good man over the phone what my need was, that I needed a drunk to work upon. Well, he was a little astounded at that. I imagine at that time drunks separately were bad enough, but if you began to collect them together, you could have trouble. But he caught the idea. He referred me to Norman Shepard, then in the Oxford group, working at the Firestone Company. Norman gave me a list of people. And I can’t understand lists eagerly, but everybody happened to be going somewhere else and they would see me the next day perhaps. They were cordial. They were nice. Some of them really understood, I think. But nobody could see me then and it was then that I needed help. And at the very end of that list stood the name of a person who has to be the link between me and Dr. Baum. Oh, because on that day she cared enough and understood enough, we all of us here are alive. And the name was Henrietta Starver. And I thought it might be some older members of the family. And I couldn’t imagine going out to one of the Starverlings on a Saturday afternoon looking for a drunk to work on. It didn’t seem to square off. I even went back downstairs and took another look at the bar room, another look at the church directory. Something said, my boy, you’d better make that call. So I made it and Henrietta’s delightful southern voice came on the wire and instantly she caught my need and she said, won’t you come right out here? So I landed the gatehouse out there at the Starverling estate and met Henrietta, who so many of you know and love. And she took me in there and we talked a little while. And she said, I know just the one for you. And that would be Dr. Baum. Oh, that fellow has tried so hard. But somehow he can’t seem to do it. I’m sure you could help. She goes immediately to the phone. It’s Mother’s Day. She calls up over there and Ann answers. And Henrietta says, there’s a man from New York who says he’s an alcoholic, whatever that is, and I think he can help Dr. Baum. And Ann said, well, I, perhaps he can, but not just at the moment, Henrietta, because it is Mother’s Day, you know, and Dr. Baum is a sentimental there, but he has just come in with a potted plant for me, which he has placed on a table, but he is so potted that he is under the table, so I don’t think we’ll be over. But said Henrietta brightly, as one who understood and cared enough, but Ann, can’t you come over tomorrow? Well, Ann said, we’ll try and bring him. So Henrietta said, take dinner with me tomorrow, and we’ll see if we can get them over. And I think it was about 5 o’clock in the afternoon of that Sunday that Ann and Dr. Baum walked in. The doctor was very restless. He said he couldn’t stay only about 5 minutes, and as soon as I got him aside, I said, I understand, old boy, you’re pretty thirsty. I don’t want to keep you long, but Henrietta discreetly led us into the library just as you come in the door there. We shut the door and began to talk, and we kept talking until 11 o’clock at night. And there, I think, something passed between us, and the spark was struck. If you look at Dr. Baum’s story in the book Alcoholics Anonymous, you will see that he was not very much impressed with my spiritual qualifications, and if that were so, he was quite right about it. I never made too much headway myself. But he was impressed by the fact that I was an alcoholic who had suffered his agonies, knew every twist and turn of his warped mind, and moreover, even though he was a doctor, I was able to bring him medical knowledge of alcoholism, showing him how it was an obsession, though once a habit, but now an obsession, that condemned him to drink against his will and a physical sensitivity that guaranteed he would go die, die or go mad if the drinking went on. Such was the age-old dilemma of the drunk, time out of mind. And Bob understood, and I suppose that struck him at death. For you see, I had stopped talking then about my spiritual qualifications and my bright light experience and all that kind of business. In fact, old Doc Silkworth says, my friend, you’ve got the cart before the horse. You’ve got to punch it into these drunks if they’re fatally ill, and coming from you, you may strike deep enough to soften them up. And if you read Dr. Bob’s story, you’ll see that is the essence of the impression that I made on him that day. Well, he did sober up and departed from us in 1950. The prince of all twelve-steppers, my most beloved friend, with whom I can say there was never an angry argument or a hard word in all of our association. And that is a tribute to him and not to me, because I’ve had lots of hard words with lots of people, but never with Dr. Bob. Well, Annie was a prudent person, and you know that prudence rates high in the list of Christian virtues. She thought to herself, well, now if I invite this fellow Bill over to the house, he can kind of keep an eye on Bob. In fact, they might be able to keep an eye on each other. I wanted to carry on this little proxy practice I was in, a lawsuit was going. So I go over to live at the Smith household. Never can I forget those early mornings there, Ann sitting by the fireplace, our quiet time reading from the Bible, Corinthians, that greatest of all definition of love, James who said that faith without works is dead. And suddenly that latter phrase began to burn into Bob’s consciousness because he said, hadn’t we better be doing a little 12-step work? So we shopped around at first. There was a preacher down the street. He had one in tow. He’s right here today, too. And it wasn’t Bill, AA number three, always so sick. It was another one, Eddie and his wife Ruth and the kids. And Eddie wasn’t ready. He was awfully badly derailed. Ann invited the whole family to come and live there and how we worked with Eddie. And it was a bust. And along about this time, Dr. Bob said, I’ve got to go to a convention down in Atlantic City and Ann made frantic motions to me, no, no, no. And well, Bob said, but I’ve always gone. I couldn’t miss one of these. Or could I? Or should I? Well, I said, after all, you’ve got to live in a world where Grog is. So why don’t you go? This is about maybe two weeks after the conversation that Ann had. So the dear old boy started for the convention. Well, we were in here for him for quite a while, for some reason or other. And about four in the clock in the morning of the fifth day, he got boarded off the train, went over to the house of his nurse where we, Annie and I found him. Well, it was a terrible dilemma then, not only the alcoholic dilemma, but there was a certain surgical dilemma. About three days hence, an operation had to be performed by him on somebody and a serious one. And he realized the plight that he was in and that the frightful hangover he had. Well, it was something serious. So we started a round-the-clock tapering operation on the old boy. And the idea, you see, was to edge him up to that operation, not too tight to do it, but not so sober that he couldn’t. And on the third night of this process, in which we got him eased down off the perch, Dr. Ann had put Bob and me in the same room. And he was awake at about four o’clock the morning of the operation, and he turned and looked at me, and he said, Bill, I’m going to go through with this. I said, you mean the operation? Oh, yes, he said. Ah, yes, the operation, to be sure. No, he said, what we’ve been talking about. Smithy was a man of few words, quite unlike me. So he goes down there, and I remember how Ann and I waited and prayed while he went into that hospital. And we had him just right. Not too tight, just right. And he did it. And he came out of there, and that was June 10, 1935. And the candle was lit from the spark that had been struck. You old-timers know how it flickered as we passed it from hand to hand. You will remember how, in 1937, I came out here and, sitting in Dr. Bob’s living room, he and I realized for the first time that enough time had elapsed upon enough sufferers and upon enough cases to prove, beyond any doubt, that God was sending a new light upon our dark world. How we speculated how we could spread this thing. This had been so painfully so slow. Didn’t we need missionaries? Didn’t we need literature? Maybe we needed a string of hospitals or drunk tanks, you know, to make the profit to pay the missionaries. I hope you got in on that, too, you know. And we went over to T. Henry Williams that night to the meeting, and there were about 18 there, and we debated these things. And there was the conservative wing, and there was the radical wing in the debate. I’m afraid I was radical. And the conservatives said, well, let’s keep it simple. Our Lord had no books. He had no hospital. He had no nothing. On the other hand, I was a promoter, and I said, well, if it doesn’t spread any faster than this, it’s going to get pretty garbled. It may fail entirely. How are we going to get this message out? And you know how that eventuated in a center down in New York, an office that could answer inquiries as we got published the, you will remember the story of the pains of the production of the book that was to be Alcoholics Anonymous in 1939, the day on which our candle now fully lighted got its name. Meanwhile, though, another great event was taking place in this area. As I’ve just said, this was a very slow business, mostly failure. How broke we were. The anxieties and the joys, too, of that pioneering day can never perish from the memories of any who participated. People remember, you will remember, came over to T. Henry’s from Cleveland. And finally, the candle was transferred over there, as it had previously been to New York, where we were just then coming up with the book, many stories being contributed from here. And a little meeting was started over there in Cleveland. And it had only grown to about 20 in number when suddenly a gent who really understood drunks by the name of Elmer Davis published in the Cleveland Plain Dealer in the fall of 1939 a series of pieces, a lot of them. The plain dealer liked the idea. God loved them, one of our greatest friends. And they put these pieces in a box right plump in the middle of the editorial page. And every other day they would run editorials alongside. And the effect of all this was for the plain dealer to say to the good folks of Cleveland and this area about, come and get it, folks. This AA thing is good. Immediately there was a clamor of inquiries such as we have never seen in any local area, a terrific outburst of enthusiasm for AA. The little band of 20 was utterly swamped by perhaps hundreds of inquiries. And in four months’ time, they had sobered up more people in Cleveland than we had sobered up in the whole four years. Well, this frantic process taught us some lessons as well as to give us the mighty assurance that mass production of sobriety was now possible. We learned that we had to form better relations with hospitals. There had to be more models of the magnificent setup that was just then being inaugurated here at St. Thomas, the first religious institution ever to open its doors to our society. That sublime, indeed divine partnership between Sister Ignatia and Dr. Bob. We had to learn all about that sort of thing. And in Cleveland, they had to learn in a hurry. So better arrangements began to be made. And out of it came the idea that each new AA member should have a personally, a personal sponsor. Someone would see him through, see him along for a time until he got going. During the rush hour there, they didn’t take long to make a new sponsor. A fellow would see a guy in a hospital, yank him out of bed, take him to a meeting, take him back to the hospital to see another case and say, no, you’re an experienced AA. And lo and behold, a great discovery. They went right on getting sober. So then, you see, here in this town, and it’s marked by a plaque up there in St. Thomas, which many of you will see tonight, the spark was struck. The first group was formed. And Dr. Bob, that prince of twelve-steppers, with immense struggle and fortitude, gave birth to the first AA group of alcoholic phenomenon. At the New York end, we were concerned with the spread of this thing worldwide and chores and tasks like literature and that sort of thing. And then, as you see at Cleveland, they proved that they could mass-produce sobriety. Then in 1941, these pioneer groups were really assailed by a problem in mass sobriety because Jack Alexander, God love him, and the publishers of the Post printed as the feature issue of their March number of that year a piece about our fledgling society that, believe me, was a lollapalooza. It was so effective that, if you think the Cleveland rush was a big rush, you should have seen the mail that descended on that little New York post office box. Six thousand inquiries, frantic ones, in maybe six weeks. We were swamped. What would we do? Frantic inquiries. Where do we find this thing? How do we learn about this? My husband, sometimes the drunks themselves, in their agony, wrote too. Well, we had old-timers in the existing groups who were traveling on the road. We sent some of these inquiries to them, knowing them by cities. Others we patiently wrote to, hundreds, thousands of letters. We sent them a pamphlet. People returned to buy the book and then started this phenomenal spread which not only demonstrated that mass sobriety was possible in an area, all of a sudden, but it proved that we could spread fast. And soon, the length and breadth of the land, little twos and threes and fours and fives of us were gathered. And presently, at Little Rock, Arkansas, we actually started the first group by mail from the New York office, an event of profound significance. And presently, this thing was traveling on to Hawaii and to Australia until now it has reached 52 countries. And only a few months ago, I saw a translation of the Twelve Steps into Japanese. The Buddhists, too, say that it is good. So went the inevitable march of this thing. But I’m telling you that during this hectic period, triggered by the Cleveland thing and exploded by the Saturday post piece, there was nothing that looked very inevitable about it to us. Because here were all these groups. Growing. And did we have growing? Oh my, the problem. How were we to function? Could we always keep it in the home? Would we have to move it in the hall? What about these erratic characters that were coming in? The originators thought they were pure alcoholics, nothing else the matter, you know. What about these strange birds? What about these disruptors? What about the little red riding hoods and the big bad wolves? Should we have clubhouses or not have them? Should we play cards or not play cards? All the problems were leaving. And they descended upon all of these little inexperienced groups like an avalanche. And from New York we had to retail the information from the old pioneering groups of New York, Akron, and Cleveland back to them. Keep track of all these travelers on the road. And then Alkies began to run the microphones in the newspapers and get the pictures printed. And we said, gee whiz, if they fell on their faces and got drunk, what about this anonymity at the public level? So there was this great and exciting welder. A fearsome and yet joyous experience. And you know the adolescence of anything or anyone is a fearsome but a joyous time. And so was ours. And it was during that period that the tradition of Alcoholics Anonymous came to view. That group of 12 principals, which later on in 1953 assembled an international convention at Cleveland, we decided to take our stand as a society. As early as 1945 or 6, not at all as author of the traditions, merely the hand that held the pencil, reflecting your experience, we were able to say, the whole is greater than the part. The good of this society is greater than the interest of any individual. And I asked myself, what, greater than mine? We were able to say then, although I sometimes wondered privately if it were true, that the only authority in Alcoholics Anonymous shall be God as he may speak through the group conscience. Our leaders are to be trusted servants. They shall not govern. And privately I said to myself, what, I’m not inspired like all these dunks collectively? I’m not to govern? Well, guess not, they won’t let me. During this period we had terrible times with membership. As I said, we were rather afraid of impure alcoholics, that is the respectable ones were. So we had rules and rules and rules to keep people out of AA who might, you know, dump us back in the drink. Why, they had so many rules. One time I wrote a letter to all the groups and I said, send in a list of all these rules and regulations about members. Boy, little Ruthie and I looked over these letters and we put all one of these rules on a sheet of paper and we kept pasting it on. Why, it looked like a newspaper ticker tape. And if all the rules that all the groups had were in force everywhere all at once, nobody could have possibly got into AA. Well, then we lost our fear and we found that the strangest people became our friends and that this thing was able to transcend with ease every barrier of race or creed. And all the strange people showed up. Criminals, think of it, in prison. Us respectable ones like to forget that practically any of us could have been in jail had we been caught. But no, alcoholics anonymous in prisons? What would people think? Were we a respectable socialite alcoholic? Would he come into a society where there were criminals? Oh, no, we mustn’t have such people around. The answer to that was 200 AA groups in federal pens in state prisons. The parole rate exactly reversed. Eighty percent of them used to go back for a drink and now only 20. When the women showed up, oh, boy, what a sensation that was. This will surely disrupt the society. And now, God love them, we couldn’t get along without them. You know, on these distant beachheads, they reenact these fearsome times still. For in 1950, Lois and I landed on an airfield at Oslo, Norway. AA had got there ahead of us. There were a thousand members in Norway. The meetings were all closed. They were so anonymous that they used their first names in speaking to each other. An American girl who was a wife of an attache to the American embassy and a marvelous member couldn’t even get into one of these Norwegian secret societies. Because she was a woman, she might disrupt it. And then all this time our wives patiently plotted along and we forced them to do it. We’d come back to these dear people and we’d say, Mama, get a load of this, those twelve steps. And she, who had done the best she could, would want it. The next thing she’d find would be that we were out nights more than we were when we were drunk. And poor Mama began to feel like a hen who had hatched out a duck egg. And the duck, it was just swimming out and was swimming out and was going around the point and might suffer and might not and besides, there were female ducks out there too. So we had our problems, all right. We had our problems. And the outgrowth of this fresh suffering on the part of our wives who felt that they couldn’t quite belong has recently eventuated in those wonderful family groups whose numbers have jumped in four years from fifty to over seven hundred groups doing prodigies for our home relations, our wives, our friends. Asking not what ails the drunk but what did this drinking do to us? What ails us? All one could go on for hours recounting fresh aspects of this marriage. I look out from my window and my study at Bedford Hills over the horizon and realize in awe that I cannot grasp even the smallest fraction of what is going on or about to be. Now you see this simple legacy that my friend brought me over the kitchen table, the chance to be sober from alcohol, the chance to be whole and in one piece and a growing concern, the chance to be emotionally sober and the chance to serve and to function. Well, those legacies became group possessions as well as individual possessions so that our society as a whole is concerned with the principles upon which all of us and those to come shall recover our twelve steps It is concerned with our tradition which we hope will hold us in unity for so long as God shall need it and it is concerned with the third legacy which has to do with all of those things that make the twelve steps possible. Whether it is the wife pouring a cup of coffee in the living room, whether it is a landlord providing a hall, whether it is a foundation with trustees providing services in magazines and literature, whether it is you and I putting some gas in the tank of the automobile, that is a part of the legacy of service which includes the twelve steps as its heart but it also includes everything, every legitimate and proper activity that makes the carrying of the message possible. Our third legacy. Now then, it is an odd thing or is it so odd that right here in Akron where the spark was struck when the candle was first lit, they were only recently seen that it is necessary for this area to function as a whole. Long since, many years since, other cities have had a place where A.A. could be reached on the telephone, from which public relations could be handled, where people could be interviewed, where hospital connections could be made. These are common places in nearly every city. Why haven’t we had them here in Akron? Well, because the older folks around here said, let’s keep it simple. And why were they able to say that all these years? Let’s keep it simple. Let’s not have any area committee. Let’s not have any of them. I think they were quite right in their contention, let’s keep it simple. I’m for keeping it simple. But the reason that they were able to say this all those years was because two people in this town were keeping it simple for them. There was Dr. Bob and Sister Ignatia. And between them, they were receiving the inquiries, they were indoctrinating those alcoholics, they were seeing that they got medically treated, and that precious care were your inter-group associations. So when they were gone, there was a vacuum, wasn’t there? Just as we found there was in other places. So I’m awful glad to see that sometimes the first shall be last, and sometimes the last shall be first. And so marches on, says A.A. Has this movement got its sense? Do I mean to make a talk which is only in praise of ourselves and commemoration of the wonderful things that we have done? No, really. No, the real story of A.A. is the story of God working through very erratic people. These people, who are even sober, are still very sick. I myself have been one of the sickest of these. Over the years, my gift of sobriety I managed to cling on to. But over the years, there have been times when sobriety has been my only virtue. How God has contrived to work through such miserable ones as I have been, as you have been. Well, that is the real story of Alcoholics Anonymous. How God, through very fallible people, has apparently born into being a very great and perfect thing. God’s work. We the instruments only. How well we know that when we think about it. Yes, I think that God has been constructing a cathedral of the Spirit. And on its great floor where are inscribed our twelve steps of recovery, there now stand a hundred and fifty thousand of us in security. And upon a solid footing. That floor is of infinite width and length and reaches worldwide. And much sitting here have seen the side walls to our cathedral of the Spirit rise and have seen them successively buttressed by our twelve traditions which we hope will contain this society in unity for so long as God shall need it. And then we have seen in recent years the final perspective, the final perfection of the spire of this cathedral, whose name is service. And of who on whom is a beacon, a candle once lit on this city on the hill Akron, a candle shining all over the world and may it too continue to burn undimmed and pure for so long as God will.