Hotel Commodore NY — 20th Anniversary, 1954

We now give you Bill W., the sole surviving founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, speaking before the annual dinner of the Intergroup Association of AA of New York in 1954, held in observance of Bill’s 20th anniversary of sobriety. In the recording of this talk, Bill ran off the original tape by nearly five minutes. To complete the transcription, a borrowed recording from another member present was used. This will explain the difference in listening effects of the last few minutes of the talk. We now hear the applause of nearly 2,400 members of Alcoholics Anonymous and their friends gathered in the Hotel Commodore in New York following Bill’s introduction by the toastmaster of the evening. It is a great and wonderful silence, and what we collectively felt and thought in that silence is surely quite beyond any expression at all. I am sure as someone before, we all felt the presence of God. I am sure that every heart here looked up to him in thanksgiving for his gifts to us, the children of the night. We thanked him for freedom from bondage. We thanked him for our deliverance into a fellowship where we have learned that it is better to comfort than to be comforted, it is better to love than to be loved. We thanked him for the opportunity to serve man and God such as has seldom been accorded Any. Then too, there has been a very personal note sounded here. And Lois and I know that you’re coming from so many distant places. It is a mighty toll on your affection for us. She and I give our thanks to you and to God for all of that. It is her anniversary, quite as much as mine, because I had reached the place where I would die. And she had reached the place where all her bright hopes and aspirations were at an end. And then through this strange paradise, strength rising from weakness, a door was opened upon a new way of life, quite beyond our wildest dreams and even the balmiest of our days. Such are my poor words to express what I have felt here. These gifts arise three stories, which commenced to run even prior to the year 34. The gifts and the stories which tell about them are the… One is the story of how we learned to break our bondage. The next is the story of how we learned to live in harmony and unity with each other and with the world above. And the third legacy of AA has to do with how we learned to serve God and men. I wish it were possible for me to give you a rundown on all these stories, but when I proposed this to the dinner committee, they said, Bill, tell us that night before Christmas Yard. You know, just how did this thing really get started? But before I embark on that, I draw attention to the fact that practically every alcoholic in this room has had someone, some friend who stuck with him, who stayed with him, who went into the cave where he was and never left. So I would introduce to you my partner in the cave, and my partner since, without whom this society would in all probability never have been. And Lois would like to say to you her thanks on her anniversary. Thank you. Thank you so much. This is really, I think, one of the most moving moments of my life. And I can’t say anything, I can’t help express what it means to me, and what being here and seeing so many of you, and feeling all your love, I hope you feel mine going out to you. But I do want to thank you, every last one of you, for all you have done through these 20 years. Because this 20 years is not only accomplishment of the first early AA’s, but of every single one of you. Because if you all hadn’t wanted to carry this wonderful thing on, each one forging a link in this marvelous chain that is AA, none of us, I’m sure, would be here tonight. And thank you again so very much. Over the AA Graveline, just before dinner, there came a flash, and the flash came out of Nicobarker Hospital. And the flash said, The 10,000th drunk, drunk number 10,000, has just passed through this place, and his name is Murphy. Therefore, I can say without fear of contradiction that Mr. Murphy is the authority of greater things to come in the day-to-day of this society. And after hearing that word, and sitting here and looking into your faces, and realizing that all of us gathered here, plus all those who recovered of the 10,000 who went through Nicobarker, no doubt 6 or 7,000, I would say, that that down list is perhaps 4 or 5 percent of all that has happened in the way of recovery. There are lots of our friends here tonight, and there are lots of A.A.s here tonight, who really don’t know much about the actual start of A.A. It can’t be said often enough that no human being invented alcoholics or non-alcoholics. God in his providence channeled ideas and inspiration through many, many individuals to bring this society to the point where it stands today. Friends, non-alcoholics, have been used tremendously and repeatedly in the formation of our recovery program, of contributions which have borne on our wholeness and unity, and they have, in legions, helped us to serve and carry this message world-wide. Tonight I would just like to talk about the recovery, and I would like to talk about four people who, in my estimate, were indispensable channels through which the main ideas coursed into us alcoholics. Again, we alcoholics invented nothing. The story properly begins at Zurich, Switzerland, probably in the year 1930, and a certain American businessman had gone there that we shall call a law. A man of affairs, a man of prominence, a man of pride. Well, he’s probably what nowadays we’d call a Park Avenue stockbroker, you know. He had run the usual course we know so well, drying out places, sanitarium. So he said, I will seek out the best man on earth. I’ll go to Carl Ewell. He went there, he stayed a year, he met business, and at the end of the year he thought he so well understood himself that he had been really released from his obsession with drinking. To his consternation, he was drunk in a matter of weeks, and trembling called, crawled back to Dr. Ewell, and that very great and humble man said to him, Roland, when you first came I thought you might be one of those rare ones, but I must be frank to tell you that I have never seen one single alcoholic of your kind and gravity recover under my care. I can do nothing for you. I think that is a humility which a good many an alcoholic could borrow when talking about psychiatrists. Well, our friend from America was shattered. The god of science had spoken the word of doom, so he went back to the doctor like this. He said, but doctor, is there nothing? Well, said Dr. Carl Ewell, sometimes alcoholics have religious experiences, conversions if you like, which liberate. It happens here and there. It happens now and then. We can’t quite say why and how. Albert said, Roland, I’m a man of faith. Used to be a vestryman in the Episcopal Church. Doctor shook his head, said that’s fine, but not fine enough. I’m talking about the kind of transforming experience that re-motivates and transforms people. Where can I find an experience like that, said Roland. Well, the doctor said you’ll have to seek it in any religious channel of your own choice. If you seek, perhaps you will find. No one can say. So Roland started his quest and he met up with the Oxford groups of that time. And they were a band of people who were talking a very simple and direct way of life. They were talking about absolute honesty, absolute purity, absolute unselfishness, absolute love. They were talking about the guidance of God. They weren’t talking much theology. They were just talking common denominators of all kinds. And in this atmosphere, putting all he had into the situation, Roland experienced this mysterious and unaccountable departure of his obsession to drink. He returned to America, went to his farm at Glastonbury, Vermont, where he was joined by two other alcoholics. One by the name of Shep, another by the name of Sebring. And one of these fellows knew the chap that we in AA affectionately called, called Ebby. My schoolman up there in Vermont. Ebby was up in the old hometown they heard, and he was raising particular hell. The family had gone back to Albany, they had just summered there at Manchester. Ebby had got a hold of Pop’s new car. He had run it off the road into the side of a farmhouse. The car made a clean knee entry into the kitchen, pushing the stove to the side with none of the occupants. Whereupon Ebby had stepped out and said, folks, how about a cup of coffee? Well, the neighbors up there who loved the boy figured that they had about enough, so they would send him down to Bennington and before Judge Graves, Sebring’s father, and get him committed. The vial broke. The trio at Glastonbury heard about this. They went and fetched it. And here was the transmission line again at work. I saw Ebby only recently in Texas. And he recalled the terrific impression that Rowland had made on him. The god of science in Zurich had said, you cannot do anything about this alone. You have to have some kind of transforming experience. And Ebby again recounted to me only months ago how deeply that hit him. when another alcoholic gave him the dose. Meanwhile, I had been approaching Ebbingston. The end of the long road for Lois and me, I came up here in Towns Hospital in the summer of 1934. Black Rollin’s case, the doctor there, one we all now know as Silky, thought that I might be one of those rare ones that could recover. But here he was in his office on a hot night talking to Lois while I lay upstairs. Here came the same sentence again. Lois is saying to him, But doctor, he’s a man of tremendous willpower. He wants to stop. Why can’t he stop? Then the dear old man was obliged to pass sentence. He was kind, but there wasn’t any doubt. Bill’s habit of drink has now turned into an obsession, which his will can’t break. There is nothing that I can do to educate him out of this. There is nothing that any physical treatment can do that I know anything about. I am at the end of my resources. So Lois, like Rollin, said, Well doctor, now what next? And Silky said, I’m afraid you’ll have to lock him up. Else he’ll go mad and die some of these days. Well, I left town. By this time I knew what the score was. For a while fear kept me sober. Terrific vigilance, fighting this thing all the time. Some months went by, something very unusual for me. Oh, I was a two bottle man a day, three to get drunk. So two or three months of sobriety. Then I began to get self-confidence. I began to say to myself, well, this isn’t too bad. I’m beginning to feel better. I go over to Wall Street, I make a few dollars. Maybe this isn’t so bad. Then 20 years ago, come day after tomorrow, Armistice Day, 1934, I said to Lois as she set out to work in the department store, where all our support now came from, I said, Lois, I’d like to go over to Staten Island and play a round of golf. I could see the fear in her eyes. She said, oh, oh do, you haven’t done that in a long time. Soon I’m going down the aisle. Beside me is a man with a fine target right. We get talking about shooting. All of a sudden the bus collides with the bus ahead of us. Nobody is hurt, but we’re left standing on the pavement waiting for the next bus. Said the man to me, let’s go in there. I think maybe we can get a drink. I said, let’s do. So we went inside. And I ordered ginger ale. What? He said, don’t you drink? No, I said, I am an alcoholic. I’m a guy who has an obsession that I’ve just got to break. This obsession drives me to drink. According to the doctors, I’ve got a physical sensitivity that condemns me to go mad or die if I keep it up. That’s how bad I am. That’s why I’m drinking ginger ale. Okay, the fellow said, please go right on. If you don’t mind, though, I’ll have a scotch and soda. We get on the bus. And this so well demonstrates this insidious incentive. We come to the parting of the way. I’m going to the golf course. He’s going to the rifle range. We’re in front of another little hotel. The bus has stopped. It’s noontime. Says, hey, let’s go in. We’ll get a sandwich. We sat at the bar. He had another drink, a sandwich. I get a sandwich, a glass of ginger ale. We sit there still talking about shooting. And I remember then how I began to sort of whirl together. The place in back of us was filling up with celebrants of Armistice Day. And the people, they were filling up, too, and that buzz arose that we know so well in the Bible. And somehow that was reminiscent of that marvelous Armistice Day in France. Oh, what a wonderful release that was. The champagne we had in Bordeaux. And these thoughts ran as an undercurrent in my mind. Along comes the driver. Driver’s above me. A glass in each hand. He plops one down in front of my friend. He plops another down in front of me. And he says, boys, it’s Armistice Day. Have fun on the house. I said, thanks very much and go. My friend looked at me and said, he. Are you completely crazy? Do you realize what you told me up the street only an hour ago? Oh, yes. I said, I guess I am crazy. And I was. Lois found me lying in the area away of 182 Clinton Street where we lived the next morning. Still dragging the golf bag. Terrific gash in my scalp where I’d fallen against a steel grate. Well, then I was back on it. What was the use? A week later the telephone rings. My friend, Eddie, who is on this line of succession from Dr. Young to Rowan, is now on the other end of the wire. Oh, I thought to myself, this is wonderful. We’ll talk about the good old days. Why won’t we talk about the good old days? Because the present was practically unbearable and there wasn’t to be any future. Yes, we drink up my gin and we talk about the good old days. Soon Eddie is in the door. Through my head I could somehow sense that he was deafening. Something had happened. He came in. I pushed the gin over the table. No. Not drinking. Not drinking now. What Eddie, you on the water wagon? No. Not exactly. I’m just not drinking now. What got into you? Eddie? Well, he said I got religion. Well, that was a terrific jolt to me. Then I knew for sure he was crazy. You see, I had one of these dandy modern educations that had taught me that man is God. Well, you had to be polite. I said, what brand? Oh, well, he said, I don’t know. You should call it a religion. I ran across a crowd of people. And then he recounted this experience I’ve just told you. And then he began to tell of his contact with this crowd of people, most of them non-alcoholics. But here and there there were some alcoholics. But truly this man had a role. And he began to tell me that though he didn’t agree with all of their tenets and some of their methods, of course, alcoholics are great people to disagree. But he had abstracted from what they taught certain basics that had released him, he said, from his desire to drink. And what were these basics? Well, there was the idea of a personal inventory of one’s defects. There was the idea of confessing these in confidence to another person. There was the idea of making restitution for harms done. There was the idea of carrying that message to other people. There was the idea of dependence upon and guidance upon God, as you understood it. Those were the essential ideas that he transmitted to me over the kitchen table. Well, I said, Andy, this sounds perfectly sensible, all except that God lives. After all, these aren’t any very new ideas, either. You might have got these most anyplace. Well, he said, but the point is, I got them, and this is where I got them. All of that, a bunch of extra group paper. And I think that Roland made me ready to receive those ideas. If I hadn’t been first approached by alcoholics, I don’t believe those people could have sold me this bill of goods. But he said, I have bought enough of it so that I feel released. It seems to me that I’m not any longer fighting booze. The obsession has been lifted up. Release, he talked about. And then he won the war. Didn’t press me, didn’t evangelize me, didn’t try to save my soul. I went on drinking for a while. And in no waking hour could I get the spectacle of that fellow sitting across that kitchen table out of my mind. So here we were, one alcoholic talking to another. Young had said it’s hopeless. Hazard had got transformed. He passed it along to Abby. Abby had been exposed to these people who were practicing what they preached. And he, another alcoholic, was talking to me across the kitchen table. And then in my background was another god of science who said, no, science can’t do it for you. So I was being made ready through all these agencies and people for what was about to happen. Abby came another time with his friend Shep. I remember going down to Old Calgary Mission, getting there terribly drunk. They were about to throw me out. I said I was looking for something. Abby said, how about a plate of beans? They get me sober enough. They take me in. I sit with the other penitents. I take the walk up the aisle. And as I knelt there among those sweaty people, I remember getting a little feeling of something a little different. And then it was gone again. And I went back to drinking. And I went back to fighting this god idea. But always the face of this drunk across that kitchen table. And I knew that he wasn’t on the water like that. Something had removed his obsession to drink. So I said, well, if there’s any great doctor, I’d better seek him out. But first of all, I’d better get sober. I go back to town’s hospital. Oh, I want to have the head of the DTs this time. Not a too bad shot. Determined to get sober and have another look at this neat little formula. I arrived there, bottle in hand. I remember Silky standing in the hall, shaking his head. I yelled at him, waving a bottle, saying, this time I got something, Doc. He said, I’m afraid you have, boy. Upstairs to bed. The poor old man really loved me. As he loved all of those 10,000 drunks that have gone through Knickerbocker and the other 30,000 he talked with besides. So I go to bed. Three days later, my friend shows up in the door. I said, Paul, maybe he’s going to evangelize me. Maybe he’s going to put heat on me. Maybe he’s going to try to save my soul. Didn’t do any such thing. He was full of that great Christian virtue called prudence. He knew my prejudices. He waited and made me ask, Abby, what’s that neat little formula? Oh, yeah, you get honest with yourself. You get honest with another person about yourself. Internal housecleaning. Clean away the debris of the past. Help others with no demand for a warrant and prestige or money. Pray to God, as you understand him, for guidance to direct your life. As simple as that. Nothing more, nothing less. And soon he was gone. And still I rebelled. And suddenly, I suppose, and momentarily certainly, this terrific ego of mine just collapsed. And I dropped into a terrific depression. And in the agony of that depression, I cried out. I said, no, I am prepared to do anything, anything, anything at all to get more evidence. Like a cancer patient, if there’s any great physician. If there is any, God, let him show himself. And then the place went electric in a great white light. I was seized with an ecstasy, which is in nobody’s power to describe. In the mind’s eye, it seemed as though I was on a mountain, a great wind is blowing. I think, this is not air, this is a spirit. I’m free. Then the ecstasy subsides, and I find that I’m in another world. A world in which everything is all right, no matter how wrong it seems to be. The assurance was complete. There was a sensation that I was surrounded by and suffused with a presence. And I thought to myself, so this is the God of the preachers. Such was the gift that I received that day. And such were the sources through which it had come to me. Well, pretty soon another source comes walking into that hospital in the shape of a book. It was called Varieties of Religious Experience by William James. I think it was then in circulation among the Oxford group. And I remember how avidly I went through those pages. Kind of a learned document, a little over my head. But out of it stood these common denominators. The people who get these transforming experiences the more readily are those who utterly surrender and give up. Then the transformation sets in. All sometimes in a blaze, such as mine did. That doesn’t make any difference. May take weeks, may take months. But it is a transforming experience that apparently arises out of some terrific collapse at depth. That much stood out of those pages. And then I realized how I had been conditioned for this. The God of science, Dr. Jung, Dr. Silkworth, said no. You can’t do it on your own resource. You can’t do it on the resources of science. Of yourself you are literally nothing. It is a question of God’s help. And you’ll do it. You can’t do anything. And when we got to that point of complete defeat, when those cases in the book did, then the transformation would set in. And would so change and re-motivate the people affected that it couldn’t be accounted for by any association or program or discipline or what have you. It began to be clear what was happening. So I get down to the Oxford group. And we have here tonight another friend who was a channel for the inspiration that Roe got and Ebby got and I got. It was from him and his living example and the principles that he taught that we have drawn the essential elements of our recovery program in AA. In other words, the scientists deflated Ebby and me and Roe and made us right. Here was the fellow who channeled in the truth which we were then able to buy. And that fellow is a great soul, and this society will forever be in his debt. He was mightily used as a channel for us, as he has been mightily used in this country and all over the world. So it’s about time, folks, that you knew Sam Shoemaker better, and I’m going to ask him to get up here and reminisce a couple of minutes about his first impressions of us drunks as we were trying to get well down around his church. I feel, good friends, that there is something inappropriate and a little bit intrusive about anybody saying anything after Bill tonight, and I wouldn’t do it but at his behest. When I knew this occasion was coming to pass, I wanted to come from Pittsburgh. I wouldn’t have been anywhere else in the world tonight if I could get here. I love Bill, and I love Lois. Lois didn’t look like she does tonight in those days. She looked 20 years older, not 20 years younger. Although she has added that silver touch on the top, which is so overcoming, and about which I’m a little more aware than I was in those days. I require it myself. It was an immense privilege to watch this thing take place, and one of the joys and privileges of my life has been the very minor share that we had down at Calvary Church in its beginnings. We weren’t sure whether Bill was going off on a kind of aberration, leaving the rest of us in the old group, and he going off on a kind of toot just to work with his own alcoholic friends. Thank God Bill stayed with it and left us alone with all his givings about it. When I think of the days and weeks and I guess years almost of pretty nearly solitary pioneering that he and a very few others had to do, I am profoundly grateful that he just kept on with the thing that he felt he was being led and called to do. I remember that incident about Ebby and breaking into the lady’s house and asking for a cup of coffee. As I recall, she wanted to have her arrested for impertinence, not for tearing her house down. We little knew in those days what was in the wind and what God would make out of these beginnings, tenuous, difficult, in a way groping, because this was real pioneering. Nobody else had dealt with this thing. Nobody else had seriously tried to apply faith in this whole situation. I still will always say to Bill and to the AA family that our main contribution was making some mistakes that if we hadn’t made them first, someone was going to have to make afterwards. I always had a kind of a liking for sinners. I always kind of liked people that were in mischief better than I liked stuffy church people. I still do. They’re more fun to fool with. And I got a pious notion when we had not long built Calvary House down at 61 Gramercy Park that it would be an excellent addition if we took on about half a dozen gentleman drunks. I had an old Baltimore friend of mine up here who was a good candidate and there were many others, and I thought they’d help each other, and they did help each other, but they helped each other down and not up. And one Sunday morning I went to my church and through the central stained glass window over the altar I found an alarm clock that had been hurled through the window the night before from the parish house that stood just behind it. I became aware that we weren’t doing such an awful good job with my gentleman drunk friend, and I still think that our mistakes were one of the best contributions that we made to AA. But I’m grateful for those years because with old Harry Hadley down at Calvary Mission and with our own blunders at 61 Gramercy Park, I think Bill and some others learned how not to do it. Concerning Rowland, it was an astonishing thing to see. I knew Rowland well, and the change in that man’s life was a fabulous spectacle. If you go down inside the front door of old Calvary Church at the corner of 4th Avenue and 21st Street and turn to the right, you’ll find a very small stained glass window inside that vestibule in memory of Rowland Hadley. When that fellow died, he was again a vestiment of that particular Episcopal Church. God had kept that fellow right through until his end in an amazing kind of victory, and I’m grateful for the part that he had in this amazing development. Bill says that the element of honesty has been terribly important in this development. Concerning those absolutes, I believe absolutes are a good thing to go for. I think they’re a very bad thing to think you’ve ever reached. I heard about a Carthusian monk a while ago who was speaking about some other monastic orders, and he said, of course, the Franciscans are rather ahead of us in piety, and the Dominicans are way ahead of us in intellectual development, but for humility we’re tops. Now look off for thinking that you’re absolutely honest or absolutely pure or absolutely loving or absolutely unselfish. It’s a great thing to go for as long as you don’t think you have gotten there. I knew an old colored preacher once who said if you think you is while you’re blind, you ain’t never going to get there. I work in Pittsburgh with a wonderful bishop named Austin Pardue, and he says that this matter of honesty, facing yourself is the beginning of all Christian conversion. I believe he’s right. He also says that he thinks we have better pray to God to be merciful enough not to show us all of ourselves at one time. We would probably die from shock. We get these things step by step as we’re able to face them, but they are part of what makes this or any other movement that has the spirit of God in it effective. I’m wondering when the churches and the rest of the world are going to learn from this thing that these 12 steps are not just good for alcoholics. They’re good for all sinners, starting with us. I haven’t reminisced very much. Bill’s better at his reminiscence than I am. I’ve been writing down every word he said that I can remember because I wanted to remember the exact story of precisely how it happened, and his memory is a lot better than mine on that. But I do want to say to him what he’s meant to those hundreds and thousands, tens of thousands of people, I suppose, outside the ranks of actual alcoholics who have learned from AA a little bit better how to live and how to go after some of these absolutes and also to remember that we have not reached them. This is a great night. I hope it’s a great step forward in this tremendous movement. I’ll say one thing and I’ll sit down. It was right here in this room, as I recall it, where we came for an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting a few years ago, and Austin McCoy, the commissioner of correction in New York, was here and was a speaker at that time. And I remember his words. He said, this may yet prove to be one of the great movements of all time. I think the succeeding years have borne him out, and I believe the years that are ahead of us are going to bear him out still more. Bill, it’s all right to listen to the kind of things these people have been saying to you if you don’t inhale. Well, let me just say one thing. You never can love any guy too much. You never can tell him too often that you love him. You can’t trust him too much. You can’t give any too great thanks to God for him if he’s putting his life out of interest for God to use. As Ben and Louis, God bless them, have done. I hope that the proof now goes on a page that nobody invented Alcoholics Anonymous. That we are the beneficiaries of a benign conspiracy of God to set us free, working through many willing minds and hearts and hands. Now, when I arrived down there in the Oxford groups, I think I crossed Sam and his dear friends into almost as much trouble as the guys with the alarm clock. Because I had this very fixed idea. Maybe it was partly inspiration, but I fancied there was a good deal of conceit in it. I was soon heard to say, I am going to sober up all the drunks in the world. And we set out a pace to do it. The house over Clinton Street was filled with drunks. We visited them at Calvary, Mission, up at Towns Hospital, anywhere we could lay hands on them. And nothing whatever happened for six months. A brief period of sobriety and then. Meanwhile, I was telling people about this strange experience. I was preaching. I was teaching. I was playing the Masada. And nobody would buy it. So one day, before he crashed fall, I went up to confide in good old Doc Selfworth. He said, look Bill, you got the cart before the horse, I think. What about this James book you used to talk about? This idea of getting this deflation in depth. He said, you’re running around talking about this mystic experience of yours and people think they’re nuts. No, he said, you’ve got the cart before the horse. You can identify with these people. You’ve had a drinking experience. You can do it while I can’t do it. But then why don’t you pour it into them? How utterly hopeless from a medical standpoint this thing gets. The obsession that condemns them to drink against their will and their best interests. And the increasing bodily sensitivity that ensures they’ll go mad or die. Pour that into them and maybe that’ll soften them up. And then they’ll buy some of this morality. And some of these ideas that will cure them. About that time, people began to murmur, why doesn’t this guy go to work? In fact, I think some of my friends have got guidance from God that I should go back to work. It was eminently practical guidance. So I began to sit around the Wall Street brokerage houses like a macabre waiting for something to turn up. And it did. And suddenly I’m in the midst of a little proxy route that took me out to Akron, Ohio. And there’s a great milling around and through some quickly found friends I hope to get control, listen to the word, of a small company. And then of course that would supply me the living in my spare time. Maybe we’d fix some drugs. We get to Akron. The deal blows up in my face. My friends depart in disgust. I’m in the Mayflower Hotel with ten dollars in my pocket, not enough for a fair haul. For the first time since that experience in Towns Hospital, I began to be afraid. I found myself walking up and down in the Mayflower lobby. It was Saturday afternoon. The bar room was filling up. Then I eased down to the other end of the corridor and there stood a church director. And absently I kept looking at him. Then suddenly I was seized with a real panic. I said to myself, look my friend, you’re in a fair way to get drunk. Then I’d walk up and down again. Why not go in the bar room and order a bottle of ginger ale? You might scrape an acquaintance. Pretty lonely there. And then it occurred to me, in fact it was borne in upon me for the first time, that even though the effort I had made with other alcoholics had apparently brought nothing to them, it had brought a great deal to me. Then I said, oh, not teacher, not preacher, not evangelist. No, I need another alcoholic so that I can forget my troubles by talking to him. I need him as much as he needs me. And I stopped again before the church directory, ran my finger down the list of churches and preachers. It stopped at the name of Walter Thomas. Turned out to be the Episcopal Preacher. I called up and I said, I’m an alcoholic from New York. I’m in a bad way. I’m not drunk, but I may get that way. I gotta have another drunk to work on. Well, this was something of a shock to the good man. Drunks, one by one, were bad enough, but not by twos and threes. However, he caught on. He was very nice. He gave me a list of some Oxford group things. Well, the Oxford group at that stage in Akron had kind of broken up into some factions. Nevertheless, one chap was very helpful. I finally got a list of maybe ten people. I began to call them up. Well, as I said, it was a Saturday afternoon. People were going away. They couldn’t be found. See you in church Sunday. Until I finally exhausted the whole list. At the end of the list stood the name of Simon. And I said, oh, must be the wife of that rubber magnate. What would she want with a drunk from New York on a Saturday afternoon looking for a drunk to work on? I even went downstairs and looked in the bar again and something said to me, you’d better go up there and make that call. So I did. A lovely southern voice came over the wire. I quickly told her my story. She said, I’m no alcoholic, but I think I understand. Will you come right straight out here? Another friend who had time and who cared enough. I told her the story. She told me about Dr. Bob, how he’d fallen apart in that town as a surgeon, how he’d tried the groups, how he’d read religious literature, how he’d tried church attendance, how he’d been treated medically. She knew he wanted to stop. Why couldn’t he stop? She called the Smithsonian. Ann answered. Ann said, well, this sounds interesting, Henrietta, but I don’t think we can come over today. You see, it’s Mother’s Day, and Bob is a sentimental man, and he has just come home with a great big potted plant for me, and he has set the plant upon the table, but he is so potted he is unfurled. So I think he’d better go. Well, said Henrietta brightly, won’t you come over tomorrow? So next afternoon at 5 o’clock, Dr. Bob and Ann walked in the door of Henrietta’s house. She discreetly ushered Dr. Bob and me into her library. Dr. Bob said he can’t stay but a few minutes. I said, I know just how you feel. You’re shaky. You probably want a drink. The upshot was that we talked for four or five hours, and as his story in the book Alcoholics Anonymous will show, and as his recording made at Detroit not long before he died further demonstrates, the impression I made upon him was not directly of any spiritual character at all. He says over and over, this is the first man that I ever met up with who knew what he was talking about. talking about concerning alcoholism out of his own experience and out of the mouths of scientists. In other words, I took Sotheby’s advice and I poured the death sentence into him as hard as I could, so far as his being able to get over it by himself. The spark that was to be Alcoholics Anonymous was probably struck then and there. I went to live with Dr. Brown and thought it would be a little safer. My business continued somehow in Akron for a while. I stayed there during that summer. And pretty soon Dr. Brown was saying to me, Bill, we better get to work. We better find some drunks. So he called the city hospital, got a hold of the head nurse down there. Said there was a man from New York with a cure for alcoholism. The nurse said, Doctor, have you tried it yourself? He persisted. She said, we’ve got just the man for you. Just came in here, used to be a city councilman, well-known lawyer about town. Couldn’t get home from here the last six times. Been in there six times in four months. Couldn’t even get home sober. So we got him strapped down. He blacked the eyes of one nurse before we did it. How would that one suit you? We got some rep, put him to bed. Here’s the medication. We’ll be down as soon as he clears up. Presently, Dr. Bob and I looked at the first man on the bed. And that was Bill Dodson, who passed out of our sighting hearing only a few weeks ago. Who never relapsed since. He kept the faith. Then in Akron, the city on the hill, three candles were lit and it stayed light. How many people then contributed? Vital contributions. Dr. Young, good old Silky, William James, Sam Schumacher. Who then invented alcoholics and others? Well, it was God Almighty. Such is the story of how we alcoholics learn to be free of our obsession. May God grant that this A.A. Trinity of recovery, of unity, and of service be a start which shall continue so long into the future as God may need us.