Good morning, everyone. My name's Jean, and I'm an alcoholic and a member of the Third Tradition group of West Palm Beach. Hi, Jean. Hi. Welcome to the second annual old-timers meeting of the second annual sponsorship weekend. Um, I hope– I will be celebrating a year this month, June twenty-eighth. Thank you. And now I would like to introduce to you my sponsor, Annie. Oh, dear. Good morning. I'm short. I'm an alcoholic, a member of Third Degree– Tradition group in West Palm Beach. My name is Annie. Hi, Annie. I haven't found it necessary to take a drink since April the eighth of nineteen eighty, and, uh, for that, I'm very grateful. Um, here it is. I'd like to read the preamble. "Alcoholics Anonymous is a fellowship of men and women who share their experience, strength, and hope with each other that they may solve their common problem and help others to recover from alcoholism. The only requirement for membership is the desire to stop drinking. There are no dues or fees for AA membership. We are self-supporting through our own contributions. AA is not allied with any sect, denomination, politics, organization, or institution, does not wish to engage in any controversy, neither endorses nor opposes any causes. Our primary purpose is to stay sober and help other alcoholics to achieve sobriety." And I'd like to introduce my sponsor, Sue. Hi, everyone. I'm an alcoholic. I'm a member of the Third Tradition group in West Palm Beach, and I'm Sue Folds. Hi, Sue. I don't believe in being anonymous in Alcoholics Anonymous. Um, could we say the Serenity Prayer? Somehow we've sort of overlooked that, and I'd like to open this meeting with the Serenity Prayer. God. God, grant us serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference. Thank you. In kind of tune with our theme for this weekend, I would like to read the Responsibility Prayer that was adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous. "When anyone, anywhere reaches out for help, I want the hand of AA always to be there, and for that, I am responsible." And with that, I would like to introduce… Oh, my sobriety date is December fourteenth, nineteen seventy-three. And with that, I would like to introduce my first sponsor, who was so instrumental in my service work and who has been a, a good f– turned out to be a very good friend of mine, Helen. I'm a grateful alcoholic, and I'm a member of the Delray Central House group. My name is Helen Hart. Hi, Helen. My sobriety date is, uh, April twenty-second, nineteen seventy-one. And I haven't found it necessary to take a drink, and I haven't taken one. You know, I used to take a lot of drinks that I– that really weren't necessary. So, uh- The, uh– I've been asked to read the Twelve Traditions, and I, I'd like to, uh, um, comment that I also have found the traditions very helpful in my maintaining my sobriety, and, uh, I've been able to use those principles in my daily affairs just as well as, as I have the Twelve Steps. Excuse me. The Twelve Traditions of Alcoholics Anonymous. "One, our common welfare should come first. Personal recovery depends upon AA unity. Two, for our group purpose, there is but one ultimate authority, a loving God Pardon me. As He may express Himself in our group conscience. A loving God as He may express Himself in our group conscience. Our leaders are but trusted servants. They do not govern. Three, the only requirement for AA membership is a desire to stop drinking. Four, each group should be autonomous, except in matters affecting other groups or AA as a whole. Five, each group has but one primary purpose, to carry its message to the alcoholic who still suffers. Six, an AA group ought never endorse, finance, or lend the AA name to any related facility or outside enterprise, lest problems of money, property, and prestige divert us from our primary purpose. Seven, every AA group ought to be fully self-supporting, declining outside contributions." Eight, Alcoholics Anonymous should remain forever non-professional, but our service centers may employ special workers. Nine, A.A. as such ought never be organized, but we may create service boards or committees directly responsible to those they serve. Ten, Alcoholics Anonymous has no opinion on outside issues; hence, the A.A. name ought never be drawn into public controversy. Eleven, our public relations policy is based on attraction rather than promotion. We need always maintain personal anonymity at the level of press, radio, and, and films. Twelve, anonymity is the spiritual foundation of all our traditions, ever reminding us to place principles before personalities. My second sponsor, who is, uh, the lady that has sponsored me since I've moved to Florida in nineteen seventy-seven, um, used to travel a lot, and that's why I have two. She was gone half the year. She's now slowing down. Uh, but with that, I would like to, uh, introduce you to Fran. Good morning, everyone. My na– I am an alcoholic, member of Sou– um, Lakewood Serenity Group. My name is Frances Hartford. Hi, Frances. Hi, everybody. God, what a beautiful looking group. I know what Jim means when you look out over this audience and how privileged we are to be here. It is just great to be sober. Happy Father's Day to all the fathers, and this is one of the greatest gifts we can give our children, is to be sober. It's also my privilege and honor to read How It Works from the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous. Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path. Those who do not recover are people who cannot and will not completely give themselves to this simple program, usually men and women who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves. They are such unfortunates. They are not at fault. They seem to have been born that way. They are naturally incapable of being– of grasping and developing a manner of living which demands rigorous honesty. Their chances are less than average. There are those, too, that have– There are those, too, who have suffered from grave emotional and mental disorders, but many of them do resco– re-recover if they have the capacity to be honest. Our stories disclose in a general way what used to be like, what happened, and what we are like now. If you decided you have what we have and are willing to go to any length, then you are ready to take certain steps. At some of these, we balked. We thought we could find an easier, softer way, but we could not. With all the earnestness at our command, we beg of you to be fearless and thorough from the very start. Some of us had tried to hold on to an old ideas, but the result was nil until we let go absolutely. Remember that we deal with alcohol: cunning, powerful, baffling. Twisted that. Without help, it is too much for us. But I got it in anyway. But there is one who has all power. That one is God. May you find Him now. Half measures availed us nothing. We stood at the turning point. We asked His protection and care with complete abandon. Here are the steps we took that– which are suggested as a program of recovery. One, we admitted we are powerless over alcohol, that our lives had become unmanageable. Two, came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. Three, made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him. Four, made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. Five, admitted to God, to ourselves, to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs. We're in– Sixth, we're entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character. Seven, humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings. Eight, made a l- a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all. Nine, made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others. Ten, continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it. Eleven, sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out. Twelve, having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to the alcoholics and to practice these principles in all our affairs. Many of us exclaimed what an order. I can't go through it. Do not be discouraged. No one among us has been able to make anything like perfect adherence to these principles. We are not saints. The point is that we are willing to grow along spiritual lines. The principles we have set down are guides to progress. We claim spiritual progress rather than spiritual perfection. Our description to the alcoholic, the chapter to the igno-agnostic, and our personal adventures before and after make clear three pertinent ideas: A, that we're alcoholic and could not manage our own lives; B, that probably no power could have relieved our alcoholism; C, that God could and would if he was sought. And And being true alcoholics, I forgot to mention my sobriety date. It's April twentieth, nineteen sixty-two. Now for a little, uh, bit of fun. Not that this hasn't been fun. But, uh, before we get to the old-timers, I'd like to have a sobriety countdown, which I think is fun, and everybody gets to participate. So if everyone would stand up, and as I call your year or less, if I say one year or less, or two years, three years, that means if you have that amount or less, would you please sit down? And then we'll have the last person standing. Would you like to stand up, please? Can you stand up that long, Eddie? Yeah. You need some help? Yeah. Are we ready? Yeah. Would one year or less please sit down. Two. Three years or less. Four. Wow. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen. Fifteen. I can't sit down, but that's me. I, I could, but I'm not going to. Sixteen. Seventeen. Eighteen. Nineteen. Twenty. Twenty-one. Twenty-two. Twenty-three. Twenty-four. Twenty-five. Twenty-six. Twenty-seven. Twenty-eight. Twenty-nine. Thirty. Thirty-one. Thirty-two. Thirty-three. Thirty-four. Thirty-five. Thirty-six. Thirty-seven. Thirty-eight. Thirty-nine. Forty. Yeah. Forty-one. Forty-two. Forty-three. Forty-four. Forty-five. Forty-six. I get goosebumps. I would like to, um, dedicate this meeting to May James, uh, one of our old-timers that was here last year who has passed away in the course of this year. Tommy Driscoll and Fred Lances are not here today. Tommy's ill, and I hope Fred is all right. So they will be in our– in here in spirit today. And with that… And please stay because after the meeting, we have another little party. I love parties. I always did. Too bad I run so many. And, um, I guess we'll start with the baby of this group. Norm. Thank you, Sue. I'm Norm Smith. I'm an alcoholic. Hi, Norm. Why did I come to AA? I'd like to illustrate that by a story of the elderly gentleman that went out to play golf at his country club, and he wanted to join some other men to play. And on the first tee, there were three young men waiting to tee off, and he asked if he could join them. They didn't like the idea of this old guy playing with them, but they included him in their foursome. And the first tee, this old guy stepped up there, and he whacks that ball out about two hundred and fifty yards. And he's on the green in two and down for three in the first hole. In the second hole, about the same thing. The third hole, about the same. One of these younger men said, "My," he said, "you're a marvelous golfer. Would you mind telling me your age?" "No," he said, "I don't mind. I'm seventy-five." He said, "Well, you're a marvelous golfer." He said, "Oh, no," he said, "I'm, I'm not even a good golfer in my family." He said, "My father's the good golfer." They said, "Well, how old is he?" "Well, he's 95. As a matter of fact, he was supposed to play golf with me today, but he couldn't make it. He's getting married today." One of the guys said, "Now, why would a guy 95 years old wanna get married?" He said, "He didn't want to, he had to." That was my situation. I didn't want to come into AA. I didn't want to stop drinking. I didn't have any kind of a desire to stop drinking, but I was one of those guys that lost everything and there wasn't any place to go. Thank God I found AA. I suppose an old-timers meeting, so-called, that we're supposed to make some comparisons between then and now. Of course, comparisons are odious, but maybe we can learn a few things from the past, as well as the past learning from the future. One thing, I might say AA is better than ever before in many respects. We have more people, and each person brings something unique to the program. We have more young people in the program. We have more women in the program. We have more groups in the program. We have everything going for us. But there are a few things that I think that we may do a little differently from what we did years ago, maybe not for the better and maybe in some cases for the better. And it seems to me that we don't hear as much about, in our meetings, about alcoholism being a disease. We don't hear too much about we have to give it away to keep it. And, uh, we don't hear too much about action. They're all there, of course. But I'd like to tell you about the disease of alcoholism by illustrating what happened to three friends of mine in AA. First is my friend Ed. Ed came into the program and he stayed sober for about two years. He, uh, seemed to be getting along pretty good. I don't know what happened to this guy, but one night he came to the meeting. He said, "I just came to resign." That was a- One for me. I never heard that before or since. He said, "I've decided that I want to drink." He said, "I like all you people in AA," but he said, "That's what I want to do." No matter what any of us could say, he was determined he was gonna go back to drinking. The next day, Ed moved out of his house and left his wife and kids, got a room someplace, and started drinking. About a year later, Ed has lo- had lost his job. He was a teacher in the Chicago school system. He lost his job, and he only had a year to go for his pension, but that was out. A little while later, Ed was found dead in an alley on Skid Row. That's a pretty lonely place for a guy to meet his maker. Then there was my friend Walter. Walter was a guy who had more enthusiasm for AA than anybody that I ever knew. Anybody. Walter'd get up there and talk, and he was so enthused about this program, it seemed that stars and stripes were, were being played by the US Marine Corps band behind him, and you felt like getting an AA banner and marching right along with this guy. Something happened. Walter went back to drinking. What happened then, he finally went into a convulsion. His mind was burned out. He was carted off to an insane asylum to spend the rest of his days. He couldn't communicate. He could just make babbling sounds. He was a vegetable. He couldn't control his bodily functions, and he had to wear diapers to, to, for the rest of his days. What an ignominious way for a guy to die. Then there was my friend, Dr. Joe. Dr. Joe came to the program. He seemed to be getting along pretty good for quite a few months. But then Dr. Joe decided he was smarter than these people in AA. Excuse me. He didn't need the program. He could do this by himself. Within a few weeks, he was back to drinking. So finally, one night, his sponsor called me up and asked me if I'd go see this guy with him. So we went over to see him. This was on a Friday night, and he was in terrible shape. We wanted him to go to this hospital to get dried out, and he wouldn't do it. But he agreed to go to a meeting we had on Sunday morning. We took him to the meeting, and he didn't have the least idea what was going on. And that afternoon, we got him to this hospital. The next night we went to see him, he didn't recognize us. The following morning, the hospital called me up and asked me to bring his wife, and I said, "Why?" "Well, we're afraid he's going into DTs, delayed DTs." So I called his wife. She wasn't very happy at the idea of going to see him. They weren't getting along too good, surprisingly. So anyway, about six o'clock that night, the hospital called me and said, "Are you gonna bring this guy's wife?" And I said, "Yes. Why?" "Well, his temperature is 108." Well, we got there pretty fast. His temperature was still 108. An hour later, it went to 109. That's as high as their thermometer would register. They're trying to bring out, bring down his fever. Doctor said to me, "Well, if he lives, he'll be nothing." He said, "His mind will be completely gone." So about midnight, the nurse came in and said, "What undertaker are you gonna have?" I said, "The guy isn't dead." She said, "No, he will be within an hour." And she was right. He was dead. You know, does this prove this is a physical disease? I think it is. Sure, when you… People die from it, and people lose their minds completely. This is a physical disease, and that's something I think that we should always impress upon people that we sponsor or anybody coming to our group, that this is a physical disease. Now, these guys weren't a bunch of dummies. They all had good educations. Two were professional men. They were in their late– One was in their late 30s, and the other two in their early 40s, what should have been the very prime of life. But alcohol robbed them everything. They had several things in common. In addition to being likable people, well-educated people, they had something else in common. Each one was an alcoholic. Each one knew he was an alcoholic. And another thing, each one had used up his last chance. You stop to consider each of us, after every drink, after every drunk, after every drink is given another chance. But sooner or later, we come to the point where we've used them all up, and that's what happened to these three guys. They used up their last chance. So again, as I say, we should impress upon new people that this is a physical disease. Now, there's still some controversy about it, but I think that we know better. I think AA has proven that. Another thing I'd like to touch on is on sponsorship. We've had these meetings about this. We've had the talks on it last night and the night before, the workshop meetings, and this is so important, and this is a responsibility we should take. But some people, it seems, in AA are avoiding that responsibility. I had one man tell me he had asked three men to be his sponsor, and each one said he was too busy. If we're too busy, we're too busy. Another thing, it seems that some people won't make 12-step calls. The other night, I was talking to a guy who was answering the phones for Broward County Intergroup office, and he said he'd called five people trying to get somebody to make a 12-step call and hadn't been able to get anybody. We're missing out on the most important thing, the most important thing for ourselves. There's nothing more important, nothing more self-satisfying, nothing more rewarding than being a sponsor to somebody or making a 12-step call. At a meeting the other day, I heard one man say that he'd had n-never had any success with 12-step calls. We always have success on a 12-step call. There's no such thing as failure. Maybe that person we call on never gets sober, but it keeps us sober seeing this guy still hitting himself on the head with a bottle. So it's important for us to be willing to make this work a very important part of our lives. Another thing that I've noticed in recent years is an unwillingness to do work in the group. We're lucky if we have one or two people. Some groups have to hire a guy to make the coffee. To me, this is terrible. I think back to when I came in. Of course, recollections may deceive us, and maybe they weren't as we remember them. But Dave had a little trouble with his memory this morning, and somebody said, "Three ways to tell if you're getting old. The first is loss of memory," and I forget the other two. Another thing that's changed is the influx of people into these treatment centers. It's charged anywhere up to 12 or 20 or $30,000 for a 28 program. I heard of one outfit, Fort Lauderdale, that tells its customers or inmates or patients, whatever they call them- Yeah … that their 28-day treatment is the equivalent of two years in AA. That's fraud. Absolute fraud. It isn't worth one minute of AA. Trouble is, these guys get out of this, and girls get out of these treatment places, they go to a meeting, and nobody recognizes them. They think he's just a visitor from some other group. They don't know if this guy is new. He's new in AA. Oh, they may have taken him to some meetings when he was in this hospital, but he's not part of it. So this is where we have to grab these people as they come in the door and find out that they are new. We have to get them a sponsor. If they don't have a sponsor, some of these people go on through life without a sponsor. Without a sponsor, they're not gonna be told how to work this program. I know one guy that's been in the program, he thinks, for seven or eight years. He's never taken the fourth step. He said he didn't need to. Nothing wrong with him. Well, there's quite a bit wrong with that guy. I recall when I crawled into AA, came to this group, and I was, I was really at the bottom of the barrel. I was a low bottom drunk. As I said, I had lost everything. And you know, people were so not only willing but anxious to do the work in the group. For example, we didn't have, we didn't have Styrofoam cups. They hadn't been invented yet. So we had to wash, wash these cups and saucers after the meeting. We never had trouble getting that. We didn't have to hire anybody to do that. We didn't have to hire anybody to do the coffee. People were anxious to do the work in the group. Now, we don't find that very much. Sure, there are exceptions. There are some groups where you're gonna find it, but in too many, we don't find it. So after I had been there about a month in this group, one day, somebody handed me a broom to sweep the floor. That was the greatest gift that I ever received. I tell you why. That made me feel I was really a member of that group. It made me feel I was really a member of AA, and it was the beginning of hope that this program would work for me. That was thirty-seven years ago. Thank you. I forgot one other old-timer that was here last year that's not here due to illness, and that's Eve Marsh. So keep them in your prayers, please. And with that, I'll give you our next, um, old-timer. And she came, uh, this morning, and I'm so thankful that she can keep these men in line. Believe me, she can. Uh, with that, I'll give you Pearl. My name is Pearl Nikkanen, and I'm a very grateful alcoholic. Hi, Pearl. My sobriety date is March twenty-sixth, nineteen forty-nine. I was thirty-four years old when I came into the program of Alcoholics Anonymous. A very sick, scared cookie. My sponsor was a man because I didn't have the privilege of having a woman. And I tru– I feel that I am truly blessed because I had a man sponsor. Now, not to hurt any woman's feelings in this room, but at that point in time, I don't believe I could have made it without a man sponsor. I come from a small town up in northeastern Minnesota, like a hundred miles from Duluth, on the Canadian border. Five thousand people. I don't come from an alcoholic family. I grew up between two brothers, one younger and three years older. A very loving, happy family. And to turn out to be the black sheep was a bitter pill, the way I hurt my mother and dad. The one thing that I did in my life right was that I chose the proper husband. You see, when I came into the program of Alcoholics Anonymous, there were no treatment centers around our Mesabi Iron Range. We sobered up absolutely cold turkey. We shook, and we walked, and we cried, and we bitched, and we swore, and we did everything we could to help ourselves stay sober. My sponsor worked with me for two weeks. He was there till midnight every night. And then he told me, he says, "Pearl, now I have given you all the tools that I can give you. I am here for you if you need me, but now you need to start out on your own." And I was scared to death. Now, if someone had told me forty years ago that, "Pearl, you will be doing something like this forty years later," I would have said, "No way, Jose." Absolutely no way. And here I am, and I feel very privileged. I am honorary member of the new Easy Does It group at West Palm Beach because of my forty years of sobriety, and I feel very privileged about that. In nineteen fifty-seven, out of forty-five groups up in northeastern Minnesota, they decided that Pearl should go to New York as their delegate, and I served in fifty-eight and fifty-nine. The first meeting that my husband brought me to eleven years ago when we moved down to Florida was a Monday night meeting at Kirk Road, the Holy Redeemer Church, and I feel that that is my home group. I speak, I chair, I do everything that I am asked to do. And the only time that I say no is when I go to a noon meeting or an evening meeting and someone asks me to do the chips like they do in so many places here. And then I tell them, "No." And I say no for the simple reason that I am cheating some young person, some new person, of having a chance to break the ice and do this one little thing and get started on his road to recovery. Give him something to do. And that's the only reason why I say no. And I always explain, and when I explain, they understand. I went once in my early days to a woman's prison outside of Minneapolis. I went by bus. I went many times by bus. And people were telling me that, "Well, what good can you do there with that hardened bunch of women?" And I said, "It's not what I can do for them. It what it does for me. What it does for me." And going into a place like that and seeing all these poor, sick women. Some of them hadn't had the opportunity to come into Alcoholics Anonymous like I did. I feel I'm truly blessed. I know that my sponsor was God-sent for me, and the eight men that I sobered up with, I'm used to sitting with guys. That's all I did for about 10 years of my early years of sobriety. It was always just men and Pearl. I have sponsored men in my time, and I don't think that any woman in the room should hesitate to ask some close AA man friend if she thinks he can tell her something that might help. This is strictly my opinion, 'cause I've had to do this many times. Many a time, I went home from my meeting, and I would tell my husband, who very faithfully went to every single solitary meeting with me for the first 10 years of my sobriety. Took me out of town. He would sit in the kitchen with the eight wives. That was pretty neat. And then after nine o'clock, they would come and join us in the other big room, and many times we were there till eleven, twelve o'clock at night. We all had problems. And I, like I said, I believe my sponsor was God-sent because he moved to my little town of Ely, Minnesota. His wife had been born and raised there, and he came from Detroit, Michigan, because he came to run a bowling alley. He moved there in December, and in January he started this AA group because he was an alcoholic and he needed the support. This group was started in January, and I came in in March with two men who were just a week ahead of me. And the first time my sponsor came to visit me, he came with two men. I didn't know any one of them personally, but the one man immediately impressed me because Three or four weeks prior to this time, I had been in one of the crummy skid row bars on a Sunday afternoon treating a bad hangover. And this man was in there, and he was standing at the end of the bar and hadn't been in clean clothes for God knows how many weeks, chewing snuff, and it was drooling from all sides of his mouth. And my husband was in there with me. My husband was always very understanding when I was sick with my hangovers and knew that I needed a drink, so he would go in a bar with me. And I said to him, "Who in the world is that guy?" Well, he knew who he was. So here's this man standing in my living room with my sponsor and another new recruit, and I am looking at him totally amazed. A brand-new suit, a real nice starched white shirt and a necktie and polished shoes, and oh God, the transformation. What this program had done for this guy in a couple of weeks, I could not believe, and that's the first hope I got. And many times I would go home from my meeting on Saturday night. We met only one night a week. Whenever we had a chance, we traveled out of town. We went everywhere. And I would tell my husband, I would be so angry. I actually hated Smitty at times because I thought he was so brutal. I'm sober because he was so brutal at times. And my husband would tell me, "Hey, he's trying to make you face the truth about yourself, which you will not accept and see. He's doing this for you, Pearl, because this is the way it was done to him." And the first time those guys came to my house and my sponsor was explaining alcoholism to me, I didn't know what an alcoholic was. People had lots of different names for Pearl. I thought that was a pretty classy name. I had no idea what alcoholism was, but I knew that I was in trouble, and I was scared to death. And he told me, he said, "Pearl," he said, "I can do for you what you want me to do, but you have got to do for you what you need to do. I can talk to you from now until kingdom come, and unless you accept this and you face the truth honestly, and you tell yourself that I am an alcoholic and I need help, no one on God's earth can help you." And this is what I try to do when I work with women. I'll give my telephone number to any woman who asks me. I'll give it to a man if he asks me. And since I've been in Florida, I've had many men ask me for my telephone number, and they have called and asked for my support, and I give it very willingly. I would not be standing here before you this morning if it hadn't been for a sponsor who knew when I needed a kick in the rear and one who knew when I needed a hug. And those– He was with us for maybe about five years, and then he moved, and one of the other men became my sponsor. And you know, I– those early days, I would get this awful craving for a drink. And my sponsor had taught me a very simple, ridiculous rule. And as simple and as ridiculous it is, as it is, that I could retain up here in this sick head and remember. Pearlie said, "All you have to do is remember, alcoholics are like bananas. You get away from the bunch, and you're gonna get peeled." You just don't know how many times that simple, ridiculous little rule kept this lady sober. These men were miners. They worked thousands of feet underground. I couldn't get on the telephone and call the mining company and tell them, "Hey, get Matt up from underground. Pearl's having a tough day." Boy, I'll tell you, I had to work through a lot of difficult things, but I'm sober as a consequence of it. My sponsor would walk in some morning, and he'd say, "Oh." Just one look at my face. "Damn pity pot again." Why, I mean, I wore that thing out. Feeling sorry for Pearl. And he'd say, "Goodbye. I'm not gonna sit here and unruffle your feathers and help you soothe your way. You work through this, and I'll see you later." See? I'm sober because of these things. I didn't like it, but I'm sober. Now, my husband passed away the early part of January this year. Lung cancer. Hasn't smoked for over twenty-five years, so I don't know. We'd been married fifty-one years. Boy, if you don't think that wasn't a blow. And if it wasn't for beautiful people like you and my AA program, I don't know what would have happened to me. The night that my husband passed away, my daughter and my son-in-law from New York were here. I have a son down in Florida. He and his wife and two grandchildren were here, and they were so afraid. In fact, my daughter-in-law said, "Gee, maybe we ought to get some doctor to give her something." No way, Jose. No way. They didn't want me to go in the bedroom, sleep in the room where my husband and I had slept together. I said, "No, I'm going in that bedroom. I have got to do this, and my AA program will help me do this, and I will do this." Now, God has done one other thing for me. The last month, I have– two women have come into my life. The one woman I met eleven years ago when I moved down to Florida at a meeting at Lake Worth, St. Andrew's Church. Met her and her husband. Her husband passed away the following year, and she began to drink. It's taken her eleven years to come back to the program. I'm chairing meetings that's, uh, on Saturday mornings at JFK Hospital for the month of June, and you should have seen her face light up when she saw me up at the podium chairing the meeting. She's in treatment there. And another lady told me the other day at Easy Does It Club, she says, "Pearl," she said, "you don't know what an inspiration you are to me," because she said, "I too lost my husband, and it's taken me eight years to get back to the program, and you are helping me waddle through this thing." And that's the kind of a sponsor I try to be. When someone calls me, I never tell them, "You have to do this." I put myself into the situation that they're in, and I said, "You can't tell me about any situation, any problem, anything that comes to you people, because I have been there, and I've gone through it, and I haven't found it necessary to take a drink." And I tell them, "Well, if you will take my suggestion and try to do it this way in the space that you're in, you won't have to take a drink." One lady called me one morning, said… She had taken my phone number one night at a meeting, and she said, "Pearl," she said, "I want to drink so badly this morning." I said, "Wait a minute." This was at a time when my husband was very ill. And I said, "I can't meet you anywhere right now." I said, "How close are you to the Easy Does It Club?" And she said, "Five minutes away." I said, "Get in your car and go. Grab yourself a cup of coffee and sit down next to somebody and tell them, 'I'm hurting this morning.'" And I said, "Call me four o'clock this afternoon and tell me how it worked out." She called me back. She says, "God bless you, Pearl. God bless you," because she said, "I worked through it." These are the things that made me strong in the beginning. I heard a lady speak here at Boca about four years ago at one of these kind of doings. She had her own unique definition of Alcoholics Anonymous. To her, she said, "It's like sex. If you're not enjoying it, you're not doing it right." I thought that was pretty neat. I was in Superior, Wisconsin, one year at a doings like this. I– Pearl went everywhere, and two or three of the guys would usually go, and we'd stay the whole weekend. And that night, there must have been three guys in the room next to me, and they drank all night long. And in the morning, I heard one of them say, "Oh, God, Joe, you gotta get me a drink. You gotta get me a drink. I'm just dying. You gotta get me a drink." When I went out of my room that morning, I picked up some pamphlets of literature the day before. I shoved them underneath the door. I don't know what ever happened to it. But Pearl was carrying the message. Tough and rough, and it worked. And God bless all of you people. I'm coming through my husband's passing away beautifully. I thanked God the first night he passed away because my daughter and I had prayed for him to go. I lost my mother, who was ninety-seven years old, in a nursing home a month ago. I haven't found it necessary to drink. I'm not afraid that I'm going to take a drink. God has done so many beautiful things for me. I've been so blessed. My husband found the program of Alcoholics Anonymous for me. And see, it was there when I needed it because I had begged for help after a three-day drunk in Duluth. This is what this does to you. And I want to tell every single solitary woman in this room that if you could have seen what these women that I saw that Sunday morning when I crawled into this crummy bar in Duluth, Minnesota, way over on the west side where Pearl would never have gone if she hadn't been an alcoholic- You don't want to look like that. God has given you a second chance. Be grateful. Don't abuse it. Work through the tough times. If you can't get rid of the craving for a drink, call somebody. Don't wait until you take it. Call somebody. There's always someone there for you. God bless you all. I love you. I've always felt very privileged to be in Pearl's presence. Our last speaker before our, uh, last party for this weekend is Eddie. I'm an alcoholic. My home group is the original Pompano book study group. My sobriety date is January 5th, 1943. And my name is Eddie Dalton. Hi, Eddie. I came to AA because it was either AA or amen. That was literally true because 10 days before I came to my first meeting, I was carted from an apartment building in the same police ambulance that I rode daily. I was admitted to Worcester Mass City Hospital, dead on arrival. If you're nudging one another saying, "Well, what the hell is he doing here today?" Medicine is not an exact science. And the ambulance surgeon, they tell me, who admitted me dead on arrival, was not in real good shape himself. Six months later, I was a pallbearer for that man. I saw him planted, and there was no clinical error in that particular case because he's been under for forty-seven, forty-six years. I'm a, a grateful member of Alcoholics Anonymous. I know it's customary to say that. But if AA hadn't come to me in that hospital room- -I would have missed the best years of my life. Mm. I would have missed meeting the best friends of my life. I would not be enjoying good health. And it's a pleasure to think that I'm in better condition at eighty-six than I was at forty. Don't be afraid. Every year on my anniversary, or about that time, I have a thorough physical exam by an internist. And every year when the reports come back from the laboratory, the doctor calls me and says, "We can't find anything wrong with you." So I tell him I'll pay him anyway. I have difficulty accepting being referred to as an old-timer merely because I live one day at a time, and each day is a new beginning. And I identify very well with those who come at this time and how they feel. And I feel deeply for them here in South Florida because the flood of new people coming to us is a blessing in one sense, but it is also an unfortunate thing that we have so many who do not have sponsors. And we cannot lay the blame on there's too many of them when some that I know have three sponsors. And I thought that over, and I can understand having one sponsor because that's the way I was taught. A means one. So I figured out that maybe the second sponsor is a sex therapist 'cause that's no lo– baseball is no longer, in conversation, the national pastime. And the third sponsor, I imagine, is a promoter, public relations or sort of a social secretary to line up speaking engagements for them. I was blessed with a good sponsor. You can't put a price tag on a good sponsor. And like many of the other paradoxes in our program, a sponsor is best described by what a sponsor is not. A sponsor is not a pro- Oh, I know they try to be. A sponsor should not be a pal or a buddy or a lover. A sponsor is not a financial advisor unless he or she is in the field of finance. A sponsor is not a babysitter. And a sponsor sure as hell should not be a proxy for a sponsee in the matters of reading our literature, attending our meetings, and practicing the 12 suggested steps. We in South Florida have problems. But the problem didn't exist in the beginning. I had no trouble finding a home group. There was only one group. And I didn't think that the inclemency of the weather was a good reason for staying home because as a drunk, I didn't know what the weather was. People corrected me at times when I said, "Isn't it a beautiful day?" And we're in the midst of a blizzard. I remember my first meeting, and I'm sure that most people do remember their first meeting. It was in January, and it was a blizzard. Public transportation had been shut down. And I had a forced march of two miles, and I had on me outer clothing that weighed more than I did, and I wasn't strong, and I wasn't well. Nothing is a quick fix in AA. And time is of the essence only when time is used, not put in. And personally, the length of time that we have in AA, I feel very strongly about this, is that I better have something to show other than the fact that I haven't had a drink for forty-six years. 'Cause there are millions of people out there who never took a drink, who haven't had a drink longer than I. I snuck into my first AA meeting, which shows that, uh, recovery is not an overnight deal. I stood under a lamppost at the junction of two streets in Worcester, Mass, and I looked up and down to see if any was– anybody was watching me. How self-conscious we get, huh? I had some courage because I passed two bars that I had never passed before. But there was a big wind. A tailwind that moved me. But I walked into a subterranean room where there were three other people who represented all of the self-admitted ambulatory alcoholics in that section of Worcester County. It was the second meeting in the Northeast. Boston, Mass had the first AA meeting in 1942. And to show that the book is correct when it says that we do not do well in the area of organization, the Worcester meeting was the same night at the same time as the Boston meeting. And not having the gift of bilocation, it would have taken me a year and eleven months to make 90 meetings. I'm in favor of a lot of meetings, providing the meetings are part of a group, not just a collection of people who Do not have a home group, but will go anywhere where there is an opportunity to talk. I'm speaking now of one of the problems, the open meetings, open speaker meetings. Anonymity doesn't even come in to go out the door. Where the entire meeting does not have an AA topic, and it can be and is, for the most part, I found out from being there, that's how I know, a mixture between seventh grade sex education and 101 psychology. And someone comes in, and they say, "Does anyone have a problem?" Most popular of problems is best described, and I'll mark my age now by that song title, Lover, Come Back to Me. I feel very deeply for those who came to learn something about AA who are there. I feel very deeply from someone who is brand new, who came to AA. And I feel most deeply for the one who proposed the problem because if you get thirty-five different opinions from people who are not equipped academically or by experience or profession to give advice in emotional disturbances, the person who asks the question leaves far more confused, far more deeply depressed than when they came in. In the beginning, we were all beginners. I like to be think– thought of as a beginner. I haven't got anything made. Whatever I am today, I owe to AA and to a good sponsor. Like most people in those days, everybody had a sponsor. And when the group was maybe about eight or nine months old, two entrepreneurs came, and they said that the group was not large enough. And they said that they had a proposition in which we could get people into AA. And I thought, there's a federal pena-penalty for kidnapping. There's also that for ambushing, taking prisoners. So they proposed that they would, they would be responsible whenever the ph-the phone rang. The place that we met in was a workshop of the founder of the group, my sponsor, for the manufacture and adjustment of orthopedic braces and things of that nature. So he had a phone. And then they went out to the bars, that is, those that they had not been outlawed from, and told the bartenders that any time that you have trouble with any drunk, call this number, and we will come. So the phone started to ring. We were five members. In simple subtraction, when you take two away from five, you don't have a lot of numbers to play games with. And they went out, and as you probably suspected, they didn't come back. And the book, Alcoholics Anonymous, does speak to us very directly in reference to returning to the scene of the crime. If we have business To go there. We have a number of bartenders, and cocktail waitresses, and beer salesmen, and pretzel sale– pretzel salesmen. Their business to go in there, but it is rushing in where angels fear to tread for the general population of our program to return to find out what the boys in the back room want. Management takes very good care of that. I was extremely encouraged when I found out we had a program. And there was a lot more to it than putting the cork in the bottle. That's essential, which means it's necessary. That's what's necessary, putting the cork in the bottle, not uncorking the bottle. When I was actively engaged in the eccentricity of paying worship to Bacchus, I wasn't interested in sobriety. And well-meaning and well-intentional people would say to me, "Why don't you cut down on your drinking?" And until I came to AA, I learned that the only sure way, effective way of cutting down on my drinking would have been that I went to surgery and had a tracheotomy, where they cut a slit in my throat, and that way I could have cut down on my drinking because it would have leaked. That's twenty minutes for me? Okay. I was just been told time is up. I may be afraid to walk out of here now. But there is a schedule to keep with the hotel, so, um, I tried to, to give them each twenty minutes, and we could listen to you all day, Eddie. I don't wanna talk anymore. All right. To wrap this, uh, weekend up, would everyone with, um, one year or less please stand up? Stay standing. Stay standing. All right. Would everyone with eleven months or less– No, wait a minute. How do I wanna do this? That's right. Eleven months or less, sit down. Keep standing. No? One month or less, please sit. No, we, we wanna go down to a month. Eleven months or less, sit down. Eleven months. More, sit down. More months. Sit down. Eleven months or more, sit down. Yeah, that's it. Ten months or more, sit down. Nine mo-months or more, sit down. Eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one. We have one. We have two standing. Twenty-nine days or more. Twenty-eight, twenty-seven, twenty-six days, twenty-five, twenty-four, twenty-three, twenty-two, twenty-one, twenty. Would you like to say your name and your sobriety date? My name is Kathy. I'm an alcoholic, and my sobriety date is, um, June tenth. I'm going to ask our oldest member here to give our newest member here the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous. Kathy, this is the book, Alcoholics Anonymous. It's not a novel, so you don't read it just once. It's a textbook. Within its pages contain all of the answers to the problems that you and I have that are related to our problem. Read it. And since it's a textbook, start with page one. Thank you. God bless you. Everybody here is new. I'd like to thank all of you for giving me such a good weekend, and could we please close this weekend with the Lord's Prayer? Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, forever and ever. Amen. Amen.
