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Source: 1955 St. Louis International Convention – 1955 St. Louis Bill W. How We Learned to Recover.mp3 File: 1955-st-louis-international-convention-1955-st-louis-bill-w-how-we-learned-to-recover.mp3 Duration: 01:25:32
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Johannesburg, South Africa, Central Group. Greetings and best wishes to all members attending convention from all here. Secretary of the Central Committee in England. From Helsinki, Finland, give the convention the heartiest greetings of the Finnish AA people, wishing a continuous success for the great work done. The Central Office in Norway sends greetings to the convention from all Norwegian AAs.
The Klubben Group in Oslo, Norway, sends its best wishes for the occasion. We are with you in grateful thoughts in the celebration of this anniversary. We wish you continued successful progress in our mutual existence under our Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. We are glad that we in Norway have had our eyes opened whereby AA really can attain the right power. There is still some work to do before reaching the goal.
We thank you in USA for the manner in which you implant AA to us in Norway. Our most sincere AA greetings. And now a most significant message. Please convey to all who participate in your 20th anniversary gathering my good wishes for a successful meeting. Your society's record of growth and service is an inspiration to those who through research, perseverance, and faith move forward to the solution of many serious personal and public health problems.
From President Dwight D. Eisenhower. This is the first moment that Bill has known and Lois of this message. And now may I introduce your chairman for this evening's session. One of AA's most respected and loyal servants coming from Whittier, California, who a couple of years ago was selected by his area to serve as a member of the Board of Trustees of the General Service Board. I am very happy indeed to introduce Cliff Walker.
Thank distinguished guests, AA friends, and friends of AA from all over the world. A most hearty welcome to our 20th anniversary party. On behalf of the General Service Board, I would like to express our deep gratitude to Hank and his conference committee, to the good people of St. Louis, and to all others responsible in making this such a successful venture. I wonder how many of you people in the audience tonight were in the Jefferson Hotel lobby last night.
I think most of you were. If you were, I wonder if you happened to notice the look on the bartender's face when he came out of his bar and looked at that mass of people in the lobby. And then saw the disgusted look on his face when he looked back into his virtually empty bar. The thought struck me, I'll bet that poor devil heard of this big mass of alcoholics gathering here in St. Louis and went out and ordered a heck of a lot of whiskey.
And then probably hired more help. You know, I'll bet he's the most disappointed man in North America. Seriously, for those of you that are visitors, for those of you that might be new,
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Alcoholics Anonymous is simply a fellowship of ex-alcoholics, ex-drunks, banded together to stay sober on an all-time basis. The only requirement to join our fellowship is a desire to quit drinking. We share our experiences with just those who want to hear them. Tonight marks the first of our three large meetings together. Bill will speak to us tonight of how we learn to recover. He will not only tell us his personal story of recovery, but also of that fascinating, miraculous chain of events and circumstances that finally wove together our present program of recovery.
It seems only fitting and proper that we start this big meeting together by reading the twelve principles that have made possible for so many of us to find sobriety and decency. Ladies and gentlemen, our first legacy, the twelve suggested steps of recovery. One, we admitted we were 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 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, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs. Six, were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character. Seven, humbly asked him to remove our shortcomings. Eight, made lists of all the persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all.
Nine, made direct amends to such people whenever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others. Ten, continued to take personal inventory, and when we were wrong, promptly admitted. Eleven, thought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood him. Ten, praying only for knowledge of his will for us and the power to carry that out. Twelve, having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to the alcoholics and practice these principles in all our affairs.
Four months ago the conference committee informed me that I was to have the privilege of sharing this first great meeting and to introduce Bill. And for the last three months I have been constantly thinking about it. How could I possibly find words to express what I felt for Bill and what I knew you felt for Bill? Most of us here know that Bill is our surviving co-founder, that he authored our big book that so many of us call the Bible, and our Twelve Steps and Traditions.
We know of his prodigious efforts at the foundation and heading up our affairs for so many years. And many of us are aware that for twenty years every thought, every waking moment he has spent
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in finding ways to find more alcoholics to hear of us and to secure our future. However, I have yet to find words big enough, descriptive enough to express the feeling we all have for Bill. So the thought came to me, you're the people that can express that as I introduce him. With love and affection, I give you Bill. Excepting for the day that Lois and I got married, and the day I sobered up, and sure enough the day I was born, this time symbolizes the summit of all our hopes and aspirations.
And judging from the kind of telegrams we've been getting, it all does suggest, too, that the drunks are coming up in the world. You know, I started to write out these talks and discovered something I should have known before. We alcoholics don't like to write, that's work, it's much easier to talk. But I did write out a page and a half, and it sounds pretty good, so I think I'll read it to you just to kick it off here.
We are gathered here at St. Louis to celebrate AA's twentieth anniversary. We have come to thank God that he has delivered such great numbers of us out of our bondage. We are here to tell AA's innumerable friends of our gratitude for all that they have done to make this wholesale miracle of recovery possible, and to share with them and with each other the sure evidence of God's grace of which this wonderful occasion is such a moving and convincing token.
Close by us this evening are many of our wives, husbands, mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters, the ones who so often sat through the dark night of alcoholism with us, always waiting in devotion and hope for a brighter morning to come. That their faith and fidelity has at last been justified, that it has indeed made this occasion possible, is something for a gratitude that none can put into words, but we do hope that all these, so near and so dear, will surely feel the full measure of the thanksgiving that is to be found in our hearts.
Most especially do we wish to pay tribute to our friends of medicine and religion, whose knowledge, faith, and help without sin was invested in the formation of our society in its early days and in all its immense growth in the twenty years just concluded. Nor can we ever forget those couriers for AA, the men and women of the press and of all kinds of communications, who have carried AA's message to alcoholic sufferers and their families.
Only God can know the immense amount of misery, even of death, that they have averted by telling the story of Alcoholics Anonymous to the whole world. We have gathered at St. Louis for yet another purpose, which is to declare that Alcoholics Anonymous has come of age. Mind you, I'm not claiming we grew up. We are to consider…
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and what, over the long future, our responsibilities are going to be for the preservation of this vital and treasured inheritance, the sum of which is the knowledge of how to recover from our illness, how to stay together in unity, and how best to serve by carrying the AA message to all those who still suffer the strange and deadly malady of alcoholism. Now before we go any further, there's some folks you ought to meet, some of them you know already, and of course, first of all, I'm going to pay a tribute and my respects and love to Lord, the one who stood by me and saw me out of darkness into the light.
Now then, in our society, something or somebody always carries the message. So I now want to make known to you my friend, Abby, the man who talked to me across the kitchen table back in November of 1934. The link between so many friends and so many events that were even then conspiring in the mind of God to make this society what it is. My friend, Abby. As each of us knows, Dr. Bob took his leave of us in 1950.
And so we have here tonight two folks who can stand in his place instead as symbols of all that he was and is and always will be. We've got with us young Bob and we've got Sue. Well, I first knew them when Sue was having her, well, her first date. And I think young Bob was a kind of a hotrod driver at the time, a tinkered car. Here they are. Stand up, Sue. My gracious, we're always overlooking something. Now there is young Bob's good lady. How are you?
And just on beyond that, that fellow now with the balding scalp, he used to have hair, that is A.A. number four, Ernie. Well, now here I've got ahead of myself again. You remember in the last chapter of the book, The Vision for You, Dr. Bob and I approached the chap that has since been called the man on the bed. The man on the bed, dear old Bill Gates. And he too has left us, that is if he really has. So his wife, Henrietta, is here. Hi, Henrietta.
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Now then, it can't be too often said that nobody invented Alcoholics Anonymous. It was surely a divine and a benign conspiracy. And many willing hearts and minds were used by God to supply streams of influence and ideas and war maids to get this thing going. I think it would be too bad if we got the idea that any of us invented Alcoholics Anonymous. We didn't. Every single idea was imported in here, if you please, from non-alcoholics, people we sometimes snub.
Now then, there are a couple of Sky Pilots here who are just about, I don't think I want to put in that about, they're just the greatest friends that we A.A.s have got. So I don't want to, you know, get out of the time sequence. I don't want to play favorites, but because Sam Shoemaker showed up first, we'll get him to stand up. You see, it was Sam 20 years ago, teaching and preaching, under whose spell Abby fell. And the basic principles that we inherit here today were derived from Sam and his friends of 20 years ago.
How much that means, I needn't say. Now we have a local character, also a clergyman, and we call him Father Ed. I think it is probably true that every human being who knows him says to his face or privately, this is the greatest example and spiritual figure and inspiration that I know. I say it, Father Ed. Now it's a stark fact that A.A. could have never worked unless it had had the support of medicine and ideas in medicine.
Another one of the many founders of A.A. departed not long ago. His name was William D. Silkworth. I know in our annals, and I think that in the annals of medicine, he will someday be accounted no less than a medical saint. And he has been followed by innumerable great friends of medicine. We shall hear some of them here, one we already have heard today. Unless we had been able to project onto the alcoholic the true nature of his conditions, I don't think we could ever board holes big enough in these egos to get enough humility to get well.
And that was Doc Silkworth's contribution. He's here in spirit. So I now want to introduce to you A.A.'s first friend in psychiatry. And I must observe very quickly that if only we could be as humble and as tolerant of psychiatrists as they have proved to be to us, well, we'd be growing up some more, not just coming of age. So I'm going to present to you Harry Thiebaud. He is the fellow who said to his associates in a medical paper, our profession is wearing bigger blinders than it knows.
Harry is the fellow who got us before the New York State Medical Society, the great American Psychiatric Association, when it really cost him something to do it, when we weren't so well known.
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Harry. Well, I'll let Dr. Silkworth's mantle fall over both of these fellows, but we can't have just psychiatrists here. We've got to have a plain, everyday M.D., a damn good one, too. I speak of Jack Norris. You heard him this afternoon. He's about to head doctor up at the Eastman Kodak Company, one of our trustees. And so I introduce him as the symbol of practitioners of medicine throughout the world who have given us such unfettered support.
Jack. Thank you. I got all but one? Oh, yeah, that's it. Of course, these friends of medicine and religion are very special friends, friends we couldn't have done without. And he has a lot of friends that it couldn't have done without who are neither doctors or practitioners. The one I'm going to talk about now is a lawyer. He's chairman of our board of trustees. He's been on that board for years. He has devoted himself to our cause, and the sole reason for it is that he loves it.
So I introduce him as the symbol of all the friends in the world that we have who love us more than they ought, no doubt. But here's Bernard Smith. Now, folks, my speech-making has ended, and I'll put away this writing, and we get down to straight A.A. business. It is already traditional in Alcoholics Anonymous, we do not make speeches. We just make talks about our own experiences and about the experiences of those around us.
And so my talk must be no exception. It was about the middle of the summer of 1934 when I lay in Charlie Town's drying-out joint on Central Park Way. I'd been there before. I'd met dear old Dr. Silkworth. I'd been one of those people that he felt might recover, that I might be reeducated. And it was a night just as hot as this, and I lay upstairs knowing for the first time that I was utterly hopeless.
Lois was downstairs, and this kind old man was trying in his gentle way to tell her the news that so many so near and dear to us have received or have guessed or have known in their hearts. He was trying to tell her that I was hopeless. What the matter was, was with me. And Lois was exclaiming, but this fellow has a tremendous amount of willpower. You never saw such an obstinate man in his life when he sets his heart on something.
He's tried desperately to get well. We've tried everything. Why, oh why, Dr. can't he stop? And the good man went on to explain that my drinking, once a habit, had got to be an obsession, a veritable insanity that condemned me to drink against my will. Against My Will, And Said She Doctors Tell Me How Really Serious It Is, So He Had to
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Let Her Gently Know, That I Would Have to Be Locked Up Soon, Else Go Mad or Die, Well Upstairs I Knew the Story, It Had Been the End of a Long Road, And for the Benefit of some of our friends who may not yet know too much about drunk, I might scurry back over the time when I was a kid, and maybe acquired some of the traits that had a lot to do with this insatiable craving for drugs. I was brought up in a little Yankee town of about fifty houses, born under the shadow of a mountain there, called it Mount Aeolus. First recollection looking out of my crib and seeing this vast and mysterious mountain, wondering what it was, if ever I would be up that high. But I was soon distracted by my aunt, who on my fourth birthday made me a plate of fudge. And for the next thirty-five years, folks, I pursued the fudge of life and forgot all about the mountain. Now, when I was ten, I went to live with my grandfather and grandmother. They were wonderful, old-fashioned Yankees, the kind of breed I guess is pretty near extinct today. I was ten then. I was tall and gawky, just the way I am now. And I felt pretty bad about it, that small kids could push me around in the fight. I remember being very depressed. This went on a year or two. And then I began to have a fierce resolve to win. I would be a number one man at this or that or the other thing. For example, grandfather came along one day with a book and said, well, this is all about arch training. Says only the arch trainers know how to make and throw a boomerang. Oh, I thought to myself, here is my chance. I will be the first white man, the number one man to make and throw a boomerang. Well, any kid could have a whimsy like that, last two, three days. Mine lasted for six solid months in which nothing else was done but whittle on them damn boomerangs. Out in the shop at night with the old raw shave and the lantern, sawed the headboard out of the bed to get just the right piece of timber. And finally, sure enough, I made a boomerang that flung around the churchyard and darn near cut grandpappy's head off when it came back. Now in reality, I was fashioning a boomerang of another sort that returning almost killed me. I had to be an athlete because I wasn't an athlete. I had to be a musician because I couldn't carry a tune. I had to be the president in the boarding school. And by dint of this awful perseverance and drive, which of course was nothing but an attempt to run away from my own fears, oh, I did become captain of the team. I learned to play the fiddle in three years well enough to lead the high school orchestra, but it was an awful bad band, folks. And so it went. All or nothing.
And I must be number one. Now look how the scene changes. I'm in boarding school. We're very, I'm very successful now. I feel secure. You know, grandfather's liberal allowance and the love and adulation of so many. Yes, I was somebody. I was secure. Only lacked one ingredient and that was romance. And if you will beg this intimacy, I'll tell you about
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the minister's daughter. Because it's so well illustrated what the matter was. As I said, I was very awkward and gawky and she took an interest in me. So now things are complete. There is romance, there is security, there is applause. I'm ecstatically happy. When one morning in comes the principal with a very long face and he finally blurted out that Bertha had died suddenly the night before because of a birth tumor.
I dropped like a plummet into a depression that lasted for three solid years. I didn't graduate from school. I couldn't sense it. The average kid, oh, he would have felt very bad. But at that age it wouldn't have lasted long, would it? After time, Lois comes along. Things get brighter. I'm alive again, going concerned. Then comes the World War. Young officers, new bedsitters. There we were projected among the society folk of the town for the first time I saw a butler. And again this terrible feeling of awkwardness, this inability to speak two or three words in a row.
Just overwhelming. And then somebody handed me a Bronx cocktail. Well, since booze had killed off an awful lot of my relatives, I had been repeatedly warned about it. But I took this. And another. And another. Ah, what magic. I had found the elixir of life. For suddenly that strange barrier that had always seemed to stand between me and people around me, even those in the area, went right down. Ghosts of Jordan drew near to me.
I drew near to them. I was part of life at last. Talk freely. Ah, the missing link. Then come the war days, the return. Lois and I are living in the city now. Like so many returning vets, I, the officer, have to go to work as a clerk. Oh no, that only spurs the same old drop. This time I think I set out to be president of Steel Corporation while a clerk in the New York Central Railroad. But the railroad soon fired me because I was such a bad bookkeeper. However, it kept on going and by a series of queer events, leading the way to now, I got into Wall Street, that famous shortcut to wealth and power.
And in a few years time, there was too much money for one so young. And in this period, I was drinking to dream greater dreams of power. Then comes the crash. Everything melts away. Well, at first I wasn't too much disturbed. Although Lois had been mighty well disturbed by all my drinking. I went in debt, but I pounded on my chest and said, yeah, oh yes, I can do this again. I looked with disgust at the people jumping from the towers of high finance. Why, we've done it once, we can do it again. But I didn't do it again because the obsession already condemned me to drinking.
So I began sinking. I became a hanger-on in Wall Street. Couldn't get a toehold anymore. Without money, I was discredited. People knew what I was like. A depression was coming on. And so, finally I slide down into the state where I was not drinking to dream dreams of power. I was drinking to forget. And again, the depression settled down. Then in the bottom, there was a wonderful business opportunity. And I had to sign a contract
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that during its life, which might be long, I would not drink. Well, the opportunity was so colossal from the Wall Street point of view, I said, well, I'll soon have Lois out of that department store where she's supporting me. I'll make much more than ever before. This time, we're going to Iraq. And when I put my word on that contract, and we Vermonters have set great store by contract, I really believed it. And for two or three months, I did say so. The operation began.
And suddenly, I went on a little trip to look at an industry. A few engineers in the hotel. A jug comes around. I find that I can say no. I think of my contract. I think of Lois. And then as the evening wore on and they played cards, again the jug would come around and somebody finally said, well, this is Applejack. Jersey Lightning. Have one. And as easily as I had said no, I suddenly realized that I had never had in all my drinking career any Jersey Lightning. So I said, boys, one little shot wouldn't hurt me.
Three days later, after complete oblivion, my new business partner had me on the phone and told me it was all over. And from that point, the curve of my descending fatality was just like going down like a ski jump until I'm back in the hospital where I know the score and Lois knows the score. Well, I kept sober for a while. I was horribly frightened. And in Armistice Day, 1934, I was in the coils again.
I'd come home at four in the morning dragging a golf bag and Lois would pick me up in the airway, and I'd have a big gash in my scalp. I'll never forget how I felt and how she looked that morning. I'm back on one, two, three bottles of gin a day. Couldn't stop. Knew I couldn't stop. Went in the telephone room, and holy smokes, it's old Ebby. That one over there. And I knew instantly over the phone that he was sober. He'd never been in New York in any such condition before.
I'd heard they were going to put him away. Alcoholic insanity. And I said, come on over. We'll talk about the good old days. Why did I say that? Because the present was unbearable and there wasn't going to be any future. That's why we talk about the good old days. So he's filling in the door, seated across the kitchen table. I have a big crock of gin with a lot of pineapple juice in it, so Lois would think it's cocktails when she got home from the store.
Ebby sits down. Suddenly there's something different about him. Not only is he sober, but there's something different. I can't put my finger on it. So I ask him, I say, well, what's all this about? You say you're not drinking? You also say you're not on the water wagon? What gives you? Well, Ebby said, I got religion. Well, that was a crusher. He got religion. I'd been brought up in this wonderful engineering school where somehow I'd got the impression that man was God.
So that one hit me hard. I was discouraged. I was disappointed. So I said to Ebby, politely as I could, well, what brand have you got, Ebby? Oh, he said, I don't think it's got any special brand name, maybe. Because I fell in with a group of people. I don't go along with all their teachings by any means. The Oxford group. But he said, those fellows did give me some ideas. And here they are. Very simple.
He said, I learned that I had to admit I was licked. I learned that I ought to take stock of myself and confess my defects to another in confidence.
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I learned that I needed to make restitution, clear away the debris of my past misbehavior. I was told that it was a fine idea to go in for the kind of giving that has no price tag on it, giving of yourself to somebody. Now he says, I know you're going to gag on this, but they taught me that I ought to pray to whatever God there is for the power to carry out these simple precepts. And he said, you know, it's a funny thing, a mysterious thing, but even before I'd done all this, as soon as I made up my mind that I would try with an open mind, it seemed to me that this thing was lifted out of me.
I hadn't had a drink for several months. Well, Ebbie didn't try to pressure me, didn't try to evangelize me, and pretty soon he was gone. Well, I went on drinking for two or three weeks, but in no waking hour could the spectacle of that fellow Ebbie be erased from my mind, nor could I forget what he had said. I still gagged on the God-blessed stuff. The rest of it made sense. Well, by this time I'm getting worse and worse.
And at last I said to myself, just as a cancer patient would say to himself, who are you to say how you're going to get well? As a cancer patient, you will certainly seek out any doctor who can exercise those malign selves. And after all, what is this alcoholism but a cancer of the mind, of the emotions, perchance of the soul? So if there is a great physician, you'd better hustle up. I started for Towns Hospital to see Dr. Silkworth.
I thought it would be better to sober up first. As a conservative Yankee, it was never due to have one of these emotional conversions, you see. So I get to the hospital. I'm waving a bottle. The old doc looks at me very sadly. I yell at him and say, I got something this time. Still more sadly, he said, I guess you have. You better get upstairs and go to bed. So upstairs I went. I wasn't in too awful shape.
Four days I was free of what little sedatives and a few drinks they gave me. But boy, was I depressed. Still gagging on the God business. Bright and early one morning, this fellow shows up. Stands in the door, smiling broadly. I didn't see what was so funny about my condition, but he was smiling. And then I got a suspicion. I said, well, now maybe this today is going to evangelize me. That's what I was hoping for in all this sweetness and light.
But no, he hung fire. He made me wait until I had sin. Well, what was this neat little formula once more? Oh, yes. Oh, yes. You admitted you were licked. You got honest with yourself. You talked it out with somebody else. You made amends to the people you'd harmed. And you tried to give of yourself without sin and no demand for reward. And you prayed to whatever God you thought there was, even as an experiment.
As simple as that. Yet, as it proved, as mysterious as that. Well, it was some small talk and he was gone. My depression deepened. And finally it seemed to me that I was in the bottom of the pit. The humiliation was utter. I still gagged on the notion of a power higher than myself. But I suppose, just for a moment, the last vestige of my prideful obstinacy was crushed. For I found myself crying out, If there is a God, will he show himself?
Now I am ready to do anything, anything. And the room lit up in a great white light. I was caught into an ecstasy, for which I have no words to describe.
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It seemed to me in the mind's eye that I was on a mountain, a great wind was blowing. And suddenly it burst upon me that I was a free man. Slowly the ecstasy subsided. I lie on the bed. But now I lie in another world, a new world of consciousness. And all about me and through me, there was a wonderful feeling of presence. And I thought to myself, So this is the God of the preachers. A great peace stole over me.
And thoughts like these would come. No matter how wrong the world seems to be, it's still all right. Things are all right with God in this world. But insensibly, my modern education crawled back and it said, Young fellow, you've gone nuts. You'd better get the doctor down here. He's a good alienist. Maybe you're hallucinating. So I got the doctor down and he asked me a lot of questions. I don't think I poured it on as heavily as I have just now because it didn't seem possible that any such thing could have happened to anybody.
After a while he said, No, Bill. He said, You're not crazy. I've read about these things in the books. Sometimes these spiritual experiences do release a man from alcoholism. Not very often. Lightning strikes only once in a while. But whatever you've got, my boy, you'd better hang on to it. It's just so much better than what had you only a few hours ago. Well, that was a tremendous reassurance. What great words those were for alcoholic phenomena.
Supposing he had spent time trying to persuade me that I was hallucinating. Maybe that would have made the difference. Who can say? At any rate, I'm soon down among the Oxford group. We're down at the Mission. We're up at Town Hospital. Abby comes to live with Lois and me in Brooklyn. And I am after the drunks, I guess on twin-jet propulsion. This sudden spiritual experience has its disadvantages. I was soon to be heard saying that I was going to fix all the drunks in the world.
And other people had very, very bad luck with them. In fact, Sam had had to run a bad luck. They'd had a batch over there in an apartment near the church to save. And one of those did not get saved. And none did, I think. But one threw a shoe through his window and it went right through a nice stained-glass window in Sam's church. So they were kind of off drunk when I came along. No wonder they thought that I had better forget about the drunks.
But as I say, I was proud as Lucifer and still very conceited, so I had a kind of a twin-jet propulsion now. I suppose some genuine spirituality, plus this desire to be the number one guy. Well, it didn't pan out very well. At the end of six months, nobody had got sober. And boy, we tried them by the score. They'd get on the rock a little while and then they'd flop business. About this time, folks were beginning to say to me, my friend, why don't this guy go to work?
Is he going to be a missionary for life? And it seemed like a good idea. Lois was still in a department store. So I insinuated myself into a little proxy row that involved control of a little machine tool company out in Akron. And there was the other side and my side, and this all came from an acquaintance I'd scraped in a brokerage shop. And soon we were out in Akron fighting for control of this company.
Well, the other fellows had more proxies when the chips were down, and our side was linked.
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And our side was so discouraged about all this, and they cared so little for me, which led to the point that they carelessly left me in the Mayflower Hotel with only about $10. Well, they went on a Friday, and Saturday I was walking up and down the lobby wondering what in the dickens I'd do. The bar at one end was filling up, and the people in the bar were also filling up, and there was that buzz in there.
Down at the other end of the lobby, for some reason I kept pausing before a church directory. And all of a sudden I was seized with the idea, listen, fellow, you're going to get drunk. I was feeling mighty sorry for myself. Well, no, maybe you won't get drunk. Maybe you could just go into the bar there, you know, and drink some ginger ale and scrape an acquaintance. And then I panicked. Now, that was really a gift.
I had never panicked before in the presence of alcohol, believe me. And then I remembered that in trying to help other people, it had helped me too. And for the first time I got off my high horse and said, gee, you need another alcoholic to talk to. You need a guy like that just as much as he needs you. Then came a very strange train of circumstance. I called up a creature by the name of Walter Tunks, an Episcopal padre out there, since become our great friend.
In great eagerness, I poured my tail out for him. I told him how maybe he knew some people that could put me in touch with a drunk or so. I thought maybe he'd know some of the Oxford groupers who had been out there. But when the good man learned that I was an alcoholic and looking for another alcoholic to work on, he apparently visioned, you know, two people drunk instead of one. But he finally got the point.
He gave me a list of people. Ten folks on that list. And I began calling them up. Well, as I said, it was Saturday afternoon. People were going somewhere. Maybe they'd see me in church tomorrow. And the list dwindled and dwindled and dwindled. And it came down to one name at the very end. And that name was Henrietta Sarbanes. Well, I had a vague recollection from Wall Street's time of meeting Miss Sarbanes, formerly president of Goodyear and now Sarbanes rubber, a man even then on in years.
I couldn't imagine calling up his good wife, telling her that I was a drunk from New York looking for a drunk to work on, not on Saturday afternoon. I think I even went downstairs and walked up and down that lobby some more. And something keeps saying to me, you better call her. You better call her. So I called her. A lovely southern voice came over the wire. In nothing flash she got the drift of what I was saying.
She said, I'm no alcoholic, but believe me, I've had my humiliations. I've had my troubles. And when you talk about spiritual things, I think I understand. Why don't you come right out here? So soon I'm at the gatehouse of the Sarbanes estate and this lady stands in the door. And we talk a long time. And she said, I know just the man, just the man for you. It's Dr. Bob. He's a wonderful chap. His wife Anne, a grand person.
He's tried so hard. I know he wants to stop. He's tried medical cure. He's tried various religious remedies. He's tried the OG. But somehow he cannot seem to stop. Seem to Stop, Oh, I Should Praise Yes, The Henrietta Kept The Phone, And The Beloved One We Know As Ann, Came On The Wire, Henrietta Explained That There Was A Man Here From New York, Explained That I Was Alcoholic, It Seemed He Got Better,
[01:00:16]
Maybe She and Dr. Bob could come over. Well, Ann said, Henrietta, it's this way. I don't think we can come today. Dr. Bob sets great store by Mother's Day, and on this occasion he has just come home. And he's brought me a great big potted plant. And he's put it on the table, but Henrietta, he's so potted he's on the floor and he can't get up. Well, said Henrietta, brightly, what about tomorrow? Why don't you come over to dinner?
Well, she didn't think she'd feel up to eating the day after, but she said, I'll try and bring it. So she invites me out to dinner. And at five o'clock on the afternoon following Mother's Day, there is Dr. Bob and Ann. That wonderful, wonderful couple. That man of whom I can say, of all the people I know, he is the one that I never had a hard word with in all our associations. This was the man who was that remarkable nun, sister of nature, was later at St. Thomas Hospital to hospitalize, medically treat 5,000 cases of alcoholism when A.A. was still quite young.
This was the man who was to head Akron's group number one. But I'll tell you folks, that afternoon he didn't look a damn bit like a founder. He was shaggy. He was very uneasy. He said he could only stay about five minutes. Ann Henrietta, bless your soul, I wish you were here. She was the soul of discretion. She soon had us off in the little library where we could talk. And Dr. Bob and I talked for hours.
I found right away that, spiritually speaking, he was much better informed, really much more of a person than I. But strangely enough, though, a doctor, he had no conception of this medical side of it. And just before I had come to Akron, Dr. Silkworth supplied us with one of the missing links in this deal by saying, look Bill, you're having nothing but failure. You're preaching at these people. You're talking to them about being absolutely honest and absolutely pure and absolutely unselfish and absolutely loving, and then you top that off by telling of this mysterious experience of yours.
No wonder they point their fingers to the head. You should turn this thing the other way around. Aren't you the fellow who showed me that book by William James that says that deflation at great depth is the foundation for most spiritual experiences, at least those that transform? Have you forgotten all about that? Have you forgotten that Dr. Jung in Zurich was the man who told a certain alcoholic, later to become a friend of Eben's, that his only salvation was a spiritual experience?
No, Bill, you've got the card before the horse. Give them this medical business and give it to them hot. Pour it into them how they have an obsession that condemns them to drink and a sensitivity analogy of the body that condemns them to go mad or die. And pour that in first and maybe coming from another alcoholic, one alcoholic talking to another, maybe that will soften them up at depth and then you can begin to prod out your other package.
Well, I remembered what Dr. Silkworth had said. I went kind of slow on that fireworks religious experience, and I just talked to Dr. Bob a good deal about my case, so he got a good identification, and then I poured this medical story into it.
[01:05:17]
Well, you'll see by reading his story in the AA book, you'll see even better if you hear that full-length recording he once made of his voice, that this was the side of the picture and the side of me that impressed him. And apparently what I had to say struck him at depth. But this was a mutual thing. I realized as I talked to him for the first time without preaching, for the first time feeling I need him as much as he needs me.
Yet that was it, working with other people, getting this admission of powerlessness, first in the mind and then at great depth, maybe that was it. Well, Dr. Bob had one more fling. Ann invited me to come over and live in that wonderful home. I can remember how she sat in the corner by the fireplace and read from the Bible in the morning when we had our quiet time. I stayed in Akron that summer, continuing this vain practice course. Dr. Bob had himself just one more fling.
One morning he got up and looked at me rather uneasily and said, Bill, for a great number of years I've had to go down to Atlantic City to a convention, a medical convention. I haven't missed one in years. Do you think I'd better go? Ann was behind him and said, oh, no, no, no. Well, I said, why don't you? After all, we have to live in the world with this drug. Well, he said, maybe we will. So off he went to the convention. Nothing was heard for several days. Finally his nurse called up one morning and said, well, he's over here. Husband and I scraped him off the station platform about four o'clock. Come over and see what you can do.
We got him back to 855 Ardmore, got him to bed, and then we learned a very alarming thing. It appeared that he had to perform an operation in about three or four days. And that nobody but he could really do it, as was so circumstantial. He just had to do it. Well, here he was shaking like a leaf. And could we get him sober enough to meet that operation? It meant that perhaps he got a toehold back in the hospital again. So Annie and I took turns around the clock trying to taper the old boy down.
And this tapering went on until he was almost sober the morning of the operation. That time I slept in the room for him. I looked across at his bed. He was wide awake, still shaking some. He looked at me and he said, Bill, I'm going to go through with it. At first I thought it was the operation. Now he said, I mean this thing we've been talking about. We drove him to the hospital at 9 o'clock and I handed him a bottle of beer, which he guzzled as steady as nerves to hold the knife as he went in.
We performed the operation, successfully came out of there, started making restitution immediately, and never had a drink since the day of his death in 1970. Well, pretty soon Dr. Bob said, Bill, you set a great score on working with these other drunks. Don't you think we'd be a little taper if we got active? Well, I said, yeah, I think they'll be fine. Where can we find some? Well, he said they always have a batch down here at the Acton City Hospital. I'll call up and see what they got.
[01:10:10]
So he called up, got a hold of a nurse in the receiving ward down there and explained that a man from New York had just brought him a kind of a new cure for alcoholism. They used to call it cure in those days. And she'd seen Dr. Bob in operation before then, so she said, is that so, Dr. Bob? And she said, have you tried it yourself, may I inquire? Yes, he explained. You put this fellow in a private room and you'll give him dust and so, and soon he'll be down.
Well, a day or two later, Dr. Bob and I were looking into the face of the man on the bed, dear Henrietta's husband, old Bill, A.A. number three, whose story you will now find in the new edition of the book which we just brought out here. And he was pretty glancy-eyed and we went through all this business about the allergy and infection and Bill perked up interest. And then we began to tell him of the spiritual approach and Bill shook his head and said, no, he says, I'm too far gone.
He said, I always believed in God, he used to be a deacon in church, but he said, boys, I've been in and out of this place six times in four months and I can't even get home for a bit from here. I'm afraid to go up. He says, no, it's too late for me. He said, as a matter of fact, I still believe in God, but I know mighty well he don't believe in me. Well, he said brightly, Bill, could we come back and see you tomorrow? He said, yeah, he said, if you could, you're the fellow who could understand all right.
I'd like to see you. So on the morrow we came back and as I recall it, Bill was talking to Henrietta over there and as we came in he pointed to us and said, yeah, there's them fellows I was telling you about. They're the fellows that understand, they really understand what this racket is. And then Bill told how during the night that hope had dawned on him. If we could do it, we could do it. Maybe we could all do together what we couldn't do separately.
And a day or two later Bill said, Henrietta, fetch me my clothes. We're going to get up and get out of here. So Bill was brought his clothes, walked out of that hospital a free man, and he too never took a drink again. So the spark that was to be AA had been struck. And the first AA group had been born. But of course we didn't know it. Well, Bob and I went frantically to work on more of these characters coming in there. Again, the long string of failure until we turned up this turkey. He was the beginning of the young people's department at that time.
And he later on became AA number four and I guess we scraped up one or two more that summer. And in the fall, proxy business falling through, I came back to New York. And now endowed with a little more humility, I guess, a little more savvy, very slowly groups began to take shape down there. And Lois, not content with nursing me all these years, thought it would be wonderful if we filled that old house at 182 Clinton Street with drunks. She had come to love them so.
And I thought it was a wonderful idea, too. We could see these ginks at very close range. You know, you could pick up a lot about alcoholism. Well, we picked up a lot, all right, because we used to have as high as five in the house sometimes, and sometimes all of them were drunk at once. That's been a possibility. On another occasion, we came home to find one swinging a piece of turkey. Came home to find one swinging a piece of tobacco on another down in the cellar.
I don't know what the resentment was, but… And on still another occasion, being away a week,
[01:15:00]
and only one in the house at the moment, we came back to find him dead, a suicide. However, out in Akron, they had better luck housing drunks. Good old Wally and his wife out there, or… Oh, they processed a lot of them and had good batting average. Not so down at our place. However, we continued working on alcoholics. Some of them found in Sam Dock's group, or some down at Calvary Mission, some up at Charlie Town Hospital where good old Dr. Silkworth, at risk to his reputation, was letting us talk to him, and very, very slowly, a little nucleus formed.
And then there was Hank. And there was Fitz. Fitz was the one who wrote that delightful story, Our Southern Friend, in the book. And soon Fitz was off to Washington, and a fella comes in from Cohoes, New York, and he gets a hold of it. And little by little, slowly, oh so slowly, with failure, oh so much failure, this little group took shape. In other words, if they were too close to us, they stayed drunk, but a couple echelons off, they began to get well, and we began to have little meetings in our parlor.
Well, by this time, it began to be clear that our great friends among the groupers had really shaved our skin. And they had done it on two counts, bless them. On one count, they had told us what to do, but certain of their attitudes were not very approachable to our cause. In fact, we had to reverse them as experience taught us. So they taught us, meanwhile, what to do and what not to do, and that was the contribution they made, and a mention.
And a little later, we began to be a group down in New York. People would ask, what kind of a group is it, what's the name of it? And we'd just say, oh, well, we're just a bunch of drunks trying to get along. And the meeting sort of centered around us. Now out in Akron, friends began to show up. Gee, I wish they could be here along with Henrietta. T. Henry and Clarence were waiting. As a matter of fact, my proxy flight had put good old T. Henry out of a very, very good job.
And he was about to lose his house. Nevertheless, he let alcoholics and Dr. Bob and me come in there and meet, along with some non-alcoholics in those early meetings. And he put up with an awful lot of cigarette burns on the carpet, and they had rather stricter ideas of things, I guess a good message of baptism. But boy, did they treat us loyally. And I'll never forget the inspiration of that poem on this frightening little group.
Each one wondering who might slip next. In those days, a slip was a terrible thing. I mean a slip by one who had been sober anyway at the time. A very frightening thing. We were like the people on Rick and Backer's raft, towed the dark sea of alcoholism next to us. Well, little by little, those two groups had split. Ours began to incline toward Philadelphia and Washington and scattered points. In Akron, they began to have Cleveland businesses.
Clarence and Dorothy and Abbey and all those folks. In 1937, I got back to work in Wall Street for a brief sell. But things fell apart, if you remember, financially in the fall of that year, and I'm suddenly out of a job again, not having got a soul. I remember coming west to kind of chase Detroit and Cleveland for some sort of position in the financial world. I think we'd been back and forth, too, several times.
We communicated a good deal, of course. And I visited Dr. Bach. And I'll never forget that fall day in 1937 when he and I sat in his living room counting nausea.
[01:20:05]
We could count failures galore, but now we could count some successes. Successes were very, very grim cases. Last gas cases. Now for over a couple of years, unheard of. And moreover, there were four or more of them. And we had upwards of 40 dry a while, I think. And as we counted up the score, it suddenly burst upon us that a new light was shining into the dark world of the alcoholic. And that a chain reaction among us, one carrying the good news to the next, had started and could conceivably encompass the world.
And by the joy of that realization, up to now we had been flying blind. But now we felt sure, ever so sure, that this was a new life. We wept for joy, and Bob and Aunt and I bowed our head in thanks. And then came a very sobering thought. Here was this precious knowledge in the hands of such a few. Must all the alcoholics in the world come to New York City or Akron or Cleveland if they were to get one?
No, that couldn't be. Simply precious knowledge. And by now, too, we had found that alcoholics, though sober, could still be awfully erratic people. Let alone getting grown up, we hadn't come to any age of responsibility. Would the forces that divide society all over the world invade us and smash us up, as they had invaded and destroyed the Washingtonian movement of a century before? How could we hang together?
We people clinging to this new lifeline, this combination of medicine, religion, and the alcoholic system. Could we hang together? Could we grow? Could we carry the message to the distant alcoholics? Yes, it was a terrific responsibility. And as we sat there that day, there wasn't too much light on how that might be accomplished. So when I stand here and look out over you, just a few of my dear friends, just the small children of the total recent size of AA today, I have to explain, with you, indeed, what has God wrought.
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