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Source: 1960 Long Beach International Convention – 1960 Long Beach Int Conv, AA speakers from Around the World 2of 2.mp3 File: 1960-long-beach-international-convention-1960-long-beach-int-conv-aa-speakers-from-around-the-world-2of-2.mp3 Duration: 00:39:24
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Susan L. is an old-timer in AA and has now celebrated her fourteenth year of rebirth in the fellowship. She came to AA in New York and now for the past four or five years has been doing a wonderful job in Runaway Bay in the West Indies Federation. She was a loner for some time, which as you all know I'm sure was pretty rough going, but has now just recently started a group in Ocho Rios. Susan. My name is Susan and I am an alcoholic and I hope Ken of Kingston, Jamaica is here because I really owe my whole trip here to Ken's daring suggestion that I pick up and leave Jamaica and come to the twenty-fifth anniversary last March.
He said, why don't you come? He said, I'm going up there and if I can go all the way from Jamaica, so can you. And I said, who me? Go all the way to California? And he said, yes. And that gave me the courage and I wrote Anne, my dear old friend at General Services, the next day and made my registration. And also the other reason I hope Ken is here is because it's Ken of Kingston, Jamaica who has kept the flame of AA burning in Jamaica for the last nine years.
As our chairman said, I just came there, my Jamaica journey started six years ago, but Ken has been there day in, day out, doing the job not only of holding the local group together in Kingston, but of being the official AA Grover Whelan of Kingston, Jamaica, leaving all Americans, Canadians, English, who come in on cruise ships. And as Bill said last night in his wonderful stirring address, on this twenty-fifth anniversary we're talking more and more, it seems, about communication as the key to AA.
And when I first went to Jamaica six years ago, as always when I go to any strange country or strange city, my first telephone call was to AA. Anne had given me the name of someone in Kingston to call and I called him and I got a very clipped English accent on the other end of the phone. And he said, oh yes, he said, I tried that AA, that Alcoholics Anonymous, but I didn't like it very much and I gave it up. He said, of course, I've just gotten back from the nursing home, 18 months in England, but he said, you call Ken.
So I next tried communicating with Ken, and because the telephone system is so ghastly in Jamaica, Ken's voice came over and I thought, oh gosh, he's blasted, he sounds blasted, and I think he must have thought I was because our voices were down like this on the Jamaican telephone. And so after that initial contact with Ken, I didn't know more about seeing him for another 12 months because I had to go back on the north coast where I live at Runaway Bay on a farm quite far from any alcoholics or non-alcoholics that's surrounded by cows and horses and the non-drinking species.
But anyhow, my communication theme is that in Jamaica, you know, I was brought up in AA in New York City, in Boston, and I was brought up on first nickel therapy and then it became dime therapy. Well, in Jamaica, the surest way for me to get drunk would be to try, if I were ever in a jittery state, to try to get through to Ken in Kingston or Michael or somebody in Montego Bay because to get through on the phone, you have to shout so loud and you lose your temper and you get so upset and you get such a resentment against the Jamaican telephone company that you wind up absolutely blasted.
So I don't try any telephone therapy at all. I get right in the car. I'm happy to say that I'm blessed in Jamaica now having a senior. She is someone that I met 17 years ago, I mean, 15, 14 years ago, but she's been in 17 years and she's lately taken up farming. When I need to talk to the only other woman AA in Jamaica, I get in my car and I drive three and a half hours to her farm and we mix in AA talk with her tending, her cattle, her horses, her chickens, and her farm where she works from 5 a.m. until midnight as a very hardworking, successful farmer.
[00:05:00]
But how do you go about helping someone in AA in Jamaica? Well, Ken can tell you much more, as I say, because he has done it much longer, but recently I've been blessed again with having a baby dumped on my doorstep in Ocho Rios and he was a big baby. He was a captain of a boat like Captain Jack and our friend from England associated with the sea. And the difference between sponsoring someone in Jamaica and sponsoring someone in New York is that you don't have anyone else to share the sponsorship with.
This began April 28th of this year and the newest man that I could have Cleo get in touch with was three hours away in Montego Bay or three hours away in Kingston on our lovely roads. Those of you who have been to Jamaica know what I'm talking about, the roads. So I had to be his practically 12 hour a day sponsor and it was a big deal. The day we got Ken over from Kingston, in fact it was an overnight trip for Ken, and we had this great big meeting of five, including Ken and Cleo and the new pigeon, we now have one, seven weeks old, and myself and Ken brought another man for good measure from Kingston.
So that's how it is. When you have AA in Jamaica, the communication and the transport are problems. However, I have a list of about, oh I'd say a hundred prospects, but I've had that list for almost six years I'm ashamed to say. Now why is it that they don't cross the line? I keep waiting for them every time, a hotelier that I know, or a plumber that I know, and I hear they've made a little trip into the hospital in Kingston for alleged influenza and my nasty alcoholic suspicious mind says, oh yes, and I know it isn't so, but they don't cross the line because we have fresh air and we have sports and there's very little ambition and therefore very little tension down there. I have the white light so I'm going to wrap it up with the, again, the communication theme. The technical communication is bad, but the meaning of communication in the larger sense of the word, which is that AA is a fellowship of love and love is communication.
And whether our phones are bad or whether our roads are bad, AA in Jamaica, like AA around the world, is bound by a lifeline of communication, which is love and help. And it's our job, as we've heard these last two glorious days, to keep the lifeline of communication open, even when the phone lines are bad and the roads are bad, and that's what we all are going to do and I know I'm going to try. Thank you.
Applause Mellon E., who goes by the nickname of Chief, comes from Honolulu in Hawaii. His hobby is the exchange of tapes through which he has been in touch with AAs everywhere and I must say that this kind of resourcefulness and interest that goes beyond just the work that he is doing with his group locally is of very real and very great value. Applause Aloha. This is the old chief from Honolulu, Hawaii, wishing you the best of everything. I'm very grateful to be here in that for the last few years, if anyone had told me that I'd ever seen this many sobered up people in my life, you know what I'd have told them.
But the groups of Honolulu wish all of you the best of everything. They sent me down here to wish you welcome, and should you come through Honolulu, drop in and see us. You know, we get tired of talking to one another. I'm not going to tell you my story today, but I can assure you that I've drank enough to get here. How do you think I got to Honolulu? I think you'd rather hear something about the A.A. group in Honolulu. I think maybe you'd rather hear something about the programs we try to work with over there, and it's just exactly like you work it here.
We say the serenity prayer, and we close with the Lord's Prayer, just like you do. We read the Twelve Steps, we try, and we're doing a little bit of good.
[00:10:13]
I come into this program, and I like to say come in, because with the grace of God and the book of Alcoholics Anonymous and people like you, I've been able to make this thing a day at a time since May the 20th, 1948. Thank God for this movement. Just a day at a time, and that's all I'm wishing for you, and that's all I want for myself. You know, as drunk as I've been and as mixed up as I've been and so scared right now, I don't know why I'm there, but I still know there's only one day, and that's today, that I can do anything about this thing.
But let's talk about it right now. Let's talk about the group movement, sir. When I come in, as I say, in May the 20th, 1948, we had one group on Fulton King Street, and there was about three or four old guys around, and a couple of them had been sober for two years, and they were modest to me, because at that time I didn't think that anybody could be sober for any length of time. You know, you're getting mixed up in this thing. You drink so much that you don't know that anybody in the world don't drink. Everybody drank, as far as I knew. I didn't realize a guy could live without it. You get your mind all fouled up, and then you get into, I'll call it somatic, you get smart, you find out only half the people in the world drink.
Well, I didn't know any of those. So then these couple of these guys said they'd been sober for two years, and I tells them, look, Pam, you know about what I thought. And I looked them over, and they were a mocking-looking bunch. And I'll let you in on something else. I had a sponsor, too. They were very, very anonymous those days, and about a year afterwards I found out I had one. Somebody said, how's the old chief getting along? I said, no use paying any attention to him. He ain't going to make it anyhow. But I'll tell you how I got started on this thing. It was in the way I made it, and it was in spite of the way I did these steps that I was able to do it the day of the time, just for the skin of my teeth.
I come in here, you know, and I look these birds over, and I think, well, now I have made an obligation here for the first time in my life. I got up and crossed myself, and I don't know yet what it means, but I did that because I seen somebody do that one time that looked like a good gesture. And I'm serious about this thing, and I said, for the grace of God, I'll never take another drink. I'm getting in deep here, because that's the first time I ever did that serious. And then I got to thinking about a story that I'd read in a Dorothy Dix, in a Starbuck. And some guy out on Bear Canyon Street was going to beat up his wife and let her bring the money home. You know the story. And she'd go down to Dorothy Dix, what'll it be?
And I usually get cock-eyed and read that thing, and it's easy for me to answer those things, but this girl, Dorothy Dix, says she should contact our coach and all of us. And that stayed with me up here somehow, even as drunk as I was. And I called them, and I said, the regular routine that these guys give you, this malarkey that you give you over the telephone, are you drinking? Don't drink anymore.
When can you come down and see us? I don't mind drinking any since three o'clock every morning. I had good work at eleven o'clock, but I'd be down at four, and I spent all day worrying about what I was getting into. Well, I went down there and I spent these three months looking these guys over, figuring out whether I wanted to associate with them or not. And I woke up to the fact that I was saying a prayer every morning and saying thank you at night. First time in my life when I'd been sober three months. And then what happened? I said, well, now these guys ain't staying sober.
I'm going to stick around here, because some guy I think maybe might have had a little trouble because of a half-empty bottle up in front of the stairs at the top of them. I think he's got a drink, you know. I'm going to stick around here, and when those guys catch those guys drunk, I'm going to hang drunk on wall drums. I'm feeling a little better now. And I stuck around there three months, and I found out I'd been sober six months for the first time in my life. And then I think, well, there must be something to this. I catch on fast. I'm a genius. It takes me all night.
How's the groups getting along? Went up there as five or six guys up there. As I said, some of them had been sober about two years. So he said, and I believe him now. I believe anybody that says, and I'll call it, and does something about it. I believe him now. But then I didn't. So I stuck around. Five or six, man, we had a big crowd in that five or six. We had a big crowd in that final six. We stuck around there and finally we got, I heard this boy, we had to tell them about those foul games, the four games we had to have.
[00:15:06]
And I don't know why there's any thirteen step work going on around there. I was too sick to look around. I expect to look. But it wasn't long, you know, you get fouled up, you know, when somebody wins money or something happens and we lose the club room. And I think we lost it about four times in the first four years. But we keep coming back. That's the nice thing about this thing, is whenever you, a bunch of guys are more sobriety, you want it bad enough, you're going to do something about it.
And you get together and you start a new group. Long after I'd been sober about six years, we decided then we ought to have a little open meeting, you know, because some of the wives were wondering whether their husbands were spending three days a week. So the chief got Bill and got us a little group started. Of course the big deal is that it wasn't going to work because you just couldn't have open meetings.
You know, a lot of the people over there don't care about seeing you drunk. Any place in time they're going to be seeing you sober. Well, it has its drawbacks. If somebody, you know, catches you sober, they might want you to pay them back some money or something. There's some things about it. Well, I know what anonymity is, you know, because I hear it here now. Something about the press, one thing or another.
But you know, my name is not Chief, you know, it's actually Mayor of Newark. I've been practicing anonymity all my life. It's nothing new to me. I come home, you're on a plane, Henry, you know, that's not my name either. We get the little group started and those guys says, that thing can't go, they can't have open meetings in this place. You've got to save face. I know where the wife's on here and I'd like to talk to you about three days, but we have a problem over there that I think everybody else has in the outside country.
About 14% of the population over there are hollies. I'm not a hollie, I'm Indian, but white kind of looking people. And the rest of them are of mixed races. 65% of the population are Japanese, got to save face deal. So far we've got one Greek, got one Chinese, we got one Portuguese, three Hawaiian, one Filipino. And I'm going to tell you how the Filipino, let me see if I can think how many groups have been gone.
These groups springing up so fast, but let's say now we've got between 10 and 15 groups in Honolulu. We've got a group in Maryland, got one on the Big Island, by the way, a protégé, Mr. Bill Wilson, I'm going to keep up there. Not the one we saw last night, but another one. We've got three Bill Wilsons, two of them over there, and one in New York, if I know of. Seems like the name has a little trouble with alcoholism, but we do get along fine over there, even with the racist problem.
We do have trouble with the locals, as we call them, because of a different deal of thinking, different line of thinking. We've got to save face deal, and they just will not stick with it. We think, though, that the locals are what we've got now, that eventually we'll be able to start groups of different racial ancestors and give these people a chance, maybe, and after they learn what this thing is all about, to be the same as I am, they don't care who knows they're an alcoholic. I love it, and I love you people. Aloha.
Now we have Jerry M. from 7th and 2nd in Puerto Rico. Jerry has been active in Puerto Rico from the beginning, and is presently serving as a delegate to the General Service Conference. I had the pleasure of meeting Jerry in Puerto Rico, and to have a visit with their group at Bayamon, and I find that his emeritus and devotion to the movement has been boundless. Jerry? Hi, everybody. My name is Jerry, and I'm an alcoholic. I'm a happy alcoholic, because I had a lot of the other for contrast, and I really am appreciating the sobriety.
I have an official paper from Glendale, California, saying that I was born there somewhere around World War I. However, I don't believe it, because I feel that I was born in 1952 in San Juan, Puerto Rico, just a kid. That's when I got an AA, and it was thanks to the experience of a commission merchant whose name was Ernie G. He died sober in 1955 at an AA funeral. Ernie was born in Texas, spoke Spanish, learned to speak Spanish the same time he learned to speak English, and lived his life in Latin America.
[00:20:01]
Along towards the end of the Second World War, Ernie became very sick. He had trouble with his liver, and he was placed in a hospital down there, very critical, and luckily pulled through. They recommended that he go back to New York, where his family was. He did, and in New York, he was separated from his wife. He took a room in a hotel, had a case of whiskey in his hotel room, had a few hundred dollars in his pocket, and he was railroaded into AA.
His family called him one night and said they wanted to take him to a place for dinner. They took him. He went to an AA club, was talked to. Something took. They stole his money, by the way, and his liquor while he was gone, all the things that usually don't seem to work with us. But in spite of all that, they took with Ernie, and he became sober. He was sober for approximately a year in New York, did a little experimenting with beer only, ten days, convinced himself, and until the time that he died in 1945, he was sober from that time on.
Ernie was a man who I don't know whether he was an atheist or what we would call him. He just didn't want to talk about spiritual things, and many times he would get up in a meeting and leave. I feel that for me it was fortunate because I was a militant atheist when I went to my first meeting in San Juan, Puerto Rico. And I know that if the thing had been very spiritual or even a little bit spiritual, possibly, I wouldn't have stayed.
But anyway, there was a great emphasis on the suggestedness of the steps. They were very suggested. In fact, they were so suggested that we didn't talk about them at all. The early experience of the San Juan group was, first of all, Ernie, when he went down to Puerto Rico after getting sober in New York, he knew that he had to give this thing away to keep it. So he, in his way, tried to buy up a few drunks down there.
He did everything the way we know today or learn today that we shouldn't. He set up one beached merchant marine captain in his apartment, and he nursed him for quite a while until he got a little bit too big a nuisance and then he had to get rid of it. He gave guys handouts. He was a generous fellow. He tried to buy their sobriety, but it didn't work. So it was quite a long time before Ernie got two or three solid citizens around him, and they, in turn, of course, worked on the thing and got a few more together.
So the early meetings were in Ernie's apartments, and as long as there were so few, they would get bored with looking at each other's faces. Where they had a custom, usually instead of having a meeting in the apartment, they'd go night clubbing. And that was their meeting. They would go from place to place just like they had gone before, buy the girls drinks, dance with the girls, and I don't know what else.
And then they would go home. That was their meeting. And for many, many months that was the system. Finally they got a few more members, including one lady who had gotten her sobriety in New York, went down to live in Puerto Rico where she had visited before many years. And then the thing was a little more complicated because there were Spanish and English. And many times the meetings started out in Spanish and then they would jump to English or else they would have a translator, and initially it was quite unhandy.
So I see I've got a light on already. I'll have to hurry. The group was split into two, one English speaking and one Spanish speaking.
[00:25:07]
We now have in Puerto Rico 13 groups, unless they started another one since I left, and they are all in Spanish but one. I have been asked to make an announcement in Spanish for the Spanish speaking people present. So if the rest of the people will please excuse me, I'll go into my poor French. Saludos amigos de habla hispana. Yo soy Jerry, un alcohólico. Y les traigo saludos de Puerto Rico. Y aquí uno de los miembros del grupo hispano aquí me ha pedido que yo hiciera un anuncio que mañana a las tres de la tarde en Wilmington va a haber una reunión en español para todos los miembros de habla hispana.
Thank you very much. Muchas gracias. Our last speaker is our farthest away visitor to the anniversary conference. He is Martin Kay from Johannesburg, South Africa. Martin has been active in AA there for five years and was designated by the South African groups to represent him at the convention. It is a long way to come and this is certainly one of the best evidences here of how AA has reached out so that now it is in fact around the world.
Mr. Chairman, now that I'm real climatized in the United States, I'll shout, aye! Aye! When I first joined up with AA, the very first thought that flashed through my mind was so much to do and so little to do it in. Here I come again today, I've got so much to say and such little time to say it in. But dear friends, I've got a watch here, it's a stopwatch. I'm not going to be caught napping, neither I'm going to be done out of a minute.
I've got a few messages for you, friends. And the very first message I've got is, please convey our heartiest congratulations to convention, fondest love to Bill and Lloyd AA Johannesburg. My second message, friends, is this, that we Elkies in the Southern Hemisphere love you good people in the United States very dearly. Thank you. If it wasn't for you good people, many of the 200-odd recovered alcoholics in South Africa would have been by now either in a loony bin or in a box six feet under the earth.
That's not even in a box. So therefore, our eternal gratitude to you good folks here in the United States. AA came to South Africa in a miraculous manner. Our oldest member, as far as I know, Bill Green, had reached the end of his terror. He had no more money left to buy any booze, but he was employed by a mining company as an analytical chemist. And he could get as much pure alcohol as he wanted. The result was that he eventually was drinking pure alcohol by the gallon.
Well, he was on the verge of death when he made a decision. When he made a decision, and he decided to see a clergy, he picked up the telephone, the telephone directory, and just picked a clergy at random.
[00:30:12]
He went to see that clergy that same afternoon, and after an hour and a half's talk with this clergy, the clergyman leaned back and pulled out a book from out the rack behind him, and behold, it was our big book, Alcoholics Anonymous. And that was what Valdez had been looking for all his life. Simultaneously, Pat F. from Cape Town had ridden to New York, and he had received certain literature. MacGregor in Natal, Durban, had done likewise, and three groups started off immediately, simultaneously, in the Union of South Africa. And when I left, that was five weeks ago, the groups numbered 106.
With a membership, recovered membership, of a little over 2,000. I haven't got much time, time frames, but I would like to pay tribute to General Service Headquarters girls, the staff there. I've been now here for five weeks, and I cannot express my gratitude in words to those girls, the way they've helped me, the guidance I got from them. There's a few that I really would like to mention by name. There's Ann, who really looked after me like a child from the very first day I got there, until I left New York a week ago.
There's Helen, then there is Nell Wing, who also was very, very good and kind to me. I'd like to pay tribute to our beloved Bill and Louise, but at this stage, I wouldn't know what to say, I haven't got the time for it. In ending, I would… Now, before I end, there is somebody very, very special that I would like to thank, because he solved a very, very big problem for us in South Africa. We had a problem there. We had the big book translated into Afrikaans, and the publication of it caused us a lot of trouble. I am very sorry that he's indisposed and cannot be at this convention. That's Hank.
And I would like to thank him from the bottom of my heart, and I would like one of these girls to convey these thanks to Hank. In ending, I would like to compare us, alcoholics, to a flock of sheep. We all know as long as a flock stays together, there is no danger of them meeting up with any wild animals or vulture. But as soon as one little sheep wanders away, it is not a very long time, and the big bad wolf has got him. Now, I think that applies to us alcoholics. As long as we mingle with the flock, and we do not isolate ourselves, I don't think there's any danger whatsoever of us ever taking that first drink again.
And now, in conclusion, I would like to end with a little prayer and thanksgiving. God, take us. God, break us. God, make us. God, thank you for AA. AA, thank you for God. Thank you.
[00:35:09]
In addition to the speakers that we had on the platform this afternoon, there are a number of people here from abroad that I think want to stand up and be recognized. There's Hart S. from Oslo. There's John B. from Sydney, Sydney, Australia. There's Maude B. from Scotland, from Glasgow. And I'll tell you, if there are any others in the audience this afternoon that are from abroad, I wish you would please stand up and be recognized.
From Alaska. Good. We offer our heartfelt thanks to all of these speakers, such good and dear people who have given so much of their love and devotion that others may live. And also our thanks to you for being here. And before closing this wonderful, interesting, and inspiring meeting, I will, if I may, I've got just a few minutes left. I would like to read to you two quotations that have meant a great deal to me in my attitude towards AA.
In the meaning of service, the Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick, who has a very deep interest in Alcoholics Anonymous and has contributed to the 25th anniversary book, the following. He says, And from Dr. Albert Schweitzer, a musician and medical missionary who is devoting his life to service in Africa, he says something that to me is very significant and very beautiful. He said, Who can reckon all of the ways in which that priceless fund of in-house men is capable of exploitation.
He is needed in every nook and corner. Therefore, search and see if there is not some place where you may invest your humanity. Before closing the meeting, I've been asked to make one announcement. It's as follows. All speakers at convention sessions are requested to meet on the lawn at the west side of the auditorium at 5 p.m. for a special group picture for our archives. And now to close the meeting, we invite all who so desire to join in repeating 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 and the power and the glory forever. Amen.