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Source: 1960 Long Beach International Convention – 1960 Long Beach Int., Dr. Earl M his story is in Big Book.mp3 File: 1960-long-beach-international-convention-1960-long-beach-int-dr-earl-m-his-story-is-in-big-book.mp3 Duration: 00:39:56
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My name is Earl, and I'm a drunk. In two ways, I differ from most drunks, and each alcoholic, I'm sure, differs in his own way. At many AA meetings, we hear, rather endlessly, about great loss of families, of money, prestige, community reputation, etc. None of these happen to me. I didn't lose anything when I came in, or before I came into AA. I made more money the last year of my drinking than I ever made before in my whole life.
More than I hope I make again. The other way that I differ, and this is really not so much of a difference, really, many alcoholics say they didn't like the taste of booze, rather the effect. Well, I like the effect, but I also love the taste of booze. And I'm not going to regale you with what happened to me in my days of drinking. Some of you may wonder how I managed to practice and drink. Rest assured that I was never in my office drunk in my life, I was never in the hospital drunk.
There were many times when I wasn't in my office or the hospital. I would like to tell you just a little bit about the last day of my drinking. I had come home from breakfast with my daughter, and I'd had a great deal to drink because I love to drink in the morning. And I'd come home and I was drinking Alexander's. I was ashamed for a long time after I came into AA to admit the fact that I like sweet mixed drinks.
And I also ate candy when I drank, and I was very ashamed of this until I read Jack Linden's John Barleycorn, and he ate candy when he drank and it was good enough for Jack, it's good enough for me. I'd heard about a friend of mine, a fraternity brother in college, who had been an Alcoholics Anonymous for about seven months. And I have no idea to this day why I went up to see him, but I did. I was not especially interested in stopping my drinking on this particular day.
The thought of stopping drinking had plagued me for a long, long time, and I could see things closing in on me. But I don't know why I went up to see him, but I did. I went up there, and incidentally I am a surgeon, but I was also trained in the East in psychiatry. I don't practice psychiatry. I could if I wanted to. I'm a member of the American Psychiatric Society. And as someone once said when I first came into AA, what's worse than a confused psychiatrist?
Well, I don't practice psychiatry, but I've had this background, and so I went up to see my friend, and he gave me the 12 steps. And he asked me what I thought about them from a psychological standpoint, and I recall going on endlessly about the steps. Then he gave me a piece of paper, and on this paper there were some 30 odd things addressed to the active drinker. But I went home, and I asked my wife if she would read them to me.
And she did. And I forget what they said, but a couple of them lingered in my memory. And one was, it said, don't give up drinking for anybody else except yourself. Well, if they had told me to take a beer towel and roll it up and flap me across the face, it couldn't have made any more of an impact. And I have no idea why, because on this particular day I wasn't considering necessarily giving up drinking, let alone for somebody else, but it made the impact nonetheless.
And the other one said, don't consider yourself a martyr because you stopped drinking. And once again, this made a fantastic impact on me, which I will never to this day understand,
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because once again I wasn't going to give up drinking as far as I knew on this particular day, let alone feeling a martyr about it. Well, I broke down and cried, and this was kind of par for the course in those days. I would ride along in my auto and I would hear Bing Crosby sing and I would cry. Or I would hear a lecture on something and I would cry. So this wasn't so unusual. And my wife, who was a very good-natured soul, put her arm around my shoulders and she said, well, I don't think I'd worry.
Something will happen and you'll be all right. And she comforted me as only she can do. And she went in the house. We have a little barbecue area up the side of the hill. And I went up the side of the hill to make the barbecue fire. And as I got to the top of the stairs, I looked at my glass and I had a very small amount left in it. And I decided I would go down to the kitchen and refill the glass and go back up and make the fire, and then I would have a drink with me during that interval.
And as I turned around on the stairs to come back down to the kitchen, a thought suddenly pierced me. It's indescribable. It didn't simply occur to me, but the only word that I can think of was that it pierced me. And it said to me, this is your last drink. And the craving to take a drink disappeared from me at that instant and has never occurred. It was just as though someone had reached down at this highly unsuspected, drunken moment and had picked a wet, hot overcoat off my shoulders and had dropped it on the ground beside me.
It was a very sunny day, just like today, and visually it seemed to get brighter. Well, to most people in AA, or to many, sobriety and the need for AA comes to them in the remorse of a hangover or some such. But it didn't to me. It came to me when I was drunk. Well, it took me seven or eight hours to sober up. And then it was about seven or eight days before I finally went to my first meeting. And I recall well going to my first meeting, and incidentally, after I had gone, I came to see the first man that talked this afternoon, Jack Irving.
And he is our central secretary in San Francisco, and I went to see Jack. And I wasn't quite sure that Alcoholics Anonymous would accept me, because I hadn't lost anything. So I went to Jack, and I said, the first time I'd met him, I haven't lost a thing, but I need to be here. Will you accept me? He said, will we? So I was in. I recall the first meeting that I went to. Some of you have heard me tell this, but I'm going to tell it again.
It was in Mill Valley, California, and there was a banquet table, one of these four-by-eight banquet tables. And this was a group that I understood was about to fade because there were so few members. It hasn't faded and has grown to great proportions. But nonetheless, on this particular evening, the following people were there. Here was the table. And on this end of the table, there was a man named Clark, who was a community butcher.
And on that end of the table was a little, short, ball-headed bird, who was aptly called Shorty. And he was a community carpenter. And on that edge of the table was a man named Vern, who was a baker, or had been. And on this side of the table was my friend, my college classmate, who was kind of a mechanic or a self-style inventor. And then there was myself. Well, good God, I looked around at this bunch of low-lifers, and I wondered, what are you doing here?
Maybe you're making too much of this. You shouldn't get mixed up with this bunch. And I asked to be excused. And I went outside, and I stood under an oak tree that's there, and I took counsel with myself, and I hope you'll pardon some personal, professional references. But this is the way the conversation with myself went. Here you are, a physician licensed to practice in this great state of California.
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And here you are, a diplomat of one of the great surgical boards in the United States. And here you are, an assistant professor of the same specialty at one of our California medical schools. And here you are, a fellow of the American College of Surgeons, and a fellow of the International College of Surgeons, and so on, and even a member of the American Psychiatric Society. And do you mean to tell me that you've got to go back in and have a butcher and a carpenter and a baker make a man out of you?
And the answer came to me clearly, and it was, yes, you do. And so I went back in and said very little, but I listened. Well, needless to say, never was a doctor so grateful for a damn butcher and carpenter and baker and mechanic. What if I spent the rest of my life attempting to repay these four men and others that have done so much for me, it would be literally impossible to break even. And I'm sure you know that so well.
Well, you know, in 1935, when this great organization of ours was getting its initial start, I was a doctor at the time, and I went to a psychiatrist. And I spent five and a half years, an hour a day, five days a week. Now this is an experience on the psychoanalytic couch, which I would repeat, actually. But then I proceeded to become a drunk. Now you know, just to digress for a minute, it always makes good sense to me, and please don't feel that I have anything but the deepest of regard for psychiatry.
After all, I happen to be, incidentally, a member of the organization. But it always made sense to me that if you were to go to a psychiatrist and discover the origin, and this is possible, of your difficulties, that they then fade. You no longer then have them. Now it makes good sense to me that if you go to a psychiatrist and you discover why it is that you have become a drunk, that then you are no longer a drunk and that you can become a social drinker.
Now this makes very good sense to me, except that it doesn't work. That's the only handicap, is that it doesn't work. Well I tell you that story to show that there had been a good number of years of investigation as to why and how I function. But one thing had never occurred to me with any degree of seriousness, and that is something about God. Oh, I'd gone to Sunday school as a child, and I had a lot of fun in Sunday school, actually.
But I don't suppose it penetrated. But all of a sudden I heard about God. Wow. And I gulped concepts of God as much as I gulped booze. And I recall that I got myself a Bible and I put it on my nightstand. It's still there on my bed. I got another Bible and I put it in the locker of the surgery at the hospital, at the main hospital that I attend. I got another one and put it in the second right-hand door of my desk in my office.
Then as a kid, in 1917, I won a Bible because I knew all of the books of the Old and New Testament. And this one is in the glove compartment of my car, and it's still there. Then I heard about Emmett Fox, and I bought every one of his books, and there are 58 of them. If you want them, I'll give them to you. And I read them, and I got all of them by Kelly and by Norman Vincent Peale and endless numbers of books.
And I read them and devoured them, and I went to go to friends of mine, and they would say, now look, have you read such and such a sentence in such and such a book? And I'd say, no, I haven't. And I would go home and I would read the sentence in that book and become filled. And then I would…
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of a spiritual bunch, I suppose, and we read a variety of things, and we exchanged these deep philosophical spiritual principles, and I couldn't wait to get home to read something that had been suggested to me, and I found myself floating way up into the sky and sitting in a cloud, and I felt like hell, and I went to my friend Clark, the butcher, and I said, Clark, what is wrong with me? I might just as well be drunk as be like this.
Well, Clark is a very benevolent, soft-spoken, easy-going butcher, and he took me over to the side, and he got me a cup of coffee and some cookies or a donut, and then he paused for a while, and then he looked at me, and he said, Earl, I'm very proud of you. It must be difficult. Here you are, a physician coming into AA, and I assured him that in the beginning this was, but I felt so much at home, but I felt terrible.
Well, he said, nonetheless, I'm proud of you, and he said, but we have an organization here in Mill Valley, and this organization is known as Alcoholics Anonymous. Now, why in the hell don't you join it? And I said, Clark, what do you mean, why don't I join it? He said, I know you've been here for four months, and you've been sober, and I'm proud of you, but he said, whatever you're doing, it doesn't have very much to do with Alcoholics Anonymous.
Well, I said, what do you do? Well, he said, I don't know what you would do, but he said, I know what I would do, and I hung on every word that he said. He said, I would go home, and I would get a hold of the big book, and I would open it to page 70. Now it's page 58, and I would read what it says. He said, have you read the big book? And I said, yes, I've read it twice. Well, he said, go home and listen to what it says.
Well, all right, I did. So I went home, and I opened the big book to page 70, and this, because it has meant so much to me, I've partially committed to memory, and let me say to you what it said to me, if I can recall, rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path. Those who do not recover are people who cannot or will not completely give themselves to this simple program, usually men and women who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves.
There are such unfortunates. They are not at fault. They seem to have been born this way, and they are naturally incapable of grasping and developing a manner of living which demands rigorous honesty. There are those two, I said these people don't have much of a chance. There are those two who suffer from grave emotional and mental disorders, but many of them do recover if they have the capacity to be honest.
Our stories disclose what we used to be like, what happened, and what we are like now. If you have decided that you want what we have, and are willing to go to any length to get it, then you are ready to take certain steps, and some of these we bought. We thought we could find an easier, softer way, but we could not. With all of the earnestness at our command, we beg of you to be fearless and thorough from the very start.
Well, you know, it started to ring through my thick head. Thoroughly give oneself to this simple program. Any lengths, avoiding old ideas, giving in somewhere. Thoroughly give oneself to this simple program. Whether we deal with alcohol, cunning, baffling, powerful, as far as I'm concerned, this program is cunning, baffling, powerful. I just simply don't understand it, really. Without help, it is too much for us, but there is one who has all power, and that one is God.
May you find him now. Half measures, it said to me, half measures availed us nothing.
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I didn't say half measures availed us half, or half measures availed us 10%, or 90%. It said clearly and succinctly and to the point, half measures availed us nothing. We stood at the turning point. We asked his protection and care with complete abandon. Well, this kind of rung through my head, but I wasn't sure at this time that I was going to thoroughly give myself to this program because this had been kind of a shock to me that I had spent four months in all of this blissful nonsense.
Well I went up to San Rafael one Sunday morning to a breakfast club to hand in my resignation, and there I met the most miserable, despicable, great guy that I've ever known. He hasn't got a brain in his head, and his name is Chuck Chamberlain, and I'm not sure he'll ever mount to a dam, that's all right. But I'd never seen him before, and he was talking that morning at the breakfast club. Well I kind of liked the yak that this big blowhard showed, and that morning it so happened that my number got drawn, I who was going to resign, and I won the big book.
Well I just meant I had to carry the damn thing home again. Then I went up later, after people had slowly filtered away, and I said to this guy, Chuck, Chuck, I said, one thing disturbs me and I'm not sure that I can stick around this outfit. Can you tell me what God's will is? Because I've been looking around for this for four months, and I haven't done very well. Oh yes, I've been sober, but I don't feel very good.
Well he looked at me, and in his great big oaky way, he laughed at me, you know, you know how he laughs, ha ha ha, you know. He said, what's your work? And I said, well it so happens that I'm a physician. Well he looked at me and studied me for a while, and he said, Doc, he said, I'll tell you what God's will is. He said, if you did something fine for one of your patients with the idea that that patient would send you another patient, that's you talking.
But if you did something fine for one of your patients because you wanted to do something fine for one of your patients, that's the old man talking. Well that sounded kind of simple to me, but it somehow made sense. Sometime after that, I was sitting in my office. I had operated on a woman who had a very early cancer, and this is a kind that we have now tacked a name on, it's neither here nor there, but it's known as carcinoma in situ.
And in those days, this was just a beginning concept of finding cancer of a certain kind that we know in advance pretty much is thoroughly curable. And I had operated on her. I had taken out the sutures that morning. It was her tenth post-operative day. This had been a major procedure. And she was well. I had given her her post-operative instructions, and she was to go home the next day. One of my nurses called me to the phone, and I answered it, and it was the husband of this patient.
And he said, Doctor, I want to thank you very much for curing my wife. He said, you have no idea what this means to me. Now, this is a kind of a dramatic, silly story in a sense, but maybe you could put this in its proper context, where somebody is finding out something that may mean something to him for the first time, a certain degree of clarity was about to come to me. And he went on, this husband of his, gratitude, and we exchanged then the doctor-patient relationship.
And I thanked him very much for the opportunity and so on. Finally, he hung up. And then I leaned back in my desk, and once again, a thought occurred to me, what he had said. And it was, thank you, Doctor, for curing my wife. Well, there I was behind my quite beautiful mahogany desk, you know, and there she was out at the hospital. Well, yes, I knew what I had done, and I didn't, I don't mean to underestimate that.
But do you know that I had seen her twice a day, maybe more, in the first day or two or three, for a few minutes each day, and I hadn't done anything mechanically except
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change a dressing or two after that last second of surgery when I closed the abdomen. Now, I know that if I had cut out those sutures right after I had put them in, the wound would have gaped. Well, I had taken out those sutures this very morning, and the wound was tightly healed together. Well, I had to say to myself, this woman has healed somewhere. Now, I know the microscopic anatomy of the healing of tissues, but I had to say to myself, even though you know the microscopic anatomy of the healing of tissues, what was it that made these tissues heal together and instigated this marvelous process?
Well, I was unable to answer the question, but I was able to answer one other question, and that was that I knew that I had not done it. Oh, yes, I'd put in the initial sutures, I understood that, but I had not healed it together. This then came to me to be a very practical, very workable, very tangible, physical aspect of what, in my own way, I call God. Now, all physicians, I'm sure, or most, they may not like the way I say this right now, many of them would, incidentally, but we all know that there is a great physician that augments the little things that we do.
Oh, yes, these little things we do, as far as we know, are necessary, and they augment what the greater physician has to do. Well, about this time, I was driving across the bridge from San Francisco to Mill Valley in the Golden Gate Bridge, and I was thinking about these things that had suddenly occurred to me since reading the fifth chapter and talking to old Chuck and this experience behind my desk, and suddenly a man cut in front of me going across the bridge, and I was forced to swerve the next lane, and luckily no car was there, but then I thought, suppose a car had been there, and I had turned over into this lane, which I couldn't help doing without obviously being injured, and suppose that my right hand, or both hands, but primarily my right hand had been cut off.
This is the way I make my living. In that hand are the talents that I have received from greater physicians than I will ever be. And it occurred to me that I had a great number of talents, but that these talents were simply loaned to me to use for the rest of my life, but they didn't belong to me. Now this is obvious, I'm sure, to you, but it wasn't so obvious to me in those days. I thought I had created these things, don't you know, that all good must have sprung from me.
Well, this was something. Well, about this time I thought, well, I guess maybe that I had better make some amends. So I went to my wife and I said, say, now look here, I want to talk to you, why don't you sit right down here, I want to tell you something about this thing. Alcoholics are a funny bunch, you know, we don't talk with people, we talk at them. If you have seven or eight alcoholics around here in a row, you've got seven or eight conversations all beginning with a high, right, like this.
Well, my wife is a wise bird and she turned to me and looked at me and she said, you know, you don't really care anything about this family. Well, here I was attempting to make this eighth step. Well, I could have smashed her once. She turned on her heels and she walked in and I clasped my hands together and as I was not used to doing, but was gradually getting used to doing, incidentally, I'd never gotten down on the floor much my whole life to pray and I went, we'll do it right here if you want.
We're kind of used to it by now, but at any rate, I clasped my hands together and I said, help me. Well, after a few seconds, an answer pierced me and it said, you know what, she's right. Well, I took counsel and I realized this is true, that I, oh, I'd been a good financial support to the family and, but I somehow, it wasn't my temperament to be the kind of a father. things and the husbandly things.
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I wasn't too hot of this, you know, somewhere. I was a good checkbook, that's about it. So I thought maybe that I could do something and I realized that I must start then to dedicate my life to this great woman and my family. And I went to her and I said, one of the things I would like from you for the rest of your life and maybe the only thing is the opportunity to do whatever you would like for the rest of your life.
Now I won't be very good at this, I'll slip at this and I won't do this so well, but at least I can start. No, she said, you're all right. She always says this, you're all right, you know. And I said, now what I'd like to do is, if I can, is I'd like to start doing the dishes because I notice you do this each night. And she said, no, that's the woman's job. No, I said, let me do it. Well, the upshot is I'm doing the damn dishes every night.
Well, you know, this isn't quite true because now I've graduated onto other things, but that's where I started anyway, see, that's where I started. Hey, you know, as far as I'm concerned, we talk about the spiritual side of this program. As far as I'm concerned, the alcoholic is a spiritual entity, I am sure, from the day that he's born. And I think that it's throughout the early years of his life that his heart gets broken, as do many hearts, non-alcoholic alike.
But this coupled with a physical difference, now the medical profession is not sure, but slowly is beginning to believe that there is a physical difference in the alcoholic. For years and years and years, it's been said that the alcoholic simply is the reflection of a distorted emotional complex. Well, perhaps this is true, but it's not wholly true by a long shot. We also have some physical differences in us, but the only thing we can do is what the fifth tradition says.
Each group has but one primary purpose, to carry its message to the alcoholic that still suffers. And I think it's possible for us to put our first names in those great traditions where it mentions the group. Earl has but one purpose in his life, and that's to carry the message to the alcoholic that still suffers. Now this doesn't mean that I don't have endless series of other purposes, but the core, the very center of each of these purposes is my purpose of carrying the message to the drunk.
Now the reason that this is true is not that my non-alcoholic activities are not of vital importance to me, they are. And it isn't that I don't spend more time in my non-alcoholic activities than I do in my AA activities. I do. But nonetheless, without the opportunity of carrying the message to the drunk as the core of each of the things that I do, all the others would then fade. So that's why to me, and this is I'm sure redundant to you because you know this so well.
I often think about how our program first got started, and I was thrilled to hear Bill this morning talk in the early days about things for a few minutes, and I anticipate so much hearing him talk once again tonight and tomorrow night. And I think about our program, how it got started, and how much we owe people who have made our program possible. I think about the doctor, how much, half of our program after all has come from the medical profession.
I don't say this because I'm a doctor now, I'm speaking simply as an AA member, as a drunk. It's come from the physician. Endless series of books, I wish you could see and maybe you have, the books that physicians have written on the likes of you and me. And yet, the physician, as much as we owe him and can never repay him, the physician has been unable to give you and to give me as drunks the kind of sobriety that we need, that we must have, that we cannot exist without.
That's like our very breath that we breathe. And then I thought so much about the psychiatrists. After all, so much of our program has come from that, half of it actually. Oh my God, the psychiatrists, you know, they have put us on an endless series of couches and they have talked to us and so tried to figure out why we do what we do, what makes,
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what manner of person is this, this rocky sort of a jerk. And yet, barring rare exceptions, the psychologists and psychiatrists, and I say this in the deepest of deference, have not been able to give you and me the kind of sobriety that we have to have, that we cannot exist without. And the clergy, my gosh, the men of the cloth they have given of their lives, and they have prayed over us and about us and to us and in front of us and all sorts of businesses, you know, and they've given their lives to try to bring us sobriety, and they have given the other half, psychiatry and medicine, the first half, and the clergy have given the other half to our program.
And yet the clergy, barring rare exceptions, has been unable to give us the kind of sobriety that in the depths of our hearts we have to have. And yet it amazes me how you can take a bunch of arrogant, self-centered, egotistical, nobodies who aren't worth a damn, if they were blown off the face of the earth, and get them all together in a room, and God knows we wouldn't be caught in a room like this and drinking our drinking days, we'd be dead, and get them all together in a room, each one carrying on a conversation that begins with I, each one that's able to get up about ten feet off the ground, and they sit and they chop their chops at one another, and I'll be darned they stay sober.
Now, this I just don't understand. How a bunch of no-goods, egotistical no-goods, idealistic perfectionists can get together and do something that these great men are unable to do. Well, one might say to oneself, what is it, what is it that you possess? And I can see it right now, as I look out here, and as I see face, I can see it, I can see it shining right up this way, and as I shake your hand, and as I get a grip, I feel exactly something.
It's like electricity, it shoots through you somewhere. And I say to myself, what in the devil is it that those people have that they have given to me, and others before me, and others that'll come, that came in later, what not? What is this power? Well, scientifically I say, well, I suppose that the doctor would call what you have psychosomatic medicine perhaps, and I suppose that the psychiatrist and the psychologist would call what is there, and what I see this minute, might call benevolent interpersonal relations.
Or they might call it group psychotherapy. And I suppose that there are those who would call what you have, and have given to me, so unselfishly, esprit de corps. But the essence of what you have, and what I see this very instant, and which has meant so much to upwards to 300,000 drunks, is the very essence of God. God bless you all. Thank you. I believe we can all take a lot of that. To go on and on and on, but we're trying to run this meeting on a schedule.
So if you'll all stand now, we will repeat the Lord's Prayer together, and then this meeting will be dismissed. 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.
Amen.