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Source: 1960 Long Beach International Convention – 1960 Long Beach Int.,chair Pat O'B speaker Charlene part 2 of 2.mp3 File: 1960-long-beach-international-convention-1960-long-beach-intchair-pat-ob-speaker-charlene-part-2-of-2.mp3 Duration: 00:31:34
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Virginia, would you stand up and take a bow? This is Tom's wife. It's funny, I never could understand how the laughter and the tears go together. I just have never been able to analyze it, and every time we say something funny and laugh, it makes me feel good, and yet I know someone is going to say, this isn't funny. We know the business is serious, and why it is so funny, I don't know. But it's in retrospect that we see the funny side. So if anyone here that objects to the laughter, let me tell you about a girl that came to AA for her first night, and I said, how did you enjoy the meeting?
She said, I thought it was horrible. I said, well, what was the matter? Well, everybody was laughing, everybody was gay. She said they acted like they were all drunk. She was the one that was out of line, really, and she never did come back, unfortunately. But these, I don't like to run down psychiatrists, because I know that the tone of this meeting and this convention is better communications, and we certainly need psychiatrists, and we can do better together than we can either one alone. But I can't help but comment on this. Here is a man who is a natural athlete. I forgot to tell you, he's been a semi-pro ball player and a professional skater. Everything comes natural to him, and yet he turns out to be a drunk. Here I am, a typical ink spiller from the time I was a little boy. I have no coordination at all, and the only time I ever scored a run was when I bribed my friend, the opposing pitcher, to give me a walk, and I scored a run that might have won the bats and balls for our side. Thank God the other side won. In this business about being in jail, I don't like to boast about it, but I always like to tell about it, because I've been sober for so long that if I don't say something like that, you won't believe it.
But one of the nice things about getting in jail in New York, in the first place, it's difficult to do. I mean, you've got to work at it. I don't know whether our first speaker, she probably had no experiences of that kind. But you always give your right name. If it's O'Brien and it's in New York, you say, my name is O'Brien, and then it's almost impossible but I managed it even at that. I wasn't asked here to give a talk, but they should have known better than to put me on as a chairman. I must say this. Every speaker that you hear, let's say 999 out of a thousand, found their sobriety in Alcoholics Anonymous. I didn't.
I was sober three years before, three and a half years, before Jack Alexander's article in the Saturday Evening Post came out. Now let's say this. I am a maverick. I did not find my original sobriety, my drying up in AA. You might say, well, what are you doing in here then? Because I have found, as the French in our Louisiana say, I have a raison, I have found, a raison d'etre, a reason for my existence. God meant that two and two equals four. He also means that Pat O'Brien works with alcoholics until the day he dies. He is the only thing I know anything about. Now we have an all-sunshine program here. I don't know whether we can include Louisiana in that or not, but you've heard from Hawaii where it's all sunshine, particularly those alcoholics after they quit drinking, and then we've heard from Florida where, of course, it's all sunshine, and we now will hear from the state of California, from a young lady whose husband is also, we have another team of AAs, and we are now going to hear the story of a young lady who has been down the road and has come back. So let's hear from Shalane. Hi, everyone. Hi, Shalane. Hi, Shalane.
[00:05:02]
I'm Shalane Coe, and I'm an alcoholic and a member of the Glendale Group. I wrote this and I'm going to read it. Second time in my life that I've ever done this. First, I want to welcome all the guests to Southern California and hope you enjoy our brand of AA because it's a good one. The past few weeks, I've been so close to the forest that I have failed to see the beauty of the trees. I've heard it said that this too will pass, and it has.
The book says we disclose in a general way what we used to be like, what happened, and what we are like now. I believe that everything bad that ever happened to me directly or indirectly I paved the way with alcohol. One of my sponsors said to me, you know I had to have two, said to me, if I wanted permanent sobriety, that I must have a change of attitude and the ability to be honest with myself. And when I looked at me as I really was, I didn't like any part of what I saw. And you were talking of something real close to my heart, Tom, when you mentioned San Diego Jail, because I was a traveling drunk and I was a bar drunk. I guess that I couldn't stand myself, so I had to be around where the dim lights and the music and all my people were. I was glad that they told me that I was a sick person when I came here, because for many years I always thought, well, this is my fate, and so this is the way I'll be until the day I die, so I'll have to put up with it.
My mother was the only one in my family that was speaking to me when I accepted this program in its entirety. This program was given to me or presented to me in 1946, but I would have no part of it. And one of the ladies is in the audience today who talked to me in 1951 when I was going through psycho. You're not looking at any little two martini burn the toast drunk. I've been around the barn a couple of times and I know a few things, but I didn't know enough to leave that first drink alone, because I didn't know that it was the first drink that got me drunk, but I was glad they told me I was sick, that I had an allergy of the body coupled to an obsession of the mind that once I took the drink, then I was no longer responsible. And I might say that I suffered from blackouts from practically the very beginning of my drinking, so there's a lot of my story that I don't know, and it's just as well because I remember enough as it is. I was born in this little coal mining town in Texas and my mother went with my dad for five years and then married him and they eventually had me, and then when I was a few months old, she divorced him. And this I can never understand, but that's the way it was. And I call him as I see him, that's the only way I know. So she divorced him and it was a big scandal and a disgrace in 1919 to divorce and these proud leaves from Virginia, oh it was terrible. So when they decided that the Andersons wouldn't have me, wasn't going to let them have me, we'll put it that way, they awarded me, you know, so many days here with my dad and then so many weekends and all that jazz that goes with divorce. And so that's the way things started out for me.
The Andersons drank, you know, and they cussed a little bit and I don't know what else they did, but I'm half Swede and maybe that accounts for it taking so long for me to get this program,
[00:10:04]
I don't know. But anyway, eventually I get it, whatever it is. The Lees didn't believe in drinking, smoking, cussing, dancing, playing cards, but they must have believed in something because I'm here. So they weren't going to let them have me and one dark night my uncle and my mother took a train and they migrated to Oklahoma. Now of all the states in the Union, why it had to be Oklahoma, I don't know, but I was different from the very beginning, I was a Texoki. So my mother was a telephone operator in this little town and she met this cop and she married him and I don't know if that had anything to do with my hatred for the boys later on or not, but I know that I didn't like the things they did to me. I can remember as late as 1952 sitting down the street in San Diego and telling this Vi Squad man, well if you're going to take me to jail, come on, let's get it over with, I don't have all day to sit around in a Vi Squad car. So I'm like that guy that talked this morning, if I couldn't run it, I'd wreck it. So anyway, I started out this way and my mother married this cop and things were fine. Then my sisters started coming along and I have a neurotic sister, I have one that controls her drinking and takes Dexedrine and Benzedrine for hangovers and so her husband throws their furniture through their glass doors and this is real normal living. So then I have another sister who suffers from hangovers from a little tequila and I hope she's having a good time this weekend because she's in Ensenada now. And this is the way that it started. So when I was about eight and a half years old, my stepfather was killed in a car wreck and that left my mother with these little stair steps to raise, two, four, six, eight and a half, and my sisters went to the odd fellas home and received a very good education, but parlez-vous-moi, I went the rounds of the relatives. One year with my uncle, another year with my grandmother and maybe a school term or a summer with my mother if I was lucky. But my mother's a wishy-washy type, you know.
Guys could come along and talk her out of everything. They talked her out of all the insurance money property and all that my stepfather had left. So this was a real, real fun beginning and I can remember them saying, parlez-vous-moi, and I liked that and I grew up with it and I used it until 1953. So when I was thirteen and a half years old, I discovered marijuana, white corn liquor and homebrew all at about the same time. And if you've ever had marijuana and white corn liquor, you know what I'm talking about because it'll get you up there and keep you up there for a long time. You just glow. So this was a real fun beginning and I can remember, you know, I wasn't a very pretty thing to begin with and age hasn't improved me much, but I'll get by in a crowd if it's a large one like this. And I always say that the reason I look this way, it's the mileage I've had on me. So on and on I'm going and I'm starting to run my own life and I'm starting to call the shots. I'm in my first jail when I'm fourteen years old and I was picked up with a bunch of characters from Chicago. I happened to be in the apartment that day and it seemed vice-quadrated and so they took me along for good measure. They gave us all floaters out of town. If you don't know what that means, that means please depart our city, we don't care for your company. So we all went to Longview, Texas, wound up there eventually, but a couple of the gals and I, and I loved to dance. That was my middle name. Oh I could just dance all night and all day too, especially if I was loaded. And so I became a taxi dancer. I thought, well gee, I love to dance so well I might as well get paid for it. And I was drinking old Texas Slim's white corn liquor many times.
to Slim's White Corn Liquor many times, and they were talking about the Norris guys, and
[00:15:02]
I said, well, who are they? And I found out, because I understood that they were loaded with dough, and so I started making up to one of them, and I eventually married him, and then several years later I left him because he drank too much. And then, if I'd known then what I know now, I might have stuck around a little longer because they had that black stuff pumping out of their land, but he's dead and gone, and so that's all in the past.
The only reason that I talk like this is that if there's any other gals out there who drank the way I did, they know what I'm talking about, and by the time that I got to Alcoholics Anonymous, I had no respect for myself, much less you. And I would just as soon clip you for your dough or anything else as look at you. Of course, I would try to buy your friendship, which I've done, and all my fair-feathered friends, but you know, my phone doesn't ring anymore with those people, and I don't know what ever happened to them.
I guess they're still drinking, but those friends of mine don't call me anymore. Well, this is a real good beginning, so I go to San Diego. My grandmother decided I should go to my aunt, and I stayed there for a while. I was so skinny that she had to fatten me up, and then I got a job with the commander over in Coronado, and I left them, and eventually I met this sailor, and I had to get married again, but first he had to get me unmarried from the guy in Texas, and I cost that man a lot in legal fees.
He is the one who is responsible, actually, for my standing here today, because he's the one that planted the seed of Alcoholics Anonymous in this thick skull that it took so long to penetrate through. I had a lot more drinking to do. I was a nice little housewife. I knitted and crocheted and stayed home, cooked, baked, washed, ironed, scrubbed floors, you know, and all that jazz, and then, who am I picking up that jazz stuff, I don't know.
Anyway, at all the ship parties and picnics, you might know who got the drunkest, old Charlene, and I embarrassed him, and this went on, and then the war came along, and I went hog wild, because I had no one to tell me what to do or what not to do. I had no one to report to, and so I started drinking every day. I turned from a daily drinker into a periodic, because I used to get so sick, I'd have to get well to get drunk again.
So I moved to Glendale with my mother, and I actually believe it was in Glendale that I crossed over the borderline in what we call compulsive drinking. I said, my mom, remember when I used to drink every day, and she said, yes, and every night too, and I used to drink like a lady. I've been to all those fancy bars, you know, Ciro's, Macombo's, and especially those guys that had three-day passes from San Francisco, or five-day passes, that wanted to see Hollywood.
Well I was in the Brown Derby, and Stan always kept this gal in mind, we had a special table, and any time that we got too drunk, he would kind of usher us out a little bit, but not too much, because we were good for business. She was a blonde, and I was a blonde, you see, and these guys went for the blondes it seems. Well, these guys would be on these passes, we were available to show them Hollywood, you know, sure, who wouldn't?
You'd be crazy if you didn't. So this goes on and on and on, and my husband's gone for three years, and I see him about, I would say, three times, you know, I'm a little hazy on that, I haven't sat down and actually figured it out, it doesn't make any difference one way or the other, that's in the past, but he didn't know what had happened to me because I had to drink every day, and I would lie, I was the biggest liar in San Diego, I know that, to my knowledge, I'm the only woman in San Diego who's carried three black eyes at the same time, and you don't get those very easy, you have to work at that too.
[00:20:03]
So he finagled a transfer off of this ship, and was sent back to the States, and we went to Gulfport, Mississippi, well, I visited their jail there too, I was always picked up alongside the road by the cops with no identification, no nothing, so where would they take me but to jail? And every time I see or read in the paper or hear on television of a woman being killed out someplace like that, a shudder goes over me and I say, but for the grace of God, it could have been me.
My drinking is getting worse, and I'm getting sicker, and I don't even know it, and I drank this man just out of practically everything, and he called Alcoholics Anonymous for me, and I was with the current love of my life at that time, sitting in the bar, and my husband called AA, and this gal walked in, and she said, are you Charlene Welch, and I said yes, and she said, well, I want you to come with me home, your husband wants to see you, and I want to talk to you, and I promise you that if you don't like anything I have to say, I'll bring you right back, well, right away, the wheels are clicking, I'll go home, I'll get more dough, I can stay gone that much longer, and that's exactly what happened, and I said, I don't like anything you have to say, so I'm ready to go back now, and she was true to her word, she took me right back, and I kept on getting drunk, drunker all the time, and all the time, just drunk, drunk, drunk, I was a hopeless, helpless drunk when I accepted this program in its entirety, and when he had me take the $250 cure, and the gal's in the audience today that said, Charlene, you're trying to be a lady now, she says, why don't you say vomit instead of puke, it sounds much nicer, and I said, look, sister, when it got down to what I was doing, there was no vomit left, it was all plain puke, and that's what it was, and I wish I had that $250 today, because I could use it, I was in this place, and I recuperated for a week, and then I stayed sober two months, and then I went on all the pills that they'd given me, and then a few more bottles of whiskey, and you know the story, well, around and around it goes, finally this man had no alternative but to divorce me, so I went to work in this bar behind the county jail in San Diego, and the guy said, you're always in here anyway, and I need a waifers, why don't you go up and join the union, and get paid for being in here, so I thought that was a real brilliant idea, I didn't know why I hadn't thought of it, so I went up, joined the union, made me a white, a black satin money belt, and used to wear these long-sleeved shirts from Honolulu that the sailors would all bring me, I knew so many sailors, it was just lovely, and so they all drank in our place, and they'd say, let's go over and see how many black eyes old Charlene's got today, because about this time I got tangled up with a Seminole Indian, from Tallahassee, Florida, and we damn near killed each other, I'd walk in the bar, and if he didn't have his hat sitting on right that day, well, I'd haul off and knock him off of the bar stool, and the fight would be on, and we fought all over town this one day, and he hit me so hard that he set me up on a bunch of beer cases, and both of my shoes flew off, and I sat there for a while, and climbed down, ordered another drink, and we ordered a cab, then we went on the other side of town to Walter's, and he's the character that used to get drunk, that owned this bar, and he'd run up and down the bar with a loaded gun, and you never knew whether he was going to shoot you or serve you, and so as we went in, I must have said something real wrong, because Paul Neal hauled off, and he slugged me one, and I went sailing over the jukebox in the middle of the floor, and it knocked me out on the tile floor temporarily, and Red wanted to come around from the bar and pick me up, he said, leave that son of a bitch lay there, she's dangerous, and so I lay there, and until I came to enough, and then I ordered another drink, and so we finally, after about nine months, dissolved partnership, but what burned me up was that he, I found out that he was taking all of my money, and my alimony money included, and going over on the other side of town, and spend it on these Danes, and that made me mad, so we dissolved partnership, and I'm looking
[00:25:07]
around again, you see, so I had to find a man that could keep me in the style to which I had become accustomed, and so I found one, and I talked him into marrying me, and I led that man a year and 11 months of plain hell on earth, by this time I'm hitting the jails in San Diego, and it's rough, so this goes on and on and on, and I remember asking him one time if he wouldn't commit me to patent, and he said no, he'd never do that to me, then I tried going back to church, and I got nothing from that, and I know now that that it was because I was not willing, I wasn't willing to let anything work for me, I had to run the whole show, I had to be the whole show, or else we didn't play ball, so one day Mr. Bush came home from the ship, oh I used to call him on the ship, and say on the way home today would you stop by the jail and pick me up, and he would say well what are you in for, and I'd say well the same old thing, and I cost that man a lot in legal fees too, so you know I used to go around these blackouts for days on end, just days and days and nights, and I'd come to, and I'd say when the hell I got here, I didn't have nothing, no nothing, no comb, no lipstick, or no anything, and I had a habit of going across to Tijuana, and I don't know why, because that place is filthy to me at times, so anyway when I called him this time, and to come and get me from jail, and we had a nice talk, and I could see that I was getting no place fast, I was going down, and I was taking him with me, and I didn't want to do that I guess deep in my heart, so anyway my mother, I got drunk, and I stayed drunk for five months, and my mother came and had me committed to patent, and I have been the mental institution route, I've had the delayed DT's however long it takes to get from Los Angeles to New Orleans, that's how long I kept him entertained on the train, and I think that a couple of my marvels are still down there, because I haven't been quite the same since, so I got my, I finally wound up two trips to Camarilla, and I started attending AA meetings there, and then I'd like to say that when I got out that I stayed sober, but I didn't, I got drunk drive charged, no driver's license, hadn't had a driver's license in 13 and a half years, so why did I need one, I sold my car, but didn't dawn on me I'm driving everyone else's car, and by the time that my trial comes up, I'm sitting back in Camarilla, so then when I got out this time, I stayed sober, and on my last drunk, which lasted a day and a half, I guess God just looked down and said, well the old girl's gone just about as far as she can possibly go, and so we'll grant her just one last reprieve, and see what happens, because I had been coming to AA since 1951, and took me three years and three months to get one year, and I'm known as a sympathy kid in Glendale, you know, that's what they say, but that isn't so, so anyway, I got my AA from the old timers in Glendale, people have been sober for 19, 20 years, and believe you me, they didn't hit me on the head with a powder puff, they told me that if I wanted sobriety, that I knew where it was now, and so by my attending meetings, and sitting and listening, Mr. Wainwright said, well what you need is stability, so he sent me in a Wednesday night meeting, and I got stability, I guess, because I found out that it's after being associated with another group, that it's been necessary for me to go back to the people where I learned, and they're glad to have me back, and I'm real glad to be back, I know that it is a real privilege and a pleasure to be allowed an olex drunk like To be allowed an old ex-drunk like me who's been in jail in eight states and a record that long, and the last time almost corona, but for the grace of God.
[00:30:05]
There's a cop in Glendale who saved me from going to corona, women's prison. I didn't even go to court. And so I've changed my mind about the cops now, too. And an old ex-drunk like me being able to carry a pass year by year to the county jail and also to be able to lead meetings at the institution to which I was a guest of twice. And it's also been a real privilege and a pleasure to be a participant in this meeting, and I want to thank each and every one of you.
Applause We want to thank Mary and Charlene and Tom for their wonderful contribution to this convention. Thank you, each and every one. And I think if I went on the next 12-step call and I go on, if I could just have one of these three there to make the patient laugh or laugh, I think I would have success. It's the most wonderful tonic in the world.