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Source: 1965 Toronto International Convention – 1965Toronto Int, Bill W in Toronto, Canada.mp3 File: 1965-toronto-international-convention-1965toronto-int-bill-w-in-toronto-canada.mp3 Duration: 00:45:08
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And now comes my easiest and probably the most simple introduction. It's useless to think of an introduction for this man. You and I were all introduced to him when we attended our first AA meeting. It is impossible to find an introduction that has not already been used. Every known adjective, every type of descriptive phrase has been spoken in this man's behalf, all of them inadequate to express our gratitude.
This makes it very easy for me because there are no introductions left. So I'll just simply say that each of you are sitting out there and we're all sitting up here with our respective lengths of sobriety. Only and only because this man is able to come to the podium and say that I have been sober around AA about thirty years. Mine is one of the great privileges of our fellowship to give you our co-founder and the man responsible for all of this, just plain Bill.
Applause I am sure that each of us seated here, of AA and Al-Aman, will declare that this hour may be the brightest jet that we have ever known in our entire lives. I bring from AA worldwide greetings to this nation, to this city, and to all of our sisters and brothers in AA here. We are grateful to you. Above all, we are grateful to God, who through us has wrought this wholesale miracle of liberation.
This is a time, too, for happy reminiscence. People say, how did it all begin? As many people perhaps will say, well, it began with Dr. Bob and Bill, and this is the thirtieth anniversary of that beginning. But this is not really so. In my view, this is our thirty-third anniversary. AA really began in Switzerland. It took shape in some of its main essentials, in a conversation between the beloved Dr. Jung, one of the founders of modern psychiatry, and the only one so far as I know who had the temerity to believe that man consisted of more than two dollars' worth of chemicals, a bundle of instincts, and something perhaps mistakenly called a brain.
Dr. Jung thought there was more to humans than this. And with him, we nowadays certainly agree. Now let's get to the point, and let me reproduce that scene in his office that took place, I should think, in 1932. A certain American businessman, once of large importance,
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had gone the route, the route that all of us had gone. He was beset by a compulsion that condemned him to drink against his will and interests. He wanted to stop. As we say, he was hooked. He could not. He had run the gamut of the cure, so-called, in this country. And so he approached Carl Jung. He stayed there in Switzerland a year. He and Jung became great friends. As time passed, his inner motivations were revealed to him.
He thought to himself, and so told his doctor, Now I think I understand. I hope and believe that I am free. He left the doctor. In less than 60 days, he was back again, hopelessly in the toils. And he said, Doctor, I really wish to know the story. Said this great and humble man, Roland, when you first came, and for a time after, I thought that my art might help you. I thought you might be one of the very few that we could help.
But no, in your case, it is not so. My art cannot save you. While coming from a founder, I say these were humble words. And this is how AA started in the humility, the wisdom, the humanity of that great man. So, said the patient, but Doctor, you were my court of last resort. Is there no other resource? Nothing that can be done? And Doctor Karl replied, Yes Roland, something else can be tried. But there is no warranty that it can be done.
Time out of mind, men have had so-called spiritual experiences. Some say religious conversions. The essence of these experiences being a shift in motivation, a restoration to sanity where there had been insanity, and an ability to do what the human being couldn't ordinarily have done on his own resources. And all of this seemingly as a sort of gift, not accountable by any discipline, any particular belief, or even any association.
Said the patient, but I am a man of faith. Jung said, Fine Roland, that's good, that's a step. But I am talking about the transforming experience. So put yourself in whatever spiritual atmosphere you choose, and hope that the benign lightning is going to strike you. It is your only chance. Second substance was what Karl Jung said to an alcoholic in the year 1932. And that I think was where we began too.
Roland came to America. He joined the Oxford groups of that day. These good people were emphasizing simple religious common denominators. They too were saying men and women cannot manage their own lives, so let us admit this.
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They were saying let's be honest with ourselves. Let's quit living alone. Let's talk it out with another person. Let us make restitution for harms done. And let every man address the God of his choice for help in carrying out these ideas. This was the substance of their teaching. It was not new. It was a particular emphasis. And among these people, Roland found a few alcoholics who had sobered. And to his intense joy and surprise, his desire for drinking left him.
And he thought himself of a friend of mine, one in our history called Ebby. And he had gone the same way. He was about to be committed for alcoholic insanity. Roland and another friend rescued him from the judge. Roland took him to his own home. Then brought him to the groups in New York. Meanwhile, I had started life with great happiness and high prospects. From the first day I drank as an officer in the World War, I was drunk.
After the 1929 collapse and my money was lost, still hope was not gone, but the drinking increased. It finally reached such a terrible severity that nobody would have a thing to do with me. The process of isolation closed in. Lois was the only one standing by. Meanwhile, I desperately wanted to drink. I didn't know how. I didn't know what the matter was with me, really. You know, standing here in Toronto tonight, it reminds me that I have come full circle.
For it so happened that my last business opportunity was had here and lost here. I had a friend in New York who thought of coming to Toronto to open up in the mines. He asked me to come when no other friend would have done this. He never recouped me for my drinking. He stood for a while. Somehow, why I'll never know, he had confidence in me. Yet. And I came up here. And we lived in the Royal George.
And I tried hard. But as you know, I drank harder. And finally I said to him, look, Joe, I am no good to you. I'm washed up. I'm through. This thing has got me. I'm standing in your way. I'm going home. And then I got so drunk that I ignominiously had to be taken down in the freight elevator of a hotel. Returning home, one hospitalization after another, finally came that summer night when my doctor, Dr. Silkworth Town Hospital in New York, was talking with Lois down in his office.
And he said in effect, Lois, I'm afraid at last I have to tell you the truth. He still senses it. He knows it in his heart. I must give it to you as a fact. He has a compulsion to drink that no resource of mine can break, nor gives. He has a physical sensitivity to alcohol so that if his drinking continues, it means madness, even death. Sitting in this audience tonight, I make no doubt there are several thousand women on whom this sentence has been pronounced, directly or by implication.
And certainly all of us have come to just about the same impasse.
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We have hit bottom. And Lloyd said, what can be done? And the doctor said, I think you'll have to lock him up. Or he may be brain damaged with any error. Of course, I'm not so sure that I wasn't brain damaged right then. Ever since, too. Anyhow, I left the hospital. I was scared to death. Constant vigilance kept me from drinking for a while. I got confident, went back to the street, made a few dollars.
But again, the old rationalizations. Again, it was a bottle. Again, I was in the toils. Again, I knew what the doctor said was true. I was a goner. This time for good. At this very moment in our history, before I was dry, and long before we had this name, my friend Eddie came to me. I was sitting in this kitchen of our house at Clinton Street in Brooklyn. With a bottle of gin on the table, Lloyd's working in the department store.
The telephone rang. My friend Eddie was on the other end. Somehow, I sensed he was sober. Something that had never happened to him in New York City. I said, come right over. We'll talk about the good old days. Oh, what a significant expression, that. If we talked and drank and remembered the good old days, we should forget the present and the obvious future. So that's what we do. Soon he was at the area way door.
I went out. And I sensed that there was something new about him. And he was not only sober, but it was a subtle something or other. And I said to myself, what's happened? He placed himself at the kitchen table. And through the gin haze, I surveyed him from the other side. And I said, Eddie, what's got into you? What's happened? You don't want to drink. You say you're not drinking now. What do you mean by this?
Well, he said, I'll put it to you straight. I got religious. Well, for one scientifically trained, this was like swatting me in the foot with a wet mop, you know. But one had to be polite. So I said to Eddie, tell me, what brand is this that you have? He said, I wouldn't call it a brand. And then he enumerated these little cliché common denominators. So they seemed to me, you know, about getting honest with yourself and making restitution and all the rest of it.
And as he talked, it grew on me that here was a fellow who had something more than warlike insubordination. As he said, he was released. And this was how it had been done. But then my treasured scientific training piled in on me and said, no, no. I cannot get well on what I know to be a delusion. So I felt very much trapped. Eddie finally went away. And in the days that followed, I went on drinking.
But never in any waking hour would his face and what he had to say disappear. And finally I thought to myself, I must look again. This time with clear eyes, I'll go to the hospital. I'll have Dr. Silkworth straighten me out again. As a real conservative Yankee, if there is to be any conversion, it must be sensational. So I went to the hospital. And like most of us on the way to be cured, for the last time I was stewed.
I came in waving a bottle of gin.
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Dr. Silkworth looked at me sadly. I shot a dot. This time I've got something. And he said, well, my boy, I guess you have. You better get upstairs and get to bed. So I did. And I'd come early on to the hospital so I wasn't in too bad shape. And two or three days later, there was no more medication. But I felt horribly depressed. And I kept wondering about what my friend had said. Well, you see, here one alcoholic was talking to another at depth.
They crossed the kinship of a common suffering. He spoke the language of the fox that gripped one somewhere deep inside. He had started to bind me with cords of love from which I was never to escape. And suddenly he stood in the door. And then I was afraid of being evangelized. I said, here's where he turns on the heat and the light. But he didn't. He just paid me a nice cordial visit. And he actually forced me to ask him, what's that nasty little formula you've got, that booze cure of yours?
Will you tell me again? And again he ripped through the principles. Again he mentioned God, and I winced. And again he went away and said he'd be back in a day or two. And after he had gone, I said, what a dilemma. You are within reach of recovery, and for lack of faith you cannot get hold of it. I sank into a terrible depression. And finally, like a child crying in the dark, I said, if there is a God, will he show himself?
No faith, just an appeal to something or somebody, or maybe to nobody. And instantly the room lit up in a great white light. I was seized in an ecstasy that was indescribable. I felt I was on a mountaintop. A great wind was blowing. I thought, this is not air, this is spirit. It went around and through me. And all of a sudden I cried, I am a free man. And as the experience subsided, I found myself of course still on my bed.
But yet, I seemed to be in a different world of consciousness. A world that was all right no matter how wrong it was. And then I was suffused by a sense of pleasance. And I thought to myself, so this is the peace that passes all understanding. This must be the God of the preachers. Now I make haste to say, of course, that this was a dramatic experience. But in its essentials it was in no wise different than that which each and every member, whether he knows it or not, is actually getting as recovery comes to him.
Let me illustrate. Soon after this occurrence, the great turning point in my own life, my friend had me returned and handed me a book, then much read in the Oxford groups. It was written by a man today called the father of modern psychology. William James, the father, who had long since passed away, had done this book and it was an examination of these transforming experiences. And the book not only portrayed their variety, but it also revealed their essentials.
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And nearly all of these experiences had come to people who in some controlling area of their lives had been absolutely stuck against a wall over which none could go, nor around, nor under. They were founded on a basis of human calamity. Then the human, or the remains of him, reached out toward a higher power, and then suddenly, or perhaps very gradually, the shift, the transformation, the remotivation began.
So, having heard from my own doctor that I was hopeless, he was my god of science. An even greater god was Dr. Jung, who inferentially had said the same thing. This I knew in my heart. So, I met the conditions of the cases in the book. And then, like them, I had reached them. And my experience was sudden and brilliant, but something had happened. I was actually scared at the time. I called in the doctor.
And luckily he, too, was not so much a great physician as he was a great human being. And he listened. And I said, Doc, am I crazy? Am I bugged? Am I hallucinating? And he shook his head and said, No, Bill. He said, You are not crazy. I have read of these occurrences in the books, but I have never seen one. In a way I cannot describe, you are different than you were a little while ago. Some great psychic event has occurred.
And whatever it is, my friend, you'd better hang on to it. It's ever so much better than what had you even an hour ago. And in the wake of this, almost naturally there came a vision. How if we used the scientific knowledge of the difficulty, the impossibility of this condition, and one alcoholic projected that to the next over this common identification so easily made, then deflation of depth could come to other people.
And they, too, might reach out to a higher power if only to their group, to people who are sober in contrast with their drunkenness. So these were some of the original concepts that were not in the least the invention of Dr. Bob and me. They were all gone from our friends of medicine and religion. We had just begun to fashion a missing link in the chain of recovery. Well, I began working with tremendous enthusiasm with drunks.
There were lots of them down at the mission of Calvary Church, where Sam Shoemaker, then head of the Oxford Groups in America, presided. The doctor let me work on some at Towns Hospital. And then insidiously, the pride business came back. I was heard to say that I was going to fix all the drunks in the world. I was. I was heard to say that anybody can have one of those experiences like mine. Far upon all the drunks tapped their heads and said, to hell with this business.
It was not enough before. So I got no place because I was pontificating and because I was preaching. So there was a final link still to be forged in the chain of recovery. And this was first my own deflection to my right side. It came about in this way. What about in this way? Some of my friends says, why don't you give up the missionary job and get to work and support Lois and get her out of that store.
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Well, I thought this was a good idea, so I scraped up some new acquaintances in Wall Street. Presently I'm not an acronym file, I'm a proxy practice, hoping to gain control through these new friends of a little machine tool company. Well, we got out there, very confident, 40% of the proxies were in our pockets. There was a pushover. I said, well, we'll get the bank all fixed up and you know I'll help it out now and then.
But we got licked in the proxy fight and my rather fair weather friends departed for New York and they neglected to leave me any money to get home myself. So I'm in the Mayflower Hotel with ten bucks in my pocket. I went down in the lobby. I walked toward the bar. I looked in. It was a Saturday afternoon. I thought to myself, well, I might go in and have a glass of ginger ale or a translation acquaintance.
And suddenly I caught myself and said, ah, here comes the old rationalizations. What shall I do? Maybe I'm going to get drunk. And then at long last, I remembered how my efforts, however poor they were, to help others had also helped me to maintain my stability and my sobriety. So I thought, if I will save myself, I must find another alcoholic in this town and right now. Walking to the other end of the church lobby, I saw a list of clergymen and their churches.
And running my finger at random down this list, I came to the name of a preacher, a rather odd name. It was Walter Tonks. He had the Episcopal Parish there. I called up the Reverend Tonks and I said, I am an alcoholic from New York. I'm temporarily sober with the help of some Oxford group friends, but none of these are around and I'm afraid I'm going to get tight, so I've got to have another drunk to work on.
Well, at first, the prospect of one drunk at a time was enough for Tonks. He couldn't see bringing two together. But after a bit, he caught my meaning and he said, I'll tell you what you do. You call up Norman Shepard, Chief Demosoic Firestone. He's one of the group with Oxford groups, not a drinker, but he'll give you some names. I know he will. I'll tell him too. And from Norman, I got a list of names. And I began calling them one by one.
Well, this was a strange request, another drunk to work on, so they could be pardoned for seeing me in church Sunday, perhaps, or some other day, or they were busy, or they would be out of town. And one by one, my list evaporated. Until at the very end, there stood a name, Henry Edda Seiberlin. Then I thought of the old Wall Street days when I had met Frank Seiberlin, the founder of the Goodyear Company.
I knew he and his wife would be on it years. I couldn't imagine calling her up looking for a drunk to work on, could I? So I get down and I look at the directory some more. And something said to me, you had better get upstairs and call that number. All on what small seeming events our destinies can turn. A southern voice came on the water. I explained to her. She caught my drift at once. She said, I'm no drinker, but I've had my troubles. You come right out here now.
So I arrived at the estate, and at the door of the gatehouse stood Henry Edda. I explained. She said, I have just the man for you. We've had a doctor that can't get sober in the group here. We know he wants to. The family has gone to plant. The house is about to be foreclosed.
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A prominent surgeon, he's lost his place at the city hospital. He wants to stop, but he can't. Would you like me to call up his wife, Ann? Oh, I said, please do. So Henry Edda called Ann and said, Ann, there is a man here from New York who has been able to stop drinking. And he'd like to talk with Dr. Bob, if he might. He says it would help him, and maybe he should help Dr. Bob. Well, Ann said, you know, it's Mother's Day. And Dr. Bob is really a kind man, and he's brought me a beautiful plant.
And the plant is sitting here on the table, but he is lying under the table, quite unable to get up. So I don't think that he will be here today. Next day, though, they came at five o'clock, and Dr. Bob and Ann stood in the door, and Dr. Bob didn't look like the founder. He was shaking. He was in a hurry. He said, I can only stay a few minutes. I said, I know you're thirsty. Diplomatically, Henry Edda pushed him to the library. We talked for hours. This time, I'm no missionary.
This time, I say, I need you even more perhaps than you need me. I need you to save myself. Instead of talking about this strange-sounding spiritual experience, I put it to him from the mouths of my doctor friends how hopeless this really was and why. He hadn't understood this. His relief was immense. He and Ann invited me to their house. I carried on the proxy fight, but Dr. Bob said, shouldn't we be working with alcoholics, you and me?
And I said, yes. He called up the city hospital. There was a nurse he knew. He said, there's a man from New York who thinks he's got a cure for alcoholism. And the nurse rather dryly retorted, well, Dr. Bob, I hope you have tried it on yourself. She said, well, anyhow, we've got a dandy customer for you. He's just been brought in. He's a well-known attorney here in town. He's been here four times in six months. And he can't even get home sober from here.
He has the DTs. He's blacked the eyes of one of the nurses. We've got him strapped down. Dr. Bob, how would you like that customer? He said, just the thing. We'll be down tomorrow. And on tomorrow, Dr. Bob and I saw for the first time what we of AA call the man on the bed. So each of us told our stories. Each of us told him what this alcoholism thing was. But the man on the bed shook his head sadly. Boys, he says, this is great. You know what you're talking about.
But me, I'm too far gone. He said, I can't even go home from here without getting stewed. But he said, you're the first persons in all my life that look to me like you know the score. Won't you come down tomorrow? So on tomorrow we came. His wife was standing near the foot of his bed. Bill, his name was Bill too, looked at Doc and me. He said to her, these are the folks that understand. During the night, I thought to myself, if they can do this, I can do it.
Wife, please fetch me my clothes. We're going to get up and we're going to get out of here. And the man on the bed stepped out of it and walked out into the world.
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And he went into a political campaign and his opponents derided his drinking. He never had a drink until he died a few years ago. Neither did Dr. Bob, neither have I. So that was the beginning of the first group of AA. As you know, another started in New York, another in Cleveland. Publicity came. The Cleveland groups proved that 20 members could take on 6 or 700, and as the result of a great burst of publicity, they made mass production of society possible.
We got together and wrote a book called Alcoholic Nuns. And the last chapter of the text is called, you will remember, A Vision for You. And in that text, written at a time when we had less than 40 recoveries, or less than 100 recoveries, I was looking the other day and found these words. They were words of hope, but to us at the time, scarcely prophetic. And here they are. The beginning of AA, 1939.
Our hope is that when this chip of a book is launched on the world tide of alcoholism, defeated drinkers will seize upon it to follow its suggestions. Many, we are sure, will rise to their feet and march on. May we give thanks to a bountiful God for all that he has wrought among us ever since. Good night. Thank you. Thank you. What have we got here? What have we got? Everybody be seated, please. What have we got here?
I can't have an explanation. And certainly, after that, absolutely nothing more need be said. It's more befitting that we leave the gardens this evening still remembering the words of our three wonderful speakers. Needless to say, our original hope for a memorable evening has been more than fulfilled. Before we go any further here, if I could have your attention here, if Pat O'Leary is in the hall, or Burton O'Leary, I should say, call Pat O'Leary at the King Edward Hotel. It's urgent.
Burton O'Leary, call Pat O'Leary at the King Edward Hotel. Now, before we close the meeting in the usual manner, I just wonder if we could have Flip and Jim bring up the result of the picture that they took here at the beginning of the session. As I understand it, reproductions of this are going to be available tomorrow morning in the Toronto Room. But I wish that you could see the way this picture is taken.
I have never seen such a panoramic view that it just kind of leaves you breathless looking at the picture itself. So I'm going to ask them to spread it out here as well. So I'm going to ask them to spread it out here, if you will. Could we have the footlights on?
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Thank you.