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Source: 1975 Denver International Convention – 1975 Denver Int, Eastern Canda AA with Pete W, Marge M, Dennis F., Gerald B.mp3 File: 1975-denver-international-convention-1975-denver-int-eastern-canda-aa-with-pete-w-marge-m-dennis-f-gerald-b.mp3 Duration: 01:20:58
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I wonder if I might have your attention in order that we might get this Alcathon underway. The hour is ten o'clock, and they've asked us to adhere to a very tight time schedule, and I intend to do that. Now, if everyone would just find seats, perhaps we could get this meeting going. The first thing I would like to ask everyone to join us in this morning is in a moment's silence. Perhaps it might be fitting if we reflected during that moment on the many, many recoveries and express our gratitude to God as we understand him for the many recoveries that we've experienced in this fellowship in the past forty years.
Would you join me in that moment now, please? Would you join me in the serenity prayer? God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. I'd like to first of all explain the anonymity tradition. There may be some who are not familiar with our tradition of personal anonymity at the public level. If so, we respectfully ask that no A.A. speaker or member be identified by full name or picture in published or broadcast reports of our meeting.
The assurance of anonymity is essential to our efforts to help other alcoholics, and our tradition of anonymity reminds us that A.A. principles come before personalities. And with that, a few chores out of the way, we'll try to get this thing underway. I'm an alcoholic, and my name is Pete Waters, and I'm very happy to be here. Hi, everybody. I have the privilege of being the Eastern Canadian Class B trustee representing Eastern Canada, and I'm very, very grateful for the privilege of being with you and being able to share here this morning.
I'm not going to bore you with any lengthy qualifications. I once heard that the earmarks of a good chairman was threefold. First, that he should stand up to be seen, speak up to be heard, and shut up to be appreciated, and I intend to do that. However, I think it is in order that I should qualify, and I'll qualify very briefly. I'm an alcoholic. My name is Pete Waters. I drank too much too often in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I'm a garden variety type drunk with two exceptions. One is that I was a religious alcoholic, and the other is I was a political alcoholic, and I've always maintained that when you put those two together, you end up with a hell of an alcoholic, and that's very true. We have some very wonderful people with us this morning that I'm very, very privileged to introduce to you. I'm very excited about them being with us.
They're people who have had a very great meaning in my life over the past many years. They have touched my life in many, many ways, and when I was asked some months ago to make a selection of some speakers for this panel this morning, it was not an easy chore because I have the privilege of knowing a lot of very wonderful people across eastern Canada, and it was a very difficult choice, but I went back in my AA days, and I try to remember those whose sobriety and whose working at the program had impressed me and had left an imprint on me because I felt that that's what you people would want to hear this morning was an AA message, and it's so gratifying to see so many of you here to turn out.
I particularly welcome the Canadians who are here in this great U.S. and have come to our meeting this morning. I'm very grateful to you. I want to say to the people of Denver, Colorado, that I think your city is extremely beautiful, and I'm enjoying it very, very much. I've been here for nearly a week now, and I haven't gotten into any trouble yet. I intend to. As soon as this meeting's over, I intend to get into some as fast as I can.
I made several connections last night at the dance. I want to say one thing further, that that dance doesn't do a damn thing for your spiritual life at all. I saw some of those people out there last night. That's a very dangerous exercise, you know. Some of you should be ashamed of yourself, the way you're carrying on. God, it's terrible. It's almost immoral. I liked it, though. It's nice to see so many people here this morning.
I'm glad that you're all up and awake, and probably not well, most of you,
[00:05:00]
as long as you haven't recovered yet. But that's okay. We'll get on with the panel we have here this morning. The first speaker that I want to introduce to you is the gracious one on our panel, a good-looking one. She's a very beautiful gal. She hails from the Willowdale Group in Toronto, and I know you're going to give her a real rousing welcome, Marg Ann from Willowdale, Toronto. Hi, everybody. I'm Marg, and I'm an alcoholic, and I know that each and every one of you wished that you were up here instead of me.
But if you stick around, your turn will come. Believe me. I'm very happy to be here this morning and very grateful that I was able to come to Denver. Is that better? I'm very happy to be here this morning and grateful that I was able to come to Denver. It's a really beautiful part of the country, and I've enjoyed every minute of it up till now. And I hope that this will continue. I'm sure it will, because I know you have all your beautiful minds wide open this morning.
Through the grace of God and the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous, a miracle was wrought in my life, and I'm going to tell you a little bit about what happened and how I got to AA. I'm going to abbreviate Alcoholics Anonymous because time is limited and I'm apt to get a poke in the back, you know. But I'm very grateful, of course, to AA because they taught me how to live without the use of alcohol and also helped me to understand myself so that I could realize maybe why this problem happened to me.
And I had to go back and see myself as a child, and I know I was not a happy child. I was a rebel, and I resented authority. I was fearful. You know, I used to think it was a world I never made, and I never liked the way things were, and I always wanted to change everything. I had a dream of life, as it were, but the reality was never the same as the dream. I was uncomfortable inside. I covered all this up.
Nobody really knew the real me. I didn't know the real me myself. So that when I began to drink in my teens, I thought I had found the elixir of life because when I took that first drink, all these uncomfortable feelings within disappeared, and life was beautiful. And this continued, so naturally I loved the booze, right from the word go. I drank far more than my girlfriends. None of them became alcoholics, and I looked forward to the drinking.
The booze was more important than what the date looked like or where we went or anything else. If there was going to be drinking, I was happy. So this went on while I didn't have too much of a problem, really. I know I drank far more than I should for a young girl, probably did a lot of nutty things, but I did not suffer physically, and I had no remorse over anything that happened. It was all a hell of a big joke.
I went to business when I was about 18. It didn't interfere. I could drink all night and go to work the next day. I had a lot of stamina, blessed with good health. So time went on, and after the war, my husband came back from overseas. I found myself in the suburbs, cut off from everything with two little children. I have two sons. And I began to drink for a different reason, not really to have fun or, you know, think that everything was glamorous.
I drank because I was bored. I'm not domesticated. I got no fulfillment from housework. Swapping recipes at the coffee parties wasn't my cup of tea. So naturally, I began to drink by myself around the house.
[00:10:00]
And this made everything easier because I escaped into my little dream world. And it went on, and things began to get worse, and our personal problems got worse. My husband had a lot of problems. I drank to escape. And I would quit once in a while when I was in the doghouse, never with the thought that I should stop drinking because I always blamed everybody and everything else. If people said to me, Marge, why do you drink so much?
I'd think to myself, if you had my problems, you'd drink too, you stupid so-and-so. But, you know, nobody else had any problems, just Marge, and I wallowed in my self-pity. And how could God and the world do this to me? Because my life wasn't turning out the way I had planned it. So it went on, and things began to get worse with my husband, the fights, and he was always trying to police my drinking.
And the more he tried to police my drinking, the more rebellious I got. I was devious, you know, the old story, we get it, we hide it, we sneak it. And I was getting sicker and sicker. At one time I could drink and maybe get good and drunk and recover in a couple of days, and by, you know, the next week when I drank again, in between I could sort of reach some kind of a balance. But towards the end I became addicted to alcohol.
I couldn't stand to be without it, and the fear was overpowering. I lived in the future, I lived ten years ahead, and it was all dreadful. Every day was doomsday to me. And I thought there was no way out and there was no hope. I didn't, I lost the ability to sleep or to eat. I couldn't even sit in my own living room. And I would get up and charge out of the house at any hour of the day or night and pace the neighborhood.
And, you know, I used to say to myself, Mark, it's a good thing you drink or you'll have a nervous breakdown. Really, I did. Talk about rationalizing. And I believed this. I didn't think there was a thing wrong with me, but just that my nerves were bad because of the way my life was going, and it's a good thing I drink. Well, I drank to get sick and I drank to get better and I drank to get sick and I drank to get better.
Ad infinitum. That's the story. Well, eventually, through our doctor and my husband, who screamed loud enough, my husband is a screamer, and when he screams, everybody hears him. Alcoholics Anonymous came to me. I can't honestly say I was so smart I picked up the phone and called AA. There were a lot of God's people involved in this. He uses people, I know. But I did get there. And I'll tell you one reason that I got there was that when two girls came to see me, and the one girl was my sponsor today, and she's here with me, and it's just great to be together because I can remember when with her already.
But when they came to visit me and they were leaving that night, my sponsor said to me, Well, I'll come down and see you in the morning. And I said, All right. And my husband said, Don't bother coming. She'll be drunk when you get here. And that's what sobered me up, because anything that SOB said, I did the opposite. So I went through the shakes and the sweats and the withdrawal the next day, and I didn't know whether I could stand up or not, just the way I felt this morning, you know.
And I got to a meeting. After this one day without a drink, I went to a meeting. And I heard a speaker who was a dentist, and our stories had nothing in common. Our stories had nothing in common, but I identified so well with that man because everything he felt inside and all that he had been going through were exactly what had happened to me.
[00:15:15]
I think God works in mysterious ways that I should happen to go to that meeting that night and hear that speaker because I was able to go home and give up the battle. At last, you know, and I had had to put up an awful fight to keep drinking in the face of all opposition as it were, but I gave up the battle that night. I said, well, my God, this is it, I'm an alcoholic. And I could have made this admission ten years sooner, you know, but I was pretty stubborn, eh? I had to keep going.
But I was able just to let go and say, this is it, I don't know how I'm going to do it, but I know that I have to stop drinking. Well, I came to Alcoholics Anonymous and joined the group, and really the feeling in the group was what helped me so much. It was the love and understanding because I'd been in this little prison of my own making. I had shied away from people. You know, my friends were saying, oh, Marg, why do you do it?
I didn't know why I did it. I knew nothing about alcoholism or what was wrong with me. Or they'd say, pull up your socks. Or they'd say, you're strong, you did it before, you can do it again. They were referring to one other time I was in the doghouse and I stopped drinking until the heat was off. But I'm so sick now that I can't do anything, you know, I'm just tolerant. But the members in Alcoholics Anonymous were so kind to me, and they understood, and I just loved it from the first minute.
My life was still very unmanageable because of the problems we had personally in our lives, my husband and I. And I didn't know how I was going to live in the same house with this horrible person and stay sober. But I learned so much, and you people taught me all I know, that I could just live one day at a time. I didn't have to worry about how much I was going to hate him next week or next year or blame him for everything.
And this went on, and my sobriety I was very happy with. I was on a pink cloud, we all know the pink cloud, it's just great. And things didn't get any better, but you know, I'd be walking along the street and all of a sudden, I would just have the most marvelous feeling and my heart would sing. And I'd think, I don't have to drink. And I was just so grateful that they had taught me one day at a time, and this is how I tried to start living my life and not to project into the future.
And I had had a belief in God all my life, but you know, I thought God had deserted me and he didn't love me anymore or this wouldn't have happened to me. And after being in AA a while and doing a little praying and meditating, a lot of things came to me. That God had protected me for 25 years through all this horrible drinking. He had protected my children. And all of a sudden, the realization of all that had been done for me, it just hit me like a ton of bricks.
So therefore, it was easy for me to latch on to step three, and that was what I lived on for a long time, just trying to turn everything over to God. He has never let me down, believe me. A lot of the steps, you know, I skipped here and there and about because some of them I didn't like. When they told me God would restore me to sanity, I was quite insulted because I was sick and I had an illness, that's all right, but now they're telling me I'm not.
I didn't like that a bit, so I skipped that one for quite a while. And then the realization came to me that that wasn't what it meant at all. It was the sanity, insanity of the first drink.
[00:20:02]
And I have come to believe today, and I ask God every morning, just please keep me sane enough not to reach for one drink. The simple prayer has worked for me. And the inventory, I had a terrible time because I still blamed everybody else. But eventually, I had to get a little honest with Mark. And I began to see what kind of a person I had been. And the day that I could take the blame for my own drinking, point the finger here instead of out there and there and there, this is when my sobriety became contented and I was happy about it.
Life didn't get really much better personally for me for about two years, but I was able to stay sober through all the crisis, the things that happened, because I came to believe that God wouldn't give me this gift of sobriety and bring me to AA and help me get sober and then make my life so unbearable that I couldn't stand it. And this helped so that every time some catastrophe came along, I would try to tell myself to sit back and wait and see why it happened and not to get all emotionally upset, you know, and, you know, tizzy about everything.
And it helped me so much. At times I would even have a little serenity within myself no matter how things were, and this was great. And eventually some peace of mind. And after I'd been sober for two years, God began to solve a lot of the problems for me. And wonderful things happened. He answered so many of my dreams, believe me. So many things I'd always wanted came true. And it was unbelievable, but now I realized that God wasn't going to give me certain things until I was able to handle them.
And my children, of course, they were, you know, when people say, well, how do I know what God's will for me is? It wasn't hard for me to know. I'm a mother. I have two sons. And I knew that God's will was that I stay sober and do the best I could for my children. And that is what I tried to do. And I'm a very, very grateful mother today because my sons grew up without any problems or hang-ups into very nice young men.
They're happily married. I even have two new baby grandsons, and I'm thrilled to death about that. So trying to practice this program has been just terrific in my life. I don't wear a halo, you know, and every day isn't perfect. But when I do have a bad day, at least I can sit back and say, now look, all your defects are popping out. I can cope with myself. I can deal with me, and this is a thing I never could do.
So that it becomes easier, I think, as I go along. And any catastrophe that I get through, it strengthens me. I feel stronger afterwards, and I realize, well, you don't have to drink every time some damn thing happens that you don't like. But booze is no answer. It never was an answer. It just made me sick. A self-inflicted wound it was to me. And I've stayed active in AA. I have belonged to the same group since I came in.
I've seen a lot of people come and go. The lifeblood of AA, the new people, it helps me. It keeps me sober. And I'm still married to this same horrible man today, believe it or not. And we have sort of come to terms with life. We each have our own problems that we manage to cope. And God knows where we would have been if I had kept on drinking. I know where I would be by now, and I think I know where he might be.
He's not an alcoholic. So the life became much, much better for me.
[00:25:04]
And, you know, when I think of how I had to change my attitude towards God as I understand him, I only thought God was a convenience and that all I had to do was ask, you know, and I would get what I wanted. When I went to high school, I used to skip school and not study. And then the exams came along, and I prayed like mad to God to help me pass. It never did any work. And, you know, the old saying, if you don't study, you don't pass.
It never did any work. And, you know, the old saying, if you pray for potatoes, you pick up the whole. But I just thought God was there to say, yes, you can have it, here it is. And I didn't like him if he didn't give it to me. So everything had to change in my life. And now I have a good relationship with my higher power. He helps me to live. He helps me with everything. And I have faith in God, and this replaces all that terrible fear that I had.
I don't think there's too much more I can tell you except today I stand here before you, a recovered alcoholic, very, very grateful, very happy to be with you this morning. And I'd like to leave you with a little prayer, and it goes, O Lord, teach us humility, that our faith may be made whole in thee, so that when trouble comes, we can say, Thy will be done. Thank you all very much. Applause She's very beautiful and very gracious.
And Marg, I am very grateful to you for sharing with us this morning. I am very deeply indebted to you for taking the time out and the effort that it takes to get here and to be with us this morning, and thank you very, very much for a very beautiful message. Marg, in her remarks, referred so often to the higher power and the help that she'd received from God as she understands him, and it's so true.
I was thinking this morning, and believe it or not, probably most of you won't believe it, but I did a little reflection this morning to ask him to be here, you know, that I had hoped he'd be in Denver this morning. And it kind of reminded me of the story of the very eminent Protestant minister who flew out of Toronto to New York on a most important speaking assignment. Now, you know by tradition that in New York City, all the taxi drivers a few years ago and all the policemen were Irish Catholics.
This very eminent Protestant minister arrived at the airport in New York, and he was late, and things were not going well, and he was due to arrive at this church to speak, and there were a lot of people waiting for him. And he said to the taxi driver, my good man, he said, I'm late for a very important appointment, and I don't want you to spare the horses. He said, I want you to take me to Christ Church Cathedral right away.
And he said, whatever it may involve, he said, I'll take care of any infractions that may occur. With this, this mad taxi driver took off, and dear God, he went through backyards, lawn fences, perambulators, and old ladies, and he pulled up in front of St. Patrick's Cathedral. And the Protestant minister looked out and said, that's not Christ Church! And the taxi driver said, well, if he's not there, he's out of town today.
I'm sure glad that God was in Denver this morning. As I sat back listening to Marg, I looked over this very spacious auditorium here, and I looked at my program, and I realized that Cardinal Breen is operating somewhere else in this building. And I knew why they had him in another room. If he was in here, you'd all have me sitting backwards. He'd want to do the balcony seat. If you're familiar with that, he fell off at one time.
Our next speaker this morning is a young man that has had a very profound effect upon my AA life. A young man that really, perhaps he doesn't know this, but I want to say that he impressed me with the brand of sobriety and the way he worked his program. He's a very, very active member, and one of the kind that the two leaders of Alcoholics Anonymous in his group, in the Kingsway group, Alcoholics Anonymous in his group, in the Kingsway Group in Toronto, and I know that there are a lot of people who are acquainted with him in the hall here this morning, and it's my privilege to ask you to welcome Dennis F. from the Kingsway Group of Toronto. Dennis.
[00:30:07]
Applause First of all, thank you, Peter, for those kind words. I do do a lot of work at AA, and I just absolutely love it. I am a recovering alcoholic, and my name is Dennis, and good morning to everyone. It's great to come to the United States, because as I'll tell you in my story, the Americans saved my life. It just happened that way, and so I'll go back a little bit, and I see Marge right on time, and I'll try to do that, too.
But I'm just a little nervous at the moment. This is quite an occasion for me, and Peter keeps picking on us Protestants, you know, and I've heard that story before many times, and I work very closely with Peter, and sometime maybe Peter will tell you that story of the Orangemen and the Catholics and all those things and what's happened fairly recently. But to go back where I started, oh, I guess really drinking started to cause problems in my life when I was about the age of 21. I had my first beer or two or so when I was 16, but back then I was a very active hockey player.
One time I thought I might become a professional hockey player. Thank goodness I didn't follow that career. Oh, the one I followed was probably just as crazy, but you'll hear about that. But really it was age 21, and I'm advancing the story and picking up from age 21. There were a couple of things back then. But just recently, and my life has changed drastically since August of 74, and just recently it seems that I'm getting more sanity and understanding the program a little better.
But I look back, and from the age of 12, as I can recall now, the thing that made me tick in my life was fear. Everything I did was fear, and the greatest thing I feared was financial failure and financial insecurity, and that became my undoing. But through becoming my undoing, it eventually saved my life. So at age 21, I started into the investment business. I'm one of Canada's larger investment dealers at the moment. But at age 21, I looked at and thought through material things, I guess really. But I said, gee, the money seems to be in sales, and that's where I wanted to go.
But back when I had left school in the fourth or twelfth grade and so on, and I was trying to get into a mentoring university and a hockey scholarship, which didn't work out. I was just telling this to my wife last night over dinner. She'd never heard this part of my story, so she still says that on occasion I'm a secretive person, but it doesn't matter. So I decided to give up hockey then and continue on this course in the investment business. So I started to take all the investment courses and things that I had to do in order to get to where the money was, which was in sales.
So I did that. And through this period, I still coach kids hockey and so on. So even then, I like to help people, as I do today. They were just a little younger in those days, but not as hard as my wife. Her younger brother, Steve, who's now in the program, was our goalkeeper. And she started to come out to the games, and her mother said, gee, you have to meet this hockey coach. He's quite a guy. I think she's changed her mind on occasion over the years, but we're bringing it back together, and it's a great thing, really.
So we got married in 1962. I was 24, almost 25 at that time. And it seemed that from the day that I got married, my drinking started to increase. This is no reflection on my wife or the type of person she was.
[00:35:05]
I think really what it was, was my beginning of starting to run away from responsibility. It was just an overrided thing. And I had a lot of problems looking after myself, let alone a lovely young girl that I had married. So that seemed to be the start of it. We went down to NASA for our honeymoon, and on the way back we were there for nine days, which was quite a good time, good party. Spent a lot of time in bars. I did.
And so on the way back, well, I just had too much on the way back, and I got lost. It's now Kennedy International, but I couldn't find, as Eric L. was saying, on the way down, I met him at Chicago Airport, Trans-Canada Airlines, now called Air Canada. And I couldn't find it. Eventually I did, but once again I just recalled that story last week with a good buddy of mine. He was talking about that. So that was the start. That was my wife's introduction to me of married life.
It was a lot worse to follow. I don't know how she's put up with me all these years, but she has. She's told me since I've sobered up that she loves me and that she does respect me. And I guess that goes back, which I rejected. This is just something new, but I'll get into that. But I rejected that over the last three and a half, three years or so. But I guess that's what captured her with me, really, was this deep love that she felt from our early days.
So to put something in chronological order, we do have three children now, a boy ten, a girl six, and another great guy, and he's almost three. But in 65, when my first son was born, and alcohol does take quite a time in your life to eventually, they say it's kind of baffling and powerful, but also I've heard, you know, you can put another word in there, and it's called patient, and it'll wait for you.
I stopped drinking in 71, but in 1965, I had some ups and downs in my drinking career. 65 was a serious up from the increased dosage, not through good fortune. I went out to celebrate the birth of my son, and I popped in and out to see my wife, but I was having just a tremendous time celebrating this thing, because I really did want a boy. If I could accept the responsibility of a child, I wanted a boy, and being the egomaniac that I was, and probably to a lesser degree still am, I named him after me, but many of us do that.
So, after a year and a half in the program, I was able to answer the 20th question, because in 1965, after this week of celebration, I went to visit my wife on Saturday morning, 11.40 or so, and that was usually during the week, you know, 12 o'clock was the witching hour, out and have a few drinks, keep the nervous system going, keep it calmed down, but it was Saturday, and I couldn't do that. And I finally had to come back to the real world and accept the little responsibility.
But what happened was, my wife was lying in the bed, and I was there for about 15 minutes, and I started to shake and I started to tremble. I had to lie down on the bed, and my arms went like this, and I couldn't get them down. I had to bring a stretcher, and I ended up in the emergency ward for three hours, trying to get rid of, as I now understand it, alcoholic convulsions. I couldn't get my arms down, so the doc gave me some pills, and I went home, and that's when I was introduced to tranquilizers, but I did not use a great deal of those.
So I was a 65 up, and we went along, and we adopted a little girl in 68. You know, God works in funny, funny ways, and we had the one young fellow, and we wanted another one. My wife did. I don't know whether I did, because I had started going a little funny and so on, but I don't know whether I did, but she said my son needs a sister. So we adopted a little girl, and she's fabulous today. But as I was saying, God works in strange ways, and once again, you know, I look at her today, and she's just another lovely little girl that I feel I'm trying to help along in life,
[00:40:10]
and just love her as much as I love the other two. There's no difference at all. So that brings me to 68, and through 68 and through 69, I worked very hard. Through all those years of the hard drinking and the investment business, it's much like the ad business. You're out at lunch, you're out after work, and I loved it. I just loved it, you know. And I love it today in the business, and just love it where all the action is, and sort of making deals and all those kinds of things.
I really loved my business. So I'd done very well, I'd worked very hard, and I got into the institutional sales arm of this company and so on. I'd switched from my original firm that I started with. I'm back there now. And I went with a firm, well, I can't mention the name. But anyway, 68, 69, as some of you may know, the stock market was going up forever. And I believed it, of course, living in the world of fantasy, and I became involved in it.
And it all stopped in the fall of 1969 and started on a very, very big downhill slide. And I started on the downhill slide with it, because I was so overextended and so on that my financial problems became so great that I wasn't able to cope. But funny how it works, you know, when you seem to get the ball rolling uphill. And the ball, really from my past, worked. Kept rolling up the hill and up the hill.
And in my last year of drinking was the year that I made the most money I'd ever made. I don't know why, but I certainly needed the money at that time. But in the year of 1969, the United States or the world's largest stockbroker bought our company up there. And I resented that at the time, you know, of this big giant coming and gobbling up a smaller Canadian firm and so on. But I was, I don't know, boy, I was getting so sick in those days.
You know, I resented anybody who was doing well, because I was doing so poorly. That was in 69. And it took from the fall of 69 to August of 1971 of this total deterioration of myself. And I went right down to the bottom of the line, really. I drank. In my last year of drinking, I drank most of the time that I was awake. Most of us here have experienced the 4 or 5 o'clock wake up with the shakes and the sweats and saying, boy, I've got to face another day.
I could never drink early in the morning. I used to start at noon. I got that down to 10.30 in the last few months. So I was heading, you know, I was heading there. But I couldn't, because at least I had to do some semblance of work. And I only worked for, really, maybe two and a half hours a day. And total insanity, really. But that's just what happened. So in the year of 71, we had about four managers come through in this takeover and so on.
And in April of 71, had had some experience with AA, and the experience he had had was that he dragged a guy. He doesn't have a problem himself. He dragged a fellow to AA for X period of time, and the guy kept getting drunk on him. But at least he knew there was some sort of help somewhere. So he had smelled what he thought was a morning drink on my breath in April while I was just left over from the night before and so on.
So finally he started to ask me a couple of questions, and he mentioned that he smelled it. A couple of questions, and he mentioned that he smelled alcohol on my breath, so I increased my SIRT dosage. On and on it goes. So he, things got progressively worse. The banks kept
[00:45:08]
calling asking for more money, and of course I was running out of money. Somehow I still found the money to drink, but I just borrowed more, but I was getting to the end of my borrowing power. So, in August, they finally came to me, this fellow Bob Chapman came to me and said, Dennis, this is August 19th, he said, I have to tell you that your drinking is causing me serious problems, and he said, you're no good to us, and you're no good to yourself, and if you don't do something, we're going to have to let you go. And, see, that was, that was a real blow to the ego. And he kept mentioning this fellow from New York a lot, and he said, if you talk to the fellow in New York, maybe we can work something out if, you know, if you decide that you do not wish to talk to him, well, we're calling it a party, this is a Thursday afternoon. And I said, well, yeah, just, you know, nothing to lose, so I'll talk to the fellow from New York. So, anyway, I was in the executive office at 10 o'clock the next morning, and this fellow much like Pete Waters behind me, only my wife says Pete Waters is better looking. This tremendous fellow pops in, and he said, I understand you have some problems. I told him all about my financial problems for an hour, and he said, gee, how much do you drink? And his name's Don S., and he's in New York. I called him last week to see if he was coming here. He said he wasn't. I guess he was too busy.
And I don't know, for the first time in a long, long while, I decided to tell him how much. So I did, and he said, well, I'm glad you told me the truth. He said, because, you know, I've been in AA for five years, and I would have known if you hadn't been telling me the truth. And he said, you remind me almost exactly of myself, where I was five years ago today. And he said, I wanted to tell you that if you stop drinking, he said, because drinking really is your only problem. It is causing all the others. If you stop drinking, I'll hop you, and we'll get you out. Well, they were just words of magic to me. Well, once again, in the old sick thinking, I thought, well, gee, I'll quit for a couple months or three months, get this financial mess sorted out, because I'm sure this big firm has lots of money, and they'll help me, and I'll get right back out there. Because I don't believe, at this time, I do not believe that I'm an alcoholic. So I go to my first discussion group, and I didn't like that. I really didn't. Because I still had a bunch of ego going for me, and I just couldn't relate. I didn't go back to discussion for a year and a quarter, but I had to go back, because I started to hurt so much I had nowhere else to turn. But I didn't believe it. I went to my second meeting on Wednesday night, and then on the Thursday night I went to the Hill Group, and I heard Eric L. do his interpretation of the 12 Steps.
And it made sense. And I thought, boy, those people up there are saying they're alcoholics. And, gee, I've done far worse things than that, and I'm farther down, because I used to drive up the highway, and that's the last summer of 71, and I didn't care whether I ran into a car, ran off the road, hit a bridge, it didn't matter anymore. Because really what I was doing, because I had affected my immediate family, my wife, my children, and I had affected my in-laws, and I had affected my own parents, and I was just dying of a broken heart. I just couldn't stand myself any longer. And that's where I got to. So anyway, we started on this course of coming back to life, accepting responsibility, and trying to live the AA way of life. Anyway, what I was going to say, I got a little off on a sidetrack there, as I do occasionally. I picked up the 20 questions. I answered 19 correctly. But, you know, craziness.
I didn't think I was an alcoholic. I really, honest to God, did not believe that that was my problem. I drank almost daily for 10 years, and not once in those 10 years did I think that I should stop drinking. I lied my way through the Addiction Research Foundation in 67. That was another one of those up-peak periods. But I didn't think I should stop.
[00:50:01]
It was just a con job on those people, and they told me my liver was okay, and I was still a pretty healthy young guy. That was just a license to vote, and, you know, really get at it. So anyway, let's start back on the road to sobriety. Went along, and I started to enjoy AA. Three months after I was in the program, the thing that really helped me was my good drinking friend from the North Country at the Lake. We'd been friends for a number of years. He decided that he should come to the program, and boy, what a great benefit that was, because then I really had to pay attention, because I was to become his sponsor.
And it seemed for the first year or so that whatever I'd experienced, he was three months behind me. So I was able to tell him, you know, gee, Gord, you're going through here at this level. I'm sorry. So we started along, and that was a great thing. So my wife started going to Al-Anon, and I'm sure all of you know of Al-Anon, and I do 12-step work. I stress that alcoholism is a family disease. It affects so many, many people, and you don't realize, you know, how many of us say, well, I'm only hurting myself. Don't believe that for a second. That is absolutely not true. So my wife went off to Al-Anon in December, Christmastime of 71. She decided that she wasn't going to go to Al-Anon any longer, because she didn't like the people there, couldn't relate, and so on. I'm not telling her story. It's just the way it is. And our life, so for anyone who is going to Al-Anon or anyone who is not going to Al-Anon, believe me, it is a miracle worker, much like the AA program itself. It's a miracle worker. My wife stopped going, and we almost, we had a great big argument, and a common problem that seems to be, and boy, I would have it if I was the mate of the alcoholic. She said, you know, I go there, and for all the terrible things you've done over the years, they tell me I have to forgive you, because you're sick.
And she said, I can't do that. I can understand that, really. You know, that's a big, big thing for anybody to do when you've been through the old torture grinder that I put my wife through, and I've gone to Al-Anon talks with the Ontario Regional Conference. The first one I went to was two years ago. I came out of there, and I felt like a real, real turkey. I said, boy, oh boy, is that what I did? Because I was drunk all the time. I didn't know how my wife was feeling. So she went back to Al-Anon, and that saved our marriage. That saved our family life. So it does work. My first three years in AA have been a very difficult period for me. Some of the Kingsway members know I have a great tendency to whine and complain and groan and moan, and so if they just bear with me, there's some other people who haven't heard the story. But it's been a very difficult period, but really, and it's the spiritual side, you know, it's the spiritual side of what makes the AA program tick, that allows you freedom to go anywhere in the world and not worry about taking that first drink. And I believe now, although I couldn't see it at the time, but I believe now that God, on that Friday of August 20th, took the compulsion for me to drink alcohol out of my life, because there would be absolutely no way I don't think that I could have stood the next three years of my early days in the program. So February of 72, I'm still hopelessly in debt. I really have no idea what I'm going to do about this thing. I'm trying to stay sober. We have two children at this time. It's a complicated thing at that time. My wife became pregnant.
And we didn't really know what to do about that, because we were trying to patch our own lives back together, let alone try to accept responsibility for another child. But that was
[00:55:02]
the miracle for me that changed my life. So we just, we said, well, I guess that's God's will for us, and we'll carry on. In July of that year, I lost this great job, these people who had saved my life through a tragic error on my part, and just absolute stupidness, not paying attention. I did just a crazy thing, and it got blown out of proportions, and I lost my job. So my wife's pregnant. I'm hopelessly in debt, and there I am, you know. So I called my sponsor, and I said, listen, I have this problem. And he, how it works, he said, you know, Dennis, 1964, I experienced that same thing. And he said, it's going to take you two months. You'll be back in the business, and everything's going to be fine. And he said, but I want to tell you this, the only way you'll be able to hang on for the next two months is by your fingertips. And he said, and remember this, whatever you are experiencing now, it is God's will for you to pass along to somebody else.
Which I did, and that's how I lived. I used to go and sit in parks in my car, and I had nothing to do except worry. And a terrible time, just a terrible time. But, you know, through the grace of God, I struggled through that. So anyway, October 72, and I get so confused. There's been so many things happened to me since becoming sober. I was talking to Peter yesterday, met me at the airport, and I said, well, you know, how do I piece all this thing together? He said, oh, well, sit up and make a couple of notes. So I got a little couple of notes here, but that's all. It's just to keep it in order, because I get off on one tangent and another. So in October 72, October the 16th, 72, I got a new job, and my third son was born on October the 18th. My third child, sorry, on October the 18th.
But even, that was quite a thing, and it was different than the first birth. I was down in the hospital, way down in the basement at two o'clock in the morning, saying, you know, what am I doing down here? But I was all right. My higher power was down there with me, and that made me feel better, because I started to feel a little sorry for myself and very lonesome. But I talked to God as I understand it. Those are what, you know, what He'll bring us through. It really is.
So the situation in the financial area continued to worsen. In about a year and a half, a year and a quarter of sobriety, I had to go back, finally, to the discussion group, because I didn't like the way my life was going, and I had the faith that I would be all right in the long run, because I was still healthy and so on. But I, boy, I just didn't like it, and I didn't trust it. But once again, I had nowhere else to go, so I had to go back to OA. My wife really caught me in this one. She said, you know, you're living on the first step, and you'll do a great job in the twelfth step. She said, but there's ten others. Are you ever going to do anything about those? Maybe they will change your life. So that's how I went along in that. Really, all I did for most of the year of 73 was go to OA, pray, hang in there, and paid a few bills I could and so on.
And that was it. That just seemed to be going to work, paying bills. Nothing else existed. But in January of 74, I decided once again to change my job, because after I lost a good job, I had to accept a medium job to keep me going until the time I was ready to come back into the larger firm. Because through all my drinking, I had lost and forgotten many of the things that I had learned over the years and so on, because working two and a half hours a day.
Working two and a half hours a day, you certainly do lose some of those great skills or whatever they're called that you have. So I had to go and get retrained, so that was the, so that year and a half in that smaller firm allowed me to do that because I had to do everything there.
[01:00:07]
And gee, that was a real blow to my ego. I had to do things that I hadn't done since I was a little bond trader on the bond desk, as it's called, and doing quote sheets and all those things. You know, I'm a big institutional salesman here and there I was back doing the things that I didn't any many years ago. So it's been an experience in AA of knocking hell out of my ego. And Bill C., who I hope, who I love, I heard him at the conference in 74, and he talks about, you know, how high your ego goes, or is, you seem to go the other way on the downside until you get it all sorted out.
And I guess I'll narrowly relate to that. So in January of 74, I decided to change jobs. And my life started, and I did finally, and I started a new firm in August, last August, ten months ago. And that, for me, has been the miracle in a, from a business sense. And really what it's done, because I'm involved in work now that I never did before, even at, you know, the low peak periods of my career previously.
And I've talked to Peter Budd and my sponsor in Toronto, and they say it's, you know, you go back through, up through your own level, and once you get above that, you better pay attention because you're in the new territory and you've never experienced that before. But this has been quite a miracle to me because what it really has done has allowed me to get, to get myself respect back. You know, to start liking myself. Because my wife used to tell me that she liked me and loved me when I was sober.
And I'd say, yes, that's fine. But I couldn't accept it. There was no way. I couldn't. She doesn't notice, I don't think, but I couldn't believe her. It couldn't get through because I couldn't like myself. And if I couldn't like myself, I couldn't love myself. And if I couldn't do that, how could anybody else? And that's what has started to change. My young son was almost three. I think that was God's miracle that allowed me to finally start on this, this change because I was allowed to show love to him.
He was the only person in the world, really, that I could love except my fellow friends and so on that have come to join me in a way, but that's a different type of love. But this is a family love I'm talking about. What that has done and what is a true miracle to me is that it's allowed me to take it way back to when I first met my wife. Whether you call it puppy love or young love or whatever it is, that type of love for my wife has now come back.
And through all those years that almost destroyed us, that has come back and my wife is my best friend and best companion now. And that is a real miracle, really, to me. So I want to thank you all for listening. It's a wonderful program and all I can say is God bless you all. Thanks. Thank you very much, Dennis. Very grateful to you for sharing with us this morning. I just want to say that I could identify very strongly with Dennis when he talked about the fact that he was not an alcoholic.
I had that same experience, of course. I was born into an Irish Catholic family and when you're Irish and you're Catholic, you're not an alcoholic. You have the failing. And God, it was nice to have the failing. I had it for so long. And my good mother, she used to send me down to see Father to take the pledge. I took so many pledges that Father ran out of them. They never lasted any longer than about five minutes.
And I'd go down and take the pledge and Father and I'd sit and have a little drink and talk about our problem. My poor mother could never figure out why every time I came home from the rectory I was loaded, you see. And she'd say, where have you been? I'd say, down to see Father. She said, you couldn't have been. Look at the shape you're in.
[01:05:03]
I said, you should see him. He didn't have to walk, I did. Very sad. You know, I had to go right across the country for our next speaker. In Canada, you know, there's a lot of people. I suppose you have the same situation here. But in Canada, we got a lot of people running around all over the place and they're all looking for God, you know. There's a great rush on today. Everybody's looking for God.
Worse than the Christmas rush. It was worse than that dance we had last night there. Everybody looking. I met a fellow the other day. He said he was going down to Halifax to look for God. I said, you're wasting your time. God hasn't been to Halifax for years, you know. So I didn't go to Halifax. I went to St. John New Brunswick. Damn near as bad. I think God was there a little while ago and he looked down on a young fellow and said he was going to get him sober through this program.
And I want you to welcome Jerry B. from St. John New Brunswick. Good morning. My name is Jerry B. I answer the nickname of Pat. I'm an Eastern Canadian. And I'm pleased to say I'm a recovering alcoholic. Both Mark and Dennis mentioned God restoring them to sanity. And a thought entered my mind. If he restored me to sanity, what in the hell am I doing up here? It's an honest program, I must tell you. Peter isn't quite as intelligent as he sets on to be.
The first thing he did was caution Dennis and I. He cautioned Dennis and I to make sure our flies were zippered and you can't see my pants. When I was leaving a meeting all the other night at home, a friend, a Senator from Walmart, a member said to me, What are you going to say when you get to Colorado? And I said, God knows. And right now I don't think he's too sure. But my wife also inquired, as many people have over the months since Peter has talked to me.
And she said, Well, how are you going to start in Colorado? What are you going to say to these people? And I said, I really don't know. My little fellow who never knew the tragedy of my story was watching television. He said, Listen, Dad, I'll tell you how you can start. You can say, If anything happened to me on the way to Colorado, I got drunk on the plane. And with the service they gave us, I damn near did.
They should really change their slogan, you know, from come fly with me to come spend five hours in the lavatory in Chicago. My sponsor told me two things when I came to the program. Firstly, to retain my sense of humor. That was all I had going for me at that time. And secondly, that if I didn't drink, I didn't have to become sick again. I've done both of those things. Fortunately, I haven't drank again.
And hopefully, I think I've retained my sense of humor. But this is a really give a damn, life and death struggle for me. I must bear in mind always the very seriousness of it all. At home, the chief of detectives in our town, and I'm only there in social business, by the way, he has a slogan on his desk. And it says, If you remember, or pardon me, if you tell the truth, you don't have to remember.
And that's all I can do for you now is just tell the truth. And I don't have to remember. I have no notes. I may ramble by time. But it's my story, and it's the only story I can give you. And it began, as all stories begin, I came up through a middle-class family, no problems in the family. And why God chose me to be an alcoholic, I don't know. I like to think that he chose me to be an alcoholic so that I would have the privilege to recover and walk in the community with you people.
And in that way, I can carry the message and work my program my way. As I tell you my story, I like to think that I passed through many plateaus. Firstly, I became dry, simply dry. I thought my sponsor was a slob. All the man did was work, save and go to AA. And that was dryness. But I, out of fear of myself, not out of fear of alcoholics, but out of fear of myself, I stayed with the program.
[01:10:01]
I knew there was not a drunk there, but I didn't know there would be another opportunity to recover. Maybe I should stay on the more tragic part of the story. But I'll have to tell you this, I had an accident that only an alcoholic could have. I was driving a little foreign sports car at the time. With a four-on-the-floor shift, you know, I was trying to let it slide a while ago. I hit a tree. I was drunk, of course.
I hit a tree, and I couldn't get through the windshield because the car was so small, so I decided to sit on the gear shift. I punctured my stomach and my ribs and punctured my lung. This was in November, early in November, and I woke up in the hospital. And I said to my wife, I said, gee, look what we did. I'm sorry. But look, you start getting ready for Christmas. And she said, it's the middle of February.
I had passed it all. I often think when people say I was a thief and a liar and a cheat, I was all those things, but I must say here and now, the most grievous sin I committed, I stole my children's youth. I stole that Christmas from my children. I stole many things from my children. I'll go on to that story, incidentally. The lawyer for the RCMP arrived sometime in March in the hospital, asked me to, you know, relinquish my driver's license to him.
I in the house says, what, this is March? Now, come on, that was in November. I said, I can't take a bus rider now. The doctor was there, a Jewish doctor who I say saved my life. He said, Mr. Batty, we operated on you four times. Nothing came out but alcohol. I sued him for malpractice. And paid my bills. I finally arrived at the doors of AA. I was broke. I owed three years' salary at that time. By this time I was working for the Canadian government.
And like all government agencies, I put on a 12-year plan. He told me God would look after it. I decided to get a lawyer to look after it. He did a fine job. I stayed as closely as I could to the program. I immersed myself completely in the program. So much so that there was times my wife would say, and not jokingly, seriously, she would say to me, my God, I saw more of you when you were drunk. But she understood what I was attempting to do.
Firstly, because she was an airline member while I was still an active alcoholic. And I like to say that the avenue I used to get through AA was the Al-Anon Avenue, and the vehicle I used was a sponsorship vehicle. A lot of my sobriety I must thank Al-Anon for, because of her. The fighting stopped at home, the many, many problems that I thought we had, she didn't recognize anymore. At first I thought it was terrific, she's off my back, now I can really drink.
I would drive her to the Al-Anon meetings. In Butler Club. I'd go back and pick her up and say, what's new? And she'd say, you're still drinking. Until one night she said to me, look, I'd rather you didn't pick me up tonight, because you're always drunk and I don't like driving home with you. And I said, who in the hell are you running around with? And she wouldn't come home with me. She took her home for a long time.
But this brought me to the program. She was recovering. She was more able to cope than I. She ceased being as neurotic as she had been. She was now more reasonable. And I had to see what it was all about. And I had to see what it was all about. Incidentally, after I was in the program a little while, my boss changed a hell of a lot. God, he was a hell of an ace fellow.
[01:15:00]
I became involved in union work right away. You know, we're going to do everything again. We're still, I'm still an excessive person. I had to do everything. And I was at a convention, a union convention. I hate to tell all you Canadians, but I worked for the post office. So, and I was involved with the negotiations last contract. We had a short strike that time. The bullies are alone this time. But I was in charge of the hospitality room.
There was another active, there wasn't any member, pardon me, who was, who had slipped away from the program. There, and I'd say I had a hundred men in the room that I was looking after, looking after, serving in booths. This fellow came up and says, Jerry, I'll have a double. And this other lad, knowing I'm an AA member, was saying, oh wait, you can't call him Jerry. Or pardon me, he called him Mr. Berry. He says, you have to call him Jerry.
He's an alcoholic, you know. I was cross for a moment or two, and then I had a laugh at it. Eventually, they were all calling me Mr. B, you know, before the evening was out. Then the morning we sat down for breakfast, and it was a business meeting. We all sat together, and I said, mess out some slippery eggs that'll slide down. I don't know what this lad's going to eat. I take the program to the community.
We're trying to build a good AA in our port city. I think we are. We all make mistakes. We all have problems. The only mistake I can recall making was inviting Peter down one time. The first thing he said to me, it was the first time I'd met him. And he said, ah, Barry, just as Peter could, you know. He said, ah, Barry, they mention you in the big book, you know. They say some are sick, but some are sicker than others.
But I'm joking, of course. He's an inspiration. And grand. It has been my privilege to come here today. One must tell the truth, and you don't have to remember. For now, I'm with my peer group. Only you people would know now if I was phony. The professional people don't. Only you people understand what I'm saying. Did I tell you it's a tough day? If you know what I mean, it's a tough day. If you tell me the same thing, I can reach for you.
I can stand before people like this and honestly say, my sobriety is the most precious possession I have. At no time in a speakeasy did I ever tell a lad this glass was the most precious possession I had. Yet it was. The program made me full, complete, humble, and honest, I make them think. With all the defects, of course. But I try to stay away from all of them. Stay away from all of them. I went home last night, I didn't stay at the dance in Oogle Lake Pier.
And I think I'll stop right now while I'm winning. If I miss anything, I'll write it out in cryptic ink, and I'll pick up a copy at the back of the room. Barry, you're absolutely beautiful. You're grand. I'm glad you come from Canada. I think we've shown you this morning that we do have some very fine people up there, and a good cross-section of the country, and the kind of AA that we are very proud of in our country.
We're very grateful to all of you for being here this morning. I would ask all of you to join with me in expressing a very warm thanks to all of our panelists this morning, because I know each and every one of them have individually taken time out of their very busy lives and their own resources to be with us and to share on this very great occasion. Would you join with me in expressing your appreciation?
Thank you so much. I just want to, a couple of words before we close the meeting. I want to particularly thank the panelists personally. I want to thank each and every one of you, particularly my Canadian fellows who are here. I love all of you very dearly and very much, and this has been unquestionably a great highlight in my life to have had the privilege of sharing in a world conference on this 40th anniversary.
[01:20:02]
I'd like to leave you with an old Irish blessing that my father gave to me many years ago, and he said, may the wind be always at your back, the red eyes to meet your feet, the sunshine warm upon your face and the rain fall soft upon your land, and until we meet again, may God hold you in the hollow of his hands. Would you join with me in the Lord's Prayer in closing this meeting, please? 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 and ever. Amen.