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Source: 1975 Denver International Convention – 1975 Denver Int. ,NE Regional AA with Junior A, Vince Y, Jane D and Larry J.mp3 File: 1975-denver-international-convention-1975-denver-int-ne-regional-aa-with-junior-a-vince-y-jane-d-and-larry-j.mp3 Duration: 01:18:12
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Welcome to the Northeast Regional AA Meeting. Following the instructions before me, I'd like to ask for a moment of silence in gratitude for AA recoveries in the past 40 years, followed by the serenity prayer. Thank you. God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. 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 AA speaker or member be identified by full name or picture in published or broadcast reports at our meetings.
The assurance of anonymity is essential to our efforts to help other alcoholics, and our tradition of anonymity reminds us that AA principles come before personalities. Announcements. No smoking on the wooden floor area. If you want to play basketball, it's perfectly all right, but you can't smoke. I am an alcoholic. My name is Junior Anderson. You can do better than that, can't you? If my mother heard that, she never would have named me Junior.
It happens to be my first name, which is probably one of the reasons I happen to be an alcoholic. It's my privilege to chair this meeting this morning. One of the first things on my note sheet here is, don't be nervous. I don't know how you overcome that when you stand out and look at this many people in a place like this. It's a real thrill to be here in Denver at this convention. It's a real thrill to meet all the people that you've come to know in and out of AA over the years.
I'm not going to say a whole lot, because I have three excellent speakers. The first speaker that you see on your program is a little confusing, because he's listed as Vincent Wye, but he prefers to be introduced as Sonny Wye. Here's Sonny Wye from McDonald, Pennsylvania. Thank you, Junior. I am Sonny Ukovich, and I'm an alcoholic from the McDonald, Pennsylvania group. The big book tells, when you tell your story, what it was like before, what happened, and what it's like now.
I'm not going to tell you people how to drink, because they say everybody in here knows how to drink. I don't think anybody in here knows how to drink, or they wouldn't be here. They'd still be out there drinking. I come from a small mining town in western Pennsylvania, population about 2,500, and my dad is a businessman, which I later became, came into his business. But I had no trouble with alcohol until I went into service in 1945.
And I would say from 1945 to 1955, there was no real serious problems with it. In 1956, my mother died, and I started to drink pretty heavy. I don't know why. I just got into the habit of stopping every night for a beer or two, then it would be three or four, then five or six. And pretty soon, I got to the point where I was stopping, and I wasn't getting home until 11, 12, 1 o'clock every night. And my family was suffering from this.
I was in business with my dad then, and the business was suffering. I don't know. It was just a humdrum affair. We had no vacations. We had nothing. But the wife and kids, they was at home, and I was out practicing drinking. Well, things kept getting steadily worse until, I would say, 1964. And that's when I really got a drinking problem. My dad wasn't in the hospital, strictly from drinking.
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He had cirrhosis of the liver and high blood pressure and a bad heart.
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And nobody thought that he would come out of there alive. So I took complete charge of this business. He had a nice business. Can everybody hear all right? How about now? Well, 1964, my dad went into the hospital, and he put me in complete charge of his business. Well, this business consists of two garages. And right between these two garages is called the Bergerstown Italian Club. I never knowed what a halfway house was, but that's what they called it whenever I was running this business.
The fellows in the garage would say, well, where's Sonny? He's in the halfway house in the Italian Club. And that's where I spent the biggest part of my time. In 1965, my dad got well enough to come back to work. And you talk about resentments, I had them. He didn't have no business coming back to work. He didn't have no business in that business. After all, I was a big hero. I saved that business for him while he was in the hospital.
He left to go in the hospital with $80,000 in the bank. When he came home, he had about $22,000. I got rid of about $60,000 for him in about a year. Well, by this time, I'm going out every day at dinner time, having a few drinks, going at 2 o'clock in the afternoon. And every time I come back, my dad would say, how many drinks did you have? I said, two, that's all. Well, the drinking got so bad, he told me, he says, you're either going to have to quit drinking or you're going to have to leave.
And I've been with him for 20-some years. So I chose to leave him. I decided, well, I'll get myself a used car lot and I'll get into business for myself. Well, I got a nice lot, nice office, but I didn't have no cars. So I said to my dad, I said, do you want to sell me some of them cars? Yeah. He says, pick out what you want. I took the best. I didn't take no junk. I took all the good cars he had and I took them out and put them on this lot.
And about two days later, he came out, he said, I'd like to be paid for them cars. I said, well, I'm sorry, I don't have no money, but I'll pay you when I get it, when I sell them. Well, some of them cars get paid for, some of them didn't. And some people get the titles for them cars and some people didn't. Every dime I took in, I drank. Everybody's in this office of mine, all up and down the Route 22.
It was nothing but a big drunk. This went on for about a year, to about the middle of 1966. And I had a brother that was in AA. And he'd come to me, he'd say, Sonny, he says, I got a friend of mine in AA. He'd like to buy an automobile. Will you go see him? I said, who wants to finance one of them drunken bums? He says, I told him, I said, I don't want nothing to do with them. Them people's no good.
I couldn't figure out where he hid his two top coats and his two hats when he went to these meetings, because that's what I figured they wore whenever they went to these meetings. He'd sit around with a wine bottle and passed it around. Well, towards the end of 1966, things was real bad. I owed the banks, I owed three finance companies, I owed everybody. My mother and father-in-law kept my wife and children for over a year.
They didn't get no money from me. My money all went down the street. Well, about November 1966, my sponsor stopped in one day, and he said to me, he says, how are you doing, Sonny? I said, I'm doing real good. I haven't shaved for about two weeks. I haven't took a bath for about as long. I got a big mahogany desk full of beer cans, old salami skins, pieces of bread, and I tell you, I look like a real prosperous businessman.
He'd stop in by every other day, and I think he was just giving me the needle. And my brother was on me. He said, why don't you go to an AA meeting? You need to go. You need to go to an AA meeting. And I told him that I wasn't an alcoholic. I could sober up any time I wanted to. But as it happened, I couldn't.
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Well, early in December 1966, I called his sponsor, and I don't think he makes me, reminds me of breaking his anonymity. And I knew if he could sober up, I could sober up. So I asked him, I said, would you come up to the house, and I want to talk to you. So he came up to the house, and we had a talk. He told me for about three hours about AA and how it works and everything, and I promised him that I would go to a meeting with him.
So the next morning, when I got sobered up, I decided that I wasn't going to that meeting. I called him up, and I told him that I had a business appointment, and I couldn't go. About four days later, I called my brother. I was sick. I was crawling on the walls. I didn't know what to do. The finance company was after me. I was afraid to answer the telephone. I was afraid to answer the door. If the phone rang, the first thing I told my wife, Tom, I ain't here.
You don't know where I'm at. Well, on December 10, 1966, I went to my first AA meeting. When I walked in, I was really surprised. I expected, like I said before, to see these people with these overcoats and hats and old shoes on and sitting on the floor passing a wine bottle around. But what I found was friendship and happiness and people that didn't want to get their hand in your pocket to see what they could get out of it.
They wanted to help you. Well, I liked the first meeting, and my sponsor took me to many meetings in the next, I would say, 90 days, seven, eight meetings a week. We'd go every night. And pretty soon, he didn't call me no more. I figured, well, what's going on? Is he mad at me or something? So I called him up, and I says, how come we're not going to a meeting tonight? He says, you know, he says, this program works two ways.
He says, you can call me if you want to go, or you can go by yourself. I showed you where the meetings was at. He says, I'm not going to carry you. Well, since then, my sponsor has got so that he don't go to any meetings. He don't need AA anymore. I just hope that I never have to make a 12-step call on him. Well, the months went by, and pretty soon, I had a year in. And we have a very small group. There's five people in our group, but we draw from a lot of other groups.
And Secretary Treasurer says, how would you like to be chairman of our anniversary? Well, my wife bought me a new suit, new shoes, a new tie, a new shirt, and she dressed me up. I just looked like a Polish priest. I got up on that podium, and I was proud. I had a year. That is the longest year I ever put in, I think. Well, things went along good for me in AA. I do a lot of 12-step work. But you get to a place where you think that you know everything about AA, and I got to that place about, oh, I would say three years ago, three and a half years ago.
We got a woman in, and I have no complaints about women alcoholics, but she sort of took over this group. She was the Secretary Treasurer, and she was this, and she was that. And I figured to hell with them. I'm going to change groups. This group will fold up if I quit going to it. Well, I started going over into Ohio. We were only 15, 20 miles from Ohio, and I went to a lot of meetings over in Ohio.
But somehow my week wasn't complete if I didn't get that home group meeting. And after about three months, I decided, well, I better go back to this meeting. It was still there. It was doing better than it was whenever I was there before. They had more people there. But I ended up Secretary Treasurer two years ago. I don't know how I got that, but there was nobody left in our group with enough time in to trust them with the money.
But five years ago, I had a heart attack. And I was in the hospital 21 days, and whenever I got out of the hospital, there was three things the doctor told me. There was three things the doctor told me. He said, you take your retirement, you get yourself a hobby, and you have yourself two double-headers every day. He said, it'll do you real good.
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So I'm sitting home after I got to stay in. They took my driver's license and everything, so I wasn't allowed to drive for a while. I'm sitting in a house watching The Edge of Day, The Crack of Dawn, The Break of Day, or whatever you call it on television, and I'm thinking about these two double-headers. And if I would have had an automobile, we live seven miles from a liquor store, I think I'd have had a bottle, and I'd have got drunk. But a fellow from another group come up, a very good friend of mine, and he took me for a little ride, and we had a little discussion, and I talked to him about this, and he told me that he went through the same problem.
Well, I didn't have any more problem with thinking about drinking after that up until March of this year. I went in the hospital the first of March for a two-day checkup, and they did a biopsy on me, and the doctor says, you've got cancer. He says, if you want to, we'll give you a couple of weeks for you to go home and get your business affairs straightened out, and then you come back to the hospital for an operation.
Well, I got to thinking about it, I figured I'd just go out, and I got cancer. Cancer is an awful bad word, but if it's treated right, it can be cured. I got to thinking, hell, I got cancer, I don't have long to live, I might as well just go out and take these couple weeks and start drinking, I won't even come back to the hospital. Then it come to me that maybe he could cure it, so I told him we'd go ahead with the operation, and I spent 47 days in the hospital, March and April, and in them 47 days, I got 389 get-well cards.
And these nurses would bring these cards in with stacks of mail, and she says to me, what are you, president or congressman or senator or something, that you know all these people? I said, no, I just have a lot of good friends out there, and I think that through the prayers of the people in AA and the good Lord above, they got all that cancer, and I'm as fit as a fiddle today, and I only have one person to thank for that, that's my higher power.
Now you talk about the rewards in this program. They say don't look for financial rewards. There's a lot of good rewards in this program, and there's also some financial rewards. Look at all you people out here in this audience. If you was drinking, do you think you could afford to come out here? Do you think you could enjoy this conference? I've got many financial rewards. I've got many good rewards. I've got the love and understanding of my family back again. I've got two daughters that's married. I was sober when both of them got married. I've got a little granddaughter now that's almost three years old.
I've got a boy that's just finished his first year in college, and he's made the dean's list all four times. Do you think that isn't a reward? But the best reward in this program is your sobriety. You do it one day at a time. A Mormon woman, I was talking to her the other day up in South Dakota. She says, you know, life by the yard is hard. She says, by the inch is a cinch. So it's the same thing as 24 hours at a time. If you do it 24 hours at a time, you won't have any problem at all.
The way I stay sober, I go to a lot of meetings. If I'm asked to do something, I do it. If I have to clean up the ashtrays, set up the tables, lead a meeting, be chairman, anything that they ask me to do, I try to do it to the best of my ability. I got the job of making coffee at our group eight years ago, and I still got it. But if you practice this program 24 hours a day, and you practice it 12 steps, and take a personal inventory every once in a while, I don't think you'll have any problem.
With that, I want to close, and I want to thank you good people for listening, and I want to thank Junior for asking me.
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Thank you very much for a wonderful AA message. You know, it might help the speaker if people sitting in the balcony or at the rear of the hall, if you're having difficulty hearing, you know, give a wave. I don't think it's going to bother anybody up here. And they'd like to be certain that you hear everything. We pass these notes back and forth here, they can't hear you, they can't hear you, and I'm not sure whether they can or cannot. Can you hear me all right now? Right into the mic? No, there's a note here that says, please stand back from mic, as sound carries best, so I don't know. Electronics are great things.
My next speaker is a member of my own group, and I guess that's favoritism. She's the kind of a girl that Sonny was talking about. She came in, she became secretary, treasurer, and everything else, and they let her do it, believe me. She didn't try to run the group, and the present secretary is sitting out here someplace also. I watched this girl come into A.A. not too many years ago, and I think that when she gets through speaking, you will agree with me that maturity and growth comes to us all if we give it a chance. Jane.
Thank you, Junior. That's the classiest introduction you ever gave me. Hello, everybody. I have the greatest advantage because I can see all of you, and you're just one big happy smile. Thank you so much for being here. I am a miracle. I'm a recovered alcoholic, a member of the Needham, Massachusetts groups of Alcoholics Anonymous, and my name happens to be Jane. Hi. I'd like to tell you what I am, what I was, and who I am today. What I am is I am an alcoholic. What I was, I was a loud mouth, foul mouth, knock down, fighting, arrogant, homicidal broad.
And today, I am a warm, loving, intelligent woman, and I'm beautiful. Now, someone sitting out there saying that dingy dame didn't look in the mirror this morning, and I'm not talking about outside beauty. I'm talking about that inner beauty that I have today, that I have through the grace of God, the program of Alcoholics Anonymous, and the powers of example of each and every one of you. I never wanted to be an alcoholic. All I ever wanted to be was loved, and I never knew what love was for 42 years.
My first recollection in life is at the age of three, and there started the pattern of my life, fear with the end result, rejection. I will skip for the next many years to my junior year in college when I needed a thesis topic, and I picked the subject of Alcoholics Anonymous. Now, I spent one year researching this program in Boston and New York, and I did my research so well, it only took me 21 years to make it here on my own. And that's when I started to drink. It couldn't happen to a nice girl like me. I was too well bred, too well brought up, too intelligent, and too much.
I also started something else. I started to run, and the first thing I did was to run away from college and run away from that thesis. I never finished it, and I ran into my first marriage. Now, I had the idea if I found some nice guy and I got him really shaped up, he could take care of me, and that was to become another pattern. Well, he didn't get shaped up over the next 12 years, and so I divorced him, and for the next five years, I played catch-up.
I'm not very proud of this period of my life or much of my life until I got to this program, and I compromised many, many of the standards which I was raised. Now, I became a swinger in this period, and I recently had to redefine swinger.
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And I was the kind of swinger. I met the marrying kind. Of course, sometimes they were married to somebody else, but they also wanted to marry me. Now, God took very good care of me because I only got married once more legally, and then I was to marry another active alcoholic. And the reason I had to marry him was that he had two children, and I was never able to have children, and I wanted those children desperately because instant motherhood was going to be the solution to all my problems. And I had to take him in the package deal.
Now, I don't know if he's at this convention today, but I'm told that he is sober in Alcoholics Anonymous in California, and I have never, ever seen him sober. And if he's here, I would love to at least say hello. I'm sure he will understand when I tell my fear when I got here. People got up here and said they got their spouses back, and I was terrified that that might be one of the prerequisites. But God was so good to them, you know, and to me, too. It didn't happen. But anyway, I married this gentleman, and there were three years of absolute living hell. Now, if you think one active alcoholic in a family is bad, I'm here to tell you two is unreal. It would make World War III look like a Sunday school picnic.
Now, on the outside, I was very protective of my ladylike image, but in the house, I described myself when I started this talk. On the day of my second divorce, I came to my first meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, and that was February 27, 1968. And I wish I could tell you I knew I was an alcoholic at that time and that I surrendered in no way. I prayed for the first time sincerely. I said, please, God, deliver me. Let me drive my car into an abutment. Let me come up dead, not named. I don't ever want to hurt anyone again. It was my first admission that I had ever hurt anybody.
And I came to my first meeting with the idea that I was going to come here for six months, be the power of example, and then go into court and take those two children away from that man. And it was not meant to be. I played with controlled drinking for two and a half more weeks, having two eight-ounce vodka martinis every third day before going to a meeting. And I believed those ads that you couldn't smell it and never thought I might show it.
And then on the 15th of March, I prayed to God it would forever be my last drink. And in a blackout, I called people in AA for help. They didn't get the message until the next morning, and it was two hours before they arrived after their phone call. But in those two hours, I had my moment of truth. I admitted that I was powerless over alcohol. And on that admission, I stayed stark raving dry for eleven months and one week. However, I did a few things right. I went to nine meetings a week. I asked a power greater than myself that was your higher power, because I didn't have one. I didn't have any trouble with that banner but for the grace of God.
I just ignored it like I did everything in my life that didn't go my way. But I would get up in the morning and say that higher power that's keeping the rest of them sober, if you have anything to spare, maybe I can use it. And at night, between clenched teeth with bitter resentment that a nice girl like me couldn't drink, I said thank you because you told me it was manners. And I asked four million questions.
Now you people may think, each and every one of you, that you have the greatest sponsor in the world. I just happen to know that God sent me the best. And the greatest privilege of this convention is that we are sharing it together, as well as sharing it with some other young ladies who call me sponsor today. There are three generations of us, and that's beautiful. I went through the motions, giving lip service for eleven months in one week, and then I was in a near fatal automobile accident.
Week, and then I was in a near-fatal automobile accident. As a result of that accident, I
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came to believe that a power greater than myself could restore me to sanity. Sanity in the sense of soundness of mind in a total human being. I had a terrible time with that word insanity. I had trouble with words like compulsion, progression. I learned about progression just ten weeks dry. I made an alliance with another alcoholic, and he did my drinking for me, and I learned about progression. And people talked about obsession and compulsion.
And I said, what do you mean by obsession? And they said, you know, when you plan everything you do around drinking and you protect your supply. And I said, hell, that's not compulsion, that's just plain practical. But I had no trouble with insanity. When I understood I wanted to be sound of mind. I wanted to be a total human being. I even knew this when I drank. And I had to turn my life and will over to the gear of God as I understood him.
And if that wasn't something for someone with my ego and arrogance. But you see, I believed you. I looked into your faces, and I believed. That's how I came to believe, to the look on your faces. And you were happy and joyous, and I hated your guts. You were everything I wanted, and that I wasn't. I lived in a black, in a little box, full of black muck. And as the years went on, that muck suffocated me. And the first time I ever got down on my knees was to ask to be removed of the drowning sensation in that black muck.
And I got up off my knees, and I still had the feeling, and I said, see, it doesn't work. But my sponsor had said to me, you didn't get here overnight, you don't get well overnight. And so I persisted. You see, if you've noticed, I left out the last half of the first step. I was so mocus, I didn't know my life was unmanageable. So I come to the third step, and it says, turn my life and will over to the care of God as I understand them. And he is a loving, forgiving, tolerant God with a sense of humor. And if you don't believe he has a sense of humor, look around you. Hell, I have to look in the mirror. And I believed. I believed in the power of love, the all-healing, all-powerful power of love, the greatest gift in the world. I didn't understand it. I wondered where the hook was.
People offered help. And I thought, what do they want? What are they after? Didn't know about selflessness, had never seen it, because in my world everything had a price tag. So I figured in this hospital I'd try turning it over. That is my life and will. Because you see, for those previous months I just handed him the booze problem, not me, and not from the gut. And today I know from my life, my very life and sanity and sobriety, I must live this program from my gut and my heart and my soul.
Boy, there were some real kickers in this program. My sponsor said to me in the beginning, did you take a look at the steps, Jane? I said, no. I won twelve and twelve that night. And I went home and climbed into a hot tub with it and let it, so I would absorb it very fast like I did with a quart of scotch when I was drinking. And the next night when she said to me, did you look at the steps? I said, of course. She said, what did you think? I said, half of them don't apply to me. She said, take the half that do and work them twice as hard. Beautiful. She never raised her voice to me. She had enough faith for both of us. She believed for both of us when I was incapable of believing. That's sponsorship.
That's love. And so here was this step that said I should take a good, honest look at myself. Now I spent twelve years paying thousands of dollars to two very competent psychiatrists to prove to them what a lovely, charming lady I was. Now women have a little trouble with identifying with me because I didn't drink like a lady. I drank like a man. As a matter of fact, you noticed I didn't say gentleman. I just said man. And I had to admit what I was. And then they said I had to tell somebody else. Admit not only to God, to myself, but to another human being. Now I loved my sponsor so dearly I didn't have the guts to go and tell her all of this because I figured if she ever knew who I really was she'd dump
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me fast. And so I went to another human being and I told him about myself. Now it took me three shots at that fifth step to do what it's meant to be because I was so terrified. It says take a searching and fearless moral inventory. I took it with such fear because I was scared to death I'd pick up a drink if I didn't dump the garbage. The first time I did it was dumping the garbage, the ax. And I didn't get the relief that I heard other people talking about. The second time I did it I did it by the seven deadly sins and it turned out to be an intellectual exercise in futility for me because I'm not that bright.
When I got here, by the way, I was the brightest bride to come through the doors. The third time it took me four and a half years to get to the motives and the attitudes. And I recently now have formed it in three-dimensional tic-tac-toe. I have the ax, the garbage. I have the motives and the attitudes. Then I have on top of that the search for sex, society, and security. And it all lines up every way. Now I don't know what happens in your 12-step meetings when you discuss this topic of the search for sex, society, and security. In my group they very openly discuss the search for security and society and not one cussed word is ever mentioned on the topic of sex. So I've come to the conclusion only the author of the 12 and 12 and I ever had any hang-ups in this section.
You know, when I got here and came to meetings and people laughed like that, I thought you were terribly rude and I knew my sponsor was not a rude person and she would be knocking herself out. And I said to her, why do people laugh at the speakers? And she said, they don't laugh at them. She said, that's laughter of identification. So you identify, ah. I heard the most gorgeous description of the six-step a few weeks ago. It is the first step of the rest of the program. It only took me three years to find the word entirely, to be entirely willing, ready to have these defects of character removed. And I struggled for seven more months to find the light for the seventh step. And the light went on when I became willing to hurt in order to grow and I stopped hurting for several months.
My sponsor has said, if I ever told you everything that happened to me in my first year in the program, that half of you would get up and you'd leave the hall because you'd say, if that's sobriety, you can have it. And if I told you about the following five and a half years, the other half of you would leave. Now I haven't had a bad day since I came in this program. Don't you hate people like that? I did. But I have had disaster. But you see, through the disaster, God was giving me an opportunity to grow and to mature and to be a real, genuine human being and to live, not exist as I had done for 42 years. And it hurt.
Oh, God, did it hurt. And I didn't want to hurt a nice girl like me, my cry through life. But hurt I did. Eight Steps suggests to make a list of people we had harmed. I had a very short list in the beginning because I figured all those characters had everything coming to them that they'd gotten. The list is much longer today. I had an attitude problem. I wanted to be patted on the head and be forgiven and be told, that's all right, Janie, you suffer from that fancy threefold disease. It's mental, spiritual and physical. And now that you don't drink, it's all right. You know what they told me? You were a bitch before and you still are. I had to change. Again, my sponsor said in the beginning, Janie, people who don't change have a tendency to go out and drink again. Now I was absolutely perfect as soon as I stopped drinking. And I thought, my God, what am I going to do? I'll go change the color of my hair and buy a new wardrobe. I somehow knew that wasn't what she meant.
And I didn't know that for me, I was going to have to take my gut and tear it out and lay it before the world in order to heal, in order to get well.
[00:40:02]
Every day when I go to make amends, I first of all ask God to present me with the opportunity. And he does. Don't ever ask for anything because you might get it. I had said in the beginning there is one gentleman I will never make amends to and that is my second husband. And my sponsor said, don't be surprised if the day comes and your sobriety depends upon it. And 16 months over, the day came, I made amends to him. He was speechless and he accepted it.
He was the first person. You see, I have to make amends because it is necessary for my growth. Now I had a terrible time with the 10th step. I used to save all the garbage up to the end of the day and end up pacing the floor and having sleepless nights until I learned about the spot check inventory. Now when things are very good or not so good, I short-circuit things that aren't so good by the simple fact of looking at me and knowing that it's a spiritual axiom when anything is wrong, it's within me. Meaning I have become totally self-centered again, worrying about my feelings, me, me, me. It has also taught me I can only have negative emotions if I feed them. It's like taking a puppy. If you feed him, he gets very fat and sassy and he runs your life. You walk him and feed him and do all those things. If you don't feed him, he shrivels up and dies. And that's what happens to my negative emotions. Through these 10 steps, I finally got to the last half of the first step that my life indeed was unmanageable. And where was the key to that? The key was in the 11th step combined with the 3rd step that I really do turn my life and will over to the care of God as I understand him and seek through prayer and meditation asking only for the knowledge of his will and the power to carry it out. That's all. You see, my first step now has told me that my personal powerlessness is not just about food but about everything and that all the other 11 steps can help and teach me and show me a way of having a manageable life through the grace of God. Every morning on my knees, I offer my life and will to God. I ask to be made willing and for the quality of willingness that is in the 3rd step. Because if I have that, I can have permanent sobriety, the 3rd step tells me. I know when I am doing his will because I am totally at peace. But when I get that creepy crawling feeling in the gut or in the backbone, I know all is not right and that I have to reexamine my behavior and my motives. The 12th step says having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps. It doesn't say skipping any of them, doesn't say you can take what ones you want. It says all of them, all 11. Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we try to carry the message and practice these principles in all our affairs. I found that word affairs very interesting when I got here.
I didn't know what it meant. I had a little different idea. I try to carry the message. As Junior has told you, I am a big mouth broad in my group and I have been privileged to serve everywhere. I have even worked in the kitchen. No way, we are going to make him coffee maker come fall. Thank you for mentioning that. By the way, having Junior for a friend and spiritual advisor is one of my fringe benefits in this program and I am grateful today for his nepotism. They got me into service work by saying you are it. GSR, secretary of the district committee woman, alternate delegate. Today it is my privilege to serve as chairman of the eastern Massachusetts general service area committee. I do 12 step work. I have worked as a volunteer in our central service office. It has been fantastic.
and fantastic, but above all to practice these principles in all my affairs, and today I know the real meaning of that word, and it doesn't mean just towards other alcoholics
[00:45:02]
for an hour and a half at a meeting, but to each and every person who comes into my life and into my world, for each and every 24 hour that I am privileged to walk this earth. I heard in the beginning, if you're going to talk the talk, you better walk the walk, and sometimes it would be easier not to walk the walk, but then I am uncomfortable, and I have been given so much, I have been given life, I have been given love, and on this day that our country celebrates freedom, I have been given a personal freedom. I do not have the words to properly express my gratitude for all that has been given to me, nor for the privilege of being here and sharing with each and every one of you today. I would like to close with one thing. I was privileged to meet a man last September, that when he came up to you he said, has anybody told you today that they love you? Well, I do.
He told me that day, Janie, I will be with you in Denver when you speak. A few weeks later he passed on, but I know today in my heart that Bish is with each and every one of us today, and for him I would like to tell you that I love you as well as for myself. Thank you. You would never believe what a flaky broad she was the first time I laid eyes on her. I was chairing a meeting on St. Patrick's Day wearing an orange tie, and she figured I really belonged, and I guess I did. Morris S., who just walked behind here, lost his badge, and he can claim it if he wants to come forward after the meeting. My closing speaker is a fellow that I met a few years back when I had the privilege of attending the General Service Conference, and he was the delegate from Central New York. And he is the kind of a person that I need, because every time any of that fat gets between the ears, Larry has a way of bringing me right down to the humility situation I should be in. So it's a real pleasure to have Larry J. with us today.
Thank you, Junior. My name is Larry Jewell, and I'm an alcoholic. First, I would certainly like to thank Junior personally for the service and dedication he has given to the Northeast region. His wise counseling and his efforts in our behalf has served us well at General Service. He's the kind of guy who makes AA tick. Thank you, Junior. And at the same time, I should like to personally congratulate our new trustee, Regional Trustee John Waterfield, who I am sure will do a fine job. I know John, and he too is the kind of guy who will make us happen.
Well, hi, John. You're here. The theme of this convention is Let It Begin With Me, and I sure as hell wish this meeting had started with me. These two guys have really done it.
[00:50:06]
They're just wonderful. I came to AA in a very sorry state, and one of the things I didn't know was that it began with me. I thought it began with the other guy, because society was what made me drink. I hated society. I resented society, and I didn't know much. And I knew one thing many years prior to my coming to AA, that I was a hopeless drunk and that there was no cure for me. When one day a man said to me, the chances are you have the same illness I have. You see, I am suffering from the disease of alcohol. And for the first time in my life, I had a ray of hope. I would surely love to tell you that this was the turning point in my life. I never drank again, and I lived happily ever after.
But such is not the case, because I'm a very hard learner. I'm not the kind of guy who can listen to someone else's experience and take his word for it. Some people call us scientists. We have to go out and experiment, and I did. But I came to AA hoping that maybe something could happen that would help me. I said to this man, who later turned out to be my sponsor, what do I do? He said, you go to the meetings. So I went to a meeting, and I heard a lot of things, and I admitted that I was an alcoholic, and all of a sudden I didn't drink. Now in my hometown I was never famous, and I might tell you that I'm from Binghamton, New York, one of the great cities of our empire state, and I happen to belong to the greatest group in North America, the North Side group in Binghamton. So the sponsor took me to this meeting, and he told me to listen, and I did, and I admitted that I was an alcoholic, and I went about my business. Now these people began to notice a change in me. These people who were my acquaintances, they certainly were not my friends because I had none, but they were used to seeing me stagger down the street, and all of a sudden I wasn't staggering, and I had shaved that morning and put on a clean shirt, and a few of them said, what happened to you? Oh, I said, I belong to a drunk club downtown, and you can't take a drink. And they said, well gee, how does it work? Oh, I said, you go to the meetings and you help other drunks. Well, little did I know that I was more than half right then, but that's all I knew. I guess I had been dry about three months when my sponsor called me up and he said, Larry, we have a call just came in to the answering service, and the fellow lives in the next block from you.
Now ordinarily I would go with you on this call, but I have to go see another fellow who seeks our help, and do you suppose you can talk to this man? Now in these three months of going dry, I had gained nothing but some self-assurance, and I said, why certainly, I'll take care of this bird, and he told me his name, and my God, it was a fellow I knew. As a matter of fact, we used to drink at the same watering hole,
[00:55:04]
and on occasion he had helped me home at night. You see, I lived on this tree-lined street, and sometimes when I was walking down the street, these trees would jump over onto the sidewalk and I'd run into them. So on occasion I did need help, and Bob had helped me. So when Ted told me who the fellow was, I said, sure, I'll take care of him. So I dressed and I went around the corner to Bob's house, and I rang the bell, and Bob came to the door with a rather woebegone look on his face, and I said, hi, Bob, and he said, hi, Larry.
I said, can I come in? He said, no, Larry, I'm expecting some callers, and I'm going to be tied up. And I said, well, were they from AA, Alcoholics Anonymous? He looked at me rather surprisingly, and he said, yes. I said, well, I'm he. And he looked at me for a long minute, and he said, oh, Christ, no. And I said, yeah, I'm the guy. So reluctantly he let me in. And I sat down and I poured out my words of wisdom to him, and he says, well, what do you do? And I said, well, you go to meetings. Well, he says, when's the meeting?
And I said, there's a meeting tonight. He said, I'll go. I almost fell off the chair. Now, this was easy. So when I got home, I called up my sponsor, and I says, Ted, don't worry about a thing. I took care of that guy. He's going to a meeting tonight. Well, now, in those days, I didn't have a car, along with a lot of other things, and my sponsor picked me up, and we picked Bob up, and we went to the meeting. And we sat there, and we drank coffee, and we were sober.
Time went along, and for several weeks, Bob went regularly to the meetings. Now, we had this little club downtown in Binghamton, in a loft building, up two flights of stairs, two little rooms with a coffee pot and a few chairs that the Salvation Army had donated to us. And in the evening, we used to sit around and play cards and chew the fat. Now, this stairway was a rather wide stairway leading up to it, and by the tread on the stairs, you could always tell whether a guy was one of our people, or whether he was one of the townies coming in to put us on for a quarter, or in some rare cases, even asking us for help. Well, this fellow and I sat there this night, and this footstep was heard, and he hadn't climbed many stairs before we knew we had a live one. He hit both walls, and it took him about four minutes to get up.
The door was flung open, and here stood my pigeon, Bob, drunk and a skunk. And he walked over to me, and he said, Hey, fella, didn't you tell me if I joined this drunk club I'd be sober? I said, Yes, sir, I did. Take a look at me. He says, Now, suppose you tell me where I went wrong. And I said, Sure, be glad to. I said, You should have, you didn't, you probably, And all of a sudden I realized I didn't know anything. I didn't know how he got drunk, but what was worse, I didn't know how I got sober.
But what was worse, I didn't know how I got sober. So I thought I'd better go home and ponder the problem.
[01:00:00]
And I did. And I used my usual logic. I said, what does a fella in a quandary do? And the answer came immediately, he gets drunk. So I did. Jane thinks she had a wonderful sponsor. I had a saint. He came to my house. He talked to me. He said, come on back. This time do a little listening. So I came back and the fellas greeted me. And we had some coffee. And now I started to listen. And I started to learn.
But it was a kind of learning by rote. I was beginning to be able to mouth the words. I could say, easy does it. I knew the first things first. I knew the steps. But I didn't know what they meant. But I was learning. Oh, I'd been dry for eight or ten months after that. And I was sitting in this soft, same club room, wintery, Christmas time evening. When the door was opened and a young man came in, a man younger than I.
And I might tell you that I was young once too. And he had that same hangdog look that I had seen in my own expression many times. And he told me a sad story about how he was about to lose his job. His wife was going to leave him. He was going to lose his home. And he had even contemplated suicide. And I rubbed my hands together figuratively and said, this is the kind of pigeon I can talk to. I said, fellow, the first thing you got to do is easy does it.
Now I said, here in this fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous, we put first things first. I said, now our first step says that we admitted that we were powerless over alcohol. And he was staring at me with a rather quizzical expression. And I said, you've got to put sobriety first in your life, as I do. Nodded his head in assent. And I quoted from the big book, chapter and verse. Then I sat back. And I said, boy, Jewel, what a hell of a job you've done on this guy.
Boy, there was nothing left to be said. And he looked at me and said, thank you, I guess I'll go. Now there was one thing I had learned up to this point in Alcoholics Anonymous. I had learned to understand another drunk. And this is the God-given power that we all have. And I knew where he was going. There was a little tavern right across the street. And when we have problems that we can't solve, we can always step in there and get a double, and we get our temporary solace.
And I knew that's where Milo was going. And sure enough, he got up. And he went to the door, he closed it, and he started down the stairs, when just then the phone rang. And a voice at the other end said, is there a Milo there? And I said, Milo just this minute has left. He's going down the stairs now. She said, oh, can you catch him? I ran to the front of the room. I threw open the window. And crossing the street, just entering the area way of the Royal Grill, was Milo.
[01:05:05]
And in my stentorian voice, I said, Milo. She looked around rather reluctantly, and I motioned for him to come back. He trudged across the snow-filled street, walked up the stairs, and answered the phone. It was his wife. She said, if you'll just stay there for a few minutes, I'll come after you. In a few minutes, she came after him. Milo didn't take another drink for the rest of his life. He became a trusted and valued member of Alcoholics Anonymous.
And I began to think right there. What made the phone ring? What made me catch Milo before he could get in that door and get his medicine? Certainly all this verbosity that I had poured on him hadn't done it. And this is when I began to come to believe. You see, when I came into Alcoholics Anonymous, I was at least an atheist, most certainly an agnostic. I believed that there might be a Satan, because look what he'd done with me.
But I looked around at these miracles whom I had been living with for all these months, and I saw the work of God's fine hand. And I came to believe. Let it begin with me. And it was at this point that my growth in Alcoholics Anonymous, and my learning ceased by rote, and my learning started by experience. And it's where I learned to have faith in a power greater than myself. It's where I learned to have hope for me, and hope for the thousands who don't yet know.
But most of all, it taught me how to love you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much, Larry. We have just a few more minutes allotted to us, and I'm not going to take them all. In the instructions that were sent to me, I was told that I could say a few words at the beginning or the end if time allowed, and I dearly hoped that time wouldn't allow. But my speakers didn't speak as long as I anticipated.
A.A. has been the most important thing in my life for the past seventeen and a half years. Now, I didn't know it. I certainly didn't know it at the beginning, because when I came to A.A., like so many others, I didn't come to get sober. I came to get my wife off my back. I was sitting in the back of our meeting hall one night. Somebody said to me, How's your number one problem? I said, Arthur, you haven't even met my wife.
And it was some years later before I understood that it was my number one problem. For the first six months that I was a member of A.A., I did only one thing right. I didn't take a drink. I went to one meeting a week because my sponsor had said, Be sure you go to at least one meeting a week. During that six months, something must have rubbed off. And at the end of the six months, I found myself with a great big void in my life.
I had been attending night school for eight years, and I was finished. I had graduated. And I had three nights a week that had been timed to going to college.
[01:10:01]
I didn't know what to do with it. And I went to my sponsor, and I said, Bill, what the hell shall I do now? He said, Go to meetings. At that point, having just received a degree with honors, I didn't have enough sense to know that that's what I should be doing, going to meetings. And I went, and A.A. got me. It's been just that simple. It's been the most rewarding period of my life by far. I got great privileges in A.A.
I served with Larry and some others sitting here as a delegate. And I just completed three years as a member of the Board of Trustees. God, what an honor. And I know I didn't deserve it, but I tried my damnedest to carry it out. I'm an ex-delegate. I'm an ex-trustee. And as of last Monday night, I'm an ex-employee of my company. I'm much too young to retire, so I'm going to have to find something else to keep me out of my wife's way.
You know, all of the speakers mentioned love. And when I came to A.A., I wouldn't even utter the word, never mind admit it. But I want to see if I can share with you an incident that took place in my life about five years ago. I may not get through it, but I'm going to try. I'm going to tell you why I believe A.A. is the most important thing in my life. I consider myself the luckiest person at this convention.
I guess I consider myself the luckiest person in the world. I hope that afterwards you'll come up and argue with me, but that's the way I feel about it. Five years ago, I was getting ready to go to the Delegates Conference in New York, and my number two daughter decided to get married. Well, she chose the day before the conference to get married, and I said, you can't do that. Well, you don't tell girls when you're married.
They get something planned, and that's it. So we arranged the wedding. I have four daughters, and you can have one hell of a wedding with four daughters. It gets pretty expensive, but it's pretty dramatic. And all four daughters were part of the wedding party. The youngest one, who is my fringemanifer, my wife says, how can you call that beast a fringemanifer? She's 12, and she was the flower girl.
And behind her was my oldest one. She's almost 30, and she was the matron of honor. And behind her was the one that's the same age as I am. She's 17. She never saw me take a drink. And she was the maid of honor. And I was standing at the end of the church with a bride. And I don't know what was going through the minds of the people in the church, but I want to share with you what was going through my mind.
I went back probably 15 years. And I remember the night when I arrived home, as I did many, many times, quite drunk, quite late. I can tell you accurately that it was about 8.40 at night because that's when the train arrived and I was commuting by train. And I walked into the house, and at the head of the stairs was my wife with her bag packed and the two oldest of these four girls clinging to her because she was going to leave and leave the kids with the older who just walked in the door.
And you know what I did? I asked her, where's my supper? And she said to me, I didn't cook any for you. And I said, I wouldn't eat your goddamn slop anyway. And I walked out. And I walked to the next town because ours is a dry town. I walked to the next town, continued to drink, finally came home. Now I thought of that that day in the church and it came into my life shortly after that. And I was in a fair way to lose my entire family.
And I'm glad I didn't. I've learned to love an AA. I've learned to say the word love. I've learned to shed tears. I've learned that I have emotions.
[01:15:00]
I've learned that I can release my emotions, and I won't have to be ashamed. You know, Janie was talking about Bish, and she was talking about love. And I got home from that same convention that we had both attended, and this little gal that is now 12, I don't know, the poor kid, we have a lot of affinity with each other because my wife lays both of us out all the time. And I said to her, Molly, anybody tell you they love you today?
And she looked at me. And I guess, you know, nobody had told her they loved her for a long time, which is pretty terrible when you start to think of it. I said, well, I love you. And we get in a habit of sharing this expression with each other. Anybody tell you they love you today? I love you. So my birthday was in December, and she came in, and she gave me this great big box. And I opened the box, and in the box was a little statuette, and you've probably seen many of these little plastic statuettes.
It's a picture of a little girl clutching a little bouquet beside her. And at the bottom of it says, When you love someone, tell them. Now, like Janie, I love you all. This is the most wonderful place to be. I'm certainly certain in my own mind that if I had my choice of being any place else in the world this Fourth of July, this would be it. Now, one of the other things I've written down, because I didn't want to forget it, along with my name, is the way I closed this meeting.
I don't know how many of you— well, I must remember to thank each and every one of you for being here, and as Bill W. says, thank you for your lives. You know, one of the instructions was you're closed with the Lord's Prayer. I've spoken it thousands and thousands of times at A.A. meetings, but I never tried to write it down before. You know, somebody said to me, I suppose you had to get down on your knees before you could remember it, and that's about the way it works.
So thank you again for being here. Thank you for helping to make this another successful A.A. convention, and will you all please join me with the Lord's Prayer? For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory forever. Amen. Thank you.