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Source: 1985 Montreal International Convention – Unknown Speaker – NEWSLETTERS AND BULLETINS – RS 06317.mp3 File: 1985-montreal-international-convention-unknown-speaker-newsletters-and-bulletins-rs-06317.mp3 Duration: 01:26:29
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I'm an alcoholic and one of the staff members from the General Service Office. It's my pleasure to moderate this workshop on newsletters and bulletins this morning. And before we begin, if we could have a moment of silence and gratitude for the AA recoveries of the past 50 years, followed by the serenity prayer, please. 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 here who are not familiar with our tradition of personal anonymity at the public level. Our public relations policy is based on attraction rather than promotion. We need always maintain personal anonymity at the level of press, radio, TV, and films. Thus, we respectfully ask that no AA speaker, or indeed any AA member, be identified by full name or photograph in published or broadcast reports of our meetings.
The assurance of anonymity is essential in our effort to help other problem drinkers who may wish to share our recovery program with us. And our tradition of anonymity reminds us that AA principles come before personalities. I have no current announcements except to let you know that tapes of this meeting, as well as every other meeting that's listed in your program, will be available at the tape sales booth in the convention center.
In each of your packets that you received upon receiving your badge upon registration, there is an order blank for the tapes of everything. Today our workshop is on newsletters and bulletins. And it's incredible to think that 50 years ago, two people started this fellowship that we all know today, which is in more than 110 countries, more than 1 million people, perhaps 39,000 contact points throughout the world.
No one knows how many AA groups. We only know of the groups that are registered at GSO, and I'm not sure about that accuracy. I think keeping us informed about each other is an incredible difficult job. We all, I certainly did, want pieces of information, but I think that often we're not inclined to pass off information onto others that we do have. And as an example, I know that even in my own home group, the rotating secretary seldom will spend an hour or two with the incoming secretary to let them know what the job entails.
You know, we say, thank God, kind of pass it on and say see you next week, and leave people to kind of fend for themselves. It's true in other areas of communication as well within the fellowship, and I think communication is what we have in Alcoholics Anonymous. It's one alcoholic who shared with another that started this chain of recovery, the likes of which we're experiencing this weekend. Some of us have skills in communication, and we have three of those up here with us this morning.
There are hundreds of newsletters and bulletins within the fellowship. We have a list of newsletters and bulletins at the general service office that we did kind of as a service piece. One person wrote in and said, how can I get in touch with people who are doing newsletters? Therefore, you know, we got one request, so we attempted to do up a list. And like everything in AA, I doubt how accurate that is too, knowing how we move, knowing how names change, and all the rest of it.
But we do have people who have skills in communication who are going to share with us this morning the newsletter or the bulletin that they're involved with, the area that they're from, and I think that you're going to enjoy all of them. I certainly enjoy reading their bulletin and newsletter when it comes into the office because most often we receive a copy and we put it all in a circulating folder and all of the staff have the opportunity.
It was difficult selecting people to participate in this workshop because there are so many good ones. And these three I think I look forward to every month. And so to share with us first, we have Travers from Bristol, England. And Travers is responsible for a newsletter called The Bristol Fashion and we have some copies of that up front, along with a copy of the Hello Central newsletter for people who are interested to see what it's all about.
So help me welcome Travers.
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I'm an archaeolic and my name is Travers. I feel at least the numbers attending this meeting this morning are a little more decent than they were last night. I would have felt slightly out of place last night. So I'm going to start with a brief introduction. The numbers attending this meeting this morning are a little more decent than they were last night. I would have felt slightly out of place last night.
I would like to begin this morning by bringing greetings from the Bristol Groups of Archaeolics Anonymous, from its members who have many friends in this room, and I think genuinely from all the groups in England. I would like to thank, before I start, the Convention Committee for the terrific work they have put in in bringing this whole show to us. I would like to thank the Americans and the Canadians for the past two and a half weeks for their hospitality in entertaining a little group of fellow group members and friends from the Bristol area.
Hospitality is something that we in England probably don't know quite as much about as you in North America. The hospitality is so apparent to us and so overwhelms us at times that we become quite inarticulate in trying to express our feelings about it. I have been afforded this kind of hospitality for many years now, particularly in Montreal, and it was very moving for me last night to see three people who have been generous enough to offer me hospitality down the years on that platform.
I refer, of course, to Dr. Jack Norris, and to Lois, and to Dr. Travis Dancy. And I think one of the things in my own personal recovery I have learned about most from the members in North America is that great gift of hospitality. I would like to bring greetings, and I have them in writing, but I'm not going to read them out, from the other journals in the British Isles. From Cher, the magazine of England, the national magazine, which is sponsored by the General Service structure.
From roundabout in Scotland. And I've had a wonderful letter from Pat O'See, the editor of The Road Back in Dublin. And very special greeting and love from perhaps our latest of what I like to call the independent journals, Billy MacM, who is now editor of the Wicklow Ways. I think that we come together so very, very rarely, people who are involved in these journals, bulletins, newsletters, call them what you like, that we really as yet have no common language.
You notice that I use the term journal. So forgive me if you are not quite buttoned into that, but that is the term I have always used. I can only tell you about journals, and the one with which I have been involved for 17 years. Last Tuesday was the anniversary of Bristol Fashion, 17 years last Tuesday. Through my own personal experience. My personal recovery began in the late 50s, and at that time there was very little to read about alcoholism or alcoholics anonymous around in England.
And anything that came my way I was so grateful for. In the very beginning I think I, any kind of continuity of written word came through that household name to most of us, little bits of clippings and things from something I did not understand, I did not know about, called chitchat. And I thought the whole world was chitchat. But I found little simple things permeating my mind in the early days of my recovery, and always at the end I say, yes, that's chitchat.
[00:10:03]
And it was a little later on I found that there was something else called The Road Back. And it was through reading odd copies that came my way of The Road Back that I eventually came to know its editor, who probably is one of the most loved of all time editors of journals, Sackville of Dublin. Now that was my introduction. I found it difficult in England, believe it or not, to get hold of a copy of a big book.
But here was something coming and I found I could write off and it would be mailed to me. And thank God they did not ask me to subscribe or pay money over, because in those days I just did not have it. It just came. I think one of the journals I would like to talk about just for two minutes, because I think it was the perfect example, was after Sackville started The Road Back, a second independent journal started in Ireland by a little man called Dan who lived in Listowel in County Kerry called The Listowel Gleanings.
I learnt a lot from that publication. The Listowel Gleanings continued from the early 50s right up until the middle late 60s and a most beautiful thing happened. One day I received a copy of The Listowel Gleanings and on the last page it said, I have had difficulty in putting this journal together this month and I regret that I have to inform you that it will not be mailed or published another month because I am in a state of terminal cancer.
And I thought there was a beautiful editor. He was not going to hold on to it, he wasn't going to pass it on, he was just something he had done for his own recovery and he was letting go of it in an honest way. Well, I depended a great deal for my early recovery on things that I had read about AA in other parts of the world. And then around about 1967, a member of the group to which I belonged said he thought it would be a good idea if we had a little news bulletin in our part of the country in Bristol to help the groups to communicate.
Now he was a high flyer, he really had some go in him this fellow and he got one or two people all steamed up and I wrote to Sackville, who was my sponsor at the time, and he said yes, he said, I think it's a very good idea, you should help him or you can. And so we set a publication date due for July and it was going to be called Contact. And he thought if we'd get a nice few articles together and we'd get a few little news items and events that were going to happen and I thought this was a marvellous idea and I fell in with it and I was willing to help.
About a month before it was due to go out, there was a tap on my door one night and a woman was standing there with a sheaf of papers. She said, Richard doesn't like to tell you this himself but he doesn't want anything to do with it and he's brought it down because he thought maybe you would like to put out this little journal. So I have to tell you right from the very beginning I was not a willing participator.
I didn't like the name Contact much. I wrote to Sackville, I said, do I go ahead with this? He said, well why not? He said, is it going to make you drink? And I said, well I don't think so. So anyway, I decided to call it Bristol Fashion. Now when I say the I, there's known to many people in this room a very wonderful non-alcoholic friend of AA's who I've been associated with for nearly 25 years called Jane Coffey.
And she agreed to help me and to be the co-editor. I went to the library and I looked up that well-known nautical term which is known worldwide, Bristol Fashion. And it suddenly hit me coming out of the pages when looking up this term, ship-shapen Bristol Fashion to find that the actual term Bristol Fashion meant a vessel with a specially designed keel able to lie up on a mud or rock bottom. And that was why we decided to call it Bristol Fashion.
Eventually our publication came. I never want to go through that day again as long as I live. I am not a technician. I had never handled a stenciling machine before. I knew nothing about stenciling. before. I knew nothing about inks and certainly nothing about stencils, and the maximum I got
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to was twenty-seven copies. Most of them came across the page that way. The content wasn't very good, and Jane and I, for the first time in our relationship, had fallen out. We mailed out twelve, kept one, and gave twelve to the local groups. It did invoke some communication. Jane still has a telegram from SACM. Your publication received. You are to be congratulated. You have set for yourselves a standard beneath which you can never possibly fall.
At least he allowed us to know that we were in a learning situation. We are an independent journal which places a great deal of responsibility on us. We have never been answering to a group, an intergroup, a region, or even a country, and I think this has been one of the hardest things of editorship, that we have always had to bear that in mind. We, through trial and error, began to publish articles written by friends of ours, together with little news events and sometimes the reports of events that had taken place in the Bristol area.
We were asked to make a decision early on about writing an obituary for a member who died. We did write an obituary for somebody who died, and it's not common in the AA to have obituaries, but this evoked so much correspondence in favour of obituary that we have continued to this day to always, when asked or sent in, obituary notices to publish. Now then, strangely as it may seem, I think mainly through the fact that I had become a reasonable correspondent, nothing like the measure of Sackville, but people began worldwide to write and ask. Not many, not a great flood or anything like that, but eventually people were writing and asking for copies, and copies were sent to friends of friends. It was amazing the things that began to happen as a result of our efforts, and those of our friends of Bristol Fashion.
One of the things that we had correspondents writing to us about was something that was not available in England at that time, and those were retreats. We could not advise them where to go for retreats, and I see there are people here from as far away as Denver tonight who have been to our retreats. And we decided we would try to arrange a retreat for the readers of Bristol Fashion, and that was something like fifteen years ago, and to this day our little journal organises several retreats each year. We felt as we were independent that was something we could involve ourselves in. From the retreats and other things that began to happen, it was suggested by two of our readers that maybe we could have a convention, an AA convention, find out about having an AA convention in Bristol. Then it was even suggested that we might try to help this convention, AA convention, into becoming the first European convention. This was not, of course, run by Bristol Fashion, but we certainly gave it a kick in the pants to make it possible. And the results of that first European convention held in Bristol are evident in this room tonight because I can see many people who were there. And arising out of that, there came an invitation to the editor of Roadback, Sackville, and to myself as editor of Bristol Fashion, to try or attempt to try to carry a message at the invitation of Pope Paul VI to Rome, and that took place in 1972. We have had our critics down the years, and we have tried to reply as best we could to any criticism or to accept it and act upon it. In trying to sum up what I feel Bristol Fashion
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has become down the years, I suppose because of the continuity of the people who correspond, the continuity of our writers, the events, and the people involved with it, that Bristol Fashion has become a sort of kind of spiritual soap opera. There are many people I have met for the first time from distant countries who said, I know all about the people involved and those who read and write for Bristol Fashion. And it is amazing down the years how we have been able to follow the lead of those crossings, the paths of those people. I think there is one thing that has come through very clear to me about the way the journals, the newsletters, the bulletins carry their message, and I believe it is in a very honest way, in a very fearless way. I would like to sum it up by saying very often it is like putting your pen or your type writer or your compositor where your mouth is, and you can't talk your way out of it.
I find that the longer Bristol Fashion continues, and I'm so grateful to the three editors we have, Jane, who has been with me all the time, to Sally, my wife, who is with us today, and to the indomitable Pat, who is a rather lovely Scottish lady who is our severest critic and works with us and also writes quite a bit for us. If I had to pick up a thread running through not only Bristol Fashion but all the other journals that down the years have been so helpful to me, their message has always been one of charity. And strangely enough in our program we don't actually talk directly about charity very much. I think charity is almost the dirty word today in the world in which we live. We think of it as a form of assistance, a handout, and yet charity like our anonymity has a deep and loving spiritual content if examined in the light of our recovery. And so in closing I would like on that theme to read something that was once written to me by my sponsor, who has been dead for many years now, but he was the editor of The Road Back, when I had been discussing something like this with him.
And he wrote to me in these terms, a poem was written in the First World War by an Irishman, four days before his death, in action, of which the second verse was this, So here, while mad guns wildly overhead, and tired men sigh with mutt for cultural flaw, know that we fools, now with the foolish dead, died not for flag, nor country, nor emperor, but for a dream born in a herdsman's shed, and for the sacred scripture of the poor.
Alcoholics join AA for different reasons, under different pressures, but I believe that we who stay actively with AA do so because its way of living has lit in us a proud ambition to play our tiny part in nursing that dream to life. That dream born nearly 2,000 years ago, that dream of loving, honoring, and serving the good God in whatever image or form he has made himself known to us. That dream of loving and serving our fellow men of free grace, with no thought of any material reward in return. St. John of the Cross wrote, when the evening of this life comes, we shall be
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judged on love. Not how much money we may have made, not on what position in life we may have carved out for ourselves, not on what we just wrote, not on what we just said, but on how we really loved our neighbor. Our greatest gift to the future will always be our love. The love and compassion with which we pass on our message of hope and recovery to those who may think of joining us. Nothing can ever take the place of that love. Indeed, nothing ever could. My great love to you all, and thank you for being here.
Thank you very much, Travers. We've heard now from an independent editor. There are many different types of newsletters and bulletins, as I mentioned before. Next, we're going to hear from an editor of a central office newsletter from one of the large areas of the United States, the Los Angeles area. Help me welcome Merle. Hi, I'm an alcoholic from Los Angeles. My name is Merle Moore. In keeping with what Sybil said last night, I identify myself at AA meetings. If anyone's in Los Angeles, they can look me up on the phone book.
It's an unusual name. It's easy to find. I have a great gratitude for Alcoholics Anonymous, for the fellowship itself, for the people that are in it, for the program. I even have a liking for some of the crusty old timers. Some of them are here who are friends of mine. At the luncheon yesterday, the central office luncheon yesterday, the table next to us, there was a crusty old timer. At that meeting, if you weren't there, the leaders would say something in English, and another one would say it in French. There was an English leader and a French leader. After this went on for a long time, this predominantly English-speaking group at this luncheon, the guy from the French had just given a rather long spiel in French, and the guy at the next table said, he said, don't drink, go to meetings and read the big books. Which in any language simplifies things for us, I think. Speaking of old timers, it reminds me of a story. If you've heard this, I apologize. If you haven't heard it, I think I apologize too, but I'm going to tell it anyway. A man whose eyesight was going poor, he was a great golfer, he loved to golf, and he couldn't play golf anymore because he couldn't follow the flight of the ball. He could see it when it was on the tee, but he couldn't see it after he teed off. So he went to the club pro and said what the problem was, and the club pro said, I've got just the man for you. So he called one of the caddies from the back room out. The guy came out and they were discussing it, and the golfer kept getting closer and closer to this guy because he couldn't believe his eyes. This was a really old man, this guy was in his 80s, and no offense to anybody in their 80s, but he said, you're going to be able to help me, and the guy said, perfect eyesight. And the club pro said, this guy's got the best eyesight of anybody I've ever known. So they go out to the first tee, and the golfer tees it off and gets a long one, and the caddy says, man, that's a long drive. The guy says, you see where it went? He says, man, that's a long drive. He says, you see where it went? He said, I saw right where it went, and I saw right where it landed and where it rolled. And they're walking down the fairway, and the golfer kept saying, sure you can, I know right where it went. And he says, it's amazing, you're aging, you have this great eyesight, and they get closer to the golfer's field. They walk quite a ways, and he said, shouldn't the ball be around here?
And he didn't get an answer, and he turns to the caddy and says, you told me you saw where it went. And the caddy said, yeah, but I forgot. But, speaking of funny things, Travers has this thing he starts off his newsletter with, those of you who have a copy of it will see that he says there's something for everyone in there. He says there's something for everyone in there, including mistakes, because some people
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are always looking for mistakes, and I've tried to use that for typographical errors in our newsletter. It's a 16-page newsletter required a great deal of typing. For a time I had a lot of help on that from volunteers at central office, but it seems in recent months I've been doing most of the typing myself. How I got to A.A. is probably just about as dull as how I got to do the newsletter, but basically my drinking history is one of drinking too much, too long, and then eventually too poorly, to the point where I realized that I had to do something about it.
Eleven years ago, this June, this past month, I came to Alcoholics Anonymous. My birthday is not until September 30th, so you can see I'm a slow learner, but I came in from my background, I'm not going to give a job resume, but it does have something relating to the newsletter itself. I was a, well first of all I'd like to point out that the strongest motivating emotion in my life has been fear, and I, like other people, I've not always said that I can't identify the fear.
I can identify it. I can identify the fears. I knew what I was afraid of. I was afraid of failure, I was afraid of success. It was like my drinking. Did I drink every day? Yes. Did I drink occasionally? Yes. Did I drink beer, scotch, wine? Yes. There's a whole, you can see this panel right across. I had fears, and I covered them up with booze. In spite of that, I was a Marine Corps platoon sergeant in World War II, and I got called back in for the Korean War.
I was in the newspaper business, I was a journalist in a San Francisco newspaper, and two of them in fact. I was an executive in public relations, and over these things I kept covering, I kept using booze to cover up my fears. And when I finally got to the point of going to AA, I realized I had to do something but not knowing what it was. I started going, I started listening, and I started comparing rather than identifying.
I was criticizing in a way. The book is so simply written, you know, anybody could rewrite it better. Thank God it's so simply written. After about 105 days on a dry, I had my slip, lasted only three days, thank God, and I came back to AA, and I decided to do what I was told. To do what was suggested to me. And I entered the original 12-step house in Los Angeles, and I eventually became the assistant manager at that 12-step house, until when I had 19 months sobriety, I got married to my wife, Bobbie, who had four more years of sobriety than I do.
It's funny, whenever we go somewhere and somebody hears that she has 15 years and I have 11, they say, well, the poor gal, she had to go through four years of your drinking, but that wasn't true. She didn't have to go through that. All she had to do was go through my crazy early years of my sobriety. But early on in AA, I had a sponsor who exposed me to the traditions, who allowed me to delve into the traditions as well as the 12 steps and the book itself.
Being somewhat of a writer, I had a problem with the fourth step. I was writing my fourth step, and it was a novel, and it just kept going on and on and on. I had about 27 pages, and I was the age of 17. So I eventually solved that by just putting key words down, and that was my fifth step. The key to my fifth step was those key words, threw the whole thrust of it away. I'm not sure I burned it, but I threw it away.
But these things are all part of what got me to doing the newsletter, because shortly after Bobby and I got married, I became the executive editor of a business publication. After a year of that, she had a pressure job, I had this pressure job, and she brought it up and decided that I'd always wanted to freelance. She suggested I do it then instead of waiting until later. So I started freelancing, and at the same time I was asked if I would be interested in planning, doing the format, planning and laying out and getting started a newsletter for our Los Angeles central office.
I was very flattered, and I said yes, and I did that. It was accepted by the Central Service Committee, and I changed the format after the first three months or so. I was given pretty much a free reign in that. No one said, you do not write about this, you do not write about that, here's what you
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do write, you do not criticize certain things, you play up certain things, no one at any point in the Central Service Committee or the central office staff has ever said that to me. I've had a free hand with it. If I do not follow the traditions and if I do not stay in line with what the Central Service Committee wants, they have certain requirements that you have to meet certain requirements to be accepted as a meeting for listing in the directory and things like that.
If I violate those things, all you have to do is say you are no longer editor of the newsletter. It's that simple. It's a matter of just being sensible about it and doing the right thing. As I said, I was going to get it started and keep it going for maybe a year, year and a half. That was eight years ago. That's the way things are in AA sometimes, you turn things over but they keep coming back to you.
I warned after about two years of being editor, I was at one of the intergroup meetings and at that meeting I had given a lot of thought to it and I warned about letting one person be the editor forever of that newsletter or of any newsletter. It's different with Travers, he uses an independent newsletter, but to have a central office or an intergroup newsletter more or less controlled by one person could be a very hazardous thing.
And sure, after eight years I am a little possessive of it. Sure enough, my prediction came true, but not to the point of being unreasonable I don't think. In the newsletter I do make points from time to time that are not popular. I can just mention some of those to you. In the Los Angeles area we have 1,400 groups, that's just in the Greater LA area itself and that doesn't take in a lot of the other sections around there.
There are a lot of meetings of course, because all those groups have one or more meetings, some have several. They have to meet this criteria I mentioned before, they have to be, it's listed out in that book, the A.A. group, the little pamphlet, the A.A. book, they follow those six steps in there and that's where you can be authorized to be listed in the directory or not. And these groups, some of them are large, some are small.
This would be maybe an average group in the Los Angeles area. Some are very large and some are just a dozen people or so. But the large meetings, people have gotten in the habit of getting there early and saving dozens of seats for friends who are going to come in at the last minute. So I took that order and I had an artist in the local area draw a cartoon about it and it got some response. A couple of meetings did change, some of them didn't change at all, but at least we posted and a lot of other newsletters throughout the country picked up the cartoon and the article and read it themselves as their local issue because it's apparently a problem everybody has.
There are issues of anonymity which we have had problems with from time to time and I've taken those things on. In strict adherence to the traditions, it's not personal opinion stuff, it's what the traditions say and it's what it says in A.A. Comes of Age or A.A. and the Good Old Timers or any of the A.A. Conference-approved literature. These are not personal opinion pieces. Personal opinion pieces are used and I even write some myself, but they have nothing to do with those kinds of issues that are covered already by tradition.
The, sorry, I'm worried about my watch, it stopped on me twice this week, recently took on an issue about people who make a big part of saying that A.A. is a selfish program, all we look out for is our group, we don't have to support central office or G.S.O. or anybody else, it's okay if we use our group money to have parties and things like that because it's our money and yet those people make as much use of central office as anyone else so I point these things out and say this is not a selfish program, maybe individuals are selfish, but the strength of this program is the giving and the caring.
If we didn't have that, none of us would be here, the people who came here before didn't have that. And so I point these things out. There was kind of a hassle between our area assembly and our central service committee over the issue of cooperation with the professional community, just not starting to fight, this has already been used in our newsletter so I can say it, the CPC came up with a committee of their own, the area assembly committee, the CPC committee, and they said this is the
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way we're going to do it, like it or not, and the central service committee in Los Angeles says uh-uh, you have no guarantees in there that the organizations you're going to affiliate yourselves with will not claim affiliation and will not broadcast it and so on and so forth, which is, you know, violation of traditions, so it's our responsibility, I feel, not to avoid issues of controversy, a personal opinion, but that's what I'm here for.
I feel that those of us who do AA newsletters do so out of our love for the fellowship. I don't know what anyone else's salary is for putting their newsletter out, but mine is sobriety, and every time I'm involved with anything of that nature, it helps my sobriety. For four and a half years, my wife and I answered the phone at the central office on Saturdays from 4 to 8 p.m. That was an important part of our sobriety, that was really important, and we had to give it up because I have a work schedule in a freelance sort of sense that takes me away from time to time, and for one period of a little over a year, I was gone practically half the time, and if you can't keep a commitment, don't make it in AA, and that's what we did.
We said we have to give up this shot and let someone else do it, and if we ever get to the point where we can do that again, we will. I know I will, and I'm sure Bobby will, but it's our love for the program, it's our understanding of the traditions, it's our adherence to the reasons for the traditions. I make an issue, too, in our newsletter of the single purposes of AA. There are people who argue AA is not for alcoholics only.
AA has never been just for alcoholics, period, it's been for alcoholics and people addicted to alcohol and some other substance. That's always been the case. You look back at the history of AA and you'll see that the duly addicted have always been welcome here, as long as one of the addictions is to alcohol. But the people who say it's not just for AA, for alcoholics only, I've asked them, what can you point out to me in any of the AA literature that says it's not for alcoholics only?
A lot of their arguments are, well, Dr. Bob had trouble with pills and Bill Wilson was practically addicted to vitamin tablets because of his depression and things. Those aren't valid, countering to what the traditions say, what our history says. So I make a point of these things. The next issue of our newsletter, there's a story on the front page which points that out. In the Los Angeles area, most meetings start with a reading of a brief description of Alcoholics Anonymous, nothing about anything but alcohol in there.
The next thing is usually a reading of the portion of Chapter 5. I don't find anything about anything but alcohol in there. The traditions are read. Some places the short form, a few, very few, but becoming more and more, thank God, are reading the long form traditions, which is helping people who are rather new to the program and some old timers to understand the traditions a little bit better. So I point these things out.
I feel that that is a responsibility I have, that I have been charged with by the Central Service Committee. It is a faith that they have placed in me and I try to live up to it. I would like to close and give time for questions later. I'd like to say that there's no way that I could get from where I was 11 years ago up here tonight. I was home from the hospital about two weeks. I had an artery bypass in my left leg and I got a phone call from, about GSO would like me to participate in this, if I was coming to Montreal, we'd pay our own way.
I was kind of overcome with the gratitude, again, that I keep feeling in this program. I have a great deal of confidence in being around the people in AA and around the program of Alcoholics Anonymous. If I look back and say that in the Hello Central newsletter that they're not afraid to kind of jump into the water and have found out that it's really okay. And I have to say that I look forward to that newsletter, personally speaking, and reading it when it comes out because they're not afraid to get involved.
The letters to the editor showing the other side of the coin also is very informative to me.
[00:45:01]
The pearls of wisdom that are shared in all of the newsletters that come into the office have personally helped me in my own sobriety. We're going to have time for questions from you and so I'll stop talking and get on to our last presenter, which is Dottie B., who is involved with the intergroup area newsletter from Washington, D.C. So, Dottie? Hello, everybody. I'm Dorothy and I'm an alcoholic. I won't say I'm an alcoholic editor. I haven't found that out yet.
I have to tell you that what I say here today will be a surprise to me as well as news to you. My two preceding speakers had nice notes before them and I thought, now that's the way people with class do it. But you see, I come from this little small southern Yankee town called Washington, seat of the government for the United States, and we don't follow scripts, as you well know. In fact, the man beat me to even greeting y'all by getting here in last night.
Talking about my newsletter and my job as editor, because I didn't really know what to talk to y'all about. I've never had this privilege before and I called the previous editor and I said, you know, what do I talk about? He started telling me, well, you tell them what kind of printing press you use and the kind of paper and how long in the number circulation and I thought, but I don't do that. So then I asked the manager to sit up here, you know, in case y'all wanted to know that, because all I know is how to type on a typewriter and pretend that I've got it all together up here.
And I can do that better on paper because I can X out and erase, but I'm not going to get that chance here, so you'll have to understand how it is for me. I got to be editor, I guess in the same way I got to be an alcoholic. I got carried away with the thought of… Not only am I an alcoholic, I'm a Leo. So when somebody came up to me and said, gee, I like the way you talk, do you think you'd like to be the editor of our paper?
And I'm sure you could handle it. Well, you know my ego. I said, thanks, I'd love to do it, until the first month. And then I wished I had not opened my mouth. So I copied some articles and I asked some questions. And our paper started in 65 and they had, up until I took over in 83, they had several good editors and their style had sort of set the pace. And so I wanted to continue in that mode and the editor before me had sort of let it fall apart.
And I thought, we've had a good format, why don't I go back to that? Now that helps a lot if you're new with the paper, if you find a format to follow. I could never have a slick of coffee as Hello Central. And I wanted something a little fancier, considering it's coming out of Washington, D.C., you know, at least we ought to be able to get the paperwork right. But, and I thought, I can use what has been done before.
And so I took over the job of editor. I had a miserable first month. I had not quite as bad second month. And then I guess I just got in gear because from there on it felt really good to be editor. Except I had a manager who wanted to keep his hand in. And there again I had a problem with my ego. Because by Christmas time I didn't, I felt I didn't need to take this anymore. And so I tended my resignation.
That's the problem with being an editor, you know, you keep thinking I'm volunteering, I'm doing all this great work, and I'm not appreciated. So I quit. But we didn't get a replacement, and they needed somebody to help out, and I'd go work it in a group anyway, so I said, well, I'll come in and do one page. The irony of this matter is the manager of the office quit also. And when he left, I came back.
We got a new manager who had happened to be someone helping me with the reporter anyway. And so now I was working in harmony with somebody that I thought I could get things done right. We have our problems also. I want it my way, he wants it his way. I think I've got him to understand what my way is like, but he puts it together. And of course by the time I see the printed page, I realize his way wins out again.
So we went back into doing a paper that was geared toward our area. Now, we don't get any material from, we get very little material from our area.
[00:50:01]
People like to read about themselves, they just don't want to write it. And being the sole editor, reporter, publisher, what else we do there, you know, circulation, it's impossible to get around to a lot of meetings and really give the area good coverage. But thank goodness we get copies of other editors' newsletters. And I steal with love from everywhere. There are a couple, I really look forward to articles in them so I can say, hey, we got something for ours.
For a while I didn't give them credit, you know, and then I guess it, GSO told us you're supposed to give credit to GSO for what comes out of there, and I figured, okay, I might as well give credit to Hello Central, too, or the interloper, intergrouper. Oh, God, do we get, do we get, there's an Easy Does It that comes out of around the Great Lakes. You know, just lots of newsletters. And it's fun reading them.
Sometimes I critique them, you know, it's a bad habit I have. I may not be able to write it perfectly, but I sure can edit it. And then we've got this new habit now of storing them. We file them by the month. And a year later, I go back through it, and I figure by now even their editor's forgotten what he said. And so then I put the bar of their material. It looks like it's fresh and new, you know.
Because some good ideas come out, and as they circulate around the country, almost everybody wants to use it. So I wait a year. That's not an original thing, but I get away with it, I think. Then, of course, I've got another great magazine I subscribe to. It comes out only four times a year, and it's called Bartender's. Has a nice joke page, because we feature jokes, too. You know, now that I'm sober, I can enjoy a joke about a drug.
One that I really loved in their last issue. They had an article that talked about DWI, the other side. It seems drunken drivers think that they're being picked on. And they felt, they were sitting around a bar trying to decide how they could present their side, you know, as if they had one. And one guy suggested that they all be issued flashing purple lights. And then as they're on their way driving home, they put this purple light on top of the car.
And anybody who ran into them was just their problem, you know. And then there was another one who suggested that on Friday and Saturday nights, from two to three, they'd set a siren, like a fire alarm. Or, you know, back in World War II, there used to be this civil defense thing. Yeah, I'm that old. And from two to three, this alarm would go off, and that would be drunk drivers' driving time. And they could get home.
You know, the source is out there, people. I did a little article on just that. It's fun reading things that people think they're quite sincere about, you know. And when it comes to alcohol and learning to stay away from it and being comfortable without it and living a good, sober life, I have to take those things into consideration and say, well, I had those days, too, and I would have thought it was great.
Now we get a joke out of it. It provides fodder for my paper. And I just enjoy it. Oh, what else have I got to tell you all about? I've been there almost three years, and it gets a little easier as, you know, the months go by. I heard Merle comment about single controller or editor, and I experienced that. You know, I'm the person who decides what goes in here. And at times, I don't like me. And I've always said if I lived with me as an alcoholic, I'd have moved a long time ago.
So I know I don't like me sober because I still want to control, in a sense. And I would love help. I'd love a co-editor or assistant editor, but we don't get those. And so I try to think of fairness. And one time, I ran an article from our chairman. Well, we have a chairman's page. And that year, she had written several articles that were kind of strong in content. And after printing hers, we had this space, you know, to fill.
And so I'd seen a little poem that was real neat with a picture, and I thought, well, put that there. And I didn't realize till the publication came out, the poem was entitled, I'm Not God.
[00:55:00]
And, you know, how my chairman didn't like that. Sometimes we make mistakes by not being as careful. It wasn't done in malice at all. And that's something else that amuses me. As I say, we had this one page that the chairman of our inner group writes an article for. That's the nice thing about format. I have a page for them, and then now we carry the minutes of our meetings. So that's two pages. I have a joke page.
You know, I have some pages that are already committed, and that makes it easier to get your material. But back to this chairman's page. For the last two years, previous two years, I had to fuss and fight and complain to get their article in, so I could type it and get it set up for printing. And then this year, the chairman happens to be my best friend and companion. And if you thought I fought people I didn't know, you ought to see the battles in our house.
We're trying to get him to write his article, because after all, he knows I've got a deadline. He knows how miserable and disagreeable I can be. So you'd think that he'd get his out early. No. But then I don't do the other articles early either. I wait till my deadline is close at hand, and then I'd say, well, he's got time. And the manager's chewing on his nails, and he's doing his big job. He does the contributions page.
And he waits to count every penny down and get it all together. And that's a big page in our group, too. People do want to know what they gave compared to what somebody else gave or who didn't give. These are all pages that help to fill up our magazine. And that is, at best, I can tell you what my magazine is like. I enjoy it. I enjoy doing it. We try to do something to appeal to our readers. I think they like it, too.
And each month, it's getting to be a joy and a treasure to do. We focus on the events for the month. Somebody, well, you'll see my June and July, and that helps in setting the format. Anything that goes in the paper to almost make it uniform, but following a method that doesn't make it a job. When I start hating it, then it's going to be time for me to leave. But right now, I love it, and I love telling you all about it.
Thank you. Donnie had one line in her talk that I see quite evident in all of the newsletters that I read, and that was that she steals with love. And I think that's wonderful, and I think that that is a sharing of experience. You know how often I use lines from someone's talk that I've heard. I think that before we open it up to questions, there is a microphone in the middle of the room. You have three people who are involved with the newsletter.
Feel free to ask them any question, and as they told me when I came into Alcoholics Anonymous, there are no stupid questions in AA. So there may be some here who are attempting to get a newsletter off the ground, and you don't quite know how to go about it. This is the time to ask. One thing I would like to point out is that anything that is in copyrighted, conference-approved AA literature can be used by all of us in things that we write.
The important thing is to give proper credit so that the copyright is not put in jeopardy. In other words, you can certainly feel free to steal with love, but please give a credit line that states reprinted with permission of AA World Services, Inc. And that's all you have to do, and if you can do that, it will help to preserve the integrity of the AA message. So I see a gentleman at the microphone. Good morning.
Thank you, Helen. I'm Brian, and I'm an alcoholic. I have about three questions, and I'll just direct them to everybody because I don't really know. A couple of them didn't cover them. I'm curious as to where they get their financial support. And secondly, who they distribute it to. And thirdly, although Dorothy covered it, I'm curious as to announcements and to what things are publicized. One of the things we deal with in our area is some of our newsletters seem to be endorsing outside issues, alumni meetings for treatment centers, etc.
for Treatment Centers, etc. Fundraising things for other groups. I'm just wondering what the editorial comment is regarding what information is published and if we're able to separate
[01:00:01]
this as an endorsement. And then in Los Angeles, I was just curious as to who gets it. Do you subscribe to it? Do only the groups get it? I was surprised you only had 1,400 groups that you looked at from your central office. We have half that in Minneapolis. So, thank you. Okay, first, your last question first. Who gets it? It's subscription. And it costs $3.50 a year for 12 months. Once a month for 12 months. And we have held it at that because we have found that's just about a break-even point and we're not trying to make money off of it.
So, each group that contributes to your central office does not receive it then without a subscription? No, each group of the 1,400 groups receives what's called a secretary's report. And that secretary's report consists of the first and second pages of the newsletter and the financial pages and sometimes the back page of the newsletter, which often contains quite a word, an advertisement for instance, for our fundraiser for central office or something. Among the things we do not use, we do not use anything that does not relate to Alcoholics Anonymous, clearly to Alcoholics Anonymous. We do not use anything from treatment centers, clubs, anything out there. We do not have advertising from clubs, mentions of clubs. Clubs are not part of Alcoholics Anonymous. They are separate entities. They are businesses. They have nothing to do with AA. They are places we pay rent to for meetings. And our material comes from varied sources, the Stealing with Love that Dottie mentioned. Also, we have a lot of it produced locally by a lot of people locally. There's one gentleman, we have some regulars who contribute quite a bit. There's a gentleman named C.C. or T.C. He's the one who, in the third edition of the big book, he's the one who has the story on senior citizens. He's a great person and he has some very great insight. There's an article, but there's two articles I believe in here by him. One's on the back page, it's quotable AA legacies. And I write certain things myself, usually using my own name. No, just kidding. I must say there was a time in the early going that I would rephrase some people's letters because they were rather illiterate and I still thought their points were good. And I don't see anything wrong with that. I'm not changing the point people are trying to bring out. Also, in the early going, I must admit there were a couple of times that I wrote letters myself to get across a point or to stir a controversy, even opposing a popular opinion.
Could I answer from a different point of view, the independent journal Bristol-Fairchild? First of all, we try not to endorse or oppose anything, but that is our own personal belief and because we're not an AA officially approved journal. And that we try to follow as much as we can of that tradition. We will publicize events if the organizers, the conveners of these events, let us have news on it. Financially, I think ours is quite remarkable. Our first issue, I told you, was 27 copies. We have evolved in such a way that we are totally self-supporting. Our last publication was about 1,000 copies. Now, I would say that at least 500 of those are what we call free copies and are posted out. They go to prisons who have requested them, institutions, hospitals, and to people who have been put on the list, made a subscription in the past, have not renewed their subscription. We never take anyone off our list unless they request it, unless we hear that they have died or that their mailed Bristol fashion is returned to us as being gone away. And the effect of putting that into practice has had some remarkable stories attached to it down the years of people who went out and drank again, but their journal kept coming probably for three, four, five years and they will write and say, thank God it kept coming because it was one of the things that brought me back to the fellowship just by coming through the mailbox. We advertise a subscription rate, which we think is fairly reasonable, and it is a miracle, one of those
[01:05:02]
other miracles attached to AA, that while we never have any money, always by the day we have to pay our monthly bills to our printers. Somehow the money is there and the next day when we go to the post office to get our emails and stamps, it has never failed yet to be there. I don't understand it. I don't understand how we've managed to continue to carry so many non-subscribing receivers of our journal, but that has happened and so we feel it is right. Thank you.
Hi, my name is Jean. I'm a grateful recovering alcoholic. Hi everybody. About a month ago in the Kentuckiana Newsletter that we have, we had something in there printed about the story of Dr. Carl Jung with Bill W., and it was really, in my estimation, it was really effective, good literature, good writing, and I just wondered if you've ever heard of our newsletter, our bulletin, and I think it's quite an effective thing for us, but I think we would like to maybe send you a copy, maybe we could get some good stuff from you all. Okay?
Yes, we get the Kentuckian, Kentuckiana, right, and I thought, I would assume because our manager sends out an awful lot to other groups, that we reciprocate by sending a reporter to you. Thank you. Now the thing, he asked if there was a clearinghouse for new editors to get on the mailing list for our newsletters. Now our newsletters would just generally, Hello Central, we exchange newsletters with any A.A. Central office that wants to exchange newsletters, and we have several of those. I do not recall if we get the Kentuckian. Our Executive Secretary is here and he says no. All you have to do, if someone has asked for a subscription order form requested, please, for the Hello Central, they're inside the newsletters. You can cut those out, or you can Xerox it and use another copy, you don't want to cut up your great souvenir.
Same with the reporter. Yes, same with the reporter. And you, your subscription? We just remind people in December, we usually make some brief reference to Paul Gee of San Francisco and say a little comment about Santa being around, and we just leave it at that. I would like to share, what I shared in the beginning, is that we do have a list of newsletters available to the fellowship at the General Service Office. If you'd like to receive a copy of that, then just write in and we'll be happy to send it to you. But like everything in Alcoholics Anonymous, as I said, we move a lot. We have a tendency to move, we have a tendency to change names, we have a tendency to do all kinds of things. There is, in the front of every A.A. directory, a listing of the delegates for every region and the area chairman. Also, there is a list of all central offices within the U.S. and Canada. You might try writing to some of those as well, because not only are there intergroup newsletters, independent newsletters, there are also newsletters and bulletins that are put out by area committees.
And so to receive those, you could write to the area chairman, who is the second contact on the delegate page. Hi Billy. Hi Helen. I've got a tenth step to take now, because our newsletter is put out by the state committee, which happens to be the Kentuckiana News. I had copies to bring here and didn't bring them. That's where my tenth step come in. And he insisted, our editor insisted that I come and attend. And I was so happy when I heard that it's going to be on tape, because I want to get it back to him. And he's one of these, he's a heck of an editor. He almost bankrupted our area committee fund there for a while, and I go talk to him. I said, hey, wait a minute now, we've got to do something. And he said, if you want a second rate newsletter, you're going to have to get someone else. If, he said, our newsletter, he said, I believe that our fellowship deserves the best. And he said, and that's the only way I'm going to put it out. If you want a second rate, get someone else. And thank you. And I think we have got a heck of a newsletter. I hope that don't go on tape.
[01:10:01]
I got something in relation to that this morning. One of my friends says, I don't care what anybody says at that meeting, you're a heck of an editor. Good morning. I'm Dick Petsch. I'm an alcoholic. My question is, well, first of all, I have a comment to the gentleman from Bristol. I've sailed your boats, and I certainly did enjoy your cream sherry. I have a question. You mentioned that you publish obituaries in the Washington, D.C. area. Our intergroup has come, and the reporter, of course, has come under some criticism for publishing obituaries. I think it may lead to a two-part question.
First of all, how do you select the people whose obituaries will be published? This sounds kind of like a task for Solomon. Am I important enough that I should get two columns, or do I just get two lines? In the second place, how exactly do you avoid, and this was the criticism in our area. I'll wear the hair shirt. How do you avoid the flowery eulogy, good old Tom, he was a great guy, sort of obituary? Right. Obituaries come two ways with us. If it was somebody we hear about who has died, of whom we had personal knowledge, we would very often write the obituary ourselves. And very often, there is a way of writing an obituary almost anonymously. It bears thinking about. I know that in some areas, this is a very, very touchy question. In England, our General Service Conference has said categorically, many years ago, that obituaries would not be accepted by our national magazine. And I said at that time, at that General Service Conference back in the 60s, then I thought they were going to have a heck of a problem when Bill died. Now Bill was Bill. And he was only Bill. There are other Bills. Other people who have performed miracles in carrying a message. Not only in the carrying of the message, but in the example of their living.
And if they come to our attention that they have died, we think that many people would like to think about them. You can't think about a person in a specific instance unless you have knowledge of it. And maybe in the thinking, they're moving into another area of our eleventh step of prayer for them. Very often, the flowery elegy of somebody may arrive. And perhaps before we actually publish, we will engage in a little correspondence with the person who sent it in. And we will do this in a quite fearless way and say that maybe you could cut it back a few hundred words. And maybe you could tell us something a little more personally about him. Because I think the most personal thing in life possibly can be an obituary. Because I believe you're not only writing about the person who has died, but you're writing about the writer. And perhaps one of the greatest exercises, I have ever known, has been to sit down as a practice to write my own obituary. It bears thinking about, and it is a good exercise. And it's one that's well-recommended.
Thank you very much. I believe I've only had two obituaries in the newsletter in eight years, and one was on Cliff Walker, who was one of the very early members of Alcoholics Anonymous. You'll find him mentioned in A Comes of Age. And the other was on Carol Alexander, who for a number of years had been the Executive Secretary of the Central We've had other people with a lot of times, Al, Em, and others of that nature, and we didn't run obituaries on them.
If someone had chose to write something about them, we would consider it. Could I just come back in again?
[01:15:01]
It so happens that in the special issue of June, there is an article by, taken, an unedited article, not article, a talk given by a member some 15 years ago, and following it is an article, an obituary, which runs to nearly two pages, called The Death of a Sponsor, which relates to the man who made that talk. So there is something there in writing for you. Thank you. Donny, anything to share in this?
The only comment I have on that is that the person who asked the question knows in our area, it has been a bone of contention. I was forced to run two obits when we had the other manager, and now that I have control, we don't run obits, Al, and we don't even run in memorials, or in memoriam. We don't acknowledge death. I think we continue to live, the person lives in our heart, and that's it. Thank you.
I would just like to share one thing. As you know, the General Service Office puts out a number of newsletters. We have combined some of those now into Box 459, and since I have been at the office, we have had members of the Board of Trustees, some alcoholic and some non-alcoholic, who have contributed a great deal to Alcoholics Anonymous, who have passed away. And I believe the first person that I came in contact with was Austin McCormick, who was a Class A non-alcoholic trustee on the General Service Board for many years, and gave a great deal to the fellowship for many years, even before he became a Class A trustee.
And when Austin died, at our staff meeting, which is a weekly occurrence at GSO, we had a group conscience on whether or not we were going to put anything in Box 459 about Austin's death. And that seems to be the way we do everything at GSO, when there are both sides of an issue, and that is to take a group conscience, and the right thing always comes about. We don't have the editor of Box 459 who says, I think it should go in.
That it is a group conscience, and in that way, we know we are indeed doing the right thing. People who have given to the fellowship, we have, in those instances, put something into Box 459, because the fellowship does want to know, and Travers said it much more eloquently than I can, and that's how we do it there. There's another gentleman at the mic. Good morning. Good morning. I'm Doug, and I'm an alcoholic.
Hi, Doug. And there's two things I'd like to share. For two years, I put out a little newsletter called the District 13 News in Denver, Colorado. I was a committee member, a district committee member, and our district was a real dead district. We had 28 groups, but we only had two or three that had a GSR, and the other ones didn't even want to know what one was. And one of the things that I found that was real helpful with a district newsletter was, and I copied a lot of ideas from Hello Central from L.A.
I've noticed that a lot of newsletters in the fellowship tend to avoid controversy at all costs, and I think this is a great disservice to the fellowship. There can be good controversy, and there can be, you know, sick controversy. There can be name-calling, and that's no good, and there can be personalities before principals, and that's no good. But some of the things that we copied from the L.A. thing was the idea of deliberately marching right into controversies.
I noticed one article that they had in the L.A. newsletter. It was called A&P Groups, Alcohol and Pill Groups, and on one page it said the case for them, and on the other page it said the case against them. And this is really good. This is helping the fellowship to arrive at an informed group conscience. So we did the same thing. We had all kinds of articles. On the Seventh Tradition and our club, we had an enormous problem with that.
We had articles on whether or not GSO should publish pamphlets for gay people in A.A. because we had some gay groups in the district. We had lots of articles on singleness of purpose, which is, you know, probably the hottest issue in the fellowship today. And what was the result of all this? We got more and more and more GSRs, and they got more and more educated. And so, you know, that Eleventh Tradition talks about avoiding public controversy.
[01:20:03]
Internal controversy is a time-honored tradition in our fellowship. And I think newsletters owe it to the fellowship to not just have fluffy articles. Yes, we want to have some humor, but when we have some real problems going on, we should have, like, the pro and the con, whatever it is. The other thing I'd like to share is the newsletter that our Denver central office puts out is called The Last Drop.
And the front page, I think, shows how in Denver we try to follow through on the Fifth Tradition because we have the phone numbers, there are about six phone numbers here, of the tax-supported public 24-hour detox services. In other words, if it's a 12-step call and the drunk is going to go into DTs or something like that, those numbers are available to the fellowship. Also, on the front page, it shows the schedule for what we call Night Watch, which is a volunteer system for handling 12-step calls after the office closes.
And I have some copies of The Last Drop, and if anybody would like them after the meeting, I'd be glad to share them. Terrific. Thank you. Thank you, Helen. There are two more gentlemen back there, and I think we can probably get you in. I hope so, at any rate. My name is Don Harvey. I'm an alcoholic from Buffalo, New York. Hi, Don. And our paper, The Frontiersman, has been probably the most exciting thing that's happened this year.
We have a staff of 15 people that are working on it. We have an artist that does a new cover each month. And what we have found that's been very helpful is we print six months' themes in advance so that people have a feel of what the next issue is going to be about, and they think about it if they want to share. And we're finding that we're getting an awful lot of participation by giving them advance notice of the topics we're going to cover.
And when I go to meetings, I guess my number one 12-step work right now is The Frontiersman, and I'm always trying to hustle up people to help. And we have typists, we have proofreaders, we have people that are writing, we have a guy doing artwork, and we have a girl that does a tremendous job each month with a cover that follows the theme. Thank you. Thank you. Hi. Good morning. My name's John. I'm an alcoholic.
Hi, John. I certainly know what these three people are going through, trying to put up a newsletter to try to satisfy most people reading it. I'm the Area Secretary in Manitoba for Manitoba General Service. Hi, Helen. I think you received our minutes through the mail. Indeed. And it was GSO that noticed I was making quotations in our minutes and not giving the proper credit to where it's supposed to come from, so they sent a letter back to us.
Now I'm trying to practice that, but probably not doing it all the time. And I noticed in the newsletter that they have one little section in there. I was just wondering, when I make a quotation, say, on page 5 of my minutes, should I give the credit right away or should I just spot it somewhere in my minutes and then include the whole set of minutes? When you excerpt something from the copyrighted material, the proper procedure is to give credit right underneath the excerpt, giving credit reprinted with permission, and really where the excerpt came from, so that one can find it in its entirety, for one thing, but it also does not jeopardize the copyrighted at all.
I can make a mention on that. In the bottom of the second page in the Hello Central newsletter, it points out, Hello Central is a monthly newsletter for the Los Angeles area office of Alcoholics Anonymous. It is about, by, and for members of the AA Fellowship. Opinions expressed herein are not to be attributed to Alcoholics Anonymous as a whole, nor does publication of any article imply any endorsement by either Alcoholics Anonymous or Hello Central.
Exception. Quotations from AA books or pamphlets in the 12 steps and or 12 traditions are reprinted with permission of AA World Services Incorporated. The AA preamble is reprinted with permission of AA Grapevine Incorporated. There are a few other things in there, but that covers the point that you were bringing up. We also have that, but also at the bottom, it will just say from Box 459 or whatever it is of that nature, because we already have done what any legal requirement would be for that is taken care of in that one thing.
I have a couple of comments I would like to make, that I think are important. Just take one minute. It is important, because about four or five years ago,
[01:25:03]
I found out something I already knew. I knew we were doing the wrong thing, and I finally got to the point where my conscience was such that I verified it, and I found out from King Feature Syndicates and others of that nature, we are not allowed to use cartoons out of newspapers and magazines because those are copyrighted. I wrote that in the newsletter, and other newsletters got that, but they still continue to violate that.
They can be sued if somebody gets mad, and people do get mad at AA or whatever else, if you are stealing stuff from them. If I was a cartoonist, I would get mad. I am a freelance journalist. I write, and if somebody steals my stuff, they are going to get sued. I suggest that you take that into consideration when you put out a newsletter. Do not use cartoons from newspapers and magazines. Also, we do not use full names in our newsletter, because our newsletter does go to people outside of the fellowship.
We do here, it's Merle M., Brian B., whatever. We do not use a full name in the newsletters, and some newsletters I notice do use full names. It is that time. This has been a marvelous workshop. I hope those of you who are anticipating starting a newsletter or a bulletin have gotten something that will help you. For those of you who care to join us, how about closing with the Lord's Prayer, but first giving the speakers a big hand.
Thank you.