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Source: Unidentified Historical Recording – Tom I Source Review 11052 – Date Unknown.mp3 File: tom-i-tom-i-his-life-story-aa-2013-archive-11052.mp3 Duration: 00:16:45
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I'm an alcoholic, sobriety day is the 2nd of February of 1957. And just tell me your story. Well, the story is about like everybody else's in a way, I'm a guy that was on the way to an early death and instead found a brand new life. I went into my first AA meeting on the 2nd of February of 1957. I had my last drink on the 19th of November of 1956, but that's not my sobriety day, that's just my last drink.
Recovery started the 2nd of February. And I went in, I'd never heard of AA, back then very few people had heard of AA. It was just emerging and just developing, and I'd never heard of it, I'd never heard of anybody helping alcoholics, I'd never had anybody ever suggest anything to do with it. I had a lot of people tell me that I was a guy with a lot of potential and promise, but I never did anything with it, all I did was throw it away.
But I'd never heard any such thing as AA, so it was all brand new to me. And so when I walked into my first meeting, I felt as out of place as could be. I expected it to be just kind of like the old county jail routine, you know, where you go in and there'd be a bunch of nice people would come in and they'd talk to the guys in the cage and give little books and sing songs and stuff like that. And I figured that's what they'd do in AA, because I thought it was going to be just a rerun of that same kind of thing, I couldn't imagine anything else.
And the thing that it wasn't, because had it been that, I would have stayed out, I mean I just didn't turn my back on that kind of thing, and I would have stayed here. But I went in, and fortunately I went into a good solid AA group. Now I was in, and that's kind of hard to believe for a nice looking fellow like me, but I was in a maximum custody penitentiary, and I was serving a 5 to 15 year sentence for a crime just like many alcoholics, a crime I didn't even know I committed.
But what happened was what happened to so many alcoholics that I was just driving drunk, I was convicted of just being driving drunk down the main street of the city I was living in, Flint, Michigan, and I was in a wreck and two young people were killed. And I didn't even know I'd been in a wreck, and I didn't really understand it until I went to trial for involuntary manslaughter, I was charged, and so I went to trial and listened to the trial, and it was as if I were on the jury of what they went over, stuff I didn't know anything about.
And I listened to the officer who investigated the crime, and he made compelling testimony, it was clear that that fellow knew exactly what he was talking about. He said he was investigating the crime scene, and he saw this guy walking down the street that he identified as me, and said I walked up to him, I had no recollection of any of that, but he said I walked up to him and said was there a wreck here?
And he said there sure was, and I said I think I might have been involved in it, I didn't even know, but that started the beginning of the end. And so he put me under arrest, put me in the back seat of the car, took me off to jail. And that was the beginning of the end, at that point when that reality really sunk in, it was the end for me, it wasn't the beginning of the end, it was the end. And I was just not the kind of guy that could deal with even the notion that I might have caused two young people to lose their lives, I couldn't handle that, and I just refused to believe it, I refused to accept what appeared to be true.
They put me in jail, didn't know what I was in there for, and one morning, the first time I heard realistically, so I could understand, was a guy was sitting in the jail just like me, and he said, man, do you know what you're in here for? And I said, no, you, and he said, yeah, I think so, and he told me, he said last night somebody was driving drunk down the main street and got in an accident and killed two people.
He said, they've arrested you for the crime. That was the first news I had, was from another guy in the jail, and just what he'd heard. And my first thought, I guess just an instinct, was just said, no, that couldn't be, I couldn't,
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I could understand it, but I couldn't accept it, that I could have done something like that, and so the mind will protect itself, I just pushed that away, and refused to believe it, thought it was just a bad, bad story, and then over a relatively short period of time, the reality set in, the newspapers came out, and it was all over the newspapers, and so I could see it was for real, and that's just something that was extremely hard to live with, and I just, I wanted to be gone, I didn't want to get out, and had no clue of it, I just wanted to disappear is what I wanted to do, and when I was just a little while, I didn't, I had no notion of AA, I'd never heard of AA, but it was just as a human being, I knew that I needed to try to communicate with the families, because there's two young people out on a date, and I knew it, for some reason, it's just human nature, I guess, that I needed to communicate, so I got some of my guys on the street to contact the families, and ask them if they'd be willing to hear from me, those families said no, understandably, said no, I accepted that, because you can't, you'll learn later in the program, we don't find our relief at somebody else's expense, and I didn't know that then, but I just knew as a human being, I had to respect their request, that I'm not gone, so I did, and later on, I was charged with involuntary mass slaughter, I had no defense, I couldn't even admit or deny, and I'll never know who or why, but somebody, it had to be one of the policemen at the jail, one of the policemen, called my family down in North Carolina, all I had to do was look at my records, and get the information, called my family, and my mother answered the phone, and said, you've got a guy up here in a lot of trouble, and said, the shape he's in, he's talking himself into more, and I think I was just so destroyed by the whole deal, the guy said, you do that, I said, I probably did, I was just absolutely wiped out, and so my family did what I think any alcoholic's family tends to do, and that's to overdo the helping, and so my family couldn't afford to go from North Carolina, where I was from, to Michigan, to take a look at a boy, they'd come to see me in jail many times before, but they couldn't afford to do that, my mother and sister worked in a mill, a cotton mill in that town, and so, but they did what alcoholic families tend to do, they did what they couldn't afford to do, because they had a guy in trouble, came up to Michigan, I didn't want to see him, I didn't want my mother to have to come to a jail to see me, but that's what families do, so they did, they got an attorney that they couldn't afford, and that attorney came to see me, I didn't want an attorney, I didn't want out, I just wanted to be gone, but he was working for my family, he wasn't working for me, he was working for my family, and so they did whatever they do, and I was released on bond, knew that I would never drink again, I mean, how could you, that was my thought, how could you possibly drink again, if you're an alcoholic, it's just the opposite, how would you not drink, but I didn't know that, and so I didn't drink the first day, I didn't drink the first few days, I just walked the streets day and night, just anything to keep from thinking or drinking, and then the day finally came, I went from, up until somewhere late June or something like that, and then I went back, I was scheduled to be tried on the 19th of November of 1956, and so I was back in Flint, where the incident occurred, and it was 9 o'clock in the morning, I knew when I was scheduled to be in court, I finished a bottle of gin, it had just a little bit of gin, 3 or 4 inches or something in a bottle, and I finished that bottle, and I knew it was going to be my last drink for a long time, I didn't know it was going to be the last one for a very long time, but it has been, that was my last drink, and I had no plans like that, I was just trying to escape the obvious, I was just trying not to deal
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with the stuff that was on me, and so I took that drink, finished it off, went to court, listened to the testimony as if I were on the jury, and it was compelling testimony, I listened to that officer describe the scene, and it was the first time I'd ever had any picture of the scene, exactly what happened, and he testified, compelling testimony, and it was compelling, and so it was compelling to the jury as well, so when they got through with the witnesses, the jury went out, came back, was convicted of involuntary manslaughter, and a judge by the name of Steven R., he later became a member of the Michigan State Supreme Court, yeah, he's a fine man, he was on the bench, and when he listened to that, and he announced the fact that I was guilty of that, and then sentenced to a sentence of 5 to 15 years in the Michigan State Penitentiary, I've never been in a penitentiary, you know, I've been in jail a lot of times, in the military, went to stockades quite a lot, but I wasn't an angel by any means, but I wasn't a criminal, I wasn't somebody that committed crimes or went to jail, every time I got to jail, it was for drunk and, just fill in the blank, you know, whatever you can fill it in, I've done it, and so when I listened to that, and they found me guilty, and I passed that sentence, I guess it was a very human reflex, that they passed sentence, and I had an instinctive reaction of fear, but I'd never been in that, I mean, you know, overnight in a drunk tank is one thing, 5 to 15 years in a maximum custody penitentiary is a different thing, and so when that was passed, I had that instinctive reaction, but it almost simultaneously was the most real sense of relief I'd ever known, because I knew it was over, it was over, there'd be no more, so I was sent to walk out, and never walked back in, and so the next day, I was taken on a, me and another guy were taken, five other guys were taken down to the Michigan State Penitentiary in Jackson, and they they let us out, took us out, and went through, went into that place, when I walked in, I never, I truly never believed I would ever walk out of there, I figured that would be the end of the road, and I didn't care, I didn't care, I just wanted to disappear, so went in, and I mean, I knew that wasn't going to be Disneyland, I knew that, you know, so I would rate it probably the third worst prison in the world, I've been to a ton of them around the world, but I'd rate that one be probably the third worst one I've ever seen, and so I went in, I'd never been in a penitentiary, to visit or even, I didn't even recognize one if I drove by, you know, if I'd been in jails and deal just overnight nuisance level stuff, but this was different, yeah, and I knew this was it, so when I walked in, the only two things I had on my mind was that I would never come out of there alive, and I didn't care, I truly didn't care, I just wanted to be gone, went in, they did the normal procedures of booking you in and all that, and in the course of it, there was no real compelling kind of experience, but the fellow who checked me in was a real big guy, he was a master social work guy, and he was going over the record, and he was getting ready to to get me assigned to wherever I was going to be in that prison, so he got through with it, and he said, just to himself, as much as to me, he said, man, you've had a lot of trouble with booze, and I said, yeah, I guess so, it's pretty obvious, he handed me a folder, thick folder, and he said, take a look at that, and I said, what did he say, that's your record of arrest for public drunkenness and drunken driving and stuff in your life, every one of them's in that folder, that thing is about three inches thick, everything in there was drunk and fill in the blank, you know, if you do it drunk, I've done it drunk, and been arrested for it, and so he was looking at that, and he said, man, you've had a lot of trouble with booze, and I said, well, yeah, you know, Now this was long before AA was on the street. I mean, it was barely known by anybody.
And he didn't know anything about it, but somebody had told him. He said, after he got through exclaiming about the record, he said, We have an AA group here. It's Britain. I think you ought to go.
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Now that was just friendly advice. If you're thirsty, there's a water fountain. Go get a drink, you know. About that dramatic. And I didn't know what he was talking about. I didn't ask any questions. You know, I wasn't in there for conversation. I was in there just go ahead and do what you're gonna do. And so I didn't have any more conversation. This was long before we'd ever started pressuring people into AA and all this kind of stuff.
That hadn't even been emerged. And so he just dropped it there and sold it out. I went on in. My report that I was assigned was cell number 39 on the third tier of cell block number eight. I'll never forget that address, you know, and that's just where I went. And a couple of days after I was assigned in that cell, I found a little note. It wasn't a letter or anything like it, just a little note on a little piece of paper.
And I didn't know what it meant, you know, but it said you can go to your first AA meeting February 2nd of 1957. Well, I had no clue what that was about. Some of the other guys in there told me that with 6,300 people in a penitentiary, everything's crowded, including AA. I learned later that you had to have a chair open before you could get cleared to go in. You had to have some place to sit. And so that's what that was, that little note.
I learned then, after the fact, that meant that there was a chair open that I could have. And so I learned that when I got over there. Walked up to the door. That group was a huge, 300 members in that group. And I walked in, that day they had an officer on the door just sort of checking people in.