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About this recording
- Topic
- Unlocking the Big Book Disc 2 Panama City Beach Florida
- Speaker
- Larry S. and Christian P
- Date
- 2009-08-14
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Source: Larry S. and Christian P – Unlocking the Big Book Disc 2 Panama City Beach Florida – 2009-08-14.mp3 File: larry-s-and-christian-p-unlocking-the-big-book-disc-2-panama-city-beach-florida-2009-08-14.mp3 Duration: 01:08:51
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We are going to open the book now. Before we do that, they've done some artwork out front for this weekend's study. It's called Unlocking the Book, and the entire set is 50 bucks. They normally go for 75, 80 bucks. And I've seen these folks work. It's beautiful. And if this is something you want to take home, see Jim or Marie out front. If you would open your book to this first page, it should be blank.
You with us? This is what I was told. This is what you know about the book at this point. Sound familiar, Roger? Roger's son-in-law is the one that taught me this stuff. So if anything gets sideways, blame Roger. He married into that family. And the very first page is your title page. It should have two words: Alcoholics Anonymous. And if you flip over one more page, it's going to say Other Books. And depending on what edition you're in, these are what's known as conference-approved books.
This is not the entire scope of the books. These are the ones that you might find for sale at an AA meeting or a clubhouse. Other AA-approved literature would be the pamphlets that are free on the back and various other things. But if you ever go to a meeting and they say, We only use conference-approved literature, this is what they're talking about. And one of the reasons why it's conference-approved literature is because there's a lot of well-intentioned individuals who, and if you again type in recovery from addiction or alcoholism in the internet search, you're going to come up with a whole lot.
You're going to get, I think there's one called Moderate Drinkers Anonymous. Well, we'll touch on her a little later. But there's a number of things, and the reason why it's conference-approved literature is because if you were to go and talk to the General Service Board of Alcoholics Anonymous, I'm not sure if it's a 60-40 split. I believe there's slightly more alcoholics than non-alcoholics on those trustees who are on this board, and they vote.
And guess what? As a group, they send their GSR to the Service Assembly. Service Assembly sends theirs, the delegates, up to New York every year, and they have this assembly up there. It's from a national perspective, and they actually vote on certain things that then they pass up. And one of the things they vote on is, is our message of Alcoholics Anonymous intact? And this literature list that's inside the book shares that information, is keeping that message of Alcoholics Anonymous, that through the 12 steps and a relationship with a power greater than yourself, you can recover from alcoholism.
There's no willy-nilly, you know, 15 column this or, you know, kudzu and a certain new pill or anything like that. And of course the question is, I wonder what two of those pills will do, you know. But I mean, what we as Alcoholics Anonymous try to do is we help people with alcoholism. We don't get into the debates of other things. We talk about alcoholism. So, does anybody need a highlighter? I've got one. Does anybody need one?
I fell short just like I always have. If that had been alcohol, I would have hit the back wall with it. The next page is, it says Alcoholics Anonymous. And this is the first promise in the book. You know, you go to these meetings and they read a thing, they call them the promises. There's hundreds of promises in this book. What they read at meetings is the ninth step promises. And to this day, I don't know why they do that, but they do.
It says Alcoholics Anonymous, and it says the story of how many thousands of men and women have recovered from alcoholism. Every time we hit this word recovered, please highlight and/or underline it. This is the first promise in the book. You're going to find the word recovering in this book one time within the scope of the first 164 pages. My name is Larry Scott. I'm an alcoholic, and I have recovered from alcoholism.
My friend Chris Raymer in Texas says, If you say you're recovering, work the damn steps and recover. So, this is the story of thousands of men and women have recovered from alcoholism, and that word is in here 37 times. My book is a third edition, and just below it, I still have the circle triangle imprinted on my pages. What happened is somebody along the way forgot to renew the rights
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to this, and we lost it in 1976. Okay? If you go to other countries, you go to Canada, you go to Europe, you go to anywhere else in the world, you're still going to see the circle triangle. If you look at the back of my Harley, my Victory, my car, my body, I've got the circle triangle because I still believe in it. Let me tell you what that circle triangle means. We adopted it from an old spiritual symbol.
Keep drinking this smart water, waiting for it to kick in, you know what I'm saying? The circle triangle means— The left bar means mind. This bar means body. The bottom bar means spirit. Mind, body, spirit brought together as a whole human being. Alcoholics Anonymous adopted it, and it's now unity, service, recovery. We can do what I can't. You with us? All right. Down at the bottom it says Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc., New York City.
Mine says 1976. Flip over the next page. You got your copyright page, and it's going to tell you what printing and what edition book you have and blah, blah, blah. It gives you a Library of Congress card, and then we get into the table of contents. And within the table of contents, it's going to give us a certain idea. Bill's a classic writer, and one of the cool things that he did, and he's the primary writer, even though a lot of people contributed to the writing of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Based upon our study of what we found, we've learned that Bill was a primary writer to keep a consistent flow in what message was being written. Now, in the personal stories in the back, of course, you're going to have the different writers. But one of the things that Bill's famous for doing a number of things. Number one, he's going to tell you what he's going to tell you. Anybody got a friend like that?
You know, he's like, Oh, let me tell you something, and before they even tell you what it is, they tell you what it is, and then they expound on it. And Bill's going to do that. But what we're going to look about here is in the forwards to the first through fourth editions, we're going to get a history of Alcoholics Anonymous as we are up to this day. And in the fourth edition, it came out in 2001.
Then through the doctor's opinions and Bill's stories, we're going to learn a good example of what the disease looks like, Step One, an idea of how it manifests itself in the lives of an active alcoholic. And we're going to get a little bit of insight more into the mental obsession, and there's a solution, and more about alcoholism. And we're going to get what the solution is, tapping into those two chapters.
And then in We Agnostics, it's going to hit us with what the solution is. And then through how it works through working with others, we're going to get an idea of how to take steps one and steps two, and then steps three through twelve, how to implement that solution in our lives to recover from alcoholism and to keep it at bay so that we may live happy, healthy, productive lives beyond our wildest dreams.
And then To Wives, The Family Afterwards, To Employers. We now have EAP groups. We now have Al-Anon family groups. And we have—those are just different examples of three ways that Alcoholics Anonymous message helped early people within the fellowship and their families and at work. And then looking at A Vision for You is a recap. But Bill's—and see if you can relate to this—Bill's going to tell you what he done told you he was going to tell you, just in case you missed it.
Because I don't know about you, I tried stop drinking more than once. I tried many times, and so I don't hear things the first time. I usually don't hear things until the 30th or 40th time. And so one of the key things is they repeat this. And if you look at the first third of the 162 pages is dedicated to one step. It's the one we got to get right. It's that step one, you know. We're going to flip over to the preface.
We're going to start out the first full paragraph—the second full paragraph, I'm sorry. Now, true to form and Joe and Charlie style, we do this book study, and I believe in our home group it takes us between 22 and 30 weeks to go through it. And we read every page, we read every word, we break it down in a lot of ways to be able to share and expound on certain things to get a lot of people thought they understood, but they didn't.
You know, it was our experience that we thought we understood until somebody took us through and shared the history and content of it. But one of the key things we're going to do is we're going to cherry-pick some key stuff. A lot of it's going to be very redundant. We might skip over parts of that and make certain little, you know, sidebars about what this is and where this came from. We're going to pick up on the second full paragraph. It starts out by saying, Because.
So because this book has become the basic text of our society and has helped such large numbers of alcoholic men and women to recovery, there exists strong sentiment against any radical changes being made in it. And if you don't have a highlighter, please bracket that piece and underline the words basic text, which tells you that this is a textbook and it is intended to be studied. They write books for one reason and one reason only: to transmit information from one human mind to another.
[00:10:00]
They wrote this book because the message that they had to share, they did not want it to become diluted and become misconstrued through word of mouth. So if you ever want to go back to the early fellowship and how they got sober and stayed sober, it's in writing. And you're going to hear me say this more than once. Bill Wilson said, If the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous ever crumbles, it'll be at the hands of its fellowship, saying stuff like, 'Just don't drink and go to meetings.' You won't do that. Just don't drink no matter what.
If your butt falls off, pick it up and take it to a meeting. Just say no. The hell does that mean? So they've made no changes in this book since the 1930s, okay? Therefore, the first portion of this volume describing the AA recovery program has been left untouched in the course of revisions made for second, third, and fourth editions. The section called The Doctor's Opinion has been kept intact, just as it was originally written in 1939 by the late Dr. William D. Silkworth, our society's great medical benefactor. Skip over to the foreword to the first edition.
And this is what the first edition looked like, the circus jacket. You want to come up and take a look at this, look at it. It's a reprint. Yeah, don't steal it because it's not worth anything. Except to those who use it. And in those people's hands, it's priceless. There you go. We were actually at a workshop with Scott L. from Nashville and Bob D. from Las Vegas, and he actually put a first edition, second printing. And if you were to go online and look at it, those books are going for eight to ten thousand dollars a pop, you know, depending on condition.
So I kept eyeballing that thing going, wonder if I could slide that little reprint in there and he'd know. You know, we got a buddy, Charlie Yow, that does archives for the state, and he goes around to big conferences and he'll put out a first edition, second edition, third edition, and early printings, and leave them unattended with all this archival information. I went up to him at the Atlanta Roundup.
I said, Dude, what are you doing? We got crackheads amongst us today. He says, Larry boy, this ain't had but one take legs since I've been doing this. He says, It's God's business. Back to the text. Anytime you hear us with this book refer to we, us, our, they're talking about the early fellowship, the pioneers. Okay? We of Alcoholics Anonymous are more than one hundred men and women who have recovered from a seemingly hopeless state of mind and body.
To show other alcoholics precisely how we have recovered is the main purpose of this book. Okay, if you notice it uses that word recovered again, and it's going to tell you about three or four different places in the book exactly what the purpose of this book is, and they're all kind of similar, sort of, but they're all kind of different, sort of. One thing that you should keep in mind during this study, if you see italics, what we refer to as squiggly writing, very, very, very key, because when this book was printed, they had no money.
These guys were broke, and they came up with the cheapest paper. They got the best bargain they could. They wanted a big book, thick, hence the cheap paper. It made it thicker because they felt that it added value. The book was selling for $3.50. They set it up in block type. There were no word programs in Publisher. They had to take each piece of zinc type and set it up in wooden trays. So when they came to a part of this text that they wanted to grab your attention with, they paid extra money to have that hand set into italics because they wanted you to pay attention. And here this squiggly writing says, Precisely how we have recovered. They use that word twice in the first two sentences.
The word precisely. It doesn't say kind of, sorta, in a roundabout way. Precisely. If you want what we got, you got to do what we did. I've got a dear friend back in Atlanta. Her mother invites me over for all the holidays: Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter, Fourth of July. And this woman knows all there is to know about cooking. I went over there one Thanksgiving about three years ago. Her name is Gail.
And we— And we ate until we were just pigs.
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And then Gail comes out with this cake, and it had nuts and frosting and coconut, and it was one of those round cakes with a hole in the middle. And I said, What is that? And she says, This is a hummingbird cake. And I said, I'll be damned, I've never heard of a hummingbird cake. She said, Well, you must try it. And I said, Well, cut me off a chunk of that. And let me tell you something, I bit into that thing and I said, Oh my God. It just lit me up.
And I said, Gail, do you think I might get that recipe? She said, Absolutely. She came out with a little three-by-five card, and she had written precise directions for that recipe. And I said, Thank you so much. I go to meetings at eight o'clock, probably what y'all do. About five o'clock one Wednesday afternoon, I'm thinking, I got to have some of that hummingbird cake. I got to be at a meeting in three hours, and it's just me, so I don't need a big cake. So I took out that card and I looked at it, and it said you needed four cups flour.
I used two. It said you needed three eggs. I like it rich. I put four. And it said that you needed a cup of sugar. I like it sweet, so I put two. And I love vanilla, and it said you needed only a little quarter of a teaspoon. Well, I used a teaspoon. And you see where I'm going with this. And then it said you preheat the oven to 350, and you stick the cake in there for 45 minutes while I was in a hurry.
I cranked it up to 425. I left it there for 30 minutes. Well, what happened, y'all, is I pulled that thing out of the oven, and what I ended up with was a cake. Oh yeah, it was a cake. But when I bit into it, it didn't taste like cotton-picking thing like Gail's cake. Because why? I did not follow her directions precisely. So when the sponsor comes and says, You need to write this down. You need to do this, don't say why.
Just do it. If you want what they got, I mean, for crying out loud, this person had something that you admire. Follow the directions precisely. And if you're in question about them, they're right in here. They're right here. They're not hidden. Okay? Precisely. It reminds me of when I sat down at the bar and the bartender put a drink in front of me. I never quite asked him what was in it. I just drank it, you know? And so it's like, you know, we get real inquisitive and like, What do you mean you want me to pray?
You know, and what about this making coffee thing? So it says, For them, these alcoholics, we hope these pages will prove so convincing that no further authentication will be necessary. We think this account of our experiences—that's key, experiences. This isn't just what we know; this is what we've done. Our experiences will help everyone to better understand the alcoholic. Keep in mind, it says help everyone.
It doesn't say every alcoholic, because alcoholism affects who? Everyone whose lives ours touches: police officers, preachers, little children, mamas, daddies, friends, employers. Okay? It says many do not comprehend that the alcoholic is a very sick person. Besides, we're sure that our way of living has its advantages for all. At last check that we were able to verify it, there's over 412-step fellowships.
The only difference between their steps and our steps is the first half of Step One. Admit that we're powerless over whatever, you know. And that's key. You know why there's over 412 fellowships? Because it works, you know, and that's a key thing. Now this is a little grandiose. This book was written in the months and years leading up from 1937 to 1939 when it was published. And so when they wrote this, see if you can see a little bit of Bill's self-aggrandizing.
He says, It's important that we remain anonymous because we are too few at present to handle the overwhelming number of personal appeals. This book hadn't even been printed yet, which may result from this publication. Being mostly business or professional folk, we could not well carry on our occupation at such an event. We would like it understood that our alcoholic work is an avocation. Avocation is free service work.
Now when writing or speaking publicly about alcoholism, we urge each of our fellowship to omit his personal name, designating himself instead as a member of Alcoholics Anonymous. Very earnestly, we ask the press also to observe this request, for otherwise we shall be greatly handicapped. Now he's going to kind of touch on some things here. See if this sounds a little familiar. We're not an organization in the conventional sense of the word.
There are no fees or dues whatsoever. The only requirement for membership is an honest desire to stop drinking. We are not allied with any particular faith, sect, or denomination, nor do we oppose anyone. We simply wish to be helpful to those who are afflicted. Sounds a little bit like what later became our Twelve Traditions, doesn't it?
[00:20:04]
Going to flip over to the forward to the second edition. We're going to go down to the bottom of the page. It's going to start off by saying, The spark. The spark that was to flare into the first AA group was struck at Akron, Ohio, in June of 1935, during a talk between a New York stockbroker and an Akron physician. That would be Bill and Bob. Six months earlier, the broker had been relieved of his drink obsession by a sudden spiritual experience following a meeting with an alcoholic friend. That's Ebby.
Who had been in contact with the Oxford Groups of that day. He, and I'm going to reference this so you can kind of follow. Some people, maybe the first time they open—I don't know about you—the first time I opened my book, it was about six months sober. Sound familiar? And it made this really weird noise. It made this crack kind of noise when I opened it up. My sponsor knew I hadn't been reading it. I don't know how he knew, but he knew I hadn't been reading it. No, not him.
But it was my very first sponsor, but he was a book thumper too. So it says, Bill had also been greatly helped by the late Dr. William D. Silkworth, a New York specialist in alcoholism who is now accounted no less than a medical saint by AA members and whose story of the early days of our society appears in the next pages. From this doctor, Bill Wilson had learned the grave nature of alcoholism. Please highlight or underline that, because what Dr.
Silkworth told him, he says, You have a disease that's killing you. We bury people. They die alcoholic deaths. You have an obsession of the mind coupled with an allergy of the body. It says, Though Bill could not accept all the tenets of the Oxford Groups, he was convinced of the need for moral inventory. And in those tenets, the only one he would not hook up with was complete deflation, the need for complete deflation. And the reason he believed that is that we got here—when we got here, we had beat ourselves down well enough, we didn't need anybody else to do it. I'm on page 292 of the third—263 in the fourth edition.
If you want to turn there real quick, we're going to kind of jog through this just real quickly, and you can see where our 12 steps came from. It's a story in the back, 263 in the fourth edition or 292 in the third edition. If you have a second edition, don't write in it. That's an expensive book, man. We used to do a book study, and we would look over, and some of the old-timers—and I say old-timers because they've been around 30-plus years—were writing and reading out of second edition books.
I said, Serene. That's a second edition book. You're writing in it. She said, Well, Larry, it's my book. It's okay. Larry asked her to sponsor him after that. Yeah. Six steps were, number one was complete deflation. That's the one they wouldn't hook up with. I mean, Bill said he didn't see any need for that. How many people came into AA their first day happy and well-adjusted? I've yet to see a hand go up when I ask that question.
We already come in beaten down by alcoholism. These were the six tenets of the Oxford Groups, which meant that you had to be beaten to a state of submission in order to recognize that you needed help. We come in here waving the white flag. We're already there. Number two is dependence and guidance from a higher power. That would be step two and step three. Third tenet was moral inventory. Step four.
Fourth was confession. Step five. Fifth was restitution. Eight and nine. Six was continued work with other alcoholics. Step twelve. All right, back to the forward to the second edition. Though Bill could not accept all the tenets of the Oxford Groups, he was convinced of the need for moral inventory, confession of personality defects, restitution to those harmed, helpfulness to others, and the necessity of belief in and dependence upon God.
Now, prior to his journey to Akron, Bill Wilson had worked hard with many alcoholics on the theory that only an alcoholic could help an alcoholic. It was only a theory. I can't, you know, there's no sense in someone outside that doesn't understand or hasn't had alcoholism, they're not going to be effective. But he had succeeded only in keeping sober himself. The broker had gone to Akron on a business venture which had collapsed, leaving him greatly in fear that he might start drinking again.
He suddenly realized that in order to save himself, he must carry his message to another alcoholic. That alcoholic turned out to be the Akron physician, Dr. Bob. Dr. Bob had repeatedly tried spiritual means to resolve his alcoholic dilemma, but had failed. He had been going to the Oxford Group for two and a half years. But when Bill Wilson gave him Dr. Silkworth's description of alcoholism and its hopelessness, Dr.
Bob began to pursue the spiritual remedy for his malady with a willingness he had never before been able to muster. Once again, and we're going to drive it home over and over again, Dr. Silkworth's description was the obsession of the mind and the allergy of the body, the two components that make up alcoholism.
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About—he was staying sober. Yeah. Lois, I mean, y'all saw the movie, I know. My name is Bill W., but Bill was packing his bags, going to Akron. He says, I don't know why I keep doing this stuff. He says, Ain't nobody getting sober. And Lois looked at him and says, You are. You're staying sober. So at that point, it came to his consciousness that his success was based on his work with other alcoholics.
I'm not here for you. I'm here for me. And that's what Bill Wilson told Dr. Bob when he met him. Dr. Bob stuck his little shaking hand out across the table and says, Mr. Wilson, I don't know what you think you can do for me. He said, I've been carved up and prayed over more than a Christmas goose. Bill looked him in the eye and he says, I'm not here for you, Dr. Smith. I'm here for me. Really. Yeah. Bill just didn't want to drink.
He was about to drink. You know, it's weird is I work with a number of guys, and they're like, you know, I'm just a hopeless alcoholic. And I said, So am I. I'm not working with you because you're alcoholic. I'm working with you because I'm alcoholic. You know, if this wasn't a win-win situation, you know, if my sobriety depended upon you getting and staying sober, our 12th step doesn't say we deliver the message.
Dominoes delivers. We carry the message. Whether they accept it and receive it and work with it or not is none of my business. That's between them and God. But my job is to carry it. It says that Dr. Bob sobered never to drink again until the time of his death in 1950, and that is not completely factual, because what we're talking about here is May the 12th of 1935. That's when they met. Bob drank again, and what he did is he—there was an AMA conference that came up in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and he premeditated by God was going to that conference.
He was a doctor. He'd never missed it, and this year was going to be no different. And he actually told his son Smitty, he says, I'm going to drink on this trip. He got to the train station. He bought all the scotch they had. He got on the train, drank all the scotch they had on the train. Got to Atlantic City, checked into the hotel, and drank scotch, drank scotch, drank scotch. Got to the point of where he was shaming himself, went and bought a couple of bottles and went to his room to finish the job.
He drank scotch. He got back on the train, and he drank scotch all the way home. And on June the 9th, 1935, his nurse called from a nearby town and said, told Bill he was staying over at— Over at Ann and Bob's, called up Bill and Ann and said, You need to come get him. He's over here and he's tanked, and he's got an important surgery in the morning at 10 o'clock. Yeah, he's a proctologist. Yeah, he's working on people's rear ends, so that's not a good deal.
So they went over and got him, and got him home, got him kind of settled down, and the next morning Bill gave him a bottle of beer, and what we know today to be of Milltown, they called it a goofball. So Bill Wilson actually gave Dr. Bob Smith his last drink. He went in and performed a surgery. So the date of our society, Alcoholics Anonymous, is dated from the date of Dr. Bob's last drink. Dr. Bob drank on June 10th, 1935.
So if you're sitting here today saying your sobriety date is the first day you didn't drink, you just gained a day. I was drunk as a skunk on December 31st, 1987, and that's my sobriety date. It's the date of your last drink. Okay? Everybody's going, Damn, I just gained a day. Now, we're not telling you that you get to change anything. What we're simply telling you is where our founders—December 11th, 1934 was Bill Wilson's last drink.
That's the day he claimed as his sobriety date. He drank on the steps of Towns Hospital. Well, you got to finish it before you go in. December 11th, 1934, and Bob's was June 10th. Now, wait, we just made a distinction here. Wow. Bill had a day shy of six months. What was he doing carrying a message to another alcoholic? You won't ever see in here that you have to have a certain amount of time before you're allowed. There's actually a treatment center—I will not mention names or states—but there's a treatment center. On the other side of the country, that actually tells their people as they go through it that you have to have five years of sobriety before you can help somebody. Now, I like the way Earl H.
talks about it. He's like, you've worked your guy through the steps. He talks about it. He's like, You've worked your way through the steps, you know, and now he's going to have to hover for the next three and a half to four
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years in the purgatory we call AA purgatory before you can go and help somebody. Oh, by the way, carrying the message helps ensure your own sobriety, by the way, you know? I mean, you see a real dramatic falloff of sobriety after about five to ten years. Let's do a dramatization here. It's May the 12th, 1935. Dr. Bob is sick. He's sick. He's shaking and shaking. Bill Wilson's about to drink. Bill Wilson enters that gatehouse over at the Soberling Mansion, and Dr.
Bob says, Mr. Wilson, I'm so glad you're here. Please help me. I'm dying of alcoholism. Bill says, Sorry, dude. I've only got five and a half months. Give me a call in about six months. We wouldn't be here. I can hand out readings, but I can't lead a discussion or help another alcoholic. So when you're hearing this stuff, understand that it's not founded in our text. It's the fellowship baloney, and I got an opinion about that.
All right. Bottom of the page continues by saying, This seemed to prove that one alcoholic could affect another as no non-alcoholic could. It also indicated that strenuous work, one alcoholic with another, was vital to permanent recovery. Strong language. Strenuous work. Vital. Vital means life-sustaining. You only have to do this if you want to live. It's not a—I mean, you know. I mean, you got an option.
Screw around with it. Yeah. And it talks about permanent recovery. What? Permanent recovery? What an audacious, outlandish comment. Because, see, I was brought up in the early days, in my days here in AA, that you only have today and that you'll only stay sober one day at a time, and, oh, you can't talk about recovered. You're always going to be recovering. That's not what my book tells me, and I choose to believe what the authors of this literature write, because they have what I want.
So it goes, Hence the two men set to work almost frantically upon alcoholics arriving in the ward of the Akron City Hospital. Their very first case, a desperate one, recovered immediately and became AA number three. There's that silly word again. You want to highlight it: recovered. This guy's name was Bill Dotson, D-O-T-S-O-N. Bill was an attorney from Kentucky that had migrated over to Akron, Ohio, and he was bad to drink liquor and show himself.
The night before they showed up to go see him, he had actually broken the jaw of a nurse, and they had him tied down in four-point restraints. And this was Bill's eighth hospitalization in six months. This boy liked to drink, and he didn't like to drink a little bit. He never had a couple of beers. I mean, he was in the hospital eight times in six months. And when they showed up, Bob had him transferred to a private room instead of the regular ward that he would normally be in, and they went in to try their treatment for alcoholism on this number three.
And I invite you to go back and read his story, Alcoholic Number Three. This guy was one of the greatest cheerleaders of our time. Dotson, D-O-T-S-O-N, Bill Dotson. So how soon is this after Bob? Within ten days. Yeah. It says the work at Akron continued through the summer of '35. They actually, within days of Bob's last drink and doing the work—and we're going to get into a little bit more of how quickly Bill worked the steps within three to four weeks, Bob worked the steps within nine days.
That's based upon what we've been able to dig up, and that's how quickly. Now again, wow, you've got to be six months without a drink before you can do a fourth step. When we get over to Bill's story, and you'll see how fast Bill did the steps. All right. So it goes, There were many failures, but there was an occasional heartening success. When Bill Wilson returned to New York in the fall of 1935, the very first AA group had actually been formed, though no one knew it, no one realized it at the time. Keeping in mind, if you're following the timeline, Bill worked with Bob May the 12th, 1935, and it says he didn't go back to New York until the fall. Did not set well with Lois at all.
But Bill had found a solution to an alcoholism that had been killing him. And there's one other disclaimer that I need to put out here. We're going to have opinions up here about some stuff, and I'm going to do my level best to let you know this is Larry Scott's opinion, okay? So I'm going to try to remember that. We try to stick to this information, but I have some opinions about some stuff, and I'm going to try and let you know that's my opinion.
All right, it talks about a second small group had been formed, and the first AA group had actually been formed, though no one realized it at the time. This was not AA yet. We were still Oxford Group, and in Akron we were called the Alcoholic Squad of the Oxford Group.
[00:35:02]
We were a sub-segment of the Oxford Group. We were a bunch of fairly well-to-do people who were helping each other with their biggest sin, which was alcoholism and drinking. And so we were helping a very select group of people, but we were the Alcoholic Squad. When Bill Wilson, and it talks about it here, a second small group promptly took shape at New York. That was called the, I believe it was called the Nameless Bunch of Drunks, and they were up in New York City.
Now, all the magic happened because we focused on what we knew best, which was working with alcoholics. This was the alcoholic squad of the Oxford Groups in Akron, Ohio. This is Dr. Bob Smith. Yeah, we're anonymous. This was a press photo. We are not anonymous to one another. We're anonymous at the level of press, radio, and film. And the main reason why, and if you get a chance, you know, we read about that at Tradition State, you know, what the tradition says, the 12th Tradition, anonymity is a spiritual principle. All right, if you read the long form of it, it's really cool.
In a nutshell, it says God gets all the credit; we don't. It's not about being anonymous so much about breaking our own anonymity so nobody outside knows about it. Hell, everybody knew I was an alcoholic before I did, you know. But it's about God getting the credit for the work being done. Because I can tell you, when I picked up my first year chip, I told everybody, man, it was a lot of hard work.
Second year chip, slightly different attitude about it. Boy, God did so much, and I helped. And then third, and as more and more and more, I realize how much He does and how little I show up, man. You know, I make some phone calls and hit my knees and some prayers and I help some people. Well, He does the boatload of it. Let me just real quick, I'm going to show you a couple of pictures. This is where the Oxford Groups were meeting in Akron.
This is the home of T. Henry and Clarace Williams. I'm sorry, I forgot. Let me just hold it for a second. This is the home of T. Henry and Clarace Williams. This is where the early Oxford Groupers met. And if you'll notice, these guys aren't drunks. This is where Bill, I mean where Bob went to meetings for two and a half years drinking with Anne. And of course, this is in the 60s, obviously, because they're late model cars. But what happened, I did this meeting, the same meeting in an Al-Anon group Tuesday, and I had everybody, every woman in that place crying.
The old cars are parked out here. The guys are inside, and they're doing the Alcoholic Squad of the Oxford Group thing. Lady gets out of her car. These women are sitting in parked cars. Lady gets out of her car and she walks over to the car parked behind her. She says, How you doing? Lady says, I don't know what I'm going to do with my husband. He can't quit drinking. Lady got out of her car and she says, I don't know what I'm going to do with mine either. Today we have the Al-Anon family groups.
That's where it started. One woman got out of her car and told another lady, she says, I don't know what I'm going to do about my husband's drinking. So this is where it started. Akron City Hospital is where they found Bill Dotson. If you haven't been to Akron, I beg you, go. If you have a passion for this thing, go. Tina just got back. She was there last weekend. That's right. And proud of it. Yeah.
This is where the first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in Akron began, at the King School. This meeting is still going on in Akron. It's not meeting at this school. The school's still there. It moved to an Episcopal church. Get your butt to Akron. I guarantee your life will change. All right. So a second small group promptly took shape in New York to be followed in 1937 with a start, a third in Cleveland.
There's a great story in the back, a homebrewmaster, about Clarence Snyder. Clarence Snyder is an amazing—I mean, it was weird. It's like you get two very different groups of alcoholics. The alcoholic squad in Overland Akron, they were doers. They were down in the trenches. Bob—we don't go into Bob's story during this book study, but if you read about it, he talks about his 15 years of sobriety, he helped 5,000 alcoholics. And the way they did the work is they got you while you were hemmed up, shaken and shaken in bed, and they brought you through the work quickly.
You didn't even go to a meeting until you'd already done the work. You had a—I mean, you literally hit your knees and started work within days of your
[00:40:02]
last drink, you know? And then as a recovered alcoholic, you were introduced into the meetings, and you were told to help people within weeks of your last drink. You were already carrying the message, and you're walking in and talking to a guy who's shaking and shaking in bed. There was none of this six months, nine months, a year, five years. There was—you were put to work because guess what? There's a lot of people just like you coming in, and we need your help, you know? And that was the way you showed your gratitude.
And it talks about, besides these, there were scattered alcoholics who had picked up the basic ideas in Akron and New York and who were trying to form groups in other cities. Now, in late 1937—paying mind, this is very critical words here—it says the number of members having substantial sobriety time behind them. Bill Wilson would have been the longest at December 11th, 1934. So by late '37, Bill's coming up on three years.
That was substantial sobriety time back then. I've heard people talk about it, and I think it's one of the greatest disservices we do to people with time. If you got a day. Wow. Bill started writing the book at three years. Hell, at three years, I still couldn't remember my mama's name. He wrote the book. Yeah, and think about how much God inspiration, how divinely inspired this literature is, to think that a guy—shoot, man.
You know, I was told by my grand sponsor my head wouldn't pop out of my butt till five years, and he has yet to tell me it's happened. You know, he said, You'll trust me. I'll let you know. But it says that at three years, that we had enough time to convince the membership, this little baby fledgling membership, that a new light had entered the dark world of the alcoholic. You heard me reference God didn't open up the gates of heaven and let us in.
He opened up the gates of hell and let us out. Yeah. And He gave us each other, and that's what they're referring to here. All right. Now it says it was now time the struggling groups thought to place their message and unique experience before the world. Now, anybody remember the game, I think it was called telephone or telegram or something like that, probably played it as a child, and it was usually a teacher-led game where they would whisper something in one of the children's ear, and then the next child would whisper it in, and just to see what would happen to the quote-unquote message as it went around the room. We used to play a game similar to that with, you know, in a drinking game, and, you know, you'd start out by talking about, you know, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers football team or something, and it comes back and you got like a snorkel, a sheepdog, and a midget. You know, what happened?
Because it talks about the struggling groups thought they had to place their message and unique experience before the world. It says this determination bore fruit in the spring of 1939 by the publication of this volume. The membership had then reached about a hundred men and women. About. So when it talks about, We are more than one hundred men and women who have recovered… When it was written, it wasn't true.
There was about 40. But you can't go to a publisher and say, Look, there's about 40 of us in the world that ain't drinking liquor no more, and expect them to jump on this movement. So Bill, being the carnival barker kind of guy he was, he says, There's a hundred of us. And so that's what they sold this publication to be. But by the time it was printed, there were that many people. It says, The fledgling society, which had been nameless, now began to be called Alcoholics Anonymous from the title of its own book. They had three things they were going to do.
Bill and Bob had a meeting of the minds. You know, Bill is a sideshow barker. He literally would stand there and say, Step right up. We got what ails you. We got a cure-all for what's kicking your butt. We know it'll work, because I've got two and a half years so far, and it's working great in my life. And Fred over here, he's got six months. Man, it's working great. I mean, that was—Bill was the promoter.
Bob, on the other hand, was down in the trenches, carrying this message to another alcoholic, working diligently, but he was the quiet one, you know? And one of the things they thought was, We need hospitals. For all the alcoholics are going to come, we need hospitals. And we need paid missionaries. We need to be compensated for carrying this message. And when they had their first group conscience meeting— Yeah, and we need a book, too.
You ever been to a group conscience meeting? You remember, you know how they fight if you choose to change the brand of coffee? You imagine that? Well, they're going to print a book, they're going to build hospitals, and hire paid missionaries. Now keep in mind, they ain't got two nickels amongst them. Bill's already lost his house. Bob's house is going in foreclosure. But they're going to do all this stuff.
Sounds good. So they did. They took a vote. There was 18 members in New York at a group conscience meeting, and they voted down the hospitals. Thank God. They voted down the paid missionaries. See, Bill was going to run the hospitals. Actually, Bob was going to run the hospitals. Bill was going to run the missionaries. Bob was going to run the hospitals. Bill was going to run the missionaries. And then they brought up the book.
Now, what is a book? It's designed to transmit information. And because, again, part of the thing was there were certain things were being changed.
[00:45:04]
And when one alcoholic helped another, and then word of mouth helped another, and then word of mouth helped another, and all of a sudden you start getting a little change. The original recipe is being changed, you know, and they needed to protect this. So what they did is they put out ideas. Of course, you know, they haven't even written a book, and they're already thinking of ideas of what to call it. Bill, being the shameless self-promoter, said, Why don't we call it the Bill W. Movement? You know.
And then they thought about What About the 100 Men? Oh, what about the James Gang after the Book of James? What a great idea, and then a woman showed up. Messed it all up. So what they did is they decided to go to Library of Congress, and they were looking at different books. One of their members went down to D.C. into the Library of Congress and were looking at different books, and they came up with—they were going to be called Anonymous Alcoholics, the Bill W. Movement, 100 Men, and another one was called The Way Out.
Well, they did research on all of these, and they found that there was actually books called The Way Out, 100 Men, but this—and see, the Anonymous Alcoholics actually came from a wet brain. He was a contributing editor to the New Yorker magazine, and he was a wet brain. All he knew is they were the anonymous, they were the nameless bunch of drunks. Anonymous alcoholics. This guy's dying. This guy's dying of alcoholism.
He's got a wet brain. You don't recover from that. So he's in this group conscience meeting, and he's rocking back and forth. What do we call it? And he kept going, Anonymous Alcoholics, Anonymous Alcoholics, Anonymous, Anonymous Alcoholics, Anonymous. And somebody said, What the hell is he talking about? He said, Just Anonymous Alcoholics, period. So they call the book, they flipped it, Alcoholics Anonymous, period. And now they put in a very subtle jacket so nobody will know.
Yeah, you'd never know that was an AA book. And then this is an early jacket. I love this jacket, Alcoholics Anonymous, Their Pathway to a Cure. But if you'll notice this bottle of whiskey. You see this bottle? See the guy down at the bottom? I love that. Oh, how cute. All right, so it says, The fledgling society, which had been nameless, now began to be called Alcoholics Anonymous from the title of its own book.
So the book came before the fellowship. So we are named after our literature. The literature is named after us. So it goes on to say, The flying blind period ended and AA entered a new phase of its pioneering time. We're out of childhood and we're about to enter, it says, With the appearance of New Book, a great deal began to happen. Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick is a noted clergyman. He was very well respected, and his opinions about literature were well received and well respected among a lot of people nationally.
It says, and actually, he ran Riverside Church in New York City. Rockefeller, who comes into play on the next page, actually was a member of that church. So his opinion mattered to a lot of the people who were going to be beneficial in our growing. So he was a noted clergyman. He reviewed it with approval. Then in the fall of 1939, Fulton Oursler, then editor of Liberty Magazine. Printed a piece in his magazine called Alcoholics and God.
See it down at the bottom by Morris Markey. Now, keeping in mind, guys, I mean, it's hard for us to dial our minds back to this day. There was no internet. And when Time magazine, Look magazine, Life magazine, Saturday Evening Post, Liberty came out and it published an article, it was like us watching 60 Minutes. We paid heed to that information, okay? It says this brought a rush of 800 frantic inquiries into the little New York office which meanwhile had been established.
Now, Bill and Lois were basically homeless after their home was foreclosed on, and they actually lived in, I think it was the 24 and a half Street clubhouse. It was like they literally lived in the upstairs portion of the first AA clubhouse in New York, and they had a room. I mean, a room. Literally, you walked into the room, you had to, like, climb over the bed to get to the clothes that were hanging in the alcoves.
But, I mean, they lived in this room, and they put this woman to work. Her name was Ruth Hock, non-alcoholic, and she was a secretary. Everything you're reading in this book was typed by her. Bill would dictate his comments and notes about what he had put together, and Ruth Hock was the one who would do this. And it says that these inquiries were painstakingly answered up until, and I'm not sure the date, but I've been told it's into the '60s.
If you wrote a letter to Alcoholics Anonymous, you got a handwritten letter back. You didn't get a thank you for your interest in Alcoholics Anonymous and a pamphlet. You got a handwritten letter specifically addressing your concerns.
[00:50:03]
A lot of those letters, a lot of those concerns, are the substance of AA's Twelve and Twelve. The experience hard fought in the trenches of AA groups early on, that's what bore into those Twelve Traditions and Twelve Steps in the Twelve and Twelve. It says pamphlets and books were sent out. Businessmen traveling out of existing groups were referred to these prospective members. Now, anybody, is there a central office here in Panama City?
If somebody needs help, they call an AA hotline, and then they're referred to, and then a member calls them, a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, and then hopefully two people go out and visit them, you know, and bring them to a meeting or help discuss alcoholism with them. Back in this day, if you were in Topeka, Kansas, and you needed help, you wrote to this central office in New York, and then somebody who might be traveling would come and 12-step you. And it might be a week or two weeks or a month.
They're like, Hey, Fred, we got a guy named Harvey out here in Topeka. You're doing some traveling, aren't you? Yeah. Can you stop in and see him? So it says, new groups started up, and it was found to the astonishment of everyone that AA's message could be transmitted in the mail as well as by word of mouth. And by the end of '39, it was estimated 800 alcoholics were on their way to recovery. See the mushrooming process here.
We were at 100 in April of '39. Now at the end of '39, we're at 800. It says, in the spring of 1940, John D. Rockefeller Jr. gave a dinner for many of his friends to which he invited AA members to tell their story. And that, it didn't kind of unfold that way. Bill and Bob were looking for money. They were looking for a grant, and they knew that Rockefeller gave them out, and they got a hold of a guy named Frank Amos, who was like a gatekeeper for Rockefeller.
And they said, Look, we need to hook up with this guy. We want to hit him up for some money. And I've heard Bill Wilson actually say this on a recording. He said, We went to New York to fleece Rockefeller. Those were his words. And they got there, and Bill actually spoke. There were a lot of people there. There were a lot of heavies at this party, and they actually asked Rockefeller for money. And he denied them.
He says, If I give you money, it's going to louse this thing up. Thank God. And he gave them what we know today to be a $5,000 stipend to save Dr. Bob's house, and they could draw off of it and stay afloat. But of course, if Rockefeller sneezed, it made the newspaper. So it says that news of this got on the wire. Inquiries poured in again, and many people went to bookstores to get the book Alcoholics Anonymous.
Now, it's funny, one of the headlines in New York was, Rockefeller dines with sots. You know, it was considered a little scandalous. You know, he's a well-to-do, he's a blue blood. What are you doing hanging out with these cretins, you know? But it goes on to the March of '41, the membership had shot up to 2,000. And then this guy named Jack Alexander, he was a feature writer. He was kind of like a Mike Wallace of the day that worked for Saturday Evening Post, and his publisher went to him and said, Listen, there's a movement going on in New York and in Akron. It's a cult.
It's a cult, and you need to go down there and discover what the hell these people are doing. You know, this is a real iffy deal. And he came down here to do an exposé on Bill and Bob and Clarence and those guys, and what happened was beautiful. They invited him into the meetings. They invited him into their homes. They socialized with him. They disclosed Alcoholics Anonymous in its finest form to Jack.
Bill Wilson said that the story that came out of that, written by Jack, could not have been written any better by himself. And today, if you—it's in our literature. If you ever get a chance, pick up that article. It's in a pamphlet and read it. It's beautiful. But there's the copy, and down at the bottom it says, Alcoholics Anonymous by Jack Alexander. So it says, He placed such a compelling picture of AA before the general public that Alcoholics in need of help really deluged us.
By the close of '41, AA numbered 8,000 members. It grew by ten times in two years. Now, this was not their only promoting type of experience. They actually had an alcoholic who was invited to speak on a nationally syndicated radio show, and they actually had a bunch of alcoholics hang out with him to ensure he stayed sober, so when he got on the air, he didn't make a fool out of himself. But here's the little self-grandizing again.
They really thought, because after that they put out postcards to all the doctors on the east side of the Mississippi, and to every doctor they could come up with, and they sent these and they said, Please be sure to listen. And they went with a wheelbarrow to get the replies for all these postcards, because they knew that for sure when people learned what this was, they were going to buy thousands of books. Duffel bags.
Yeah. They weren't really moving books at this point.
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They really weren't. I mean, they expected hundreds of thousands, and they got about 12. They got 12. I've actually heard Bill tell this in a recording. He said, Me and Hank went over to the post office, and we had these bags and suitcases, and we were just sure that these boxes, and everything, there was only 12. And Bill looked, forever optimistic, he looked at Hank, he says, There's so many of them, they've got them in a big box in the back.
And they got the postman, he said, Where's all our cards? He said, That's it, dude. We're going to go for about another 10 minutes, and we're going to take a break. But what we're going to go through here, and it's often overlooked, but please, this is so important. We, again, didn't get here because two white guys got together in 1935 and talked shop. You know, we got here through an experience that occurred over the last 74 years. That's where we're at today with present-day AA.
It says, Our society then entered a fearsome and exciting adolescent period. We all know how teenagers are. The test that it faced was this: Could these large numbers of erstwhile erratic alcoholics successfully meet and work together? Nope. Would there be quarrels over membership? Yep. Leadership? Yep. Money? You betcha. Would there be strivings for power, prestige? Oh yeah. Would there be schisms which would split AA apart?
We almost died. As a fellowship, we almost died. Because guess what? We're full of alcoholics, man. So it says, soon AA was beset by these very problems on every side in every group. But out of this frightening and at first disrupting experience, the convictions grew that AAs had to hang together or die separately. We had to unify our fellowship or pass off the scene. And what was going on is Bill—Bob was sick.
They're both getting up in age. Nothing happened in AA unless they approved it. They were the parents of AA. Everything that happened, they got the phone call. Bill said, We're dying here. We got to do something because we have to give this leadership over to the fellowship. And Bob was the guy that said, Easy does it. One day at a time. You know, easy does it. And it said that Bill, had it been left up to him, he would have franchised it into oblivion.
And had it been left up to Bob, it never got outside Akron city limits. So what happened? Bill came up with this, what we now know to be the traditions, thank God. And what happened there, Chris? Well, one of the key parts about this is the unify our fellowship. Bill was in, like, the mid-40s, and Bill had started writing some ideas for conduct, how we should conduct ourselves as AA members. Not rules, but just conduct, you know, some guidelines.
A guy from North Carolina sent him a story about these groups. Back in the 1800s, there was a group called the Washingtonians. Washingtonians predated AA and Oxford Groups. Guess what they were? They were a temperance society. They helped people stay sober, not drink. They didn't have any true, they didn't have any, like, program of action like ours, but people would get together and sign a pledge, a temperance pledge, not to drink, and they would help each other. They were huge.
They were bigger in numbers in comparison than we are today. Yeah. I mean, why did they fold? Well, back in, one of the also key things they did is they loved to selflessly promote themselves too. And they would get these notables to come and speak. There was this young up-and-coming lawyer who had tried and failed a couple times to get elected into a certain office, and a guy named Abraham Lincoln actually spoke at a Washingtonian society. But here's the problem.
They didn't stick to what they did best. They started dipping into slavery issues and women's rights issues and Republicans, Democrats and Whigs. They started dipping into anything and everything except treating alcoholism. Here's the cool thing. When September 11th occurred, they went to central office, the AA World Service office, and they asked Alcoholics Anonymous for a comment. And you know what our comment was? We don't have one.
We don't get into anything other than helping people with Alcoholics Anonymous. Outside issues. Now that's a really cool thing. It's very, very lofty. But you get into an AA meeting and all of a sudden we got opinions. And so that's one of the key things. We have to unify our fellowship. Our buddy Kip C. out of California talks about it like this: the most important person is the person walking into these rooms for the very first time who knows nothing about why they're here.
Their life is burned to the ground and they're hopeless and they need help. That's the most important person. But if we are not unified in our fellowship about the message of hope that we carry, guess what? They can shop for a solution. They can get coffee therapy. They can get Braves games. You know, maybe we do some work, maybe we don't. Hopefully we can be unified in our— work, maybe we don't. Hopefully we can be unified in our mission.
And what is our hope? That the alcoholics walking through these doors will hear that this solution, these 12 steps, this program of action will enable you to live happily and
[01:00:02]
healthy, that you will no longer be bound by the confines of alcoholism, that your life can be better than it's ever been. How many times do we actually hear that in AA meetings, you know? So one of the key things it talks about is, We discovered the principles, getting back to the book, by which the individual alcoholic could live, so we had to evolve principles by which the AA groups and AA as a whole could survive and function effectively.
Now it was thought that no alcoholic man or woman could be excluded from our society. You can be asked to leave an AA meeting, but you can't be kicked out of AA. That our leaders might serve, but never govern. That each group was to be autonomous and there was to be no professional class of therapy. There were to be no fees or dues. Our expenses were to be met by our own voluntary contributions. There was to be the least possible organization, even in our service centers.
Our public relations were to be based upon attraction rather than promotion. It was decided that all members ought to be anonymous at the level of press, radio, TV, and films. Notice a couple of things going on here. The word principles. The definition for that is rules of action or conduct. That's what the traditions are, rules of action or conduct. And the other thing to note there is it sounds a lot like the draft of our current traditions. The only difference is it says TV.
TV is not in our traditions today. Wonder why that is. They didn't think TV was going to make it. They thought it was a passing fad. They dropped it. The Super Bowl wasn't around then, was it? Yeah. Under no circumstances should we give endorsements, make alliances, or enter public controversies. Now, the early fellowship broke all those traditions. And guess what? That's the reason why we have them, is because we found that when we broke these types of rules of conduct or action, we hurt ourselves.
We don't help the cause. We've got about ten more minutes, and we'll take a break. This was the substance of AA's Twelve Traditions, which are stated in full on 561 of this book. Though none of these principles have the force of rule or law, they had become so widely accepted by 1950 they were confirmed by the First International Conference held in Cleveland. Today, the remarkable unity of AA is one of the greatest assets our society has.
Now, while the internal difficulties of our adolescent period were being ironed out, public acceptance of AA grew by leaps and bounds. And you want to start highlighting or underlining right here: public acceptance grew by leaps and bounds. Keeping in mind we're talking 1950 or so. For this, there were two principal reasons. Number one, large number of recoveries. Number two, reunited homes. You're on the tail end of a couple of wars, WWII, Korean War.
Guys are coming home. Homes are wrecked. They're drinking like fish. And all of a sudden they get a hold of AA, and you've got they're recovering, and the families are getting together. The word divorce was almost like non-existent during this era. Mom and apple pie, baseball. And so we're growing by leaps and bounds because people are getting sober and families are getting back together. It says, These made their impressions everywhere.
Check it out. Of alcoholics who came to AA and really tried, 50% got sober at once and remained that way. 25% sobered up after some relapses, and among the remainder, those who stayed on with AA showed improvement. Other thousands came to a few AA meetings and at first decided they didn't want the program. But great numbers of these, about two out of three, began to return as time passed. I invite you to read the book, AA Comes of Age: Conference Approved Literature, and that figure that they, if you do the math on what they just talked about, recovery rate in 1955 was 75%.
All right, skip over to the third, forward to the third edition. We're going to go to the third paragraph. Starts out by saying, The Basic. The basic principles of the AA program, it appears, hold good for individuals with many different lifestyles, just as the program has brought recovery to those of many different nationalities. The Twelve Steps that summarize the program may be called les douze pasos in one country or les douze étapes in another.
But these Twelve Steps trace exactly the same path of recovery that was blazed by the earliest members of AA. All right, the Twelve Steps, you see them on the walls of AA meetings. They hang up there by the traditions. When they hung those things up there, it's the greatest thing that happened to AA. Those same Twelve Steps that they hang on the wall were the worst thing that ever happened to AA. Huh? What the hell is Larry talking about?
Because knuckleheads like Larry and Christian walk in, we look at those steps and we go, Uh-huh, uh-huh, yeah. We do that shopping list thing. Those are but a summary of what's in here.
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I invite you to write this. This definition down here, summary. It's a condensed statement of—I'm gonna read the whole thing. Condensed statement of substance of principal points of a much larger work. That's what summary is. Condensed statement of substance of principal points of a much larger work. This book tells you how to work those steps, how to take those steps. Because a knucklehead like me, I go in, I look at them and go, Uh-huh, uh-huh. Are you drinking?
You want me to what? You want me to do what? Make a list? No, please. All right. Now, we hit upon the summaries because so many people don't reference this literature. The literature is the program. The steps on the wall is just a summary of this literature. And it's kind of like this, and I was famous for this in high school. The teacher would give the assignment on, like, say, the beginning of the semester, and it would go something like this: We want you to read this particular literature, and we want you to write a report on it. All right.
I may get the assignment in September. I have the paper due by the end of November. When do I start the paper? The second week of November, right? I go out to get the book. I haven't any time to read it now, so I'm looking for a particular area of the bookstore, and many people recognize this. It's a black and yellow wire rack that says Cliff Notes. The Twelve Steps of the Cliff Notes on the wall. That's the Cliff Notes. Do I want the substance and the effect?
I got to do the whole deal. So we're going to flip over to the very last page of the foreword to the fourth, and again, it's just a reiteration of something that we believe emphatically. You know, why do we pound home a book that was published in 1939 so emphatically? Why do we talk about a book that was, when it was reviewed, it was called hopelessly cornball, gender imperfect. Because guess what? Alcoholics are just like we were in 1939.
That this program of recovery continues to work in our lives like it did in 1939, and that God continues to do what He's always done. And at top of the page, the last part of the foreword to the fourth edition says, While our literature has preserved the integrity of the AA message, there's some meetings around this country, and I have an opinion now, that will actually turn you away if you walk in the door with the Big Book. Yep.
They will actually. And there's actually meetings in this country that will actually charge to hear a Fifth Step. I got opinions about that. There's a clubhouse in Atlanta, and they have meetings where you cannot lead a discussion out of the book. If you walk in there with a book, they'll turn you away. It's a B&B meeting. You know what B&B is, right? I don't know either, but it sure ain't A&A. So it goes on to say, While it has preserved the integrity of the AA message, sweeping changes in our society as a whole are reflected in new customs and practices within our fellowship. How many people get a 24-hour-a-day or AA thought of the day in an email, or go to a website, or, you know, download speaker talks?
We got this great thing called the internet. Tons of great things. It says, Taking advantage of technologies, for example, AA members with computers can participate in meetings online. I email and text Tim sometimes hourly, depending on what's going on in our lives. We can participate in meetings online, sharing with fellow alcoholics across the country or around the world. In any meeting, anywhere, what do we do?
AA share experience, strength, and hope. That's the cool thing with each other, in order so not only we can stay sober, but we can help other alcoholics. Modem to modem or face to face, we speak the language of the heart in all of its power and its simplicity. Any questions on what we've covered? We're going to wrap this thing up at, come back at 20 till. We'll only take a few minutes and we'll go eat.
Take a break.