Audio
About this recording
- Topic
- Long-Timers Part 2 7th Archives Workshop
- Speaker
- Unidentified S
- Date
- 2002-09-01
Transcript
Source: Unidentified S – Long-Timers Part 2 7th Archives Workshop – 2002-09-01.mp3 File: unidentified-s-long-timers-part-2-7th-archives-workshop-2002-09-01.mp3 Duration: 00:32:37
============================================================
He's the one that encouraged me to come to Alcoholics Anonymous, which I was very hesitant to do, because this happened in the month of October of '76. And the program of Alcoholics Anonymous talks about some of us alcoholics being kind of stubborn and stupid, and I believe I was that type, because I had to wait the rest of the year and then the first month to make a decision of coming to you people. But I'm sure glad I made the decision, because life has been good to me.
And like I said, it's been ups and downs. Many, many good things in my life happened. I've had some sad days, but I haven't missed a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous under none of those conditions. Even when I have a family member laying in the mortuary, I still go and make a meeting because I'm not going to revive that person. I've had family members in the hospital dying, and I still go to a meeting because I'm not the doctor. They can wait for me to go to a meeting and then come back and see them again. That's what I was taught.
So I think I have followed instructions to the best of what I can do, and that has brought to me what I am today, a good AA member. Thanks a lot for listening to me. Thank you, Warren. Moving right along, Bud M., our next speaker. A McDonald non-alcoholic. In conclusion, I'm saying that, you know, I have something here. I don't know whether it belongs in the archives or not, but it's true. Sybil gave me this many, many, many years ago, and I've had copies of it made.
And it's dated Alcoholics Anonymous Post Office Box 607, Hollywood Station, Hollywood, California, December the 5th, 1941, two days before Pearl Harbor. And I won't tell you the gal's name that it's written to, but it gives the address and says, Dear Mrs. so-and-so, at a meeting of the Executive Committee of the Los Angeles Group of Alcoholics Anonymous held December 4th, 1941, it was decided that your attendance at group meetings was no longer desired until certain explanations and plans for your future conduct were made to the satisfaction of this committee.
This action has been taken for reasons which you should most apparently be apparent to yourself. It was decided that should you so desire, you may appear before the members of this committee and state your attitude. This opportunity will be afforded you between now and December 15th, 1941. You may communicate with us at the above address by that date. In case you do not wish to appear, we shall consider the matter closed and that your membership is terminated. This is signed.
I'll tell you, they're all dead. Mortimer Joseph. Mortimer Joseph, who brought the book from Palm Springs to Los Angeles and started the meetings here in 1939. Frank Reindel, who was the first manager of the central office. It was on Wilshire, Ed Jessen, Fay Loomis, Pete Cunningham, Pete Pamphlet, and Al Mareno, the arrogance of those assholes. That my sobriety date is sometime six months before March 10th, 1953. I came out of jail on that day, and that's the date I remember.
And I was in jail for drinking. I was in jail for stealing. Now, there were thieves, and I wasn't a thief. I was poor, misguided youth, you know. But thieves were people that stole from me. Now that's a thief. But I, a lot of you have seen me, I know, and you don't know it. But if you remember the old Our Gang comedies, the Little Rascals, little freckle-faced kid named Buddy, that's Buddy McDonald.
That's me. And I started just at the time the Depression hit, and my dad
[00:04:59]
had been—he was a laundryman, and in those days people sent their laundry out, and he
[00:05:03]
would pick it up and deliver it, and it was a good job. And when the stock market crash came, people started doing their own laundry, and my dad was out of work. I won a spelling contest, and in the L.A. city schools I was champion speller for my grade, and got my picture in the paper, and it showed all the freckles I had. I was just really looked like I'd been following a cow, you know, and parted bran in my face or something.
But they had an article in the paper about me winning the spelling contest and my picture. My folks sent it into Hal Roach. He called, or his studio called, and I went out there and was interviewed and sang a song, recited a poem, Little Fly Upon the Wall, Ain't You Got No Clothes at All. You know, and I started my first picture the next day. And in those days, it was a lot of money. We used to get $7.50 a day for a walk-on, $10 a day if you spoke.
And my dad would work gladly for $5 a week at that time. So it was a lot of money, and I was spoiled rotten. People knew me, and everybody in town. I lived in a little town of Bell. That's Buddy McDonald. He's in the movies, you know, a big deal, and I'd strut around, and I really thought I was something. And it was about that time that I had my first drink of booze. It was about the time that I had gotten out of the movies, or at the end of my career in the movies, and my mom took my two brothers and I. They got in a fight. My parents did.
They were both alcoholics. My mom took us to Oregon, figured that we had some relatives up there to take care of us. And they pointed to the berry fields and says, Go and sin no more, you know. And that's what we did, picked berries for whatever we could do and survive somehow or another on that, and that was 1933. I started my drinking, got in trouble, went to reform school. Later on, went to prison. Later on, went to Marine Corps in World War II, and I was constantly in trouble.
How I kept from getting a dishonorable discharge, I don't know, but I did somehow or another. I got out in 1943. I got hurt. They sent me home, and everything was going fine. I was married the first time, and my wife divorced me while I was in prison the first time. And I, as I say, came out of the Marine Corps. I was a truck driver. That's what I did for a living. I made a good living at it, but I'd get to drinking and spend all my money.
Didn't know how to save any money or anything. I owed more money when I came out of jail. I had restitution to make of many thousands of dollars. In 1953, that was a lot of money. That was just a tremendous, on the national debt. And I solved the problem, though, through the program of Alcoholics Anonymous. I changed the third step. I made a decision to turn my life, my will, and my paycheck over to the care of my wife.
And by God, the bills got paid, you know. But my home group is the Hole in the Ground in Huntington Park. Tex Adams was the guy that started the Hole in the Ground. He was Sybil's brother, and Sybil was one of my mentors. She celebrated her 13th birthday when I celebrated my first, and we were good friends, and I learned a lot about the history of Alcoholics Anonymous, especially the history of in Los Angeles from her. And she, when Frank Randall left the central office, she took it over, and she's the one who really built the central office up.
Sybil was quite a gal. And she was married at that time. She was married to Jim Willis. That's before she married Bob Corwin. And old Jim Willis started Gamblers Anonymous, and that was his claim to fame. But there was a lot of, always a lot of discord in AA around the Hole in the Ground, especially Tex Adams when he started it. Well, there was—he left the group at the Cecil Hotel. He wanted to say something one night, and Frank Randall told him, Shut up.
You don't know nothing. He says, To hell with you. I'll start my own group. Oh, you can't do that. You'll wreck AA. And they went out to Southgate and started a little group over in Walter Watts' living room, and then moved to the end of the J car line. On December the 6th, 1941, that building burnt down, and he rented the Ebell Club in Huntington Park and found the basement. A few days later, he rented it for Friday night and Sunday night, found the basement and started the Hole in the Ground there.
And he was the boss. Now, the Hole in the Ground has been in existence for over 60 years, and we got kicked out of that building after 58 years and nine months or something like that, 10 months. But the group still exists. And there was always guys that were critical of Tex Adams, who ran the place.
[00:10:03]
And Tex, when he died, he gave the keys to Duke Carson. Duke died in '84 and gave me the keys, and I was secretary, third secretary. Al Fierro is the secretary now. We've had four secretaries, so there were no traditions when we started that. So we said we were grandfathered in, and we would do what Tex did. If they get to bitching about, Where's the money? What does this do? What does that do? or whatever, you know, buy them a pound of coffee, a book, and tell them go start their own meeting.
And, you know, a lot of people have gotten sober at the Hole in the Ground. I have three pages of names: Jim Farwell, Bob Corwin, and I, and a couple other guys sat down and tried to think of everybody that we could that had gotten sober at the Hole in the Ground. And we had some amazing people: Arson Annie, you know, our old man told her to clean the house or she'd get her wine cut off at the grocery store. She took a look at it; it was too dirty to clean, so she set fire to it. You know, Whiskey Bill and Mouse Trap Johnny, Bob the Cook, Bob the Barber, Bob the Grocer, Bob the this.
You know, they all had a handle of some kind or another. But there were all of these people that got sober at the Hole in the Ground, and under that regime, I see a lot of my friends here. Bob Z. over here, he and I go to the same meetings on Thursday night. We go to the Cider House, and I got lucky and met Judge Leon Emerson way back when, and I don't, back in the '60s sometime. And he was having a problem. They would get a guy for some drunk arrest, drunk or drunk driving or something, and he'd write a letter to the local AA club and tell the guy, You go to AA.
And so he'd write, Joe so-and-so will be coming to AA, and Joe didn't go to that meeting. He went to some other meeting, and he didn't call himself Joe. It was Joseph or something like that. And they were getting busted for violating the summary probation, you know, and we're trying to figure out what the hell to do. He said, How about if we give them a card and have it get it signed and bring it back?
I said, Well, hell, I guess we could do that. And so anyway, we drew up a thing and I took it to a printer friend of mine, and he printed the first thousand court cards and gave them to us. And that's a standard form now. This was about 1965 or '66, and it's a historical thing in Alcoholics Anonymous, the court cards. And there was a lot of criticism about it. The committee came, you know. They didn't have some broad to pick on this time; they picked on a judge, you know. But he defended himself well and has been one of the best friends. And then he corrals me, and I was—Frank Benelli appointed me to the L.A. County Commission on Alcoholism.
Now I'm an ex-convict, and I got a—my best friend is a judge, and they give me a badge and a seal for the windshield of my car and everything else, you know. And I'm wondering, why the hell did this happen to me? I was an ex-convict, as I say, but there was a probation officer in Walnut Park named Brown who was going to law school. And he found a thing in the law that you could take a person's criminal record back to court if the guilty pleas were in.
I pled guilty every time I went. I had a public defender, and they'd tell you, you know, plead guilty. And so I did. But all my felonies were taken back to court, and the guilty pleas were removed, and the guilty pleas entered, and I had all my citizenship rights restored to me because of Alcoholics Anonymous, because this probation officer used to give his probationers to me in Duke. And we had a couple of gals that—Louise Anderson was a women's probation officer, and she'd give her women to Sybil and other people around the hole in the ground.
And because of that, I was appointed the L.A. County Commission on Alcoholism, and I met Emerson. And he was saying, you know, there ought to be a place. Pat Wiggers had the place downtown, but it wasn't a program; it was just a place to live, a sober living place. He said there should be some kind of way that we can make these people listen. You're going to keep them sober, but at least you'll have their attention for a little while.
And so we opened up Cider House, and we rented two buildings on the grounds of Metropolitan State Hospital. And they hit us at the last minute of, You got to show fiscal viability. What the hell does that mean, you know? You got to have enough money to operate the program for a month without getting any money from the government. And it was a government grant. They gave us a $27,000 grant to start the place.
But Tom Pike, Pike Industries, the CEO of the big oil people, and Tom Pike… His company lent me, who I'd… Company lent me, who I had to have three cosigners to pay cash.
[00:15:02]
You know, I mean, I had no credit whatsoever. Lent me $10,000 to start Cider House, and that's what we did, you know. And we got a lot of people to go through there. And so I've been blessed. I have three children. I got married again in 1950 while I was still drinking and putting my wife through hell. And I got three overachieving children. My oldest daughter, we just had a big party for her up in Reno.
She's an attorney up there, and we had 57 people that came and celebrated her birthday with a big dinner. My son flew in from New York, and he did the cooking, and my youngest daughter was the gopher. And we had a big party there, and there was some wine drinking and stuff. I never saw one drunk. There were about, oh, I'm going to say maybe eight or ten people from AA that were there, and we didn't have to gang together or anything else.
It was just a real fine party. And my daughter, as I say, is an attorney, and she was raised around Alcoholics Anonymous. My son got his B.A. at Berkeley, got his Phi Beta Kappa at Harvard on a National Science Foundation scholarship grant. They paid him $400 a month and full tuition to go to Harvard for five years to get his Ph.D. And he was director of research and technology for Time Warner for many years. Quit them just before they went ploppo, sold his stock, and he is senior vice president of Condé Nast, the publishers of the New Yorker magazine and those things. If you look in any of their magazines down among the people there, you'll see senior vice president Scott McDonald.
And my youngest daughter, I had breakfast with her Thursday morning, and… Kuzma Mesa, and she was down here on business. She's in marketing research, and she's got a big project she's working on right now. And she did a lot of work for Bill Gates. He likes her real well. But she's working for Home Depot now on a project, and she flew back this morning to, or midday today, to San Francisco where she lives.
And she'd be going to New York on Sunday and then going on this Home Depot project to New Jersey. So they're overachieving children, and they were all raised in Alcoholics Anonymous. I can remember my kids going around pouring coffee. Ray Tenorio sitting back there, his Mijita, his little daughter, same way, raised around Alcoholics Anonymous. Hell, she was in the Air Force. She is in charge of the Tulip Festival and some other big shindig in the Netherlands, just because of Alcoholics Anonymous.
And so the archives, you know, tell you a lot of things that have happened, but the successes that have happened are just innumerable. And I did want to say something about that old boy talking about Texas that kind of reminded me of the guy driving down through Texas, and he bought some gas in this station. Guy washed the windshield and checked his tires and oil and water and really gave him good service, and got ready to leave and takes and pulled out an old earthen jug, uncorked it, and a pale blue smoke come rising out of the top.
He says, Say, pardner, have a drink. The guy looks at the jug and says, No thanks, I don't drink. He says, Put that the Texan pulled out a six-gun with a barrel about that big around, put it up between his eyes and said, I said, have a drink. The guy grabbed the jug, tipped it up, and he said, Oh God, that's awful. He said, Yeah, now you hold the gun on me while I have one. Well, how's everybody feeling?
Pretty good? It's actually 10 o'clock, but we have one more guy who is on the list here, and how about calling up Ray T. to come on up and give us… Hi, gang. My name is Ray, and I'm an alcoholic. And I don't know nothing about archives. I don't even know what the heck it means. I think I must be an archive myself. I'm one of those dinosaurs left from another era, from another time. I come from way back when you didn't go to the store to buy a fifth of Old Overcoat or something.
You just made your own in the brew, whatever the hell was there, little corn, potato peels, anything in there, anything that would brew, and distill that and take a drink of that stuff. Just like having a bad trip on H. Boy, that's good stuff. So
[00:20:01]
I'm very, very, very grateful and surprised that I'm going to get called in a place like this because I am not a speaker. I'm a talker. When I came to the holding ground, I came from the street, and I hadn't gone to school. I never got married. I never worked. I never did anything but run those two streets. And I didn't know, I couldn't speak English, and I couldn't speak Spanish either. I spoke three languages.
I spoke Easterly, Watts, and vulgar. So I came in the hole after having been running around and everything. Finally I was out running on the railroad boxcars and all. Came home to visit, and I had invitation from the President of the United States, greetings, he said, bring enough clothes for three days. Where the hell would I get that many clothes? But I went along anyway. I went to Africa, Sicily, Italy, France, Germany.
I was in the Third Infantry Division. The company I was in was a machine gunner. I went through all that, and I came back with a dishonorable discharge. I would have gotten dishonorable discharge if I'd have joined the Girl Scouts. That's the way my life went. I came back from there, under the gun, they turned me loose. I got to L.A., and in order to get home I had to go back to the Nickel Alley, you know, down on Fifth Street, to drink a little wine and blast a little of that friendly weed so I could get in a proper uniform to come home. Hell, I was bold-legged drunk when I left.
If I come sober, they might not recognize me. So I went back to the same thing over and over again. I started getting in the jail. First night I got home, I came home mad at everybody. I tore people's screens and threw rocks at their walls at their houses and cussed at them. Called the cops, and they took me over to Sawtelle, turned me over to the Veterans Hospital. I was getting a little clear by then.
I kept quiet until the cops left. The cops left. I don't belong here. Why aren't you crazy? Oh, I'm crazy, but I got a dishonorable discharge. Get him out of here. I don't know how the heck I got back to Inglewood that fast. I lived in Inglewood. I don't know how I got there that fast. I was back in jail before morning. It went on and on, and finally I wandered off into Long Beach Avenue up in L.A. and 41st out there, and I fell under a train and lost that leg and lost that finger. I lost a— Lost the teeth already in the stockade overseas where I was winning the war. And so that's the way I came into. That's what material I brought into A.A.
I didn't come in by myself. My brother and my sister-in-law picked me up in an alley in Watts. We call it South Hollywood. Doing a little social drinking down in an alley, and they came and picked me up. I didn't want to go. If I had one more leg, they couldn't have got me there. Got me there. Down the gutter I go. That's all I had. And I walked in there, and I didn't know. I was scared to death. I was raised in Inglewood where they had the white supremacy, and I was born in Arizona, in an Indian town. I didn't even know I was born in an Indian town.
Tucson, Arizona. I didn't know it was an Indian village in Barrio Libre until somebody gave me a book. My niece gave me a book, and I found that out. Anyway, I was born over there in cattle country. My papa was a cowboy, and he moved to California over here. We had to go to school. We go across the tracks to school. After school, run back to the brickyard. Mexican, those white kids are gonna come throwing those rocks at you.
And there we go. And back again. I tried to organize the Mexicans, come and stand up, let them know that we're not alone, we're protected. Boy, you're crazy. So I was mad at the whites. I was mad at the Mexicans too for being chicken shit. Become a middleman. You get pretty lonely in the middle. I didn't belong there. I didn't never had a hometown of my own. We'd moved around so damn much. And when we got here, right away I got mad and took off. I went to Nicollet, where the good honest people are, you know, down to Fifth Street. And I started—most people get there after years of drinking.
I started there and I ended there. That's the way that my living went. I stayed until I came into Alcoholics Anonymous.
[00:25:01]
When I came in, they took me in, and I was afraid. I took—these big, I thought, big, big oaky types, you know, big hillbilly types up there. They come up there, My name is Joe Blow, and I'm Irish, and I'm an alcoholic. Ooh, must be an Irish disease here. I'm not going to stick around with these guys long. I hear there's a Latino meeting. I went over to the Latino meeting, and they liked me there. But after the meeting, everybody was inviting, Let's go over.
I'm going to go to the meeting, go to the movies. You want to go? I'm having a little game of cards. You want to go? I'm having something. They invited everybody, and I'm standing there at the door waiting to be invited. Nobody invited me, so I came back. I'll go back to those guys. And I stayed up there. See, we get what we need and not what we want. And that's what I needed, to be there. These people took me and put me together in a way that I could function out there. They put me in a little room there, and they told me to sit in the chair and don't make a move. Don't do anything.
Don't get married. Don't get pregnant. Don't— And then they finally got me a job. Ever since, I started living a life of shame. I started working for a living. First job Bud got me was driving a taxi up in East L.A. I didn't know where— In East L.A., there were no lights on the street. There was nothing driving out there. And they got me. Then they got me a job at Garrett Air Research out in Torrance, where I stayed until I retired or graduated or something.
I had a very, very, very responsible job, very hard. I had an air gun in my hand and a little grindstone. I took the sharp edges off the gears and all that sort of stuff. But I stayed there, and after a while, you know how we are, they were going to make me a lead. I went to the place to get a lead made, and I saw this pretty girl sitting behind the desk. She was a secretary, and she peeled her teeth at me.
She had lots of them. I don't mean—I don't mess around. She was 200 pounds of bone and muscle and mean disposition and a loud voice to go with it too. And I told my sponsor, I'm going to get married. He says, You have the poorest husband material in the industry besides myself. You've never been married. I've never been married. What kind of husband material? Any girl could walk down the street backwards and run into better husband material than the both of us. I didn't believe him, but I soon became a believer.
Anyway, she stuck around, and then we had a little girl, and she was raised around the holding ground. She learned to walk around this chair, and they added another part to the archives of the holding ground, and my little girl is there, and she's got part of it too. And she's the only kid that I know of that—she said when she was about nine years old, Do you think they would let me bring my birthday cake and share it with my people? Well, let's call Duke.
Yeah, Duke said, Bring it over. So she brought her cake and shared it with her people until she was about thirteen, and she got too busy going to school and all that. So she's the only kid that I know that was invited personally to Chino Prison. Come on, Mayor, and bring your little curtain climber. It's crazy. So they came, and I'm driving up in a little panel truck that somebody had given me, and they're not going to let us in, baby, but we'll go.
She's about eight years old, but they're not going to let us in. But the guy's crazy. So we drove up, and the guard came out, You must be the mayor and his little curtain climber. Yeah, come on in. She has a beautiful—she has a life like one of Shirley Temple stories. She was raised around the drunks, and some of them were pimps, and some of them were ex-horses, and some of them were not ex yet, thieves and prisoners coming from prison, priests and ministers.
We had some ministers too. All kinds of people. They all helped my little gal. They all helped me raise her. If I'd have raised her by myself, I'd have raised another nut like me. But she was raised with— Kids there with Bud's children and all that, and she came out a beautiful… With their bunch of children and all that, and she came out a beautiful little girl. She went to Holland to visit, and she fell in love with the country, and then
[00:30:02]
she got married up there. She has two little girls. One is in university. She has two years studying law, and the other one just started. She's studying art, and she's going to send me a ticket, an airplane ticket to go and visit her country, my beautiful country. I want you to meet my people. I know her husband. She's about yay big, and she's dark. She's black. She shines. My papa was an Indian, shiny.
She took, go back to papi, and they fell in love with her beautiful personality, and she wants me to go meet her in-laws and her friends, see how your little grandchildren are shaping up. Everything that I know, everything that I've taught them, going all over again. Well, I raised that, and I got my wife, by the way, I married again, and then I had another boy. He's in Las Vegas. He's got a good job with the First National Bank with the computers and all that.
And I got through raising all that, and some more stepchildren and step-grandchildren, and I finally ran out of work up there, so I came back to the hole in the ground. I go back to the hole in the ground, and I got there five days before they closed it, and they told me, Lay down in the corner there until we get you something, somewhere to go. Bud got me a place over there at Cider House, and I'm up there, and I'm up there with those young kids playing around, and I get out.
I got there, and they play those games, you know, this and that and that and all that, and I'm out there, Hey, … here, here. I'm out there. I feel like 25 years old myself. I have lived an exciting life. Everything has been changed for the better, and this right now is the most exciting part of my life, being there with those kids and knowing that I stand short. My vocabulary, I never learned a whole lot.
I was working with winos up there. These are young kids. They're addicts and alcoholics. They're young. They're better educated. They come from everybody and all that, and I'm having to learn a brand new—I'm learning. I'm going to a new school. I'm learning how to communicate. I have lost…