The History of AA at the Robbers Roost AA Group's Back to Basics men's retreat in Cuyamaca State Park in San Diego, CA

And he's one heck of a guy, and, I'd just like to introduce, James m from Slidell, Louisiana. Thank Hi, everybody. My name is James Murrell. I am an alcoholic. Amen.

I'm I'm using my last name because I put Slidell on my badge and everybody says your name James Slidell, Louisiana. And I wanna tell you what's New Orleans, our largest suburb. You know, it's, it's right next door to there. And, I wanna tell you that by the grace of a loving God, as I have come to understand him in Alcoholics Anonymous and hanging around with guys just like you and you guys. I have my last drink, July 11, 1981.

I'm very grateful for this period of sobriety. That happens to be 7,609 days, one day at a time if you keep track of such things, and I do. My first sponsor told me that every day was precious. I slipped and slide it around this program for a year and a half before I got sober. I picked up 40 of those in in New Orleans, there's 24 hour chips of green chips.

I picked up 40 of those green chips because I couldn't seem to surrender to this to this program. And when finally alcohol beat me into a state of reasonableness, I asked for help. The first time, Been an aide for a year and a half. Never asked for help. Wanted to look good.

Better look good than feel good. And I asked for help. My first sponsor told me, he says you keep track of those days and you give your sobriety date every time you talk. Two reasons, he said. First of all, you need something to hold on to.

You need something to hold on to because you've had nothing to hold on to. 2nd reason, I wanna embarrass the hell I ever get drunk yet. Everybody's gonna know you're sobriety day. And so I keep track of it one one day at a time. God, it's good to be up here.

Good to be with you folks. The Robber's Roost group. Yeah. What a deal that you meet Thursday night. Y'all got a good group.

There was enthusiasm in that group. There was a spirit in that group. And that was the spirit of Alcoholics Anonymous and it's it's in here today. I wonder why you guys all doing here? I mean, I was kind of standing up here before and feel a little nervous, a little inadequate, you know.

Kip asked me how I was doing. I said, well, I guess I just gotta apply my usual philosophy. You know, when in trouble, when in doubt, run-in circles, scream and shout. You know, I I don't know. I'm kinda hoping that fire alarm would run ring again, you know, and, we have a I ain't had a fire drill since I was in elementary school, you know.

That was we all just wandered outside, you know. And, I thought, yeah, that's actually interesting. It's beautiful up here. It's really an honor to be up here. Pronounce this lake, Cuyamaca?

Yes. Cuyamaca? Is that that Cuyamaca. Cuyamaca? Is that close enough?

Beautiful place. I don't have any hills in Louisiana. Oh. Cuyamaca. Whatever it is.

Who cares? I don't know. It's just it's just it's just great. It's, it's really great to be here. I guess we're really all up here to help Kip celebrate his, his 18th birthday tomorrow if he's he stays sober that long.

You know, you think think he'll make it till Okay. Ah, we better we better watch him. You know, in some groups, they have this tradition where where you do a watch, you know, when it's the night before the guy's birthday, you get together with him, you know, and you you stay with him till midnight. We do that, that, we do that from time to time. Best watch I've ever was on, I was speaking down a little South Louisiana, Cajun town, called home of Louisiana.

Kids been to home. Kids talked in home. And old Ned was about to have his 6th birthday. And so after the meeting, he said, we're gonna do a watch for Ned, you know. And Ned's this occasion.

He's dating the stripper down at the strip club, you know. So all the AAs go down to the strip club, you know. And and, and all the strippers are there, you know. We hang around there and everybody knows Ned's in AA, so Ned can't get a drink in there, you know. And and we're hanging around in there and all the strippers are coming up.

And at midnight, they put on the show for him and everything and I thought, boy, this is all of us. It's pretty good deal. That's pretty good. Kent, we can't promise you any strippers tonight, but, we'll do the best you can. You know.

You know, one of the things they don't tell you, you come in here and you say, god, I wanna be an old timer and you don't realize if you accumulate a little over 20 years, you also become old. Kip was telling me, he says he says, you better start taking some Geritol with your Viagra so you remember what the hell it is you're taking this far, you know. Poor man, Viagra, he could probably afford. You know, you can get it at Walmart. It's combination of of Miracle Gro and Fix A Flat.

You know, You know, you know, I've never been to a men's retreat before. I don't know whether it's, safer. That reminds me of the story. You know, we got these Cajun down in in in South Louisiana. You know, I'm I'm originally from Texas, but when I was 10, my father discovered the French Quarter in New Orleans and he found that that's where the party was.

So and some of y'all been sharing with me that y'all have been to the party down there, you know. And it was a party. You know, I didn't kill myself doing that. But I grew up a little small south Louisiana, Cajun French town called New Iberia, which is Cajun's country. The motto there is which means let the good time grow.

And coming to a men's retreat reminds me of the story of Robichaux and Boudreaux. And Robichaux comes up to Boudreaux and he says, Boudreaux, this kind of a sponsorship moral in this too. He says, Boudreaux, 3 years ago, you remember you told me that I should take my vacation and I should go to Catalina Island off the coast of California. And Boudreaux says, yeah, I got to tell you that. He says, well, when I come back 9 months later, Marie, she has a baby.

He says, and you remember that 2 years ago, you told me to take a vacation to Cancun? And when I come back 9 months later, my re she has a baby. He says, yeah. I remember that. He says, and last year you told me to go to Paris and I've come back and 9 months later Marie has a baby.

He says, yeah, Boudreaux. What you gonna do about that? Says, next time I wanna take Marie along with me. So I don't know what you got to work on what's going on at home, but, here we are, you know. Here we are.

I wanna tell you that I'm a member of the strange camels group of Slidell, Louisiana. We are yeah. Strange camels group. You know, Bill Wilson once remarked, people are always writing Bill and, complaining about what was going on in the group, you know, saying, oh, we're getting these oddballs and these narrative wells in here and crazy people are coming to us and whatever. Bill got these letters all the time.

And one time he wrote back to this guy who was making this complaint, you know, about all the losers and ne'er do wells and the not so that it showed up at the group. And he wrote the guy back and he says, well, different, he says, you know, AA is just kinda like a little small oasis in this vast desert of alcoholism. He says, in this oasis of AA, many strange camels wander into our tent. Finally, Bill, you know, and we looked at that and thought, yeah, we're the strange camels that wandered into the tent. And I wanna say having been to a meeting of the Robert's Roost group, y'all have fit in just fine in our group.

We meet on top of an old fashioned ice cream parlor. There are bars on the other 3 corners. We've even measured it. You know where it says in the big book, you don't think you're an alcoholic? Go to the nearest bar.

We've determined that cat's club is exactly 2 paces closer than many of the wild Irish roast, so we know exactly where to refer them to. We are a smoking meeting. All of we yeah. Yeah. We're still smoking Louisiana.

Yeah. My group has a smoking policy, however. Anybody who wishes to not smoke can step outside and not smoke all day long. Never have stopped anybody from not smoking. But we are an active enthusiastic group of Alcoholics Anonymous.

And we move around a bit and we sponsor and we 12 step wet drunks. And, we have grown from myself and one of the guy reading the big book to each other 7 years ago that we have 75 members now. We put on a couple of workshops like this a year. We've been privileged to have Bob Dee who's going to be sharing with us tonight to come in and spend a weekend with us and to go through the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous with us and it was an extraordinary week and we we do that twice a year. We bring in, someone and we get together like this for a weekend.

Of course, you know, it start my group started off as a men's group and then, my wife, I was I was married then, you know, we've been going on for about 2 or 3 months and then Sharon had been meeting with her girls. And one day, they kind of, we were meeting at my house out in the yard. They were meeting in in the dining room table. And one day, they come out and they said, we decide to come to your meeting. I said, oh, God, there goes the neighborhood.

So anyway, it started out as men's group, it didn't end up that way. But, in in fact, we have some very strong active women who sponsor people in that group. You know, there's a point in talking about all this. I'm about to get into the history and traditions of Alcoholics Anonymous. And a lot of you all have asked me, you said, what what's this all about?

Why are we talking about this? Are you an historian? Do you something like that? I said, no. Not particularly.

I have a degree in history. I have a degree in history for exactly one reason. I found that you if you were, taking history classes at LSU, you could spend most of your time at the bingo bar and lounge and pass those courses. You know? It makes sense to me at the time.

But when I got here, I've always been interested in history, not as not as a series of dry events, you know, like who gives a damn that the treaty of Genet settled the French and Indian War in 17 63. You know, that doesn't and that doesn't, you know, who cares? I didn't care then. I don't care now. But I come here and y'all were telling your stories and I found your stories fascinating.

I love to listen to your stories. God, did we hear a great story last night. Larry moved me. Larry moved me. We we heard Alcoholics Anonymous from this from this podium.

We heard the recovery from a seemingly hopeless condition of mind and body. We heard the story of a man who was setting out on a quest to try to do something with his life and wrecked his life and then found recovery and relief and joy in this program. That's what we heard last night. And that's what I hear when I come to the meetings about. That's what fascinated me about you folks from from the start.

And AA story is just as fascinating. It's a story of colossal human weakness, terrible failure of drugs who had really no business recovering or no business even coming together, coming together and starting something that 66 years later had led to us being at this beautiful campground in the mountains of California, gather together. You see, history to me is simply a series of stories. It's a story of Alcoholics Anonymous. And in the process of that story, we've learned how to live together.

We've learned how to, as I was as I was sharing with JB and some of the others this morning, none of us got sober on the principles of this program. Not one man in here got sober because he read the 12 steps and said, I'm gonna just sit down and do these 12 steps and stop drinking. Not a one of those did. We come here and a spirit touches us. A spirit.

When I walked into the room, the first time I walked into a meeting of alcoholic tonight, y'all were laughing about things that I've been trying to hide all my life. Y'all were telling stories. Y'all were hugging each other. It wasn't in the French Quarter. Men were hugging men.

What are you doing? What are you doing? No. But I got I got to like that. I got to like that.

There was something different there. It was the spirit that attracted me. It was the spirit of Alcoholics Anonymous upon which I stopped drinking. Now I stay sober by practicing the principles of the program. I stay I cannot stay sober without taking the steps of the program and applying them in my life.

But what we're talking about when we start talking about the traditions is just simply the way that we manage to combine the spirit of this program into hanging out with each other just just just like just like we've done we've done this weekend, you know. And it's it's been a marvelous weekend. Y'all have really treated me beautifully and I want to thank you very much for inviting me to come out here and to be with you. I love going to your meeting Thursday night. That was as good a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous as I as I've been to.

I'd say it was full of enthusiasm. It was full of, of a lot of laughter. And it was it had some pathos in it. You know, we had one guy there who just was having a horrible time saying so. We just couldn't figure the deal out.

And y'all guys shared your recovery with, you know, whether he hears it or not, but shared it with me. You shared it with me. I wanna thank Kip for taking me out to dinner and, and you guys for feeding me last night. Oh, that I tell you what, that barbecue last night was about as good as it gets. Really enjoyed that.

I wanna thank Jesse for the beautiful artwork on the t shirt. I'll I'll carry it home with me and that and the cup and and it'll be like a little memory of you guys. I'll carry you home home with me in that sense. Well, I'm really gonna carry you home with me is in my heart. I had the chance to share with quite a few of you this weekend.

I hope I've shaken all of your hands. If I haven't, please come up and introduce yourself to me afterwards. No. I'm here to be with you all this weekend. I'm up here today simply because I'm an active member of Alcoholics Anonymous who happens to have gotten interested in how this deal works.

You know, when, Jesse was reading the how it works. Says rarely we see the person fail who was thoroughly followed our path. What's the path? What's the path? Today, we're gonna talk a little bit about the path of alcoholic synonyms.

We're gonna talk about a miracle that has occurred in the world. We're gonna talk about the fact that 66 years ago, nobody got sober. Nobody had ever gotten sober and stayed sober. I mean, they might have gotten dry for a while. But when I say sober, I mean something more than just the absence of alcohol.

There is a man in this room that hadn't tried the absence of alcohol. And the absence of alcohol makes me thirsty. I can't stand the absence of alcohol. I'm in this room because I can't take the absence of alcohol. When I when I'm without a drink, you become a craphead.

You the world contracts around me. I don't like you very much. I don't like me very much. No. And at the age of about 14a half, I found that a couple of shots of bourbon whiskey, old charter to be specific, taken down quick.

And it didn't come back. Tried to, but it didn't come back up. It almost made it back up. It went back down. And all of a sudden, I felt power coming through me that I've been looking for all my life.

I was the short fat kid. I I I was the school bookworm. I was the kid who made straight eggs that everybody made fun of and didn't talk about. My nickname was rubber butt. I went out in that parking lot at that high school dance.

Got a friend of mine gave me a model old charter. Like I say, it got down in there and it went around in and all of a sudden I felt like I grew about 4 or 5 inches. I felt like I lost about £20. The pimples fell off my face. And rubber butt might have walked out into the parking lot, but Tab Hunter walked back in.

I was looking for Debbie Reynolds, Rich. I'm not even a founder that night because I discovered a phenomenon in my life. Then when I took a drink of alcohol, it changed my relationship to the whole world. It changed my relationship. Made girls prettier.

It did. I'm a lot prettier. And, I pursued that feeling into the gates of insanity or death because if alcohol does that much for it, eventually starts doing something to you. Mankind has noticed this from the beginning of recorded history. We have noticed this and never had anything to do about it.

Archaeologists tell us that the, they have found traces of fermented grain or the remnants of wine making and pottery dating back as far as the year 10000 BC. Man has crushed the grape or or fermented the grape. You know, it's it's been around for a long time. Now, man didn't have a recorded history till about the year 4000 in the Babylonian tablets, the clay tablets. And even the clay tablets mentioned a certain type of drinker who seemed to drink too much.

There are hieroglyphs on the walls of the Egyptian pyramids and the tombs dating back 4000 years that mention a certain type of that well, they talk about the beer ration being given to the builders of the deal and, you know, just the general use of of of beer. No big deal. But they also mentioned a certain type that seemed to be very, very interested in it, more interested than the rest of the people. There's an ancient Chinese manuscript from from 2000 BC that talks about the, courtiers, certain number of the courtiers drinking too much wine and and causing havoc in the empress court. You know, the first detailed recorded history we have of an alcoholic is in the bible.

Oh, Noah, the ark. Yeah. Noah, I it's pretty obvious from reading the story. He he was he was drunk, you know. God tried to sober him off by sending him on a 40 day cruise on a boat, you know.

And what did old Noah do as soon as he got out of the treatment center? It says right in the Bible, he planted grapevines. He crushed the grape. He drank the wine, and he danced naked before his daughters and before God. Now, does that sound like an alcoholic?

Yeah. I identify with old Noah. And from a very, very early time, You see, the strange thing about alcoholism the strange thing about alcoholism is that not everybody drinks alcohol can become an alcohol. Statistics show and it depends, it kinda varies from country by country. But no more than 10% at at the most in any given country or ethnic group can become alcoholic.

We see it up around 10% in certain groups like, the Irish. A pip. You know, my last name is Morel. It wasn't Morel before we moved to Louisiana. The French town they start calling Morel.

It's Merl. And Merl is Irish. You know? And about 10% of the Irishmen, about 10% of the American Indians become alcoholic only about we don't know why. Very small percentage of Italians and who are still in Italy are are Jews become alcoholic and then it varies but it's never higher than 10 and it's usually around 5 or 7% of the people who drink alcohol.

The rest of the people simply won't drink enough. They say crazy things. They say, no. Thank you. I'm starting to feel it.

You're starting to feel it. Well, of course, you're starting to feel it. Why the hell else you're drinking it? Or they'll say something like, oh, god. I'm starting to get sick.

Well, you drink right through sick. There is a promised land on the other side. Tell them that and they will look at you like you're from another planet, which we are, which we are. But always the question has been, what do we do with the alcohol? What do we do with the alcohol?

The first really great description of the alcoholic comes from the 23rd chapter of the book of Proverbs. Book of Proverbs is written by King Saul, who has a reputation in history of, being a man of great wisdom. Yeah. And, he was a great observer of human nature. Now, Solomon was not against the use of wine.

I mean, read his glory. One of the great love poems of all time is the song of Solomon, you know. He talks about his dearly beloved and drinking the wine with her and everything. This is not written by a man who is against drinking. This is written by a man who loved his wine.

Loved his wine. But he observed that there was a certain class of drinker even amongst the Jews. We're talking about 3000 years ago. We're talking about roughly around the year 1000 BC. And our friend Solomon wrote this.

See if you can identify with this. Who hath woe? Who hath sorrow? Who hath contentions? Who hath babbling?

Who hath wounds without cause? Have you ever come to and you're bleeding from some place and you don't know why you're bleeding from there? Who hath redness of eyes? They that tarry long at the wine. They that go to seek mixed wine.

And he said, thine eyes shall behold strange women. Have your eyes ever beheld strange women? God have I beheld some strange women. Of course, the worst thing is when they're looking at you and that next morning and you know that they're you're their strange man, you know, oh, God. Thy heart shall utter perverse things, the personality change.

You know, you remember early on in the drinking when, I remember it when alcohol made me social and fun and good time and wonderful to be around and then all of a sudden it changed and and instead of that, crap was coming out of my mouth. And I was getting in fights with people I didn't wanna get in fights with and and saying things that I had no intention of saying, he says that should be full of perverse things. And he says, yay, thou shall be as he that lie down in the midst of the sea or he that lie upon the top of a mass. Y'all are right near the ocean. You've seen a marina out there with sailboats in it.

When the water gets stirred up, how the mass sways back and forth, that would certainly change. They have stricken me, thou shall say, and I was not sick. They have beaten me and I felt it not. Ever will ever come to feeling like you've been beat up? Ever come to been beat up?

I've had cars that have come to beat up. Then Solomon asked a question, this is the point of all of this. Solomon asked a question that nonalcoholics have been asking about us for 3000 years. He says, yet when they awake, they will seek it again. When they awake, they will seek it again.

After all of the trouble, after all of my troubles and my and and whatever I come to, and I have to have more of that very thing that put me in that in in that state. Like, I I could go on out through history, but I think this is just it shows you that from time immemorial, men of wisdom, physicians, counselors, people that cared, wives, children, whatever, have asked that question. Why are you going up in the morning seeking it again? Look at all the trouble it's caused you. What are you gonna do?

And time immemorial, mankind has sought a cure for alcoholism. You know, Mohammed had an idea of a cure for alcoholism. The Quran recommends that a drunkard, they pour molten lead down your throat. I'll guarantee you, you're not gonna have a drinking problem after that one. And yet, friends of mine who, have been to Saudi Arabia tell me that there are meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous in Saudi Arabia, and they're not just attended by American workers over there.

I have personally been to a meeting with a with a good member of Alcoholics Anonymous from Afghanistan several years ago. He's passing through New Orleans. I got to talking to him. He's about 10 years sober now. Allah is his higher power.

You know, this God of our understanding has gone around the world and there's there's Alcoholics Anonymous everywhere. But threatened to form both and let down, didn't didn't do it. They they tried locking us up. They tried hanging us. That's another penalty under the under Islam, law for a for a drunkard is to hang you.

You see, they consider beheading a respectable way to die and hanging is reserved just for drugs just for drugs. And nobody ever had a solution. Nobody ever had a solution. It was viewed as, a criminal act and to some extent, society still views it that way. It was viewed the way that I looked at it as a personal weakness, as a moral failing.

You know, religion is preached against us. Doctors have tried to lecture us and pointed their fingers at us, said you're ruining your health and we kept drinking. The preachers and the priest have shaken their fingers at us and said, you know, you're you're going to hell, boss. And I had to drink even more to handle that that, you know, time immemorial. Nothing has ever worked.

The first person to ever suggest that alcoholism might be something more than a moral failing, might be something more than a criminal problem was one of the signers of the declaration of independence of the United States of America. His name is doctor Benjamin Rush, and he was quite a character. He was a he was a doctor in, Philadelphia. He became the 1st surgeon general of the United States. And in the year 17/90, he wrote a little little pamphlet.

Now I have read this pamphlet. And it's only 7 or 8 pages long. But he said in there, in effect, all this stuff about this being a moral problem just doesn't make sense to me since I've observed a lot of he called them chronic drunkards. And he said, that just doesn't seem to explain it. He says they all seem to act the same.

He says there there seems to be some something different going on with them than there does with people who can take it or leave it alone, even those who get drunk occasionally who who drink. There seems to be something different. He says, I think these perhaps are sick people. I think this is some some form of illness. And he first suggested that in 17/90, but nobody paid a whole lot of attention to it because there was no solution.

You know, in the early part of 19th century, temperance movements arose. You know, they said, well, we're gonna solve the drinking problem by banning alcohol. Well, most folks didn't think too much of that, but within a 100 years, we had prohibition in this country. We actually in 1919 outlawed the importation and sale of spiritus liquors of all alcoholic beverages. Did that stop us from drinking?

Hell, no. We drank more. Read doctor Bob's story in the big book. He says when the prohibition experiment came along, he thought, well, now that it's illegal and I can't get very much of it, it'd be alright for me to drink. Because, obviously, I couldn't get drunk because there's not gonna be enough of it around.

So he stocked up his cellar with beer and started drinking. Now if you understand that kind of thinking which James understands, you understand why laws against drinking simply don't work. You know, there were various experiments that were tried. In 18/40, some guys almost figured the deal out. In 18/40, there were a few guys sitting around the bar at, at Chase's Tavern in Baltimore, Maryland, And they were all in a lot of trouble.

These were all just, middle class, you know, one one had a a wagon shop. 1 was a a little construction business. Another had a store. A couple of guys in there were currently unemployed because they drank their way out of it. And they were all having trouble at home and they said, is there some way that we could do something about this deal?

You know, we we just we just can't seem to stop drinking. And one of them, we don't know which one it was suggested. Well, maybe if we helped each other maybe if we helped each other, we could we could not pray. I said, yeah. That's a great idea.

We're gonna help each other. We're gonna help each other. Well, temperance pledge is real popular at that time. You know, you'd sign a pledge that you were never ever gonna drink again as long as you live. And so they drew up a little temperance pledge and they signed it.

But they came up with one other additional idea. They said, let's go out and grab some other guys and bring them in and bring them in to our next meeting. Let's have a meeting here. Let's meet again here next week and see if we've been able to go a week without a drink. So the next week, each guy was commissioned to bring at least 1 person back.

So the next week instead of 6, they had 12 and the next week they had 24 and and pretty soon they were bringing people in and became fantastically successful. It was one drunk talking to another. You know, sounds a little bit like alcoholics anonymous. And it grew like wildfire. You know, at the end of the 4th 1st year, it spread to other cities.

They had maybe 4, 5000 members at the end of the 1st year. By the end of the 2nd year, they had one meeting in Boston that drew 13 thousand people to that meeting. They were holding torchlight parade. There were articles in the paper about them and they had named themselves the Washingtonians. And they've done that because George Washington was a big hero of the day and everybody looked down on drunkards, so they figured they adopted a famous man's name.

They wouldn't, they'd have something that they could sell to the public. They were very evangelistic movement. I mean, they they just went out, you know, AA would do it a little Steve's out there laying in the gutter. You know, if he lives, we'll get him. You know, they went out and and just pulled you off the bar stools and pulled you out of the gutter, brought them into the meeting.

They would have regular meetings spread like wildfire. And by the end of the 2nd year, they probably had 50 or 60,000 members in the United States. And you gotta remember that the country only had about 30,000,000 people in it at the time. It was maybe a 10th the size that it was it was right now. You know, at the end of 5 years, we only had, we only had a 100 people.

I mean, people are coming to this thing like crazy. In 18/42, they decided to celebrate their 2nd anniversary so they decided to ask some famous people to come and speak at their events. And at the gathering in Illinois, they asked a rising young lawyer there named Abraham Lincoln to come and address the meeting of the Washingtonian Society. And I've seen a copy of his speech there. It is truly remarkable.

It's really remarkable. Because what he says in there, he says, you know, he made this wise observation. He says, you know, drinking must do something more for you than it seems to do for me. You seem so much more interested in it. He says, I'm I'm not I'm I'm no teetotaler.

I I drink occasionally. But when I want you drinking, when I listen to you talk about your drinking, it's much more important to you. It seems to do something for you that it doesn't do for me. Amazingly wise observation from a from a non from a non alcoholic. And it certainly fits in with James' experience because I drink for what alcohol did for me and to hell with whatever it did to me.

And he further went on to say, I guess it's maybe, that's only you drunkards, one drunkard will understand another drunkard. Another amazingly wise observation. It looked as though they had found part of the answer to alcohol in the early 1840. The lowest estimate by 18 45 of the members of the Washingtonian Society is 250,000. Within 5 years, they had 250,000.

The highest estimate is 500,000 to 600,000. Now, remember, this is a country 10 times smaller than it is today. By 18/48, there was one group left in the country and within a few years nobody had even heard of. What happened? What happened?

We're gonna really get into this tradition. Basically, they collapsed. Within a period of about 3 years, they collapsed. First of all, they got the idea that every well meaning spiritual movement that's ever been on the face of the earth seems to have. Gosh, if we can do this much for alcoholics, think what we can do for all of the other ills of society.

Think what we can do for the people who are addicted to drugs at the time. And there were drugs and no cocaine, you know, no, no heroin, but there was opium and there was a lot of them. I thought, well, look what we could do for the people who have other moral failing to who, look at what we can do for society itself, you know, and it's like proslavery and antislavery was a big issue at the time. And some of the Washingtonians became proslavery and some became antislavery. And where the Texas would be admitted to the union was a big deal at the time.

And some became for it and some became against it. And they were getting their names in the newspaper. And they didn't practice anonymity and a couple of the leaders of the movement got drunk after about 5 years and all of a sudden that was splashed all over the papers. And the whole thing just collapsed. It just collapsed.

And they also didn't have a real spiritual program of recovery. They could get sober just by one drunk talking to another, but they didn't have any program of recovery. They didn't have the 12 steps. They vaguely said that it had something to do with spiritual and they talked a lot about god and about religion at their meetings. But when one Presbyterian would start talking about his religion, the Catholics in the audience would get a resentment and the Methodist would.

When a Baptist would get up, the Lutherans would get mad. When the would get up, everybody would get mad. I'm an episcopalian. You know, I'm sort of Catholic like, you know. It's sort of Catholicism without the guilt.

You know, they I say whenever whenever 4 Episcopalians are gathered together, there's always a 5th. You know? So they had problems of money, politics, religion, and everything. It just fell apart. Promises start.

Didn't happen. The rest of 19th century, there was really no solution. Few little movements got started here and there. Religious people tried to sober stuff. There have been some time in memorial Christian missions trying to preach us sober.

And they all succeed. They always succeed. Nobody actually takes a drink while you're in the mission. You know, think about that problem. You guys been in the missions.

The problem is staying sober when you're in the mission. The problem is staying sober when you're in jail. The problem is not staying sober when you're in the jitter joint or the treatment center or the nut house. Problem was what happens when you leave out of there? No places like that make me thirsty.

I have to have a drink to reflect upon the experience. You know? I've been saved a few times. I've been sprinkled. I've been dumped.

I've I've got saved at a Billy Grand Proof site. All just made me thirsty. I drink on the way home. Just think about it. You know?

Tried everything. Nothing much had happened. And the result is in, the first public health statistics that we have in this country about early 1890s which are remarkably consistent with any public health statistics you would find from the year 2000 suggest that only 1 or 2% of the what they call then chronic drunkards ever found a way to stop drinking for any period of time. 1st public health statistic in this country, 1893. 1 to 2% of chronic drunkards, what they what we call today, alcoholics, ever stopped drinking.

Statistics. 1990, early nineties, last we have available. About without Alcoholics Anonymous, about 1 to 2% of alcoholics find a way to stop drinking for any period of time without alcoholic anonymous. The only thing that's changed is alcoholic synonymous. So how do we get started?

So how do we get started? It's a remarkable story. It's a story of some remarkably different sorts of guys, gals got together and it's a series of things that I guess if you weren't a member of Bylaw Comics anonymous, you would call coincidences. I prefer to call them god incidences. I can I can see the hand of a higher power operating through these things?

So let me set the stage for you. Let's go back to say 1912, 90 about 90 years ago. And a little there's a little town called Manchester, Vermont. It's not a very large town. It's probably not much larger than, say, this little tourist town up here of, Julian, We're right outside of.

But it's a resort town. There's there's a lake there called Emerald Lake. And, evidently, it's a very pretty place and it's in the green mountains of Vermont. Probably looks a lot like this this camp and the lakes that we've seen around there. And a lot of the wealthy and powerful people like the the lake homes there.

So they would come from from New York State and from other parts of New England and buy themselves some nice houses around there. It was a summer resort. You know, nobody wanted to be there in the winter because it was just all all snow and ice. But it was an incredibly popular summer resort. From over and over in New York, the Thatcher family built a, built a house in Manchester, Vermont.

And the Thatcher's were very prominent. They owned a company that, manufactured the wheels and the undercarriage is for railroad cars. And, of course, railroads were the primary form of transportation. Abby Thatcher's grandfather was mayor of of of of Albany, New York. His brother later became mayor of Albany, New York.

They were wealthy. They were powerful. The city park in in, Albany is called Thatcher Park. Wealth and the powerful came there. From Rhode Island came the Hazard family.

Rhode Island came the Hazard family. An old family in in the Hazards and the Perrys. One of the heroes of the American revolution enabled heroes, Oliver Hazard Perry. You know, the Perrys and the Hazards kept intermarrying and, Roland Hazard's family had a summer home there. And they were really wealthy people.

They were companies that we'd recognize today. They owned Burlington Mills. You know, people who make the carpet. They owned out what became Allied Chemical Company. They were big bucks then.

They are. Big bucks now. Others with perhaps less money came up there. There was a doctor Burnham that came up from Brooklyn every every summer. He was a very respected doctor and, he would go up there in summer and and, a lot of his patients thought so much of him that they would go spend some time up there in the summer too just so they could stay around and burn them.

And he had a daughter named, Lois. He A daughter named Lois. And the Perrys and the Hazards had a son named Roland, and the Thatcher's had a son named Evie. And from about 15 or 20 miles away in the tiny hamlet of East Dorset, Vermont came a guy named Bill Wilson. Came a guy named Bill Wilson.

And Bill's daddy had left a couple of years before. Bill's daddy drank a bit, and he and his mother, had split up. He had left and gone out to British Columbia. And divorce wasn't very common in those days. Bill reports that he felt really different and isolated because his folks had gotten a divorce.

And his grandparents were raising him and they did a damn fine job. But about 1912, they sent him to academy in, in Manchester, Vermont. And, which was a private school. And, you know, you can read the story in the in the big way. Now, look, where do I get all this where do I get all this information?

Where do I get all this information? It's it's a literature. Well, the best kept secrets in Alcoholics Anonymous. Alcoholics Anonymous comes of age. This is a fascinating book.

It's a great story. Well, it's all about I mean, we sell millions of big books. We sell about 30,000 of these a year. We got 3,000,000 members worldwide. It's a good story.

I recommend it. The prefaces and forwards in the book I'll call it synonyms give us some of our history. The book, the language of the heart, published by the Grapevine which is a collection of all the articles that Bill Wilson ever wrote that have appeared in the Grapevine. Great stories in here. Great stories in here.

I usually bring, but since I was flying on the plane, I usually bring about a dozen or 15 books of these deals, you know, and, but I can only carry so many on the airplane, you know. And, doctor Bob and the good old timers tells a story of doctor Bob and how things got started in Akron. The book Pass It On is the biography of Bill Wilson. You can read these things. They're all good stories.