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

Okay, everybody. Let's let's, can I ask you to join me in a moment of silence? God. Just get ourselves centered. Let's invite God into this deal.

Oh, are you are you? Just have a moment of silence. Let's get centered and invite God into this deal. Okay? Hey, everybody.

I'm James. I'm an alcoholic. Welcome back for the afternoon session. We lost a few. 1 of the jitter joints took their clients up for a hike someplace.

Think hiking's got a pretty poor record of keeping folks over, but, I guess maybe if somebody's talking about traditions this afternoon, they wanna go take a hike. I want you to look you know, I go to a lot of these events. I go to a lot of roundups and conventions. I mean, a lot. I love these things.

I love these retreats. And it's funny how on Saturday night, the crowd's always 4 times what it is on Sunday morning. Same thing, you know, here we lost a lot of people. But I tell you what, if you want somebody that's gonna save your life, you don't look around at the Saturday night crowd. That's got the body shoppers and the social climbers and whatever else.

You look around on Sunday morning and see who shows up on Sunday morning. It's the same thing this afternoon. Look around. We're the people that are supposed to be here. We're listen.

I can go out there and expect to get half drunk. I was a mad dog alcoholic. I wanted everything that was out there, and I wanted it in doubles. And when I got into this program, I wanted the same thing. I wanted the whole deal.

I wanted to be with you people. I had this hunger and this thirst. You know, the carpenter said many years ago, he said, blessed are they who hunger and thirst for they should be filled. I'll tell you what. He was talking about alcoholics.

You know, he didn't seem to have much use for the lukewarm people, and I don't either. You know, give me a man that's hungry and thirsty, and that describes alcoholics. Describes alcoholics. We had this thirst. Bill Wilson, writing some years afterwards, and you remember we left him drunk down there on Clinton Street still.

We're gonna get back to him in just a second. Writing a few years later after he got a little clear insight. And he described us alcoholics as rebellious nonconformist, unable or unwilling to conform to the laws of God or man. Now can anybody in this room identify with that? Yeah.

Tell me you can't, and I'll show you. Just in a sec. Just out of pure perversity. Just the way we are. It's the way we're put together.

Bill was in exactly the same shape in late November 1934 as James was in in that first year and a half in AA. You You've heard the expression of having a head full of AA and a belly full of booze. When you're sitting at the booshary bar trying to explain to Gus the bartender about 12 steps and you're ordering doubles, and he's looking at you like you're from another damn planet. You know? Tell me more about that.

Give me a double, Gus. You know? And Bill was in exactly that same position those last, that last week of November and the 1st week of December of 1934 because Abby had carried a message to him. Abby carried a message in 2 ways. First of all, Abby was sober.

Bill knew Abby was a drunk. They had been drunk together since they were late teenage years. You know, Bill started drinking when he was about about 19 or 20. Abby's, been drinking earlier than that. They had many drugs together.

One time they even, and it's mentioned in the literature, they'd even chartered an airplane that heard the Manchester, Vermont was gonna open its airport and, so they decided they wanted to be the first ones to fly in there so they found a pilot. And, the the pilot was already having a few drinks so they bribed him with a with a $20 bill and a 5th of whiskey to fly them in there so they could beat all the other airplanes and and get in there and be the 1st plane to land there. Well, they drank the 5th of whiskey on the way over there from, from Albany, New York. And, by the time they had come time to land, the, mayor was out there. The high school band was out there.

They were cursing because they were gonna have the formal landing of the first plane the next day. So instead here, this plane comes in, and it's gonna be the 1st plane to land. And it lands, and and the band's playing, and the mayor's cheering, and everybody said we gotta play today ahead of time. But Bill falls out of the cockpit. Eddie falls out of the cockpit.

The pilot falls out of the cockpit. Hell, they're all drunk. They're all drunk. This is the kind of guys we're dealing with. You know?

And talking about any Thatcher, we got a newcomer here, Kevin. Where are you, Kevin? There you are. There you are. Who's from New York who has been drunk in Thatcher Park in Albany, New York.

Ain't that right? Yeah. Yeah. It's just a good place to drink. Good place to drink.

Yeah. You're in the right place, Kevin. So So Eddie was sober. As it says in our book of experience, Bill had never seen him in that condition. Just never seen it that way.

Never seen it that way. We've all had the experience, and it's a powerful experience to see somebody maybe not all of us. You know? I didn't have that experience really until I've been sober a couple of years running into somebody that I've known, drunk, and then they were sober. And and it's incredible experience when you see it.

I remember running into Mike, guy who was behind Lewis, rather, who was a couple years behind me in school, and I didn't recognize him. I literally didn't recognize him. Gone to high school. He was a couple years behind me. Known him for years.

He looked like a completely different person, and he had a couple years sobriety. So that was the first impact. The second impact was that Abby had carried to Bill a message that there's a way out. Bill had been trying to find a way out. He'd been going to the town's hospital.

The town's hospital was the fanciest drying out joint in the country then. It was the Betty Ford Center of the 19 thirties. If you were rich, if you were famous, if you had a buck, you went to town's hospital. Toniest address you're gonna find. I mean, that's expensive real estate right right in there.

You know? And, the only way he could get in there, because Bill was broke, was his brother-in-law, doctor Leonard Strong, who had married Bill's sister, happened to be a very successful doctor and happened to know Charlie Townes who had the hospital. So Townes was, putting Bill on the cuff to to put him in there because, doctor Strong was a good friend of his. And, still, I just found out the other day that doctor Strong is still alive today, Bill's brother-in-law. He's in a nursing home in New York.

He's, like, a 102 years old, but he's still alive. I I know that. But, he played a very important part in our family because he got Bill in the jitter joint. You know? And in there, Bill got a message carried to him.

You know, we had talked earlier about doctor Benjamin Rush saying alcoholism may be some kind of an illness. There may be something wrong with these people. They may not just be moral lepers. They might not just be, essentially, evil people. There may be something wrong with them.

That idea kinda floated around, and nobody had ever really been able to latch onto it. When the stock market crashed in 1929, sort of like what happened to our dotcom stocks here a year or 2 ago, you know, and everybody went broke, there was a, a New York neurologist named, doctor, William Silkworth who, was very, very well-to-do. Lost every nickel he had in the stock market crash of 29. Had semi retired, so he didn't have a medical practice left. Went to work for Charlie Townes for something like 30 or $40 a week.

You know, doctors weren't make a lot of money in those days. In fact, if you had a job at all, a third of the country was unemployed. One third of the people did not have any kind of a job whatsoever. It was tough times. Sorkor went to work for Charlie Townes there because it was a respectable job, and, he didn't have any experience in that field, but he quickly gained some.

He became in a parlance the little doctor who loved drugs. For some reason, he really attached to us. He wanted to he he but he kept treating us time after time after time, and we all kept showing back up drunk again. He'd get somebody sober and, keep him in there for a week or couple of weeks, and and then they'd come back again. Doctor Silkworth was later to write a paper.

He's a very prominent doctor. He was to later write a paper in the late 19 forties where he described the 40,000 alcoholics that he had treated over the in previous 20 years. 40,000. His estimate was and you remember that estimate before for public health services? That 1 to 2% of those drunks ever achieved any kind of sobriety except for Alcoholics Anonymous.

But in the meanwhile, doctor Silkworth was a bright guy. Smart guy. He had observed these drunks, and it finally was occurring to him because he'd see guys get drunk, not just when things went bad, they seemed to get drunk when things went good. You know, the only thing worse for an alcoholic than adversity is prosperity. You know, we get drunk in the good times and drunk in the bad times.

Doesn't much matter. You know? Get drunk when nothing's going on. It started to occur as he observed 1 drunk after another drunk after another drunk that there was some physical factor at work in alcoholics that wasn't at work in anybody else. Somehow they seemed to react differently to alcohol.

Somehow Somehow alcohol seemed more important to them, seemed to do more to them, more for them, and he came up with a theory that, and he called it an allergy. Discussed in the doctor's opinion in our big book. And an allergy is nothing more than an abnormal reaction to a food or a drug. You know, if 95% of the people on the face of the earth can can eat cucumbers and 5%, like myself, get acute terrible indigestion immediately from even a cucumber that's part of a salad that I'm eating and go into this horrible indigestion, then I'm allergic to cucumbers. The rest of the population is not allergic.

I just have an abnormal reaction. Most of you out there can eat cucumbers. I discovered that when I was in my late twenties. Cucumbers don't work well with me. Guess what I did?

I stopped eating cucumbers. I have never had to go to cucumbers and olives. I did not have to get a cucumber sponsor. I have never obsessed over cucumbers in the middle of the night. I just didn't do any more cucumbers.

No? So, of Earth, on the other hand, noticed the alcoholics kept going back to it time and time and time again. He said, I know there's something physically wrong with these guys. It isn't just a middle failing. When when they take a drink, they develop what's called phenomenon of craving.

There's something in their body that's demanding more alcohol, and it doesn't happen with the rest of the the drinking populace. When they say they've had enough, they really mean they've had enough. When they say they're out of control, they're feeling uncomfortable and out of control. They stop. They really are.

They don't know about that what we talked about earlier, that promised land on the other side of out of control, which is, yeah. I never had that feeling in my life. No matter how drunk I was, if I couldn't get up off the floor, I still felt I was in control of the situation. So, physical abnormality, and then he said they had something he called a mental obsession. An obsession is an idea that's so powerful that it crowds out every other idea.

Every other idea. Think back to your first great lust. Susie or Mary or whatever her name was. You just can't think about anything else. You just can't think about it.

God just just, you know, just just got you all the time. You know? He just and he said it was something like that. It was an idea that crowded out every other idea. So he got the idea that there was an obsession of the mind.

He didn't know where it came from, but he said these these people are obsessed. And, when they take any alcohol at all, and he'd come up today, they have to drink more and they drink and drink until they until they get drunk. He conveyed these ideas to Bill. Bill understood them intellectually. He understood them intellectually.

He understood he wasn't supposed to drink. Bill's last drunk started, when he was on a bus and he's explaining all this to a guy that was on the bus with him. The bus had an accident. Stomped. They went into a bar.

He's still explaining. The guy had been explaining to says you must be crazy. You tell me you're gonna go crazy or die if you drink. Are you crazy? Bill said, yeah.

I must be. Yeah. I must be. Ever had that feeling? James said that feeling.

So here's Bill with a he he has the knowledge. He knows what's wrong with him. Doctor Silkworth has described the illness described the illness, but he doesn't have a plan of recovery. He doesn't have any any way out of it. He doesn't know.

Here Abby shows up and says, I got a religion. He'll say, oh, shit. You got what? I got religion. But, Bill, you figure out your own concept of god.

Mainly, I've just done these simple things. And what he was doing was giving him a head full of AA. Oh, they wouldn't call that at the time, but he had a belly full of booze. Bill was in torment for the next 2 weeks. And Abby came back to see him.

He Bill kept drinking, kept drinking. Finally, it occurred to Bill that he had to try this thing. He had to try this thing. And on December 11th of of 1934, Gold managed to get 3 bottles of beer on credit at the local grocery store, and the only reason he got 3 is that's all the guy had given him. That was the limit of his credit.

He got on the subway and he went to went back to town's hospital. And he showed up there drinking the last beer, waving the beer bottle, and telling doctor Silkworth, doc, I found something. Doc Stilworth said, yeah. It sure looks like you have. Go upstairs and go to bed.

Silkworth's thinking, oh, here's that poor guy back again. You know, this is the guy that's, I'd hoped so much for but he ain't gonna make it. He ain't gonna make it. And Bill goes up there and they sober him up over the next, the next day or so. Abby shows up.

Abby hears he's in there. Bloyce called Abby and told him this. And, Bill says, would you repeat that simple little formula to me? And Eddie tells him once again, he says, well, we just try we just admit we're licked. We, try to get honest with ourselves in a way that we never have before and we find that the only way we can do that is by talking our case over in confidence with somebody else and we try to make restitutions for any harms we've done and, we go try to help somebody without any hope of any reward or payment and, we pray to whatever god there might be for help in in doing this.

Bill's turning this over in his head. He's thinking I can do all this, but I can't pray. I just don't believe in a personal god. I just don't believe in it. You know, you've offered me a way out that I can't get.

And I can identify with Bill on this. You know, I could believe in a remote God, a God that had that started the universe off, that it sort of like, General Motors. You know? They had made my Chevrolet. They'd shipped it down to Louisiana, but, they weren't gonna honor the warranty.

It was out of warranty. You know, don't don't expect any help from up there. And they was talking to him about a personal god. And Bill lay in torment in his hospital room midday, December 14th 1984, and you can read the story in in our book Alcoholics Anonymous. You can listen to it on, tapes.

He tells it especially well in that talk back there at Georgia in 1951 that Virgil has. You can find in the book Pass It On, wonderful biography of Bill Wilson. Wonderful biography. Bill lay there in torment, and finally, he was so depressed. He he had reached the absolute bottom because he saw no way out of it, And he cried out, god, if if if you're there, show yourself to me.

And Bill recounts that the room lit up, that he felt a presence, a spirit. He felt he'd been lifted to a mountaintop, and that a clean wind, not of, of wind, but a spirit was blowing through He made this remarkable statement then and in every other time he made the talk. He said, I felt I was a free man at last. I felt a free man at last. And he thought, this must be the God of the preachers.

He has what what is called a true spiritual experience. God came and visited Bill in that hospital room. Bill never knew how long that lasted. It could last a few minutes or 30 minutes or however long it lasted. I don't know.

But it it eventually subsided. And this is how quickly the ego comes back, you know, and he's laying there and he's thinking, my god. I'm I'm maybe I went crazy. Maybe I had a hallucination. And he sent for doctor Silkworth who came in to visit him.

And doctor Silkworth came in and Bill said, look. This is this is what happened. Am I crazy, doctor? Am I crazy? Our fate held to the balance at this point.

Was hell was hung in the balance because, most of the doctors I'd known were slap your ass full of Thorazine and, said, you know, don't worry about it. You'll feel better tomorrow. But doctor Silkworth, the little doctor that loved drunks, looked deeply into Bill's eyes and said, Bill, I don't know what happened to you, but I do know that I see something in you that I have never seen before. And whatever it is, it's so much better than you had just a few hours ago. Whatever it is, hang on to it.

Hang on to it. Doctor Silkworth validated Bill's Bill's experience because he was a wise and good and loving man who cared for this Bill Wilson who was on the bed in front of him. He cared for him. He cared for him as much as we care one for the other, one for the other. When this thing happened the next day, Abbie shows up again and, because he knows Bill's still in the hospital, doesn't know Bill's had this experience.

And Abby's carrying a book with him. In the Oxford group at the time, they had a number of groups, books that they that they were reading that were being written around around that time and, some that had been being written earlier. But one of their favorite books was this book right here. The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James. This is the only book which is mentioned in our big book, The Alcoholic Synonymous.

It's mentioned in chapter 2. It's the only other book that's mentioned in our in our book. Ebby had this book because Roland Hazard, who was sort of his quasi sponsor in the Oxford group, had made Ebby get it, made him go down to the public library much, you know, think about it, guys, just like your sponsor's done to you sometimes. Go get that book and read it. You know?

Well, he had told Eddie, go get that book and read it. I've just been grinding him about reading. So Eddie finally goes and gets the book. Eddie does not wanna read this book. Eddie's on a visit to Bill.

Eddie's got this book in his hand. He's thinking, and he gets this thought talking to Bill. Well, maybe if I got Bill to read it, it'd be sort of like me reading it. Here, Bill. Read this book.

Well, I mean, you can understand that thought process. Can't you? No. Well, Bill don't have much better else to do so he starts reading this book. And I wanna tell you, this is one of the truly extraordinary books of of all time.

William James, just as Freud and, Adler and and Carl Jung are considered the founders of psychiatry, William James is considered one of the founders of the science of psychology. He was a professor from the late 1900. He was one of the truly great men. He, came up with this school of psychology or philosophy called pragmatism. In other words, look at something and see whether it works or not, which is a brilliant American viewpoint approach.

You look at that. That's the test that we use in America. Does it work or not? That was his idea. And in 18/99, William James was invited to give this different series of lectures in, University of Edinburgh, Scotland, which was virtually the equivalent in 18 99 of receiving the Nobel Prize.

It was the most prestigious thing you could get a hold of. It carried a big chunk of money with it. And once a year, they'd hire they had, awarded this prize to somebody. They'd come in and give a series of lectures. And the series of lectures William James chose to give was a different way of looking at religious experiences.

A different way of looking at it. Before William James, any book you get on religion, usually starts from a point of view. It may start from the Catholic point of view. It may start from the Baptist point of view. It may start from the Mohammedan point of view, but it all starts from a point of view.

Looks at man's religious experience according to the whoever the author's idea of how it ought to be in the first place. When James took a different thing, he says, wait a minute. Let's look at what's actually happened to people who have reported that they've had vital spiritual experiences or religious experiences, and he uses spirit religious here in the same sense we use spiritual. He says, let's look at what happened to him. Let's see what they reported.

Let's see whether it did anything in their lives afterwards to see if these spiritual experiences were real. He goes through this book and examines spiritual experiences that have been recorded throughout history. You know, he talks about what happened to Saint Augustine, what happened to Saint Teresa of Avila, what happened to Booth who founded the Salvation Army, Wesley who founded the Methodist movement, Saint Paul. You know, I I personally, I kind of identify with Saint Paul. I think he was one of us.

I mean, look at it this way. He was taking a geographic cure to Damascus. He fell off his ass, or donkey or whatever he was riding. He heard voices. He saw visions.

He was struck blind. You know? And so maybe he was one of us. I don't know. But it changed his life.

Changed his life. He took a whole different course, and that was the point that William James made. William James said these spiritual experiences are 2 different varieties. 2 different varieties. Some of them happened very suddenly, like Paul on the road to Damascus or Bill in the hospital room.

But some of these spiritual experiences developed slowly over a period of time. He called those the educational variety that they develop over a period of time. But he said there's a common denominator in all of these experiences. You have to have some preconditions. You're not gonna have a spiritual experience unless you have a lot of pain in your life, unless some calamities happen to you, unless you're in a in a in a blind alley.

You've reached a point where you can't seem to get out of where you are under your own resources, And he called that deflation of depth. He called it deflation of the ego at depth. That'd be one of the vital thing. There had to be a simultaneous transmission of hope at the same time. Now, would you reach a point where you couldn't get out of it?

You you were in terrible shape, but you're not gonna surrender at that point. You can get despairing and you can kill yourself or you can die or you can break yourself to death, and we've all seen people do that. There has to be simultaneously the transmission of hope. Abby coming to build. Me going to my first meeting about politics and arms.

That's why the steps 1 and 2 are so intimately related. I, James, could not take step 1 until I had come come to and come to believe that maybe y'all believed in something, that I saw a way out. You see? There has to be a way out. Deflation at depth plus some transmission of hope.

And that's what happened. Bill read that, and Bill said, and listen. This guy, William James, had an understanding of alcoholics. Now this book wasn't really about alcoholics, although a couple of the people who reported here were alcoholics who had this this experience. See if you can't identify with this.

Varieties of religious experience. This is William James talking. The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature. Usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. Think about that.

Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no. Drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. It is in fact the great exciter of the yes function in man. It brings its votary from the chill periphery of things to the radiant core. It makes him for the moment one with truth.

Not do not through mere perversity do men run after it. To the poor and the unlettered, it stands in the place of the symphony concerts and of literature, and it is part of the deeper mystery and tragedy of life that whiffs and gleams of something that we immediately recognize as excellent. And he goes on to say it should be granted to us only in the earlier phases of what in effect becomes a poisoning. He he he understood what this he talks about what alcohol did for us, for some people, those that it did the thing for. Doesn't do it for everybody, you know, but it seems to do it for alcoholics.

The world is full of crazy people. I've been in some nut houses. After I get sober for a little while, I wanna run the joint. I'm an alcoholic. I get questions asking they're like, what are you doing in here?

What are you doing in here? You know, because after a couple of days we we seem very, very normal. It's easy to tell what's wrong with them. They may not know where they are or what day it is or something like that. But alcohol doesn't get them out of their problem.

Got me out of my problem like that. Got me right out of it. You know? That's the difference between this regular intense neurotic or emotionally crazy person and the alcoholic. You know, the difference between a neurotic and a and a psychotic.

Psychotic, you know, is completely out of touch reality. Psychotic thinks 2 +2 equals 5. The neurotic, the alcoholic, knows that 2 +2 equals 4, but he just worries us a great deal. Just don't like it fitting together like that. You know?

I'm comfortable with it. I have a drink and think about it. So this is where we are, and this is where Bill was. And he finds in this book a validation of his spiritual experience. Everybody else in this book, virtually, who had had that spiritual experience connected it with religion.

Paul went off to, in effect, found Christianity to the to the gentiles. Saint Augustine, left the hookers and the and and the ballrooms and everything and became one of the great saints of the Catholic church. Booth became the founder of the Salvation Army. Wesley started the Methodist church. You know, they they identified it with religion.

Bill identified it with Evie the drunk coming to talk to him, and his thought that day that that next afternoon as he's reading this book is maybe I can help other alcoholics. Maybe I could take this thing to others. You know, this has been brought to me. I'm a free man. I feel free for the first time in my life.

I'm gonna go help other alcoholics. That was his thought. He gets out of the hospital, and most of us had this experience when we finally get sober. God, we just wanna go out and sober up the world. You know?

We just wanna go grab people and say, hey. Look. I found it. You know? But Bill was was worse than he ever.

I mean, he got out of there and he started going to these Oxford group meetings and telling them about this great white flash that happened. Oh, the room lit up, you know, and everything. And they were saying, oh, that's really nice, Bill. That's really nice. So Bill starts going around the ballrooms around in New York City and pulling drugs off the stool and saying, you know, you you gotta get sober.

The room lit up. They start saying, oh, man. Yeah. Go go away. Go away.

Right. The next 5 months, Bill would drag drunks home, try to sober them up. They'd get drunk again. He god, he just had the worst time. Not one of them got sober.

Not one. And Bill is just preaching for everything. You know, he's just doing everything he can. And, finally, right at the end of April of 1935, Bill's about 4 and a half, 5 months sober. He comes home one day, and he's really, really discouraged.

And he says, I thought this thing was gonna work. Tells us to Lloyd. He says, why? He says, I thought this thing was gonna work. He says, god visited me, and and I've been out, and not one single person is sober right now.

This thing doesn't work. And Lloyd says, why, Bill, you are so ungrateful. Don't you realize that it does work? Bill says, what do you mean it doesn't work? Nobody's sober.

Bill, you're sober. We've been married for 17 years since the first time you've ever been sober. It's kept you sober. Bill gives the alcoholic answer like, oh, oh, okay. Bill goes and talks to doctor Silkworth and and tells him he's strong.

You know? The boys won't listen to his whining. You know? We all do that. You know?

Our sponsor won't listen to our whining. We'll go find somebody else's wine too. So he goes and whines to doctor Silkworth saying, I thought this thing was gonna work. Doctor Silkworth says, Bill, you've been preaching to these guys. You've been going in there and telling them the room lit up.

Go ahead and talk to them about your own experience. Tell him about your drinking. Talk to him about the fact that alcoholism is a disease. Tell him they're gonna die, Bill. Don't tell him the room lit up.

Hit him with the god stuff later. Bill says, oh, okay. Well, Bill didn't have a chance to do much about that because about this time, you know, he's broke. Wife's working. Been sober 4 or 5 months.

Everybody, Linden Strong, all the rest of them are putting the pressure on him. Go to work. Go to work. Go to work. And so he hears this opportunity to go out to Akron, Ohio.

There's a proxy fight going on. They're trying to get enough shares together, for a rebel group to take over the national tire, tire equipment manufacturing company in in in Akron. They made molds that made tires, And they had a couple of patents that, way to press tires together in a certain way or something like that. So Bill says, well, I got a chance to do this plus his ego starts returning at this point. They're saying, Bill, you get the proxies on this deal, we're gonna make you president of the company.

You're gonna run this company. Bill starts thinking, wow. I'll make some money. I'll be alright. So he goes out there 1st week of May 1935, and, it's a very bitter proxy fight.

And it seems as though the, entrenched management, was able to overcome all the objections, and they beat him. They beat him. And all of a sudden, it's it's it's Saturday. It's May 11, 1935. They, the guys that brought him out there have left town.

His hotel bill is paid through Monday. He has $10 in his pocket. That's all. He's in the Mayflower Hotel in Akron, Ohio. Nice hotel.

Been there. Went to Akron for Founders Day 5 years ago. And once a year they let you back in, there's now senior citizen center. But in 1935, it was only about a year or so old. It was one of the few buildings built in the town during the depression.

Beautiful art deco time. So he's in a nice hotel in town but he ain't got no money. Room paid through Monday. And he's depressed and he's sad. Business has collapsed.

He doesn't know anybody in Akron. Knows nobody. It's about later on in the afternoon on Saturday, and he hears the people start to go into the Merryman Lounge. That was the name of their their bar. And he hears the tinkling of the ice being in the glasses, and he hears the laughter of people, and he sees a few good looking women in there.

They've always had an eye for a good looking woman. And he gets this crazy idea. He says, maybe I can go in there and have a ginger ale. Maybe I can go in there and have a ginger ale. God.

I mean, this guy you gotta remember now Bill Wilson has had god almighty himself in his in his hospital room 5 months before. And this is how quickly our ego returns, how quickly the illness returns. 5 months later, he's standing outside this bar thinking I could go in there and have a ginger ale. Well, as Brownie, an old timer in my area who's gone to her reward and gone to the big meeting used to say, you'd if you go into a whorehouse, don't expect to just get kissed. No.

We'll think about going in there, and then it occurs to him what Lloyd's had told him. You know, you've stayed sober this period of time by health working with another alcoholic. He thinks, where can I find another alcoholic? I don't know anybody in this town. He's wandering around the lobby, and he's going back and forth and back and forth.

And he notices a church directory there, and a name catches his attention. They always like strange names for some reason. And it was a reverend Walter Tunks, and he thought Tunks were my rhymes with drunks. I'm I'm gonna call Tungs to see if he knows any drunks. So he calls Tungs and says, do you know any drunks?

And Tungs says, I don't know any drunks, but then Bill explains to him he's a member of the Oxford group and he says, why don't you call Norman Shepherd? He's a local Oxford group man. He's not a a drunk himself, but maybe he can give you some names. So he calls this guy Norman Shepherd. Shepherd says, well, I'll give you the names of some people who might be able to put you in touch with some people.

He said, so he gives him a list of 10 names of somebody that might help him find the drone, and Bill goes down the list. Now here's the point. Up to this point, before my visit there at 97, I've identified intellectually with Bill. I've read his story many, many times. I've, I finally got around to where I could see myself in his story, but I've never identified on a gut level basis with.

There in 97, Charlie b and I were there at the, Bayflower Hotel, and and this story's coming through because, you know, here he's gone and looked at the hotel directory. He's finally decided he's gonna make these calls. He needs some change, and I start looking around. Now the the hotel the the lobby of the hotel is smaller. It's about the same size or smaller than this room.

Here's the church director over here. Here's the registration desk right here. Magazine stand over there. Bill could've gotten changed there. There There's the magazine stand over there.

Bill could've gotten changed there. There's the, little pharmacy, drugstore, and ocean shop right over here. He could've gotten changed there. Then you go up a couple of steps, there's a cigar and cigarette stand Bill could've gotten changed there. Now what does Bill, a good alcoholic, do though?

He passes all of those places up and goes into the bar, slaps a buck on the table and says give me 20 nickels. He does exactly what any good alcohol. I thought, my god, I would have done the same thing, you know. Bill is a real alcoholic. You know?

He had to have that last little taste of of of the deal in there. And he called the first nine people, and, oh, they didn't know anybody, or they said, well, we'll talk to you another time, or we'll see you in church on Sunday, and they just blew him off. What happened? Then he looked at the 10th name, and it said Henrietta Sibarling. He thought, my god.

I can't call the wife of the owner of the of the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company. Frank Sibarling was the owner of the Goodyear Tire. He thought Henrietta Sibarling was his was was his wife. And he agonized her, and he thought, I might get drunk if I don't. I'm gonna have to call her.

And when he called her up, he said, I'm a roam hound from from which is a term at the time. I was, a rum hound from New York and I'm looking for another drunk to work with and I'm an Oxford group member and and and I need a I need I need another drunk to talk to. And Henrietta gave him the damnest response. She says, well, of course, you do. And I have just the man.

And Doyle goes, And Henry said, I've been expecting your call. Bill, you could've knocked him over with a feather. Here's what had happened. In the local Oxford group, there was a doctor there, and his name was doctor Robert Holbrook Smith. Doctor Smith was, Bill at that time was 39.

Doctor Smith was about, 55. He was had one point been an extremely prominent doctor in the town, but he had become a drunk. You know, he's the guy that Prohibition started. He figured he couldn't get drunk during Prohibition, so he'd turned into an absolute drunk drinking during Prohibition. He had lost almost all of his practice.

He was exactly the right kind of doctor to be found Alcoholics Anonymous. You know, throughout history, men have speculated on where the seed of a man's soul is. You know, the Catholics think it's in the sacred heart of Jesus, and the Buddhists think it's in the that's the reason Buddha has a big belly. You know? They say the soul's in the belly.

Well, doctor Smith was a butt doctor. He was a proctologist, and I've come to believe in alcoholics anonymous that the soul is in the ass. Cause we save your ass and somehow your soul comes along with it. He knew exactly where alcoholic's brains were located. Yeah.

And, he couldn't get sober. He'd been going to the Oxford group for 3 years. He had fallen asleep drunk reading his Bible at night. He he he sensed something in him. He sensed that it was spiritual solution, but he couldn't get it.

He couldn't get it. And finally, 2 weeks before, he was operating on the same principle that most of us operated and nobody knows about. Having an Oxford group meeting at, t Henry, William's house, and he finally fesses up. Says, I'm a secret drinker. I know y'all don't know anything about it.

Of course, y'all knew about it. Y'all, they could smell him. You know? If you could smell him, you can tell him. And he says, I am a secret drinker, and I can't stop.

And would y'all pray for me? And they all got down on their knees and prayed for a solution, including Henrietta Seiberman. Henrietta Seiberman is one of these women of immense faith. You know, know, these kind of people you just kinda stand in awe of. You know?

They don't aren't in our program, but somehow they got a connection. You know? Like, my little grandmother in East Texas, boy, I knew she had connection. I never could get it, but I knew granny had it. Well, Henry had had it.

And when she had prayed for somebody to come help doctor Smith, she expected an answer to her prayer. So when Bill called up and said, I'm here because I need to talk to a drunk, she said, of course, you are. You come right on out to my house. So he goes out to the gatehouse at the Seiberling Estate, and the Seiberling Estate is one of the grandest states in the United States. When a and e did that series on castles in America, it was one of the deals that they they showed.

You know? It's just, whoo, mince thing. But Henrietta was not the wife of Seiberling who owned it. She was the daughter-in-law. And she and Seiberling's son had become divorced, but, Seiberling still liked her a lot, thought his son was a jerk for divorcing her, and had her living in the gatehouse, like, the interest of the estate.

Now the gatehouse itself is a a is a really nice 2 or 3 bedroom house, pretty pretty large, beautiful place. So she was living there with the with with the grandchildren, and Bill came out there, and she immediately gets on the phone, calls up Ann Smith, and says bring doctor Bob over. I found somebody who's got a solution for alcoholism. And says, well, I can't really bring him over right now. Tomorrow's Mother's Day, and he knows how much I like potted plants, and he has a potted plant for me.