The Northern Colorado Intergroup "DecaDance" in Fort Collins, CO

Thank you very much. This is I'm Mel Barker, an alcoholic, and really I'm terribly nervous tonight. The, I've been getting a great build up out here, and I I think, I think I've been oversold a little bit. But, this is really a nice just a nice group here tonight. I've been to 3 AA meetings since we got here Thursday, and this is just great.

This is the day I would have my regular meeting back in Toledo at 2 o'clock in the afternoon. I I belong to the Rab Road group out there. It's about 10 miles west of town out in the country. And I told him this morning at the meeting when I'm driving out there for our 2 o'clock Saturday afternoon meeting, there's no place in the world I'd rather be than right there. That's just something I feel.

Well, I've, I guess we start out by saying given our sobriety date, my sobriety date is April 15, 1950. And I tell people that I have 55 years of alcohol sobriety and 45 years of cigarette sobriety and 10 minutes of emotional sobriety. I got to be 80 years old somehow. I'm 80 years old. I'm I also say I'm so old that I can remember when a gay bachelor was a guy who chased women.

I I wanna thank you for this podium. I like a podium that covers me up in in case I forget to zip up. At at my age, I sometimes forget to zip down. I asked somebody, what do you do about that? And they said, well, it depends.

Well, you you met my wife, Lori, there, and we've we've been married 45 years. And I also tell people she's probably the only woman in the country that could put up with me for 45 years, although many of them would like me for one night. Well anyway, I would like to tonight I would like to tell my personal story and then just a few things about AA history that I learned. As Chad said, I I did know Bill Wilson. I didn't have a long friendship with him like that little blurb implied.

I did just I heard him speak for the first time in 51, and I think the last time I talked with Bill briefly was in 64, but over the years I met him a few times in the New York office and also heard him speak several times, and I took some pictures of him in 1958 at doctor Bob's gravesite in Akron. And those pictures, that one picture has been used in several books now, and I knew at the time that I took it that that's what was going to happen to it. You know, certain things you feel in the program, they just they just work out that way. But I had covered my story and I write limericks once in a while and I got a little bit of Irish background. I have 2 Irish great grandmothers That may be where I got my alcoholism, but I I don't have any resentment because that's where I also got my good looks.

But, anyway, this is my story in 12 limericks, 12 verses. A fearful young man from Nebraska drank amounts that would surely aghast you. He'd take any old slop and drink till he had dropped and finally fell on his asker. But that man from Nebraska got well. That's the story he now wants to tell.

He had loads of self pity and life was quite shitty, but AA took him out of that hell. He went to a place on a hill. It was run for the mentally ill. Some thought he was crazy and maybe just lazy or a chap just in search of a thrill. He admitted his problem was boozing.

It had gone past the point of mere choosing. He was hooked on the stuff and was now on his death, and booze was the cause of his losing. He learned that the problem in drinking was linked to the way he was thinking. He needed to hear how resentments and fear had made his life useless and stinking. Though his emotions were raw and still bleeding, he took time to start some good reading.

He started to look at AA's big book and found answers he had always been needing. He found that a god of his choosing could help him give up all that boozing. The book made it plain that he could abstain, though life might be tough and confusing. That man from Nebraska, still fearful, saw days that were far less than cheerful. But when he was bleeding, he went to a meeting and friends helpfully gave him an earful.

He learned to share secrets with others, with folks who were sisters and brothers. It gave them all gain, though sometimes with pain, and improved them as fathers and mothers. This fearful young man soon got better and escaped from John Barleycorn's fetter. He lives day by day and takes time to pray and follows the steps to the letter. He knows that his status in life and the love his of his children and wife is a gift from AA that came day by day and brought him from misery and strife.

He lives now in Ohio's glass city, a town that some folks might pity. Though some think it dull, his life is quite full and AA has made things quite pretty. I want to give my little, thanks to you very much. Thank you. Well, I'll still tell what happened in the, in the story.

I was born in Norfolk, Nebraska in 1925, and grew up there during the Depression. And I guess I grew up with a lot of resentments and self pity and fear, all of the things that go hand in hand with alcoholism. And I had, I guess, what would today would be called a dysfunctional family. My parents separated in the mid thirties. There was a lot of resentment and self pity about that.

I had an older sister who did very well and a younger brother who also did well, but I was in the middy, in the middle, and I was a really great underachiever. And it seemed that there was a barrier between me and other people. I didn't get along well with other kids, and, that was good. But one thing, it was kind of a benefit that I didn't get along with people because when as I became more dysfunctional, if anybody, any other kids had been planning on robbing a filling station or doing something bad like that, they wouldn't have invited me along. Even the guys who were in trouble didn't like me very well.

So that's, that's how I grew up. But when I was about 13 or 14, I got in some of my dad's wine, and boy, I found something. I didn't become a drunk overnight or anything like that, but right there I found something that registered that there was something that would give me a different feeling about myself and the world and everything else. And, I think my alcoholism started somewhere there. But I didn't, of course, become a drunk overnight or anything like that, but I went out fishing with an uncle and drank all of his beer.

And by 1941, I had dropped out of high school, and my dad and my stepmother were living out in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, which is just north here, north and east a little ways. I dropped out of school there and I just wasn't performing well at anything. And I finally got kicked out of you know my parents had custody fights about me. Each one wanted the other to take me. And I I wound up going down to Denver about early, maybe February, January February of 1942.

I was 16 years old. I dropped out of school and had about a year's credit in high school. I went to work in the Fitzsimmons General Hospital in Denver, and I discovered I could drink in their PX. They had beer in their PX, even though I was only 16 years old. I go in there and drink with the soldiers and other people who worked there.

And I worked at a few other places in Denver, and then around May or June, I went out to California. And I remember catching a ride with a guy out of Salt Lake City, and, he had a bottle. And he gave me 2 or 3 slugs out of his bottle, and then when I wanted another, he said, kid, you're one of those people who can't drink. Now there I was 16 years old and I didn't know it, but this guy who was probably a drunk himself had diagnosed me as an alcoholic. Well, I wound up spending a year in Vallejo, California.

I worked for a while at the Mare Island Navy Yard and other places around there. I had a habit of getting fired from jobs for not getting along well with people and also for not doing my work. But there in Vallejo, I discovered that's right near the Napa Valley. I discovered wine. Now you know there were goofy people around and somebody would say, He's a wino.

Well I didn't want to be a wino, but you know you could get a bottle of wine there for 25, 30¢. They had little neighborhood stores, and you could take a jar in and fill it up with wine out of a barrel in the bag for 15 or 20¢. So it was easy to become a wino, but I discovered after I got an AA that a wino is no different than a beer or a Whiskey O. We're drinking it for the alcohol that's in it. And so finally around March of, 43, I left Vallejo, went back to Nebraska, where my mother lived, and was there a couple months, and I was starting to drink, get drunk now and then, and find, find ways to find booze and so on.

And I got drunk one night and just really got beaten up badly. Now that was something that would happen to me every now and then. I was always hitting people on the fist with my nose after, when I'd been up there in Scottsbluff, after I dropped out of school on New Year's Eve, in 1941, a truck driver and his girlfriend had come in with some with a bottle, and I'd started drinking with him. And about midnight, he had knocked me into a snow drift. So these are things that happened to me.

Well, then in May of 1943, I joined the Navy, and I spent three and a half years in the Navy and 2 years of it out in the Western Pacific during, this was during World War 2. The actually, I don't know if there was any connection, but the war has started to turn in our favor the very month I missed it. And, they, I wound up on an amphibious ship. They called them LSTs. They were ships that would run right up on the beach.

They had bow doors and, they would disgorge tanks and weapons and everything else, trucks. And so I wound up getting 5 battle stars out in the Pacific. But, in fact, I was in Okinawa when the atomic bomb was dropped on this. But there was one incident that happened in the Navy. Now I did quite a bit of drinking, but one incident stood out.

We were anchored in the Philippines late March of 1945. We were all loaded up with troops and supplies and everything else. We knew we were leaving the next day. Well, they let half a third of the ship's company go ashore. This is a little island in the Philippines.

They had a little recreation area and they gave you 3 cans of beer. And, they gave it to you. They carried it on the ship. You couldn't drink it on the ship, but they gave it to you when you went ashore. So I went ashore, and as I got off the boat, the Liberty boat on the dock, a Filipino came up and he had his shirt stuffed with beer bottles.

And he said this was potato whiskey, and it was $5 a bottle, 10 pesos, I think. Well, I turned it down because we've been warned about this bad stuff that people were selling. And So I had my 3 cans of beer, another guy gave me his, and I bought 3 more, and then suddenly there was nothing more to drink on that beach. So I look up the potato whiskey man and I bought bought his bottle and I remember buying one more. And then the next thing I knew it was 4 o'clock in the morning, 0400 Navy Time, and I was in the boat.

It had been hoisted on the Davids. They had carried me back to the boat and then just hoisted hoisted me up. And there I was at 4 o'clock in the morning, really sick, terribly sick. And I've we we left the next day for Okinawa. We were in on the invasion of Okinawa, which was April 1, 1945, Easter Sunday.

I think I was still sick when I got there, And I didn't get anything out of that experience until after I got into AA and realized that I'd had the sanity to turn down something that might be harmful when I hadn't had anything to drink. But then with 9 cans of beer, I thought anything. And that's why people, you find out that people die of drinking wood alcohol and all of that. You know, I've been wondering about all this ethanol that they're putting in gas tanks. You know, that is probably drinkable.

And, because that's what alcohol is, you know. I may what what will happen when alcoholics discover that? When you can buy it for $2 a gallon. Well, I got out of the Navy in late 1946, and went home to Nebraska. And you know, I stayed drunk as long as my money lasted.

And I didn't even realize that I was on a continuous drunk. And then by 1947, I got started getting shut off in bars now and then. In fact, I could get shut off in a bar after 2 drinks, sometimes. Not always, but there was something about me. I think these bartenders have radar, and they know who's gonna be troublesome, and I could almost tell when a bartender was gonna shut me off.

There I was only 21 years old and already so bad that I was getting shut off in bars, and my behavior was pretty bad too. And, I was wearing out my welcome, and it had never been warm anyhow, and I was wearing it out, more and more. Well, then I went out to Idaho where my dad lived, out near Boise, Idaho, and, wore out my welcome there and finally wound up early in 1948, destitute in a little town on the Oregon Idaho border. And I was ashamed to go back to my dad's house. So I went out and I worked on a railroad Gandhi gang.

And you know, those are guys that worked worked up and down the railroad, lived in railroad cars, all alcoholics, every one of them. They couldn't run that railroad without those guys and worked on the tracks, you know. They did the tamping and the ballasting and all of that. And it's kind of scared me that, when I looked at what those guys, what their lives were like and so on, and they'd sit around in the railroad car at night and talk about, Oh, you don't want to get picked up in Pocatello or watch out for those cops in Salt Lake City and all this kind of thing. Well, I wasn't gonna be like them.

Well, I get paid after about a month. And I go into this little town of Weiser, Idaho. And by gosh, I wake up the next morning in jail, and I don't even remember where they found me. I passed out on the sidewalk at 1:30 in the morning. And so I went back and stayed with my dad for a while and then I got drunk over in Boise and took a cab 30 miles without a cent to pay the cab driver.

Well, you know, that doesn't go over. And, I wound up getting a jail sentence out of that. And, shortly after that, I I left and I hitchhiked all the way down to Southern California, where my sister lived. You know, and looking back at how I survived those years, well, even like when I was 16 years old in Denver, how did I get by? I was so sick and troubled and everything else.

There must be a higher power looking out for us because I certainly wasn't looking out for myself those years. Then I was in Ventura, California, and I got a job working in the oil fields, and that's just terrible work. Nobody should even have to do that. I mean, I'm incapable of that kind of physical work, especially with a hangover, but somehow I made it through that summer, And that fall I got in touch with AA. That was in October of 1948, maybe 5th or 7th October.

And a guy came out to where I was rooming and took me to a meeting in a little town, Santa Paula, California. And I kind of really fell in love with AA from that point on. But, you know, I only stayed sober 5 months because I was only 23, and, people would come up and say, boy kid, if you get the program at your age, it'll really be terrific. But their tone of voice was, you poor devil, you won't. People people under 30 were just not making, the program very well.

And that's 30 was considered young. And, but you know, funny one funny thing that did happen was the second and third members I met were out from Akron, Ohio, and one of them was one of the first 2,000 members of AA, and one of them was one of the first 200 members of AA. So right at the start, I kind of became an AA historian without realizing it. I didn't realize that someday there'd be something called television, the Internet, and everything else, and there'd be the AA History Lovers and all of that. That was back in 1948.

I didn't even think about those things. Well then for 13 months I had a lot of road testing. And I won't go into the details, but, I spent 7 months in the Army. And the Army is not the place for me. I might have gotten along well in the Navy if I hadn't had the drinking problem.

I don't think I could get along well in the Army under any circumstances. In the Navy, if you got back to the ship, you could be dead drunk. They, as long as you got back to the ship, you were okay. But in the Army, if you come back to the post drunk, may they arrest you? See, that's that's how intolerant they are.

So I get kicked out I got kicked out of the army in New Brunswick, New Jersey with an undesirable discharge. And the next morning, 3 o'clock in the next morning, I woke up on a lawn on the edge of town and I'd been rolled. And my money was gone, my railroad ticket, my belt and my tie, and even my undesirable discharge, that was gone. Somebody in New Brunswick has an undesirable discharge, he did learn. You know, it sounds awfully funny when you tell about it today, but gosh, that's an awful it's an awful shape to be in.

And, you know, in a strange town and with nothing. But somehow I got back to Nebraska and I made it through that winter living with my dad, or my mother and stepdad, and that next spring, I made it to jail once that winter, I stayed sober a few months at one time, but I didn't go back to AA. And finally that spring, somebody took me out to the state hospital, which was on a hill overlooking my hometown. I spent 7 weeks in that state hospital, but my sobriety date started with the day I went out to that state hospital, I haven't had a drink since. And I've stayed very close to AA ever since.

I was 24 years old, getting to be an old man by that time. And so AA has been my life since then, and I couldn't have functioned at all without AA. I'm confident of that. I had to stay sober at all costs. I learned that and I went back to AA and I thought that the people in the AA group had probably been talking about me there in my hometown.

A guy came out to the State Hospital to go to the meeting, he saw me there and he says, I didn't know you were back in town. You think everybody's always talking about you. And then a few months later, I went out to moved out to Michigan, where I had an aunt and uncle living and worked for them for a while. And lived in Michigan, until 1972, and then went to we moved to Ohio. Around 1960, my wife and I were married.

By the way, her folks didn't like it when they learned I was in AA. I'd been sober 10 years by that time, and they didn't like it that when they found out I was in AA, that there was something wrong with that. But her sister was married to a guy that made me look pretty good over time. You know, I really shouldn't say that. The poor guy is dead.

But, and if my sister-in-law were here and heard me say that, she'd be hurt. But, so please keep that all to yourselves. Well anyway, that's that's how I got sober. And, it's been a very good life. You know, we find out that just just because you put the plug in the jug by everything, that's when we start solving problems finally.

We were running away from problems when we're drinking, but then you start having to face life when when you get sober. And that's what I had to learn. I had to learn how to grow up, and AA helped me do that. But I can just look back right from the time I finally quit drinking altogether, why things started to improve. A A little bit here and a little bit there, but they did.

And, I think that anybody can have that same experience in AA. Well, I was going to tell a little bit about AA history. I've only talked for 15 minutes and I've told my whole story. Pardon? Well, yeah.

That's and now that's really something. I guess I've gone to about 13 or 14000 meetings somewhere, something like that. I go to a lot of meetings. I go to 3 or 4 meetings a week. In fact, they get tired of seeing me.

I have this regular group, the Rab Road Group, which is out west of Toledo, as I said, and that meets at 2 o'clock on Saturday afternoon. But there's a noon meeting downtown that I go to quite a bit. And I tell them, I told them this week that I was coming out to save AA in Fort Collins. And that's, that's become a kind of a joke, you know, when I go somewhere to talk, where are you going to save AA this week or something like that. And, then I always get treated well on these trips.

I went back one day and told my group, I said, how come I get treated so well? I come back here and you poke your folks crap on me all the time. They said, Well we know we know you Mel. One of the people I had way up on a pedestal was Bill w, and in 1951, Bill came out to Detroit. I was living in Pontiac, Michigan by that time, and I was living with these relatives.

And, I had an old car. It was a real cold night. I probably couldn't have made it down to Detroit on those icy roads in this terrible old car that I had. But some guys took me down there to hear Bill W. Give a talk.

And Bill was barnstorming the North America, I guess, all the big cities in in the United States and Canada, promoting what he called the 3rd legacy. Anybody know what the 3rd legacy was? That was service. The three things we have in AA is unity, recovery, and service. And Bill was promoting what became the General Service Conference.

And, I just went down to Detroit with these guys to hear him talk. And you know, there's a book called Pass It On. That's the biography of Bill. And page 348 is my little account of of that night of going down to hear Bill. But I never got to meet him that night.

He gave a 2 hour talk. It was interrupted by a cigarette break. About 1500 people came over there to hear him. But he was talking about the necessity of having a general service conference so that AA could be controlled by the grassroots, so that the fellow, the people in the fellowship could control the central office and have a say in how things were run. Well, I couldn't have cared less about that.

I just wanted to hear Bill give a talk, But since then, as I got to know more about AA and how things work, I think that that showed tremendous vision on his part, that if we didn't have the General Service Conference, AA probably would have split apart, because there's there's a lot of people around that want to run things their own way. Some some of the people that were against Bill were in Akron, Ohio and Cleveland, those places, you know. People that should have been very grateful to Bill for coming out there, carrying the message, and all that. But a lot of them were jealous of Bill. I heard people say bad things about Bill.

And, but having the General Service Conference and this feedback and everything, I think it's kind of kept the lid on things over the years. Bill had an ability to look ahead and see what the problems were down the road. I think, in some ways, that he was a genius at the things he could see. For example, AA came under attack in 1963. The up until 1963, everybody said good things about AA.

Every newspaper article, every well, there was one real smutty magazine that had an article called, AA, No Boos, But Plenty of Babes, or something like that. But that was the only bad article that ever came out up until 1963. But in 1963, Harper's Magazine ran a cover story, AA, Cult or Cure. Alcoholics Anonymous, Cult or Cure. And it was written by a guy with a PhD, from Columbia no less.

And you know, when anybody runs a magazine article with a title like that, Cold or Cure, you know they're going to come out negative. And it really was a very negative article. And boy, AA is all over the country, mad as hell. Nobody in AA ever read Harper's until that day, that month. And, my gosh, letters came in to Harper's from all over the country.

In fact, I wrote one and I'm glad they never published it. And, but Bill, they they went to Bill and asked him what we should do about that. And Bill said, well, let's look at what, and and he had a little publication that he had prepared called 12 Concepts of World Service. And I remember talking to Bill in New York when he was working on that publication. It's available, I think, in all our central offices.

And he goes into 12 concepts of world services. And what do you know? It says, suppose AA should come under attack. That was written a couple of years before we came under attack. And so what should we do?

Well, the answer, he he he prepared an article for the grapevine titled, Our Critics Can Be Our Benefactors. And the point of it was that if what these people are saying is true, well then we should thank them for it and try to correct what is wrong. See? It's like if somebody tells you you got bad breath, well, you know, they're doing you a favor. And, but, he didn't say that.

I added that. But then suppose suppose they're terribly wrong, they're unfair and everything else. Well, if you oppose them, he said, unreasonable people are stimulated all the more by opposition. Of course any married man knows that. Oh, I should have said that.

But, you know, wasn't that so good? And the point of it was, that the best defense was no defense at all. And AA never responded to this guy. See, that would have been entering into controversy. Even when somebody attacks AA, that's kind of an outside controversy.

So never responded. And of course, the guy who wrote the article, I think he was furious about that, because I believe he wanted to become the Ralph Nader of AA, To, you know, have a cottage industry out of writing bad things about AA. He wrote a couple more articles, and then the thing kind of died down. And, I tried to look look him up some years ago, and I found out he'd passed away. So, down in Arizona somewhere, and I never could find out what he passed away from or anything else.

But anyway, that was how Bill handled that when we came under attack. And you can read about that. You can read that article in a book called, The Language of the Heart. That's that was published by the Grapevine. It's all of Bill's articles in the Grapevine.

And it's just a great, a great publication. If you wanna know what Bill thought about what AA should do or about any situation that arises, it's in that book. And it's just great. Well, I Well, I always thought that someday I might like to write Bill's biography. Now that was in the back of my mind.

It's funny how you get these ideas. And, then in 1975, a biography came out about Bill, and it was about the same time they had the international conference in Denver. And, they sold it for a while from the AA World Services, but it had been privately published, so they decided that they wanted their own, that that, AA should have its own biography. And a fellow wrote, the biography of doctor Bob, which is called Doctor Bob and the Good Old Timers. I met that fellow once.

His name was Niles. He did a great job on it. They did doctor Bob's biography first because they realized that it would have to be based on interviews from people around Akron and so on. And these people were getting pretty old along in the tooth, so the Niles went out there and, isn't that something to get long in the tooth? And, he went out there and interviewed all these old timers who had known Doctor.

Bob, and that's what the book is made up of a lot of these interviews. It's very good. And I think that was published in 1980. And somebody asked me if I'd had anything to do with that book. I have two photographs in it, the photograph of King's School and the one of St.

Thomas Hospital. But then Niall started on Bill's biography, and he got cancer and passed away after he'd just done a little bit of work. So I happened to know the general manager of GSO, so I went in there and threw my hat in the ring, and they gave me the assignment of working on Bill's biography. So I worked on it for 2 years, in 1980 and 81. And in that in that time, I spent a few days at Stepping Stones.

Lois, Bill's wife, she invited me up there, stayed there a couple times. I interviewed Nell Wing, the one that was mentioned. There's a marvelous person. And got in the AA Archives, read a lot of Bill's letters and everything, worked on that for 2 years, and did 2 manuscripts. And then, by gosh, they hired some more writers to work on it.

You know, it's pretty hard to satisfy those people. And they finally came out in 1984 under the title, Pass It On. I had wanted to call it Bill w and his friends because I thought that went along with Doctor. Bob and the Good Old Timers. I could see both books in a slipcase, you know.

But, the last line of one of my manuscripts, one of the 2 manuscripts I submitted, was pass it on. And that's what Bill would tell He'd tell them, pass it on. Pass it on to somebody else. That's that's the way you're But he'd tell him, pass it on. Pass it on to somebody else.

That's that's the way you show gratitude in AA. You don't thank Bill or thank any of the old timers or anything like that. Pass it on to somebody else. Bill always talked about the million who still don't know. He would always write about that.

The people who are still in their caves and drinking, that we had an obligation, a duty to keep this thing going for them. And Bill worked real hard to see to see that that was done, That AA didn't get loused up. There were a lot of people who had loused it up. And Bill always said, I think to his friends, I never heard him say this, that his personal life wasn't all that great in some ways, but he felt that every decision he had made for AA was right. He He was more like a parent, you know, looking after a child.

You know, Bill and Lois never had any children, but I think we're we are their children in some ways. The, and it but he was very protective of AA. He wanted AA to keep functioning the the way it did. He had he had our best interests in mind. But anyway, I worked on this and, when I got to New York, and I was see, I was still working for Libyans Ford as in public relations at that time.

I had worked for a company called Arrowquip in Jackson, Michigan for 19 years. I became editor of their company magazine. And they, they hired, Libby Owens Ford acquired Aeroquip just to get me on their payroll. And I was transferred down to Toledo. That's how I got into Toledo.

Somebody told me to be honest tonight. I'd better be careful. But anyway, Lois invited me out to, to their home, Stepping Stones, which is in Westchester County, near Bedford Hills, New York. It's a little home. It's in a nice wooded section up there.

And Bill and Lois had lived in that place since 1941. They hadn't had any money and everything, but, some real estate woman got the idea that they deserved having a home. They were living in a couple of rooms in a clubhouse down in New York. And And Bill said, well, we don't even have enough money for a down payment. Well, she got them out there and figured out how they could get the house without a down payment, and that's where they lived the rest of their life.

I feel that they were supposed to have that house. It was just a wonderful place for them. And Lois lived there the rest of her life until she was 97. She passed away at 97. But she invited me up there.

And so I got there, and there was a woman staying there with her named Edna. And this woman couldn't have weighed more than 80 or £90. She looked awful. And she fluttered around and wanted to help with the dishes and everything. And she sat there and listened patiently while I interviewed Lois and talked with her.

And I wondered I thought at first that she was probably an Al Anon woman. And I didn't know much about her. And, but the whole weekend she was just very always wanted to try to do something. Well, on Monday, a man came to take her away. And it turned out that Edna had been a had worked for Lois as a housekeeper some years earlier.

And then she had been working for another family as a live in housekeeper or something, and she got sick. And she went to the hospital and she was terminal. You know, that's why she looked so bad when I saw her. But she couldn't stay in the hospital any longer for some reason, and the hospice couldn't take her for another 2 or 3 weeks. And there the poor woman was desperate.

She was penniless, had no place to go, and she called up Lois and told her what her situation was. And Lois says, Come out and stay with me. And she was staying there with Lois for 3 weeks, and then on Monday morning, a man came in an old car and took her away. And a couple months later, Lois told me that Edna had died. Now this woman had been living with a family, working for them, And then when she got sick, she wanted to come back and stay with his family until she could go to the hospice.

But, of course, she was no good to him anymore. She couldn't, you know, do the work for her anymore. And but Lois, you know, that's the type of person she was. That's probably why she played the role that she did. You know, we owe a lot to people like Lois.

And then there was also Anne Smith, doctor Bob's wife. And she she did things that, you know, we don't probably don't give her credit for. You know, I've only talked to half an hour. And that means I have an hour and a half to go. Right?

But anyway, we, that was a great experience. And I learned a lot about AA, just going into the archives and talking to some of these old timers. Some of them didn't like Bill Wilson. And with real credit, I I spent a whole day with 1 guy. He'd found an AA in a big city and everything.

Couldn't get him to say one good word about Bill. You know, not not one good word. And so you you found that. And it's just amazing that our fellowship, keeps going the way it is. And, of course, when I told the guy, I thought he had a resentment.

He the thing you know, the way people express resentments are they, hey, if you tell somebody's got a resentment, they'll say, no, I don't have a resentment. I just feel sorry for the poor bastard. It's that kind of thing. But, you know, I learned learned some things about AA in Akron. The manuscripts I submitted had a lot a lot to do about the early background in Akron before Bill Wilson got involved out there, and that got chopped out of Pass It On.

There wasn't too much of it. And a lot of the stuff that got chopped out of Pass It On, I put in my own books, New Wine and My Search for Bill W and Ebbie. Those are books that I wrote for hazelnut. They're not conference approved, but by God I approve of them. And they would all be best sellers, except that millions of people have chosen not to buy them.

But actually they're they're doing fairly well though. But what I learned was that, you know, AA did come out of a fellowship called the Oxford Group. There's a lot of history about this group. It, there's very little of it mentioned in AA, but there's there's quite a bit of there's been a number of books written about the Oxford group, and that was founded in 190 8 by a guy who had a terrible resentment and got over it. He wasn't an alcoholic, but he had as much resentment as any alcoholic ever had, and he got over it through a spiritual experience.

And it's very interesting that we were helped or we were grew out of an organization that was founded by a guy who overcame a resentment. Well, it flourished, And in the 1920s, it acquired the name, The Oxford Group. It got a lot of publicity in those years. You can go back to the old reader's guides and find a lot of articles about the Oxford Group. And a few alcoholics were getting sober in that fellowship.

Nothing like what happened in AA, but they were finding out that by following the principles that the Oxford group had, some alcoholics were recovering and some of their principles were making restitution, praying for guidance every day, admitting your faults to other everything we have in the 12 steps, but just not in that form. So around 1934, Bill W. Got in the Oxford group, and that's all in his story about how a fellow named Eby, didn't give Eby his name, but that was his old school friend, called on him. And and Bill immediately Bill had been trying to do everything to try to quit drinking. Nothing had worked.

And then he had this big spiritual experience and, you know, that's all in his story. But out in Akron, there was an Oxford group member who went to work for Harvey Firestone in 1928, a young fellow with a lot of ability. And Harvey Firestone's second oldest son had a terrible drinking problem. And this young Oxford group member started working with him, trying to help him. And, this is in my book, New Wine.

And they would go on business trips together. This fella's name was Bud, Bud Firestone. And they would even pray on their knees in in the hotel rooms, and Bud would even start crying, this young Firestone fellow, because he couldn't quit drinking. Well then, he went on, they went on a trip out to Denver, for crying out loud, and on the way back, Sam Shoemaker, that's the guy in New York who helped Bill Wilson a lot, went into a compartment in the train with with Bud and started talking to him, and something happened. And and this this man told me that when he came out of the compartment he looked different.

Just right there. And he got sober. And that was the talk of Akron. You see the Firestones, they were the big they were the people that everybody in Akron looked up to. They they were held in awe at that time.

And the fact that Bud Firestone had gotten sober became the talk of the town. Now that was back in 1932, 31, 32. So Harvey Firestone, out of gratitude, sponsored a big Oxford Group rally in Akron. And that's when Doctor. Bob and some of the people who were involved with the early A's, that's when they got in the Oxford Group and started following these principles.

Well, now that's all part of AA history. See, that that had something to do with our getting sober along the way. Doctor. Bob, in his personal story, he tells about falling in with a group of people that impressed him because they seemed ill at ease and could talk without self consciousness or anything like that. And he was uptight all the time, And they he went to their meetings for two and a half years, but got tight every night nonetheless.

That's in his personal story in the Big Book. Well, that was the Oxford group. And they were meeting there in homes in Akron. And one of the women who was quite, prominent in the Oxford group was a woman named Henrietta Cyberlane. Now this is the woman that Bill Wilson would talk to, who would introduce him to doctor Bob.

And she was the daughter-in-law of Frank Seiberling, who had founded the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company. And she lived in the gatehouse of the big mansion called it's called Stan Heawood. It was a big 55 room mansion there in Akron, and the Cyberlings had built that in 1917. It was a Tudor mansion, one of the best mansions, my finest mansions in the whole country. And she was living out in the gatehouse because she was separated from her husband.