The AA's 73rd Anniversary in Galliano, LA

Hello everybody, My name is Hilda and I am an alcoholic.

I'd like to welcome everybody to our 73rd Alcoholics Anonymous birthday bash. I guess should we call it celebrating a a 73rd? I'm going to go ahead and introduce James. He's going to be, he's going to be doing our traditions workshop today. James M.

Thank you Hilda, I'm James Morell, I'm an alcoholic as only by God's grace and the power of the program of Alcoholics Anonymous that I had my last drink July 11th of 1981 and I'm just absolutely thrilled about this period of sobriety for 9835 days. I've had the best days of my life. I love this program. This program took a stumbling, mumbling, bumbling, drunk

drugged me out of that cave that alcoholism had become. You know that cave we all end up in?

You know, drinking. It started out fun, hadn't it?

Oh, it allows you to be one of the guys and dance with the girls and get out there and be something that you want.

Spend money you didn't have to impress people you didn't like.

But maybe you're drinking like my drinking ended up in that cave of that dark, dark cave of alcoholism, lonely and alone and unable to get out of my own kitchen. And and you brought me out of that. You brought me into the light.

Some wonderful people to live my life with.

Today we're celebrating the 73rd and I'm a little nervous. I'm always nervous. Want to start these talks? You know my first sponsor, Ed Harding, the old goat, Joe Lanny, some some of y'all knew knew Ed. You know, he, he called himself the old goat. Everybody called me old goat. It looked like an old goat. And I was telling him he he died when I was 3 1/2 years sober.

You know, that man not only taught me how to live, but he taught me how to die. I want to tell you that there wasn't a happier man in the VA hospital

as he was awaiting his end up there. He had a joke for everybody. The nurses would come by because he was constantly telling stories. He taught me how to live and he taught me how to die. I've seen people die drunk and I've seen him die sober and sober. So much better, so much better. He went to the big meeting with with No Fear and only gratitude in his heart for what this this program had given him. But I remember about a year before that I was telling Ed I was, I was having to make one of my great talks. I think I was a 15 minute speaker at intergroup, you know,

and I was saying, gosh, yet I'm so nervous. I'm so nervous before I speak. I'm just so nervous. It says, well, you know, James Ed was a taper like me. That's how I got into taping. Before he died, he told me to take over the taping and and he died before I get him to change his mind. I said hell it. I don't know anything about Taven. I'm a lawyer. He says, you'll learn.

So I said it. I'm just so nervous before I speak. And Ed, listen to all the great talks, you know, either in person or on tape. And he said, well, James, I've listened to a lot of the great speakers and I've talked to them and the great speakers and Alcoholics Anonymous say that nervousness is a divine characteristic. It's it's part of the spiritual energy that these great speakers feel. And I'm starting to get puffed up and I'm thinking he's finally recognized my talent. And he kind of looked at me says, But in your case, I think it's God just trying to shake the truth

out of you.

Oh, well, OK. 73rd A, a birthday. 73rd A, A 73 years old. It's almost as old as Jack Whitney. No, not, not, not, not nearly. Guys, what an honor it is to be invited back to speak here at the Bayou Cajun Group. I spoke here the first time in 1990

and y'all must be a sick group of puppies because you keep inviting me back.

Maybe you just didn't quite catch what I had to say, I don't know,

but I love you and you always feed me so well. That meal was just wonderful, wonderful food. The cougar and the

white beans and a green bean casserole,

potato salad, Everything there was just Mexican dish. Whatever it was,

it was just wonderful.

But that's the kind of hospitality and fellowship. And on you say, why does somebody drive? You know, I'm gonna drive 300 miles round trip today to talk to you folks. Why do I do that?

Why are you sick puppies sitting down here and on a Saturday afternoon on a on a beautiful summer's day when you can be out fishing listening to me? It's because we found something special here. We found something special. I want to tell you what I need this program more now than I did almost 27 years ago

because I've got a lot more to lose.

This program has given me everything that I ever desired in life, most of which I didn't know I desired when I got here. When I got here, it's giving me something vastly more than merely being dry from alcohol. Cuz I tried being dry from alcohol. I think I did it one time for seven weeks to impress my psychiatrist that I was not an alcoholic.

And that's when I became convinced I wasn't an alcoholic because I went seven weeks without a drink and I became batshit crazy.

I mean, I was just nuts. And one night I finally picked up a rum and orange juice because I said you can't get drunk on rum and orange juice. Women drink rum and orange juice. I'll have a rum and orange juice. That's not a, that's not a man's drink. Anybody can drink a rum and orange juice. I drink a rum and orange juice. Nothing happened.

So, well, nothing happened. I better have another one. Obviously I was making too big a deal out of it. So I had another and another went into a blackout. Few hours later, I'm startled out of my blackout by a fire alarm. I'm at my house. The house is burning down around me. And so my conclusion out of that, out of coming out of that and burning my house down was that it's not safe to not drink because you get out of practice.

So that's the kind of alcoholic that's talking to you today. That's that's the kind of mental processes that

going to be up here. But I want to talk to you a little bit today about Alcoholics Anonymous and about where we came from. I think it's a lot the story of a A is a lot more interesting than James's story. And let me set the stage by telling you that, you know, I'm in Breaux Bridge, LA now. Hurricane Katrina blew me out of New Orleans refugees in Lafayette for 2 1/2 years, and

my wonderful daughter and son-in-law helped me get a home on the banks of the Bayou Tesh. But I grew up on the banks of the Tesh in New Iberia,

graduated Catholic High there back in 1960, and a year ago we had a class reunion

and there were thirty of us that graduated in 1960.

Amazingly enough, we're all still alive and 17 showed up for this this reunion.

17 showed up,

far and away the most successful guy from an economic standpoint in the class and, and the class did pretty good. You know, we've got, I mean, we've got a District Judge there. We've got a retired naval pilot, a commander in the Navy. Interestingly enough, the current District Judge and the retired commander in the Navy and I all spent one night in jail together when we were 17.

We got liquored up on vodka and started throwing cherry bombs at this guy's house 'cause he hadn't invited us to his party.

And the guy was currently the district judges. Father was the sheriff and he was not amused. And he packed us all into the little drunk tank. It was a one man cell. He put all three of us in there, left the window open. It was a cold December night. One of those cold fronts had come through

and we started to sober up and then we started to get sick and then we got sick all over each other all night long. And in the morning they came to let us out. A sadder group of guys you had never seen in your life.

Well, you know, if drinking made you an alcoholic, all three of us should have been Alcoholics,

if just simply drinking. Because everybody at Catholic High drank. All the people I grew up with drank. All the people I went to LSU with drank, but they got out and they were like it talks about in Chapter 2.

They were hard drinkers. But given sufficient reason. Well, I've graduated from high school, I've graduated from college. I've got a family now.

They moderated or stopped altogether. But the real alcoholic

me, possibly one of the guy in that class,

he hadn't recognized his problem yet. But I'll tell you what, he was bobbing and weaving at that reunion.

He was bobbing and weaving.

But the most successful man in that class is a fan named Ruben. And he and I drank together a lot in high school. And Reuben started off in the car financing business, ended up with a series of car lots. Then he bought a helicopter leasing company. Then he bought several helicopter leasing companies. And I was saying, Ruben, I haven't seen you in seven or eight years. You still got your helicopter. He said, no, I sold them out for a chain of hospitals. I said a chain of hospitals. So what do you do? He says, oh, we do drug rehab.

I said, oh really?

That's interesting.

Tell me about it. He was telling me they've got a couple here in Louisiana, one on the Gulf Coast. They got one in Aspen, Co that the stars go to. And I said, well, do you and what do you treat there? He says, we just, we just treat. We treat drug addiction. I said, what about alcoholism? He said, James, he said, we we just stopped doing that. And I said, well, why is that, Ruben? He said, well, we're really, really good at getting people off prescription medication.

We even had some success with crack addicts. We've got a pretty good success with the opiates, with heroin addiction and stuff like that, he said. But our record was zero with Alcoholics. Our record was just zero, he said. I said, well, but these people can pay, He says James, there's there's more to run in a hospital than simply the income that's coming in, he says. I've assembled the best doctors, the best nurses,

he said. But if you're running 100% failure rate in dealing with Alcoholics,

he says that brings the whole hospital down. It depresses people to see failures. People in order to continue working, need to see some successes. I said, well, what do? What do you do with the Alcoholics? It's all that treatment centers that treat them or else they can go to that a, a thing. He doesn't know I'm an A A. He doesn't know I'm an A A. Now, what's the reason that I'm telling you that story?

Here is a man with every economic reason to take in and treat alcohol.

Here's a man who, although not a medical doctor himself, owns a whole string of hospitals. I mean, he's worth big, big bucks. He has the best medical advice that money can buy because Reuben always had this amazing talent for spotting other talent

and getting that talent to like him and to work for him. He's really one of the most personable guys you've ever met in your life. He's from Saint Martinville,

and yet he recognizes that medical science today,

the year 2008, has no cure for alcoholism, has no cure whatsoever. All right, let's go back not 73 years

to 1935.

Let's go back another three years to 1932. In 1932, one of the wealthiest men in the country. His name was Roland Hazard.

Y'all ever seen these Burlington coat factories? You know, I'm talking about, you know, these stores that you see at the malls and stuff like that. That's his family that's still in the Hazard family. And the Perry family, old family came came here way before the American Revolution. One of his ancestors was a Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, who won the Battle of Lake Erie in in the War of 1812. And

one of the Perry's got to the North Pole and you know,

Perry's and the hazards constantly intermarried and were related and stuff like that. And in 1932, he was the head of the family. The problem was that he was a bad, bad alcoholic. He had tried every drying out center in the country, including towns hospital in New York were Bill eventually, eventually wound up and he would stay sober for a little while and get drunk. And his family was just pulling their hair out because they loved rolling. I mean, he was good at running the company, but he'd get off on these drunks

and 'cause havoc and and disappear for long periods of time. So they had a family meeting. Has anybody ever had a family meeting on you? You know, one of those meetings where you're there, but nobody's either listening to you or talking to you. They're there talking about you.

And they said, what are we going to do with Roland? I said, let's get the best doctor in the world. So the first person they tried was Sigmund Freud. But fortunately for you and for me, Freud was a little too sick. I think he was recovering from one of his own cocaine addictions or something like that at the time. But,

and so they went to the other great psychiatrist, the other co-founder of the science of psychiatry, Dr. Coral Jung in Switzerland. And this story is told in our book of experience. It's told in Chapter 2

about the businessman who went to Europe

and sought the greatest doctor in the world, Doctor Jung,

And he stayed with him a year, didn't have a drop to drink. And at the end of the year, Doctor Young says, well, it's time for you to go on back to the country and go run your go run your companies. And incidentally, they'll not only Burlington Coat Factory, but they own Burlington Mills, which is a carpets and fabrics and all that kind of stuff. They own Allied Chemical Company, which next to DuPont, is the largest chemical company in the country. Still a family company.

Still a family company. We're talking about very prominent people, a guy who had all the money in the world,

all the incentive in the world. He wanted to run that company, his family wanted to run that company. And he left there after a year,

just like James, after seven weeks,

just like perhaps you at some time when you tried

without this program to not drink, without any program at all. He left there in high spirits, knowing that he had it licked. Of course, this was the days before airlines. So he took the train to Paris, and then he was going to take another train to a port and then get on a steamship and come back to the United States. And

he would have made it, except somebody in Paris asked him the wrong question.

I said, Roland, would you like to have just one drink?

Roland thought, well, it's been a year, one drink couldn't possibly hurt me. Cut a Long story short, within a week he was face down in the gutter and Paris dead drunk, didn't remember the last three or four times. Went back with his tail between his legs to Zurich, Switzerland,

Went back to Doctor Young and said, doctor, you got to take me back. It didn't work. I've, you know, told him what had happened, that he'd been drunk. Now here, Doctor Young, just like my friend Ruben,

with every financial incentive in the world, one of the richest men in the world sitting there with a blank check on his desk says, no, Roland, I'm not going to take you back.

And Roland says, well, why not?

Why not?

He says. I'm really sorry, but I think I misdiagnosed your case. I thought you were romantic depressive. I've had very good luck with manic depressive. I've worked with them. But Roland, I see that you are what is called an alcoholic,

and to the best of my knowledge, and this is the greatest medical doctor in the world, 1932 talking to the best of my knowledge,

there is no medical treatment for alcoholism, Roland says. Well, what am I supposed to do?

He says, well, Roland, you're going to intermittently drink until you die or you go mad. The only thing I can think of to do is you might, since you have enough money, hire a bodyguard to keep you away from alcohol. You might voluntarily lock yourself up someplace. And roll at this point was really down. And he said, well, is there anything else?

And here called? Young said. Well, here and there once in a while, But it's so rare as to be a phenomenon. I mean, I've never seen it personally. I have read and have been told of people who've had what's called a vital spiritual experience,

and they change and they don't drink again. And Roland brightens up at this point. He says, oh, that's all right. I'm, I'm a Vesterman in the Calvary Episcopal Church in New York City. I just bought him a new stained glass window. I'll go back and buy him a couple more. And the young says, no, no, Roland, you're, you're just not. You're not getting it. What I'm talking about. I mean, that's fine. You have a church membership, but I'm talking about something different. I'm talking something that grabs you on the inside right to the depths of

spirit, and turns that spirit around and changes it and transforms you.

It gives you an entirely different outlook

on life and on how you will live that life. And Roland says, well, how do you have one of those experience? Young says. Nobody knows.

Nobody knows.

Nobody knows. Young left there

dejected, but surrendered to the fact that he was a hopeless, helpless alcoholic. He sought some help.

Jung did give him one piece of advice though. He said

you could try putting yourself in some sort of a spiritual atmosphere. Not necessarily a church, not necessarily buying stained glass windows, but put yourself in some sort of spiritual atmosphere and hope the divine lightning strikes you.

Now, to put it another way, you've got about as much chance of being struck by lightning. Is this happening? But you, you know, you wanted something to do. Go do this.

Go do this.

If you forward 30 years later, Bill Wilson wrote in 1960 a letter to Carl Jung. You can find it in

Language of the Heart, which is published by the Grapevine, which is a collection of Bill's writings to thank Carl Jung for the part he had played in the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous. And Jung in January of 19, on January 30th of 1961, wrote Bill Wilson back a letter. And it was fortunate he did a thing because Jung was to die only two months later and he wrote him back a letter. And I put copies of this letter up here. Y'all are welcome to as many copies as you would like.

In which Jung said the story you've reported because Bill told at more length than we find in Chapter 2, the story of Roland coming to young and and

dear Mr. Wilson, your letter's been very welcome indeed. I had no news from Roland Hazard anymore and often wondered what had been his fate.

And he goes on to say he had adequately reported what had happened to you. And I was young was confirming, yeah, this is exactly what happened with me. And I was curious to know what had happened to him.

He goes on to say that the craving for alcohol and the alcoholic is the equivalent on a low level of the spiritual thirst of our being for God,

he says. But how could you tell somebody that

without being totally misunderstood in those in those days?

He says the only right and legitimate way to such an experience, and he's talking about a spiritual experience. I believe that it happens to you and can only happen to you when you walk on a path that leads you to a higher understanding. You might be led to that goal by an act of grace or through personal honest contact with friends or through a higher education, he says. I see the Rolling Shoals the 2nd way by walking along the path with a spiritual group of the day called the Oxford Group,

he goes on to say. I'm strongly convinced that the evil principle prevailing in the world

leads the unrecognized spiritual need into perdition. In other words,

the alcoholic not recognizing the spiritual need is LED straight to hell. Perditions. Another word for it, if it's not counteracted either by real religious insight over the protective wall of human community. An ordinary man, not protected by action from above and isolated in society? Get that isolated in society.

Any of you all try Ever try to stay sober on your own? Cannot resist the power of evil, which is very aptly called the devil.

But the use of such words arouses Sony mistakes. One can only keep aloof from such as this. And he closes by saying, you see the word for alcohol in Latin is spiritus and use the same word for the highest religious or spiritual experience. And he says the formula therefore is Latinas spiritus contraspiritum, which means the spirit

over veils or prevails against the spirits of alcohol. Anyway, I got copies for that letter up there. Roland stayed sober a little while, dragged a fellow named fellow drunk out of jail named Abby Thatcher. Abby Thatcher was sent off to

New York because the judge didn't. The only way the judge would let Abby out of jail was that Roland agreed to take him out of the state. You know, get him out of here. I mean, he'd just driven a car into a farmers house,

landed in the kitchen, he was drunk.

The woman is standing startled in her own kitchen with his car standing there. Evie smiles out the window and says, I just stopped by for a cup of coffee. Well, Vermonters are not known for their sense of humor. And she called the cops.

So the judge says get him out of my state, just take him and go. So he took him to New York City where this spiritual group called the Oxford Movement, from which we got many of our ideas, but which was very highly evangelical and wasn't exactly AA, but we got a lot of our spiritual principles. For them. It was an organization that was non denominational. They didn't care what denomination you were. They met in people's houses. They

initially at least, tried to practice anonymity. Then they kind of got lost in seeking the rich and powerful to endorse their organization and

kind of faded from existence. But for a while there they were flamed very brightly on the spiritual horizon back in the 1930s. And they did attract a lot of the rich and the famous President Herbert Hoover was a member, President Harry S Truman was a member of the Oxford Group, Walter Chrysler, head of Chrysler Corporation, Walter Firestone, head of Firestone tire and rubber. You see a lot of the real big shots in the country. Some of their meetings, they had one meeting in the Hollywood Bowl that drew 30,000 people. They would regularly fill Madison Square Garden

with their spiritual meetings. So it was a big movement at the time.

But it faded because they sought power and prestige and money, and they abandoned their early principle of anonymity. We'll get more into that later.

So Ebby's back in New York and Roland's saying, well, one of the principles the Oxford Group is you had to go witness to somebody

you had to and we'd call it 12 stepping, but they call it witnessing. And it was a good deal more evangelical than what we do. I mean, Hayes attitude was, well, I sold Lanny Lane in the ditch the other day. If he lives, we'll get him, you know. Well, they don't wait for that. They go out and and scour the ditches and drag you in and and put a healing on you and sell it to you, you know, and so they were saying, maybe you got to you got to go. They were saying, well, I don't want to go witness. They said, well, would you like to go back to

Vermont and see the judge? No, I think I'll rather go witness.

Then he thought about his old drunken drinking buddy, Bill Wilson, and they had never been sober together. They had never been sober together and

and he looked around, found Bill living over in over Brooklyn. Bill hadn't worked, although he'd been a millionaire on Wall Street several years before. He had drank himself to the point where, just like James, he couldn't get out of his kitchen. Lois was at the department store working and maybe went by to talk to him.

And you can you can read the rest of the story. The book Eddie brought him a simple message.

The most simplest of the messages was as Bill says in Bill story, he was sober. I had never seen him sober before.

And he was happy.

And Bill said, how did you do it? He says, I got religion. And Bill felt like he'd been slapped in the face. Bill was a agnostic bartering on atheist. And he just said, oh, no, don't, don't give me this religious stuff. What? Just. And then, very sarcastically, Bill's drinking his gin and pineapple juice. And the more Abby's talking about his spiritual awakening, the faster he's drinking his gin. And

Bill said,

well, just what kind of brand of religion is this?

And every morning exasperation than anything else. Say something that is the basis of this program that saved your life, and it saved my life,

he said. That's no particular religion, Bill. Why don't you just choose your own concept of God

now? How in the hell do you argue with that

when somebody says, well, you just choose your own concept and see if maybe you can find a way to pray to whatever the concept that happens to be. Bill did a little more drinking, checked himself back into that town's hospital. That fancy drying out joint. It was sort of the Betty Ford Center of the day. If you were rich and famous and powerful, you went to Towns hospital. Just like today, all the celebrities go to the Betty Ford Center. And the only way that Bill could get into the town's hospital because Bill was dead broke. Lloyd's was working down at Macy's department store,

you know, making not much money at all, even though she had been a high society gal earlier and even though he'd been a millionaire earlier. And the only reason he could get in there was that his brother-in-law was a Doctor Who was good friends with Charlie Towns, who ran the hospital and Doctor Silkworth there and was actually paying for his room and board there. I don't at a reduced rate. And Bill went in there and Bill just in frustration on the night of,

early in the morning perhaps of December 14th, 1934,

just threw up his hands and said, I don't think I can do that. If there's a God, would he show himself to me right now?

Reveal yourself to me.

And Bill was the recipient of one of those, one in a million strikes of lightning.

He records that the room lit up, that he felt he was on a mountaintop somewhere, that that a wind not of not of air but of spirit was blowing through him. That he felt. And his great cry was, I'm a free man. I'm free. At last I'm free.

I'm free.

And he never looked back on that. You know, from time to time now, a good thing happened. The next day Abby came to see him because Abby knew he was in the hospital. And Abby had been there the day, the day of his spiritual experience and once again, very prudently

didn't try to evangelize Bill, just outline, well, this is the things that I've done. You know, I taught my problem over somebody else. I admitted I was licked. I tried to pray as best I could to wear whatever power there might be. And I tried to go help some other people. You know, that was a simple formula that Abby was given and that Roland was given. Sounds a lot like most of our 12 steps, doesn't it?

Well, Roland had been telling Evie that you need to advance your spiritual development. So Roland had given Abby this book called Varieties of Religious Experience by William James the Great. He's considered really the founder of the American School of Psychology. He was a Harvard professor of moral philosophy. They called it then, and

he'd given this series of lectures in 1899 at the University of Edinburgh, which at the time was considered perhaps the foremost university in the world.

Being asked to deliver that Gifford series of lectures with the equivalent today. Because this was before the Nobel Prize of receiving the Nobel Prize. It was literally the highest academic honor that could be extended to a human being on the planet. In 1899 was to be asked to come talk at Edinburgh for this Gifford series. Nobel Prize didn't come along for three or four years after that,

and he delivered a series of lectures on spiritual experiences and he examined spiritual experiences differently.

He had looked at not

what they ought to be, but what the people reported. He examined the spiritual experience of Saint Paul on the road to Damascus. You know, Paul in some of his writings, talks about some hidden character defect. I suspect Paul was a drunk like us. I mean, look at it this way. He was on, he was taking a geographic cure to Damascus. He fell off his ass. He landed on his rear end. He was sort of seeing lights, hearing voices. He was blindly.

I mean, that sounds like some of my drunks,

but whatever happened to him changed his entire life, He reported others. A spiritual experience of John Wesley who founded Methodism and Booth who founded the Salvation Army in Saint Teresa and just just Saint Augustine was right on down the line.

Here was the difference with Bill Wilson, every other spiritual experience that William James reporting,

the people who had had this experience and William James said the true test of spiritual experience was did your life change afterwards?

Did your life fundamentally change? Were you a different person afterwards?

But Bill, instead of identifying it with religion, identified it with helping drunks.

His first thought the next day was I've got to go carry this message to other Alcoholics.

Well the next day Billy never heard of William James. The next day Abby shows up with his book that his

that Roland, who I guess was the Oxford Group equivalent of a sponsor, told him he had to read and if he didn't want to read this book and he didn't want to read, I've read that book. I've read it several times. You want a good night's sleep, Get William James, lay in your bed and start reading it. If you make more than 3 pages, you've got serious insomnia.

It works better than a pint of bourbon and three joints.

So Evie didn't want to read this thing,

so he thought, what am I going to do? Oh, I'll take it up to Bill. So Bills in the hospital. So Emmy takes it up there and gives it to Bill, and Bill didn't want to read it in. But then something caught his eye and he started reading it and it validated what had happened to him the night before.

He found in there that yes, men did have these kind of experiences and that they were changed. That they could take this message and go forth with it and go forth with it. Six months later, he wound up in just to cut the story of a short of how we got found at 73 years ago. After six months of not of trying every possible thing he can do to help other drunks and not getting one single person sober.

And his relatives are saying, well, you need to go back to work. You know, law, you haven't had a drink in six months,

Lois is still supporting you. Be a man, go to work. So he took a flyer on a stock speculation and went out to Akron to try to get a hold of a small rubber manufacturing company out there that made moles to make tires. Akron was the big tire city at that time. I think. Yes, it still is where a Firestone and Goodyear and all that are. And he went out there and that, of course, ended in disaster. You know it, they weren't able to take it over. He's left alone in the Mayflower.

All these business partners have left town. He's got 10 bucks left in his pocket. It's a Saturday afternoon. He knows absolutely nobody there. The crowd starting together in the in the lounge there at the Mayflower. And I've been there. I visited Akron one time, Joe, I think you've you've been there too, haven't you? Maybe some others.

The noise is starting to come out of the bar now. Here's the necessary part of the protective wall of human community. Here's Bill Wilson, who's six months before

had God Almighty himself in his hospital room and Bill's thinking, I can go into this bar and have a ginger ale.

That's called alcoholic thinking.

But he had been restored to sanity because he remembered that he needed a drunk and he went over and

got change. And now he went into the bar to get change, You know, I mean, you know, that's such an alcoholic act. I I'd have gone there to get changed. Where else you go to get changed? And he started calling ministers till finally somebody put him in touch with somebody. And it was a woman named Henrietta Cyberling. And he didn't want to call her because the Cyberlings were the people who owned Good Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company. And when he called her up finally, and he says, look, I'm, I'm a drunk from New York and I,

I need, I'm a member of the Oxford Group and I need somebody to talk to. And

your name was given to me. Do you know anybody? And she says, well, of course you called me.

I've been waiting for your call. Bill says, what do you mean? She says, well, a member of our Oxford group here, a doctor, Doctor Bob Smith, confessed to the group 2 weeks before that he had a drinking problem. And he's been coming for three years. We knew he was a drunk, but he won't tell anybody in three weeks before he did. And he, he asked for help and we didn't know how to help him. And so I've been praying for two weeks for somebody to show me how to help Bob Smith.

Of course you called me. You come right on out to my house right now. And they tried to get Bob out that day, but it was the day before Mother's Day, and Bill and Bob had bought

and Smith a potted plant, but Bob was more potted than the plant and was currently passed out underneath the table. And so they came the next day,

and Bob's first words to build well, what can you possibly say to me? I'm a medical doctor.

He's the right kind of medical doctor for an alcoholic. I mean, what's the specialty of choice for an alcoholic

doctor? Bob was a proctologist.

We know where we've all got our heads up when we come in here. Who else would we go to see but a proctologist?

Well, maybe a veterinarian. They're used to dealing with dumb animals and won't tell them their symptoms. But one of the two,

Bob said. What can you possibly tell me

that will help me with my drinking? And Bill said to him in all sincerity. Oh, you misunderstood. I'm so sorry, and I really do appreciate your coming, but I'm not here to help you. I'm here to try to stay sober myself, and it seems to help if I tell my story to another alcoholic. Would you mind listening to me a little bit while I tell you about my drinking and then maybe I can avoid taking a drink? And Bill started talking to him about his drinking.

And instead of the 15 minutes that Doctor Bob said he was going to give, and many of us in several of us in this room I'm sure have met Doctor Bob's son, who was, who had driven his father to the meeting because his father was too hungover to drive his car,

said they stayed in there five or six hours

and they talked and they talked. And Bob was to say later, he's the 1st man that ever talked to me about myself from his own experience. And they set out and Bob had one more slip. And then on June the 10th of 1935,

Bill and Ann have been sobering Bob up. I mean, doctors in those days didn't make much money and he'd been too drunk to get very many patients. In fact, a joke in the medical community at the time was if you go to Doctor Smith, you're really betting your ass.

They sobered him up enough to do an operation, gave him 2 beers to steady his hands. My sponsor never gave me two beers anyway and send him off to the hospital. And those were the last drinks that Bob had until he died in 1950. And from the two grew more and grew more and and Alcoholics Anonymous started to grow. In 1939, we published a book called the book Alcoholics Anonymous, which was the experience of the 1st

100, more or less, probably less than more. I've listened to a tape of one of the first 100, Jimmy Burwell, who's responsible for giving us the phrase God as we understood him because Jimmy was an atheist at the time. Anyone hearing this God stuff? And it's part of the general collective effort in the writing of the book. The the penmanship was bills. The words were bills. But everything got passed through the group in New York and in Oxford and in Akron, and

Jimmy Burwell's contribution was God as we understood him. He's in

in chapter 3. He's the used car salesman. You know, you've read his story in there. Who wanted to go out to the country bar to find a prospect for a used car. I mean, only an alcoholic is going to drive out of town to a bar to find a car sales prospect and drink Scotch and milk. That's weird. But anyway, Burwell says that there were maybe there were a hundred a as at the time coming and going. He says mostly going

probably weren't more than 30 or 40 that had more than a year's sobriety.

Remember, Bill only had 3 1/2 years when he wrote this book.

But Jimmy Burwell says with the book, once we had a common solution, once we had a common solution, we began to grow by leaps and bounds. We had something upon which we could agree.

A first exploded in Cleveland later on in 1939 through a series of articles in the Cleveland Plain Dealer and pretty soon had 1000 people in Cleveland. Gross was slow for a year or two then one of the great

they call a muckrakers back in those days be sort of the equivalent of to have this guy Alexander show up at your doorstep would be sort of like having Mike Wallace with saying I'm from 60 minutes standing there with a camera. I mean, he was a exposure of rackets,

you know, of frauds. It was a sensationalist writer. And he was going to expose Alcoholics Anonymous. So Bill and Bob said, well, before you expose this, would you simply come to some meetings? He came to some meetings and was totally transformed, wrote this wonderful article in the spring of 1941 on Alcoholics Anonymous. And then people started coming in by the 10s of thousands and

100 after four years. We had 10,000 or more members at the end of 1941.

Then the war came along, but the growth still became and then they started just simply having a lot of problems. They had growth problems. They had people selling memberships. One guy down in Florida was selling memberships. New Bill Roading says you can't sell memberships. And I he says, Oh yeah, I can't. He says people don't value what they're not getting for nothing. He said, besides, I turn the money back over to the group anyway. But you know, I'm charging for him by God and you can't tell me I can't do it. You got other people appearing on radio. You had people breaking anonymity. You had

a group in Connecticut deciding to go into business. A wealthy guy got sober, bought a three story building. He was going to put a, a club on the 2nd floor or a loan company on the 1st floor because Alcoholics all owed money and hospital on the top floor and you know, just crazy stuff like that.