The Problem with Life That Was Solved by Drinking – 1960 – Bob A.

Thank you, Stan, and good afternoon, friends. My name is Bob, and I'm an alcoholic. After all of that, I don't need to talk. I said to Stan, you know, statistics and jobs and stuff like that mean absolutely nothing to anybody. Please don't use those in the introduction. You heard what he said, you know. Try to tell an alcoholic what to do. My home groups are the Wednesday smokeless meeting in Greenwich, Connecticut, and the Monday meeting out in Sun Valley, Idaho. We have two homes for another five weeks. We've sold one in Connecticut, and five weeks from now after we go home from this meeting and clear the house out, I'd rather stay here, thanks. But then we will make Sun Valley our permanent home. They'll come out there and visit us, and we can take it to some great AA meetings. This is a little valley where there's no more than 10,000 people scattered among four towns. And there are 52 AA meetings a week in that valley. About every fourth person that you see on the street is a friend, you know. And it's really wonderful. And I too want to thank Mickey and the committee for inviting us here. My wife, my beautiful and beloved wife of 53 years is sitting down here. Get up, Bess. You remember Dr. Bob said that we alcoholics seem fortunate in attracting wonderful women as wives. And that's really true. All of them. And this is a very unique meeting to me, and I'm really excited about being here because, first of all, I've seen so many really old friends and dear friends and associates here that I really had no idea about. Betsy and I were staying for the last couple of days out with Mike and Mary Alice Rainbow. and of course he's just one of God's noblemen he has about as many years as Stan or almost exactly I think if I'm not mistaken I think it's 52 this year and then there are so many people here that I just didn't expect to run into I haven't seen Bob B down here we had a great relationship during a little tour of California groups in 1976, and I haven't seen him since. And what a thrill this is. And a past staff member, Lila B., who just was here. And all these people. And I hope that by the time that the day is over that I will have met some more people who will be meaningful friends. And of course we all share something in common who come to this meeting, I suppose, and that's an interest in the history or the early days of AA, and that's something that has always fascinated me. And I'm always going, when I'm talking to other groups who don't really give a damn about it, they're the ones who really should be told about it. You all know. I told Mel Barger, who's going to speak to us tonight, I said, I'm going to get up there and speak and don't you dare correct me in the middle of my talk. I said I'll do the same to you when you take me tonight. But anybody here is able to do that, of course. Paul just spoke to you on that lovely talk. I mean, he knows an awful lot about the early days of AA, even though he was not there as I was in many of these cases. I will probably ramble a lot in this talk. But I knew an older man, Lowell Thomas actually, the old radio announcer. And he used to preside at a luncheon that I go to a lot. And he was fond of saying, The trouble with growing older is that everything reminds you of something else. And that's unfortunately what you'll see as an example here this afternoon. Well, I guess I should certainly start by telling you what happened, what it was like and what happened and what it's like now. But suffice to say that I was born and raised out in Kansas, as was Betsy, and it was in the Depression years, and I was an only child. My parents were certainly functional. They're not non-functional in any sense. They were loving parents that treated me marvelously, and I'll be forever indebted to them for the values and things that they brought to me. And the only odd thing about my childhood was that my father, in an effort to keep bread on the table, we moved around a lot. And we moved 18 times in my first 13 years of life. And that meant that I was always going into a new school situation. I never went to the same class, the same school two years in succession. So that meant when school would start and I would get there, of course all their cliques and the gangs and so on were already in operation and I was the new kid on the block, and the first thing that boys do in such a situation like that is beat you up. And that's sort of testing you, you know. And I'm not complaining about that. That's your life. And I certainly had a very wonderful and happy childhood. But this moving around a lot, But I would finally, I'm shy and introverted, skinny little kid and not outgoing at all. And so it took me a long time to make friends in the new situation. By the time I had two or three friends that I was delighted with, my dad would pick up steaks and we'd move to this new situation." So I began, the effect of this was that I kind of lived in a, I got to kind of live in a dream world of my own. I fantasized an awful lot and really sort of reached out to enjoy life vicariously through, I became a very voracious reader. I read an awful ton. I was reading adult pulp magazines when I was in fourth grade when I could smuggle them into my room under the covers and read all these, you know, adventure stories, Western stories, amazing stories. I identified, you Know, with the people in these stories and I was a great movie fan. I was tremendous. I saw every single movie that came out that I could possibly get to and the movies in those days changed programs every day. And so, you Now, in the summertime when I was visiting my grandmother up in Lawrence, Kansas. I was always at the Dickinson Theater every single matinee by myself in the dark theater just all excited about whatever was going to come up on the screen. And if it was a movie about war heroes, I'm talking about World War I now, friends, you know the officers would say over the top men and they would lead them out of the trenches into the enemy fire and that was me boy I was leading those troops you know and if it was a western I was the one up on that white horse in the white hat with my two six shooters going after the fellas in the black hats which was a crock because I'm afraid of horses and I've never really ridden a horse, hardly. But in my mind I did. And my favorite fantasy and one that I really pursued in the end was those movies of Fred Astaire with the top hat and the white tie and the tails whirling Ginger Rogers in her flowing gown around and around and around in Central Park in New York. Well, when I went to school, I started drinking. I was a late starter. I didn't start drinking until I was 18 years old, and then it was the college type of beer bust drinking. And even then, in retrospect, I drank differently than the others. I was kind of a loner. Even in a crowd, I I would kind of go off by myself and drink, even though the other people were right there. Anyway, I became interested in writing very early. I am today a writer by trade. In fact, now I'm a writer for hire by trade, and I'm engaged right now. If I have time, remind me, andI'll tell you something I'm writing right now, which is of tremendous interest, I think, to AA people. But anyway, at that time, I wrote something in school. Actually, I made my way through school by ghostwriting themes and theses for other students. And eventually, I started in a junior high school, and we all went from there into other colleges. And I ended up with a mail-order business in eight different schools and colleges writing themes and theses for people I had never met in courses I had never taken no wonder when they caught up with me they accused me of intellectual dishonesty I figured well you know I made very good grades because I was an avid reader and I'm enthusiastic and all that and so I was making very good grade and I made grades for them whatever they wanted me to me. I had made the mistake very early. This isn't about this. What am I talking about up here? I'm talking about ghostwriting. That's another talk, huh? But anyway, what happened was that I pursued this writing. I was editor of the yearbook in college and went right on from that, on the basis of that. I went right on to, what I was going to tell you was that in my senior year, in addition to the other writing, I had written my experiences of this ghost writing. And I called it Ghost Behind the Grade. And it was bought by a very prestigious magazine in New York. And it Was picked up by the Reader's Digest. Now here I am in Kansas, 20 years old, and I'm famous, you know, I think. And this is so typical. You begin, we alcoholics, begin to have really fantasies about ourselves or ideas about our own achievements that are really not possible to achieve. And so I began to think that I could, you know, I would be famous and write anything in the world that I wanted to do. So as soon as college was out, I beat it back to New York. And I got a job, sure enough, on a magazine back there. It was a company magazine published by a big company, but it was the realization of my dreams in a way. And most of all, their company was in the offices. It was an big corporation, one of the biggest in the world, and they had offices in the RCA building in Rockefeller Center in New York. Now, for a kid, you know, there I was in my green gabardine suit and my two-tone shoes and my straw hat going to work for, you know, in the middle of this glamorous city. You know, I was looking for my white tie and tails, really. I really began to, my idea of success in life, I thought at that time, would be to come into a restaurant in New York City and have the captain say, Ah, Mr. Pearson, nice to see you. Your table is waiting, and lead me over to it. I mean, is there anything that you want in life beyond that? Not for me, there wasn't, you know. So what happened was that the people at this company who were a little older than I was, I was 21 years old at that time, and they were mostly in their, let's say, 30s and 40s, they were very nice to me, and the first two or three days that I was there, One day they said, would you like to come down and have a drink with us after work? Oh, what a, you know, it was that glamorous to go down to the English Grill, this great beautiful mahogany bar down in this concourse of the RCA building. Boy, this was living, I'll tell you. And so I went down and had a martini or Manhattan with them. In retrospect, I will tell you what happened. I had a blackout that very night. And the last thing I remember, we were over in Staten Island. What we were doing over there, I have no idea. Nothing terrible happened. I simply got drunk and came back and went back to work in New York. But that was the beginning of sort of the pattern that I had there in New York. And really, I think from that day on, I was a daily drinker until I came into Alcoholics Anonymous. There were many red flags at that period that I would recognize now. I didn't at that time. I attributed anything bad that happened to something else, certainly not to my drinking. And so the only break in that was that when World War II came along, I was commissioned into the Navy as a writer down in Washington, D.C., And then when, well actually I was down there before the war and when Pearl Harbor came along, we were encouraged to go to sea and I went to sea. I was trading reminiscences last night with Mel, he was a Navy man too. And I was a gunnery officer on a destroyer escort through the war and emerged as a lieutenant commander and I had a wonderful, wonderful experience in the Navy, really. It grew me up, but that's still another story. But what did happen was that I, of course, I didn't drink on board the ship, but we sure didn't make up for it when we went ashore and I made such a disgrace of myself on two different occasions, well, on one occasion on the ship and then another time, that I had two occasions when I was disciplined in the Navy for my behavior and for my drinking. And when the war was over, in 1945, Betsy and I had been courting in the finest bars in New York, you know, the Stork Club and the Downtown Cafe Society, downtown and all of those kind of places for a few years. When the ship would come into port, we would always go out on the town. And then in 1945, in the last year of the war, we were buried. And we went on a wonderful honeymoon over in the Pocono Mountains in a lovely resort over there. To give you an idea of how I was trying to live this fantasy out, We had champagne in a silver bucket by the bedside day and night for four or five days. And that was the way I really wanted to live the rest of my life. But I had to go back to reality and back to the ship. And afterwards, we began to have children. We moved out to the suburbs. By this time, I was dependent on alcohol. I was drinking alcoholically but didn't know it. In fact, I thought, as so many of us do, I thought I was having mental problems. And in a way, I was. But I became a daily drinker at this time. I had been hungover when I went into work one day and one of the fellows there said, well, what you need is a bit of the hair of the dog that bit you. And I said, oh, what do you mean? And he said, oh, well, just have a drink. Go down and have a Drink. And that will really straighten you out. So I did. And sure enough, it did straighten me out. And I read in the Grapevine some years ago, you know, the little quips down at the bottom of the page in the grapevine. And it says, when an alcoholic does anything once, it's a habit. and from that day on I had morning drinks, of course I don't think a day passed until they gave me an Alcoholics Anonymous that I didn't have a morning drink later on the last five years of my drinking I vomited every single morning and even so I would keep trying until I could keep one down and that was my morning drink But anyway, getting ahead of the story, and I'm going to cut the story short right now. What happened was that the progression of alcoholism set in. And while outwardly, Betsy, you know, she didn't even realize what was going wrong with me, but my life began to kind of drift professionally, certainly. And I began to live more for drinking than anything else. And I eventually got a pot belly and yellow eyeballs and broken blood vessels across my jolly face. And I shook. I had a terrible time with tremors. I don't know about any of you, But, you know, I would wake up in the morning and I couldn't control anything to get anything to my mouth. And sometimes this would last clear into the day. And here I was supposedly a professional executive in a company. I was by this time in public relations for this big company. And I would sometimes have to go out to lunch, you Know. and I had this terrible anxiety that I was going to shake. And so sure enough, if they served me soup, you know, for example, which was an anathema to me, I would pick up the soup spoon and I would get it into the soup and I'd get it up to about here and it would start shaking, you now. And humiliating, of course. And so your solution to that, of coarse, is to quit having soup. And this keeps spreading to everything in your life, you know, until you don't have much control over anything. Again, this reminds me of another story in The Great Vine. It was a wonderful article by some guy. I think he actually was over in New Zealand or Australia. He wrote about it and he wrote about this situation. And he said that any time an alcoholic has to take a drink in order to do anything, and it works. And that's what happened to me. I found that a drink would solve the tremors and the shake problem. In fact, it just gave me peace all over, you know, wonderful. and it would make it possible for me to answer the phone, which was a terrible terror to me for a while. It would make It possible for Me to sign checks. Imagine that. Wonderful. You could read My signature. And things like that. It said that if an alcoholic takes a drink to do anything that he has to do and it helps, then he can never again do that thing without a drink. we're nodding. That's right. And that was certainly the case. And this article went on to say that it's one thing, of course, to have to take a drink, for example, in order to answer the door in case somebody's there. You have to answer the door. It said it's quite another thing to take a drink in case somebody might come to the door but that's what I had come to this was where I had come to in my life and I was waking up in the middle of the night needing a drink knowing that something was terribly wrong Betsy and I slept in a double bed as we still do now and I remember some nights I could wake up and hear her crying in the pillow on the other side of the bed. And I knew that what I was doing was just wrecking her and our three children and endangering everything in my life, but I was absolutely, guess what? Powerless over alcohol. That's what I Was. I still had to drink. And so at that time I remember waking up and I would see these things floating in front of my eyes. I was not in DTs, but it was mighty close because I would say, I could see these formless things in front of me and I'd close my eyes and they'd still be there, you know. But that was what was happening to me. So at this point in my life I was a busy traveling executive with this company and I developed a hard lump in my abdomen. And it scared me to death because it got bigger and harder. And I thought, oh God, here it is, the big C. So I finally got up and was curious to go to our family doctor. And he put me out on the examining table and he felt around my abdomen and he asked me the question which might have been asked to some of you. and I said, Bob, how much do you drink? And I said oh, now this was once that I didn't lie. I was a terrible liar when I drank I told untruths when I didn' t even need to I mean, sure you need to a lot if you're a drunk but I just would lie about things that were no consequence But in this case I said to the doctor I said, oh, eight or nine drinks a day. He just pertinently fell off his examining stool, you know. He said, you don't mean every day. And I said、oh, sure, every day, you Know. And he said、well, I think we may have a clue to your problem here. And he gave me a test for liver and of course my liver was really badly impaired. It was right on the edge of cirrhosis of the liver. And so he read me the Riot Act and told me that alcohol was poison to me and that there were some people who could drink and some people can't and I was the one who couldn't, and all those things. And so for ten months, he took me off of alcohol. And for ten minutes, I functioned pretty well. But, you know, something was sort of missing. But it was not a bad period. And yet, at the end of the ten months, I had to keep going back to the doctor for continuing examinations. And after about ten months when I went back to him he examined me and he said, this is remarkable, he said your liver has made a simply almost miraculous recovery. And he said, it's functioning fine now and it's about as good as it's ever going to be. And he says, you don't need to come back for another six months and we'll take a look at it. And I had not expected this, but I heard myself saying from somewhere in my subconscious, I said, well John, does that mean that perhaps on a hot summer's day when I've been out cutting the lawn I might have a cold beer, and he looked kind of troubled. And then I hurriedly said, or a fine wine with dinner, which was really a crock because my drink of choice was hundred-proof vodka chased with Valentine's ale. That was what I drank. That's a Russian boilermaker. But when I said that, he said to me those fatal words to the alcoholic. Now here was a doctor, but he didn't know much about alcoholism at that point. He learned on me, I might add. But at that moment, he says, well Bob, one won't hurt you. So, I left his office, I hopped in the car, we lived in Connecticut then, and I drove home maybe five or six miles away and this was in the morning and I burst into the kitchen where Betsy was waiting and I said, guess what? I can drink again. She was overjoyed to hear that, you know. But she controlled her enthusiasm very well. And I hopped on the train. I was a commuter and I went into New York and I sent the bartender Sam set them up. I can drink again. And so he set them up, vodka, ale. I drank it. Of course, it didn't hurt me. That's the worst of it, where you deal with alcohol, cunning, baffling and powerful. And So it was only weeks when I was trying a drink here and a drink there. I reasoned, of course, and I think this is very good reasoning that But you metabolize, we metabolize alcohol in about two hours. So if you have a drink, one drink, which won't hurt you, then you metabolized this, you see, in a couple of hours and then you can have another one drink because your body doesn't know that it isn't just one drink. I mean, it's easy to figure that. And so that was the way that my mind was beginning to function. Well, you know what happened. In weeks I was just as bad off as ever. I want to tell you now, I'm going to jump ahead here and say something that I've got to remember to say to you. And that is that this ten-month period of not drinking, when I thought that I would have told you when I started that that if I had gone two hours without drinking, I would've gone stark raving mad. I could not imagine going more than about two hours without a drink. But I was able to go that ten months. Well, after I'd gotten into Alcoholics Anonymous and I was on my first business trip down to Houston, Texas at that time and my sponsor in Connecticut, I went to him and I said, now what will I do? I said you know I've been under your care here now but I'm going to be on my own. What do I do and he said first of all when the stewardess comes down the aisle and says what will you have you don't say a martini you say I'll have a cup of coffee or something see so I did that and then he said when you get down there look up AA in the phone book and get your tail over to a meeting just as quick as you can. And I did, as soon as I had to. It was in the evening, actually, when I got there. I quickly looked in the phone book in the hotel, hopped in the cab, went out to this meeting. As I went into this meeting, the old-timer who was conducting the meeting, he was saying, just right after I came in, he said, AA doesn't teach us how to handle our drinking. Well, I got my immediate attention because for six months, That's all I had been doing was trying to stop drinking, you know. And did stop drinking. I had not been stopped for six months. So he was saying that all alcoholics can stop drinking You know, you stop when you're in the hospital or in jail or during Lent or on a pledge or to keep your wife off your back or what have you. And he said at the very worst you have to stop between sips So, stopping drinking is not the name of the game. And that's really true, my friends. Stopping drinking is NOT the name of the name because, as a matter of fact, I'll even digress with interdigression here. If you think about it, isn't it amazing that the only people in the world who stop drinking are alcoholics? You know, I talked to a physician who is an expert in addictions up in Toronto once. And he said, you know, when I get a new person in the office, I can tell by an answer to just one question whether he's an alcoholic or not. And I said, well, what's that question? And he said, when I ask him, do you drink? If he answers, I can take it or leave it alone. I know I got an alcoholic. Isn't that amazing? That's really true. I mean, a normal, whatever normal is, right? I'll tell you what, I'll digress within a digression within a regression. I'll say what normal is. A fellow in Twin Falls said, I know what normal is. It's a setting on the washing machine. That's as good an answer as I ever heard. So, anyway, he said, you know, a normal drinker will never say I can take it or leave it alone because he never needs to leave it along. Isn't that amazing? Anyway, back to whatever I was talking about a while ago. At any rate, I was telling him about this fellow who said that AA doesn't teach us how to handle our drinking because I had just handled it, you see, for ten months. so anyway that was later but anyway he said AA doesn't teach us how to handle our drinking it teaches us how to deal with how to handle sobriety and that's what none of us could handle in the first place and that is why we drank isn't that simple it just made a light bulb go off in my head really seriously and it has affected the way that I thought about AA all my sober life And it has helped me immeasurably in talking to the civilians on the outside about Alcoholics Anonymous. Because, you know, people will say, you haven't had a drink in so many years, why do you still go to those meetings? And, you Know, the answer is simply that I don't have a drinking problem, really. Haven't had an alcohol problem for 36 years. So why do I still go to those meetings? Because I have the problem with life that was solved by my drinking. And now that I don't drink anymore, I've got the problem of coping with life, with every trauma and every human relation and every emotional crisis that comes up and every disappointment and every anger and resentment, all those things that we have every cotton-picking day of our life. and that's what AA is all about. I always love what Clancy says when he's digressing and he's talking about the big book and he says, you know, there's not a single page in the big book that tells you how to stop drinking. There's not one single paragraph. There's no single sentence that tells you how stop drinking and when you think about it, that's actually a fact and yet here are two million people who have stopped drinking through the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous. Incredible. But what the big book gives you is, as we all know, it's a way to live and to become so happy, joyous, and free, and to live the life beyond our wildest dreams so that we don't want to go back. We don't need to go Back to Drinking. We Don't Want to Go Back Drinking, We Wouldn't Be Driven to Go back to Dranking as long as we're living this kind of a life. And, of course, it says right there in the first sentence of the essay in the 12 and 12 on the 12th step, it says, joy of living is the theme of our 12th steps. And that means to me is that if we're trying to carry the AA message, It doesn't make any difference what we say if we exemplify joy of living. That's what attracts the new man or the new woman, not our preaching. It's the fact that we are indeed joyous. And that's to me the essence of AA. Hey, now what happened in a few sentences is that I drank for another two years after this episode and it got worse and worse and worst. Of course, by that time I had gotten into cirrhosis of the liver. I'd gotten very weak. I was just a tottering wreck really and going to the office every day carrying my little briefcase with a bottle of vodka in it. I had another bottle hidden behind the drapes in my office so that these carafts that you have in your office with a little glass by the side, the caraft is supposed to be full of water. Mine was actually, but the glass was always full of vodka. And for some reason I got to such a stage of compulsion. I've never said this publicly before, ever. But I got to such a stage of compulsion, I had a locker down in the basement of the building down near the subway which I had rented. I mean, I kept it by the day with coins in which I Had another bottle hid. What the hell I ever needed that for? I have no idea. But you know, you get these ideas. Well, if I run out here, I've got one there. You know, I think I left it in the locker when I came to AA. I think it may be still there. Anyway, I finally came to the point where what the doctor kept telling me, the doctor said, you're going to die. You're goingto die. I'm not talking about years or months. He said, You're gonna die in weeks. And he said, Why? Why? He would say to me, this was, you know, my wonderful, caring doctor. And I would say, I don't know why, John. I don' t know why. I just know that I would rather go on drinking and die than to quit drinking. So, I was on a business trip out in Chicago, and what he had warned me about came. I had a massive esophageal hemorrhage, esophagal varices they call it. I lost half the blood in my body in about two hours. and vomiting it, losing it rectally, losing it through my eyes and ears and everything else really. And they rushed me to a hospital out there. I didn't even know what hospital I was in for several days. I was on a bed with intravenous feeding going in one arm and blood transfusion after blood transfugion after blood transfiguration in the other arm because if you have this problem In those days, anyway, there was no solution to this kind of internal bleeding except to keep up with how much blood you were losing by keeping more going into you until the body healed or until God healed your body. And that's what happened to me. And once I left that hospital about seven days later, they said to me, they sat me down and they said, You know, if you ever have another drink, it may well be your last. Well, I said, after what's happened to me out here, my God, I've learned my lesson. Sure. I got back and in a month I was going to a football game back there in Connecticut and simply in my mind I could never imagine going to an event like that. Going to a baseball game without a drink. I mean, that's a perfectly rational viewpoint in my view. I mean, obviously when I was drinking, I knew that everybody else in that whole stadium was drinking. Right? It astonished me after I quit drinking that there are a few here and there that don't drink in that stadium. But anyway, I had a drink and of course nobody had told me about AA. Nobody had told us that it's the first drink that gets you drunk. Nobody had taught me that we're in the grip of an obsession and a compulsion that dooms us to either death or insanity unless it's curbed. None of these things. So I had that first drink, and of course within weeks I was just as bad off, worse off than I had ever been before. And I continued to drink for some months, and probably six or seven months later I came back from another business trip and I had one of these esophageal hemorrhages right then and there and was rushed to the Greenwich Hospital. And in the middle of the night, as I had lost quantities of blood, they rang a code 500 on me in the hospital, which there in that hospital means the patient is dying. And it brings all the medical help and the nurses and the aides and the oxygen and the priest for the last rites. I don't happen to be a Catholic, but there he was. And by the grace of God, of course, by the grâce of God I did not die as you can see. And I came to in the next morning and they continued the treatment and four or five days later I had enough other people's blood in me then I felt, you know, pretty good. And so they declared me ambulatory. So this was in June and I put on my shoes and my pants and my shirt and I ambulated down to the liquor store which was about a block away, got a bottle of vodka and smuggled it back into the hospital and into my wastebasket and had been sucking away on it merrily when Betsy called me. That was a mistake. She could detect when I had been drinking for 50 miles away. And so she talked to me for a few minutes and she called our doctor, poor long-suffering John. And she said, John Pierce, she called me Pierce, she said Pierce has been drinking And he said, well, that's ridiculous. He's in the hospital. He can't have been drinking. She said, oh, I know he's been drinking! So the doctor came up to see me, and of course I was soused. And he was absolutely devastated, really. I mean, he had been trying so hard with me all this while, and he was such a sweet man, but he was very angry with me. And he was disappointed and he was frustrated and, I mean, terrible. And he said to me, I can no longer be responsible for your life. He said, you're fired, so to speak. He would not be my doctor anymore. And he says, with this kind of behavior, you need to go to a psychiatrist. And so I said, well, you know, Paul was reading this morning from Dr. Silkworth, where he says the alcoholic reaches a point where he can't distinguish between fantasy and reality, so to speak. And so he believes that alcoholic behavior is normal behavior. So I said to him, of course, you don't know, I'm not crazy. This isn't normal behavior, of curse. But he said, you've got to go. So I did, and the man that he sent me to was, and here's the historical part. You've been waiting for that, right? He sent me this psychiatrist who practiced in the same suite of offices as he did in Greenwich, Connecticut, and the gentleman's name was Dr. Harry Thiebaud. You're wonderful. You know, I tell this story now when I'm speaking to a young audience. They had the faintest idea who Harry Thiebaud was, really. All of you know him, isn't he wonderful? So anyway, so here we are. I'm now at the first historical character in AA that I ever knew. And, of course, at that time, he not only was the professional who knew more about alcoholism than any other in the whole world, but he was also a non-alcoholic trustee on the General Service Board of Alcoholics Anonymous. But he didn't let me know that, and so I went to him for exactly twice. Well, what happened was that the first time that I went through him, he gave me a copy of Marty Mann's Primer on Alcoholism. here's a man nodding on his head I hope that many of you know that book he didn't give me the big book right off, he gave me that to try to persuade me to try and go through this denial you see what I didn't tell you when I came in to see him he said well Mr. Pearson what's your problem I said I don't have any problem I said I just like to drink he gave me this book of Marty Mann's and so I read it and came back and the second time that he talked to me he said now we could explore your psyche and we could try to determine what in your childhood makes you an alcoholic but he said we don't have time to do that or you will be dead. So he said, I know a man here in town who has had the same problem that you have and he is successfully recovered and lives a good life now and I think he could help you. And he said will you call him? I said no. I said I don't want to bother him. and Dr. Thiebaud said, you know, these are very peculiar people. He said, they don't consider a call of that kind any bother at all. Isn't that wonderful? So I still didn't call, and Harry Thiebault picked up the phone, and he dialed the number of the man who was to become my sponsor. And I always remember this, when we insist that the alcoholic call us, you know, or the alcoholic want help from us. Because if Thiebaud had really hung to that, hell, I wouldn't be here before you right now. I'd be long since underground. But he made the call and then he put the phone in my hand And this wonderful man on the other end said, Ho, ho, ho! You know, full of joy. He didn't really. But he was very cheerful sounding. And he said, Bob, you don't have to ever drink again unless you want to. Well, that was the last thing I wanted to hear. If this was attraction rather than promotion, it was a failure because all I wanted her to do was get out of that office and drink again. but this man did become my sponsor, and it was wonderful. So I did go ahead, and I drank for another week or so, and I started going to AA meetings with this wonderful sponsor of mine. He was in Greenwich, Connecticut. He was the town attorney, a very prominent guy. His picture was always in the paper, and his name was always on the paper. And I, of course, had no idea that he was in AA. and he lived in a big beautiful house out in back country Greenwich and he was bald and so he wore a beret when he was outside and he had a handlebar mustache and a deep voice and everybody who remembers him even to this day said he had the most wonderful laugh. He was always laughing, you know. And he had a black belt in karate. He was a potter. He made wonderful pottery, which I still have as gifts from him in the house that we're going to go back and clear out. And by the way, we must remember that somewhere there's some of his top pottery. Anyway, just remembering, he also drove a Porsche sports car. And so this was the man and the vehicle in which I went to my first AA meeting. And I thought I deserved no less. And I enjoyed what I saw, but you know, Paul this morning used the word mocus. I was too sick and too mocus to really get it, you know what I mean? So I went to a few meetings and I continued to drink and I ended up making a terrible spectacle of myself on two or three occasions during that week. Once we partied at our yacht club. Social life had long since disappeared in our family as far as Betsy and I were concerned because she couldn't take me anywhere for fear of what my behavior would be. So on this occasion, on one of the rare times that we have disagreed on things, She just said, I'm not going to go there with you. And I said, well, I am going to. So I went. And I went up with this nice crowd of people. It was summer night. We went down on the poolside. I had taken the precaution of taking a bottle of vodka down, which I had hidden in a stone by the edge of the parking lot. And so during the evening, I visited the parking lots on several occasions and I had a few drinks. And finally, I got really drunk And I wanted to help these people, so I went from table to table saying, I'm now an alcoholic synonymous. And if there was ever an argument for anonymity, that was it. And that really is one of the reasons that I truly believe in anonymity is this kind of a situation. And then on July 3rd of 1961, they had a big fireworks display. I got badly drunk before we went down. I took the family. I dropped the family off. I parked the car. I went back, couldn't find my family. The fireworks were going off overhead. It was all very confusing. There were people spread out all over this park with their blankets and their food and their baskets and their perambulators and all that kind of thing and I was stumbling among them and as the fireworks would go off overhead and the fire would come down. I could see pretty well then, and all these people were looking up at me like that. And when it was all over with... You remember all this, don't you, Bob? Same talk as 23 years ago. But anyway, on that occasion, everybody left the park. The fireworks was over, and the band played America the Beautiful, and everybody got up and folded their blankets and left. And I was left there because I still hadn't found the family. And they were gone, apparently, because they weren't there. And so I thought, well, they've probably gone to where the cars parked. And I thought no, I let them out so they don't know where the car's parked, for God's sakes. And I though, I don't now where the care's parked. So, there I stood. And I followed the last of the people who were trailing off the hill and I stopped about halfway up the hill and something I had heard in those few AA meetings that I had gone to really hit me. Not that I was powerless over alcohol, but that at that point my life was unmanageable. So I sat down. This is the typical way to cope with life if you are in AA. I sat out on a rock and cried. And my sister-in-law came along and put her arm around me and said, they're there. And she led me to where the family was. And it was where the cars parked. How they do that, I don't know. But anyway, home we went. And the next day, Betsy here had an intervention on me. Now you must understand that this is in 1961 and interventions had not been invented. Interventions. Interventions had not be invented. But she invented them. You have here in this room The woman who invented alcoholic interventions. Because she had assembled my word from my boss, you know, for leave of absence, from our minister, from a lawyer from whom she had gotten commitment papers to commit me to an insane asylum. That's right, so help me God. And another friend or two, and they confronted me. And somewhere along the line, somebody had poked a finger in my chest at an AA meeting where I was, you know, they could smell me, I'm sure. And they said, where you belong is High Watch Farm. You all know the name of High Watch Farms. It's in Kent, Connecticut, and it's described at length, actually, in AA comes of age because Bill and Marty Mann went up there in 1939. It was a lovely 200-acre beautiful farm that was operated as a kind of a rest spot by a woman named Sister Frances. All this is in AA comes of age. And she was so impressed with what Bill and Marty Mann were doing in helping alcoholics. She was trying to help almost any wayfarers along the road. She had some people who had mental problems and people who were just destitute and other people. and it was a sort of a religious retreat that she ran. And on the spot, isn't this one of those miracles of God? On the spot she said, I am getting older and I want this farm to be taken over by Alcoholics Anonymous and used to help alcoholics. And of course they couldn't take even then, and this is 1939, they had a tradition that we can't own property And so they formed a separate corporation, the one that, no, that's Stepping Stones. Anyway, they formed an operation to own High Watch Farm and it consisted entirely of AA people and they took over that farm and it was the great granddaddy of all the treatment centers in the country. I mean, when I was at the General Service Office, there were maybe 4,000 listed. And they all started with High Watch Farm. And to this day, it's still there and they're still doing the same work. They don't have any counselors. They don'T have any nurses or doctors. They DON'T have many ministers. All they have is a spiritual place. In fact, when Bill and Marty Mann went there to look at it, they went into what Sister Frances had as a chapel. Really, it had been a former living room of the farmhouse. And it was a little kind of makeshift chapel. And as they stepped in, Marty said to Bill, My God, Bill, you can cut it with a knife. Meaning the spiritual feeling in that chapel. That's what you had up there. You had a spiritual place and a place that gave you nourishing food and nobody to talk to but members of Alcoholics Anonymous day and night. I mean, the people like yourselves who would volunteer to come up and put on meetings and spend a night with us and talk to us, you know. And everybody on the staff, everybody onthe staff was in Alcoholics Anonymous. So, you couldn't get away from it. And, you know, as I say, there was nothing formal about it. But the recovery rate was phenomenal and still is. And inexpensive. I think what did it cost, Betsy? Seven dollars a day it cost for room, board, and treatment. You can't beat that. Now, when I came back, I got active in the groups in Greenwich. And even though I was still inside a shy, introverted kid, I fell under the spell of the wonderful people that just took me under their wing. Not my sponsors so much, but there were a couple of people there in town. And this is what's so wonderful about AA. I hope it still goes on. When I was up at High Watch, I got a letter from a man named Ted Ballard there in Greenwich, a fellow I'd never met in my life. He said, I understand you're up there taking care of your drinking problem. He said I want you to know that I've had the same problem and I'm now an Alcoholics Anonymous and when you come down I just want to be your friend and want to help you and I hope we can become acquainted. And it's got the same kind of a letter from another fellow named Ed Tiger. Well, these two men, when I got back, I had talked to the man who ran High Watch Farm about my future and everything else. By the way, he was the first man I asked about who runs this thing? How does it run? Where does the money go? Where do they get it? You know, these kind of things. He said, if you're interested in that, he said, I really encourage you. He said, I just hope that you'll go and find those answers when you get back because it could mean a lot in your life. Well, God, that was how I got into service. Right there at that farm, I got really very interested in service. So anyway, these two wonderful guys, when I got back, of course, I was so excited about getting back into life. I wanted to get back to my church work and my Boy Scout work and all my job and all these things, you know. And did I have any time for AA? Well, that was questionable. I certainly wanted to do something about that, but I wasn't really very committed. And so the phone would ring and one of these fellows would say, Bob, would you like to go to a meeting tonight? Gee, Ted, I would just love to, but I'm busy at the church and maybe later in the week I can do this. And he would just ignore that and go right on. And he'd say, well, I'm going to the Wednesday night meeting tonight and there are awful nice people there and I know that you would enjoy it and suppose I come by and pick you up. And I said, well, you don't understand. I'd like to do it, but I just can't do it. He said, I'll pick you over at 8 o'clock. And he would. And that's the way I started going to meetings, really. And both of them did this. And so I was going to a lot of meetings. And these guys, they weren't 12-stepping me. Yes, they were, I suppose, in a sense. But it was just plain service, as in love and service is our commitment. So anyway, that was the way that it got started. And I have, as Stan so nicely read, I really got into it. And I never pursued or desired an AA service job, so help me God. I simply sobered up at the right time and the right place and with a willingness that was instilled in me by my sponsor and by people up at the farm that when they're asked to do something, you always say yes. And just by doing this, I became so involved in it. I worked on the grapevine. I got on the Grapevine Board. I got onto the AA World Service Board. I served on the two boards at the same time because again, I just happened to be there at a time that there was a personality conflict between the people who were on these two AA boards. And the then chairman of the board, who was Dr. Jack Norris, a wonderful, wonderful man, he and the manager of the office at that time, who is Herb Morse, took me to lunch and they said, you serve on the corporate board of the grapevine. He told me about this conflict and said, we thought that it might be helpful if one person served on both boards so that there would be more, certainly some communication between the two boards. And would you be willing to do that? I said, well, yes, sure. So I was put on the two Boards. Busy, busy time, I tell you. So you continue to serve on the subsidiary Boards even if you are then representing those Boards on the Board of Trustees. So when the time came, the Grapevine Board asked me to go on the board of trustees or they appointed me, really, to go on the board of trustees as their representative. So now I was on the Board of Trustees and the Grapevine Board and the World Services Board all at the same time. And furthermore, all these boards have committees. You know, so I was a nominating committee here and a finance committee there. It was a busy time. But it was an opportunity that I'm just speechless because it is such an evidence of the working of the grace of God in my life. Because not only did I come at a time in AA when this was possible, but it was a time when, as many of you old-timers in this room know, It was a time when many of the key figures in the early days of Alcoholics Anonymous were still alive and still around. And because I was there in New York, it was a times when I got to know all of them, or many, many of them. And, for example, rather early on when I was working down at the New York Intergroup, before I went up to the Grapevine, there was a man, Barry Leach, dead now, but he wrote some of our literature. He helped Lois write her memoirs and so forth. But he was also on this same committee and he said, you know, I work up at the Gravevine. And he said, would you like to come up there and see what it's like? Maybe you'd like to do something up there. And I said, yeah, sure. So he took me up one day. And this was when the offices, general service offices were on East 45th Street over near the United Nations over there, kind of in an old loft building. And so he took be up. And in those days, Bill came to the office every day. Not every day, once a week. day a week. And it happened that this was the day that he came. And so, I'm sure Barry had picked it for that reason. And we went up there and I met the people on the staff. And of course, he took me to meet Bill. And Bill jumped up from behind his desk as he usually did and came over and shook my hand. And he said, hi, I am Bill and I am a drunk. And I said, well, I Am Bob and I'm a drunk, too. And that was the total conversation I had with our founder. But that was my first meeting with him. And of course, later on, as I became more and more involved, I had a great deal to do with Bill. They had Christmas parties at the office every year. And the picture that I kind of love to think about is that when after the merriment of the party had sort of settled down, why they always cleared... Parties were held in the office then. Now they're held in a huge hotel ballroom. But in those days, they were held there in the Office. And they would clear the desks away until there was a big area. And they'd put a chair right out in the middle and Bill would sit out there and we would all sit on the floor because there weren't enough places to sit otherwise. We would all seat on the ground on the floor at his feet around in the office, and he would spin what they always called his bedtime story, which was really, of course, Bill's story and his reminiscences of the early days. And what a privilege that was as I look back on it, you know. I mean, when I met Bill, I wasn't really impressed particularly, but now, you know, in retrospect, you realize what a precious, precious thing that that really was. And I remember Bill on many occasions, this happened to be at the time when he was pushing, what is it, B12 or B, is that right, B-12? And he was a controversial figure in his own fellowship and Dr. Jack had to finally talk turkey to him to say, look, you're violating your own traditions here, trying to push this but Bill he really wanted to help alcoholics so that was what he was really trying to do. But anyway, we went through all this and I was around, you know, all this was going on, in fact, talking to both sides in this particular case. And I remember at the general service conferences in those days, Bill would still attend the general services conferences, and I remember on at least a couple of occasions when he would get bored with the proceedings and rather than leave, he would just go back to the back of the room and stretch out on the carpet and go to sleep. That's serenity. And I was, of course, down at the 1975 International Convention when he made his last talk. I'm sure people have told you about that, his appearing on the Sunday morning. All through the convention, he usually would be around at all the different meetings and they would always say, well, he can't come to this because he's not feeling up to it, but he'll come to the next one. Let me regress, because at a meeting at a general service conference about a couple of years before, it happened just after he had fallen off the roof of his studio there at Stepping Stones. And he didn't really hurt himself too bad, but he never really recovered from that fall. He deteriorated in health from that moment on. And this was, in fact, the next year at the General Service conference. He was supposed to make the final talk. And he got up and he made a talk for about ten minutes and he said, I just can't go on. He quit. God, it just shocked everybody to death because everybody believing, my friends, And those, at that time, even though the 1955 coming-of-age conference was by that time 11 years before, and they'd had six regular General Service conferences by then, or more than that, seven or eight I guess. But everybody thought if Bill dies, it's just all going to collapse. I mean, what will happen to AA when Bill dies? Everybody all over the fellowship sort of was wondering this, you know. And so it was a terrible shock when he couldn't even finish his talk there. And he was looking poorly. He was looking skinny and weak and haggard. Not good at all. And so, of course, it got worse and worse and worst. And by the international convention down there in Miami, he did come down. And if you haven't read Nell Wing's book, Grateful to Have Been There, she starts out, the first chapter is telling about this flight from Stepping Stones down to Florida with Bill dying really right there, almost. So anyway, he couldn't ever make it. And they got Bernard Smith to fill in for him. And Burns Smith, of course, as you all know, you students, was the first chairman of the board of the General Service Board. There had been the Alcoholic Foundation before that, and I think Willard Richardson and people like that were the head of that. But the first and long-standing chairman ofthe board was this Bernard Smith. So hurriedly they got in touch with him in New York, and he came down and delivered that talk. So here was still another really historic figure for AA that I at least got to spend an evening with down there in Miami when he delivered his talk. And then, of course, on Sunday morning, everybody was gathered and unexpectedly and unannounced by they introduced Bill. And he came through the curtains at the back of the stage in a wheelchair with the oxygen. And the host committee at that convention, being in Florida, they all wore these flaming orange jackets to identify who was on the host community. And so Bill comes through, our founder, in a great flaming orange jacket with tubes in his nose from the oxygen, you know. And he, of course, the place just broke apart. There were 10,000 people there and the place just absolutely broke apart when this happened. And Bill got kind of shakily to his feet from his wheelchair up at the podium and he kind of hung on to the podium, but he stood tall and his voice was good and strong. And he just made a little talk of about ten minutes saying what it meant to him to see so many people from all over the world because there were people at that convention from all around the world and what it really meant to them and just nice words like that. And then, I don't know if I can get through with this. At the end, he said, as I look out on this audience, he said I know in my heart that AA will endure for a thousand years if it is God's will. And with that he sat down and with that everybody was in tears. Everybody stood up and was just applauding and stamping and cheering. And that was the last public appearance that he ever made. Just amazing. So, of course, later on we got to know Lois real well. I had known her all along, but I'll tell you just one or two little things about Lois. Lois of course was Al-Anon and she came over to see us one time from Stepping Stones over to our house there in Greenwich and we took her to the yacht club for lunch and Betsy you know the waiter came around and said would you like something to drink and Betssy was about to say she didn't know what to say but she wanted to say oh well no and Lois I said, I'll have an old-fashioned. And Betsy, you know, was shocked at this. And Lois turned to her and said, that was Bill's problem, not mine. And another time... Oh, so many... I could tell you a lot of things about Lois. She was great. One time we went by there. I think it was right after one of her famous Christmas parties. That woman was so with it that well into her 90s, she was hosting and conducting these parties at her house for AAs and Al-Anons as if she was 40 years old. She would write the invitations personally. She held one party, probably Stan and some of these people were there, where she gave a huge gathering at Stepping Stones for everybody who had sobered up prior to 1950. And so a lot of people from all over the country showed up there and we got to go simply because of my position at that time, I guess, at GSO. God knows I didn't have that kind of sobriety. But anyway, she hosted that thing herself and she wrote personal notes to, I think, everybody of the hundreds of people who were at that party. She was incredible. And so one time when we went by there, she was sitting up in her bed upstairs on the second floor of Stepping Stones with a little pink ribbon in her hair and a nice little peignoir or something on, you know. And I had just noticed downstairs that so many people who had come to this Christmas party had left all kinds of lovely notes and cards and gifts, of course. And I said, Lois, isn't it absolutely incredible and wonderful that so many, many people love you, know you, and love you. And that you mean so much to everybody. And she said, oh, just goes with the job. I sound flippant, but that's her way of trying to be sort of modest about it, you know. Another time, Betsy and I were calling on her over there at Stepping Stones and just the three of us around the fireplace and a nice fire going. And for lack of something else to say, I guess, I was admiring the Cape Cod lighter that she had there. You know, a kind of an iron pot that has a soapstone on the end of a little rod that sticks down into kerosene. And it's the old New England way of starting a fire. You know, you get the kerosene soaked into this rock, put the rock under the wood, light it, and you've got a good fire, see? And I was just saying what a wonderful little invention that was from the pioneers, the revolutionary pioneers admiring it. And then she said, you notice we've got two of these, one on each side of the fireplace. And she said I think Bill would have liked for you to have one of them. So she gave me one of those things right on the spot. And, you know, it sits, of course, at our fireplace right now. And, uh, you don't know what to do with it. You know, I think it's one of the most precious things. I should give it to the archives sometime, I suppose, but not really. Another Lois story. I could go on here for two hours, I'll tell you. Another law story, and this I think is so great. When she was literally dying, she was in the hospital on the very last stay there. She was taking oxygen, so she had a mask over her face, so she couldn't speak, and she had to communicate by writing on a pad of paper. And so my successor at the General Service Office, the general manager, John Bragg, went up to call on her when he heard that she was in the hospital. And he was a fine man and he sat by her bedside and he said, Lois, I just wanted to express the love and concern of all of the people of AA and to you for what you have meant to Bill and what you've meant to our fellowship. And she wrote on her little pad, handed it over to him, and what it said was, Not me, but God. And he said, But Lois, you were the vehicle through which God did this. And she wrote something on the hand back and said, so are you. Isn't that wonderful? And I knew so many other people. I'll just lay a few of them on you and sit down. It just happens that Marty Mann, of course, was the first woman who ever got sober in Alcoholics Anonymous. And where she got sober, of course, was at the Blythewood Sanitarium in Greenwich, Connecticut. And Harry Thiebaud, here we go again, was the man who was the medical director of Blythewood. And through an incredible series of coincidences, which would be better than almost anything I've told you so far but I don't have time, A modalith copy of the big book had gotten in Harry Thiebaud's hands, and he had only a couple of alcoholics in this sanitarium, and all the rest of the people were mental cases. But this woman who was a society woman of Greenwich, but had been committed by her sister because she was such an awful drunk and was dangerous on the streets of New York, So she had been put in the sanitarium and was in a rage at her sister. Terrible. But Harry Thiebaud gave her the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous in its modal form and said, you really ought to read this. They've got something here. It might help you. Well, she rejected it and didn't read it. And eventually, you can read her story in the big books, of course.