Finding Small Signs of a Higher Power Early On – Sandy B.

Hi everybody, my name is Sandy Beach and I'm an alcoholic. How are you all doing? Thanks for coming in out of the beautiful sun for a little storytelling. That's one of my favorite things to do in AA is to tell stories. And so this afternoon I'm going to tell you a story that I love telling. and when you tell stories you're not supposed to give away the ending in the beginning but I think in this case we can do it I can tell you right now that this story has a very happy ending and I'll tell you what the happy ending is the happy end the happy thing is you and I that's the happy ended the fact that we're here enjoying sobriety and enjoying each other is the ending of this story. Now, I like to start all stories with once upon a time, so I'll start this one with that. Once upon a Time, quite a few years ago, there were six young men sitting in a bar. They spent a lot of time sitting in the bar. And they were in their late 20s and early 30s, And they were very successful. They had families. They were, by all appearances, doing well. But as they sat at the bar, they started talking about how their lives were going to suddenly take a dramatic turn for the worse. because each of them, and as a group, they recognized that they were alcoholics and that their drinking was getting worse and worse and worst and worse. And they sat around just drinking and talking and one of them said, I wonder if we could help each other stay sober. So in their drinking state, that sounded like a great idea. Maybe we could help each other get sober. So they decided to write a pledge. Pledges were big. Take a pledge and you'll be fine. So in their own creativity, they got back the following week and they had put together a pledge and they wrote it out. And this pledge did not involve God. It didn't involve anything outside of a promise to not drink and to live by good moral principles and we should be able to succeed. Well, they took the pledge and then they met once a week and they would talk how their week was going and they found themselves staying sober. So they decided that this news was too good to keep to themselves so they went around the city to find other people And the people they got were like important people. They would get people high up in the local government and people high up in business world, very high profile people. And when the word spread that these higher profile people were staying sober, then more people came. And they kept this up for an entire year. And at the end of the year, they decided to have a parade in this city. And it was an eastern city, a seaport city called Baltimore, Maryland. And on the first year after they put that pledge together, they had 4,000 people in the parade. Now that's amazing, 4,00 people. And they realized they had found something remarkable. And so they decided that they should appoint several people out of their group to go to other cities where they would be the one in charge of getting this started. And they said, you know, we got this thing going, we ought to come up with a name for it now that it's succeeding. So they started thinking and they said, well, why not name it after the founder of our country. And they said, that sounds good to me, and so they named it the Washingtonian Society. And the Washingtonia Society took off. This is in the 1840s. And it wasn't long before cities all up and down the East Coast, over into Washington, D.C., into Pennsylvania, Virginia, Maryland had a contingency and succeeding very, very quickly and growing rapidly. As a matter of fact, at one of their conventions where they brought everybody together, they had a young lawyer from Illinois come and address them named Abraham Lincoln. And when you look in the Abraham Lincoln history, you will find under his speeches that he gave a speech to the Washingtonian Society in the mid-1840s. And at one point in their history, now the estimate varies, but historians tell us that it reached three to four hundred thousand people. now that number is a higher percentage of the then population than AA is today of our current population just to give us an idea of how much this succeeded but it was not founded on spiritual principles there was no higher power it largely was built on momentum and the excitement of new people coming in and the celebrity-ism, and it just consisted of telling your story. They would tell how their week went, and that's what the meetings consisted of. So it lacked a lot of the traditions and the principles that we have, and it probably would have fallen apart eventually, but what did it in was the fact that once you assemble that many people as a group, it is perceived by others as a very powerful force. You know, a lot of people would love to be endorsed by Alcoholics Anonymous. It would mean good revenue to them in certain instances. So outside forces would come and they would say, why don't you join in the temperance movement, you sober alcoholic, certainly you understand that we ought to ban alcohol in the United States. Certainly you could get behind that. So they decided to take a position on an outside issue of temperance. And then other people came and said, well, you have so much insight now. Now you're sober. certainly you can understand the evils of slavery and your organization can take a position on this terrible, terrible injustice so they took a position on that as an organization well not everybody in the organization agreed with those positions and so there started to be arguments and there startedto be fights and there was a total lack of unity and before the 1840s ended, there was no more Washingtonian society. It disappeared so much that when Bill Wilson was writing The Traditions and he was scratching his head as to what are some of the things that an organization might have to deal with and someone said, well Bill, you might look into the history of the Washingtonians He had never heard of them. I mean, can you imagine that? That the founder of our fellowship had never even heard of the Washingtonians. That's how far they had disappeared off the radar. So that having happened, my imagination, and this is purely my imagination. Tells me that God looked down and he said, you know I've put a lot of diseases on the planet as challenges to the humans down there and they have figured out cures for all of them or they're on their way to figuring them out you know they've figured out things and they're about to discover the polio thing and theyre about to discovery the chicken pox thing and they are about to discovered this and someday they'll discovered the thing to cancer but I don't see them making any progress whatsoever on this horrible disease of alcoholism. And he got to thinking about it, and he said, well, no wonder they're not making any progress. I'm the only one that can fix this. They can't fix it. They could try till the next 50 generations, and they're nicht going to be able to lay a glove on this because that's the way I set it up. So I think the only thing I could do is to set in motion a chain of events that will lead them to me and the answer to their terrible disease. Now, that part is pure speculation on my behalf, on my half here. But it's based on hearing time after time and reading time after times the history of Alcoholics Anonymous and all I see when I read that is this higher power putting breadcrumbs out so we'll follow that or when we decide that we go this way he puts a barrier up can't go that way, well it must be over here and we end up where we are today through no credit to any of the early pioneers. All of their plans, as you will hear, were entirely different from the way it turned out. And one way of seeing the origins of all of this is to go back to the early 1900s, 1910 to 1925, somewhere in those years, and a very important cast of characters was assembled in a town in Vermont called Manchester. Manchester, Vermont is a charming, charming place and a lot of the wealthy from around the eastern part of our country had summer homes there with country clubs and nice restaurants. A lot of elegance is in Manchester, Vermont. And one of the characters in our story, his family, the Hazard family from Rhode Island, had a particularly lovely home in Manchester. And their son Roland spent every summer there and got to know some of the other teenagers that were there. One of them was a young man who was just over about five miles away from East Dorset, Vermont. And his name was Bill Wilson. And he was attending the Burr and Burton Academy. It's a school there. It's now a high school. But then it was a private school. And so he didn't have a summer home there. He was from the other side of the tracks. He did not come from the wealthy aristocracy, etc. He was form the quarry over in East Darset and his mother and father had split up and he was being raised by his grandfather. And so he was over there, but he liked the allure of all of this. He liked riches and golf courses and all of that, but it's very nervous. But he was mixing in and got to know Roland. And then there was a family from Brooklyn who had a summer home in Manchester. And it was a doctor named Burnham. And he had this lovely daughter named Lois. and so they were there and at certain social events they met Bill and Roland Hazard or she met Bill and Roland Hazzard and the last character in the story came over from Albany, New York and where his father was the mayor of Albany and the Thatcher family was a wealthy family but very political they were into politics in the big time And they had a large summer home in Manchester. And their son, Evie, was a playmate of some of these people. And as they grew up, they either knew each other or of each other. And as the years went by and the alcoholics got involved in alcohol and Lois continued her education, the first one to bite the dust was the millionaire's son from Rhode Island. And he just was getting worse and worse, Roland. And he was to inherit the family business, which involved a lot of activity on the stock market. He had companies around the country. And he himself knew that his disease was going to take this from him, and his family knew that it was going to take all of this. Now, this family had unlimited resources to save their son. Whatever it was, they could afford. And they tried everything that this country had to offer at that time. And it all failed. And so they sat down and had a family meeting and they said, you know, there's a psychiatrist in Switzerland named Carl Jung that many people are speaking highly of. I think as a last resort, Roland, you should go over there. And Roland agreed. So they corresponded and set it up. And he went to Switzerland and he stayed the better part of a year. And during that time, Dr. Young, in his later writings, spoke of how he understood the devastating position that Roland was in and how he knew that it was essential that he somehow, through his psychiatric techniques, create a profound personality change. that nothing short of that would enable him to continue in life without the crutch of alcohol. So at the end of a year, he said to Roland, I've done everything I can. You do understand your situation, I assume, that if you keep drinking, you're going to either die or end up locked up in a sanitarium, which is what they did with alcoholics. He said, I understand, I understood, and thank you. I'm so grateful. And he started his trip back to the States, and he got as far as Paris. And someone asked him the wrong question. They said, would you like a drink? And he said, as a matter of fact, I would. And it was just a very short time that he was in the same shape he had been in when he went there. So he went back to Switzerland. And he went Back to Dr. Young. And he said, Dr. Young, you've got to help me again. I mean, it's over. I desperately need your help. And whenever I see this part of our history, I think about the ABCs at the end of Chapter 5, that we were alcoholic and could not manage our own lives, that Roland had finally said this. Dr. Young, I am an alcoholic and I cannot manage my own life And then Dr. Yang filled in the B part Because he turned to Roland and he said There's nothing I can do for you No human power could have relieved our alcoholism And at that time, Dr. Young had to symbolize the maximum human power that you could get in an attempt to cure the illness of alcoholism. And that power looked Roland dead in the eye and said with all humility for a psychiatrist, there's nothing I can do for you. those were the magic words because they created a state of desperation it was like someone had pulled the rug out from under him there was nothing left he was desperate and Dr. Young said you know I've heard of a few cases and have read about a few case like yours, where people apparently have found a spiritual answer to this. If I was you, I would go seek such a solution. The point of the story is that until Part B took place, Roland wasn't interested in Part C until he got in that desperate situation. He was not interested in spiritual solutions like some of us possibly. And in that state of desperation, he turned and started searching and the big movement that was going on, it was very popular, was the Oxford Movement. It was a Lutheran minister from Pennsylvania named Frank Buckman had broken away from the church and had ended up with a zealous idea that personal evangelism, where one person brings God to the next person and then that person brings to the last person, brings to them the next one. And when they met in these little groups, they called them house parties, The only person in charge was the Holy Ghost. That was what they used, but it was, well, how does your group make a decision? Who's in charge? And we just wait for the Holy Spirit to tell us what to do. And it's almost like one of our traditions, you know what I mean? That the own group conscience and higher power as he may reveal himself. and so Roland came into this and he got sober and he got happy and he stayed with this and he went back to New York and then he went back to Manchester one summer to work in the local I forget what effort it was they were doing in Manchester and right about that time the second in our cast of characters hit his bottom, and that was Ebi. Now, Ebi had been in trouble in Manchester on a couple of occasions because his family had finally decided that he was such an embarrassment to the political future of the family that they wanted him away from the family. So they said, Evi, we're going to make you a deal. We're goingto give you the summer home in Manchester and we'regoing to give you a monthly stipend. but there's one condition you must never come back to Albany and he was happy to take that man I got my own place I got money this should work out perfectly and of course he became the town drunk and was in all kinds of trouble you read our history books one time he got drunk on a Saturday morning and drove his car into a farmhouse and went into the kitchen itself where the lady was making breakfast and his only comment after the car stopped was, could I get a cup of coffee? You know, so with that kind of stuff there was a lot of notoriety and people were wishing that Ebi wasn't part of their community. And he would go up in front of the local judge and, oh, I promise, and, you know, the judge is getting some pressure. So on this last occasion, Ebi had decided that the family home needed to be painted. He looked at it and it hadn't been painted in a long time, so he decided to paint it. He went out, he got some ladders, got some brushes, and he started painting. He got about 10 square feet done, I remember doing this, and decided to sit back and look at it, and imagine the rest of the house painted. And while he was doing that, some birds came by and crapped all over the paint. Got him upset, so we went back inside and got a beach chair and two shotguns and a drink, and sat there guarding the paint from birds while it dried. And whenever they came near, he'd start shooting at them. And of course, the neighbors are hearing all this gunfire going on and getting nervous, so they call the police. Now he's in front of the judge and he said, Ebby, we're going to have to send you away. And the judge was an Oxford Group member's father and he was talking about this case. And Roland said to the other member, Shep, let's go see if we can intervene and get him into our group. So they went in front of the judge, and Roland was able to get Ebby released in his personal recognizance. They took him to the Oxford Group, and Ebby got sobered. And we all know from there, most everybody knows the history that Ebby ended up down in New York, was enjoying this wonderful newfound sobriety and he thought about his old drinking buddy Bill and he just wondered how he was he decided to look him up he called up and Bill is at desperation point zero where he was down no longer employable Lois is working in a department store he's stealing money out of her purse in order to buy gin and Evie comes over and starts telling Bill that he's got religion and all this stuff that Bill doesn't believe in. Bill gave up on church a long time ago. But there was something in Evie's eyes that made him just couldn't deny anymore that something had happened to this man. And Evie said, Bill, I know you don't like God. You just don't believe Him. But why don't you choose your own conception of God? And that got Bill where he couldn't resist that. And the next time he was hospitalized in Towns Hospital, he sank to such a point of desperation that he screamed out, God, please help me. If there is a God, please show himself to me. The room lit up. He had a sense of immediate relief from alcoholism and he was never tempted to drink again in the rest of his life. Even though he had depressions and terrible things to deal with, he was never tempted to drink again in his life. The alcohol problem was lifted out. He had a sense of being up on a mountaintop, the wind is blowing and he knew that he had been touched by the creator of the universe. Now the beautiful part of this story is that we have another psychiatrist named Silkworth who ran that hospital. Now you've got to realize Bill's going through detox and you're the psychiatrist and you come in in the morning and the guy going through a detox says, You know what happened to me last night? my room lit up i was on top of a mountain god came in and set me free from alcohol i can think of a lot of psychiatrists that would have said oh well take these but dr silkworth was a very astute man and he looked at bill very closely and he said if i was you i would go with that i think that really happened to you and Bill went with it and with the spiritual awakening that he received and with almost all spiritual awakenings there comes this wonderful sense of elation and the irresistible desire to give it away we almost don't have to be told to go reach out to the next alcoholic I don't know about you but it was like there's a syndrome in AA that I've observed that when people get about two years sobriety they suddenly are taking psychology courses to become alcohol counselors because and that's this thing inside of them that i want to give this away i want to give it away it's all part of it so bill's out trying to sober drunks up and he's going into bars and he is telling the drunks you don't have to sit in here like this anymore you could have this thing i saw god there was this bright light in the mountain top and all these things and the drunken are going well that happens us when we drink rum. We're not interested in that. It wasn't until a number of months had gone by that Dr. Silkworth suggested to Bill that he had the wrong message, that he shouldn't be talking about the spiritual awakening. He should be talking about the hopelessness of the disease. And we carry that to this day, that the way we get spiritual is to get hopeless and so he would go around then after he and dr bob got together and they would always emphasize the surrender that this is a hopeless situation and you surrender once you surrender then you're surrendering to something of your own conception but anyway he has um about six months and a chance to get his big job back he always wanted to get money and get back on the golf course. That's all, you know, he's just like the rest of us. Very impatient for that part of our lives to get straightened out. And for Bill it was a long wait. And so he found himself in Akron where they told him if he could win a proxy fight over control of this machine tool company that was involved in producing tires which is sort of the rubber capital was Akron that he could be the president if he wins this proxy fight. And so he went out and worked as hard as he could and lost the fight. And he found himself totally depressed. Everybody knows this story, walking up and down the Mayflower Hotel, thinking about going in the bar, getting a drink because he felt so awful he didn't have enough money to pay to leave the hotel. And something hit him inside that he better find another alcoholic to help or he himself was going to get drunk. And with that push, he looked at the church directory, called Walter Tunks, the minister. I don't have time to go into this, but Walter Tucks was the minister at the church where the Oxford group came to Akron. That's a long story there just to understand how it was even there for this connection to be made between Bill and Bob. But he called him and he got a number of Oxford groupers. And the one he finally got a hold of was Henrietta Seiberling, who was a member of the group that Dr. Bob and Ann Smith belonged to because there had been this big revival thing in Akron. And she went over and said, oh, this looks wonderful. And Bob, you're coming. And they had been attending the Oxford Group meetings in the Williams home. But Dr. Bob was getting all of the Oxford group spirituality except the not drinking part. That was the only part that hadn't kicked in yet. And they were praying for him and praying for him. That was part of the thing they did. So much so that when Bill came over and talked to Henrietta or talked to her on the phone, she actually said, we've been expecting your call. When he said, I'm a drunk from New York and I know how to, I think I can help other drunks. So they set up the meeting with Dr. Bob. Dr. Bob had hung over, said I'll spend 15 minutes with this guy. He didn't feel like talking to anybody. The two of them sat in a room by themselves and they talked for five hours. There was that instant bonding between two alcoholics. That started, Bill then checked out of the hotel, borrowed the money to check out, and moved in with Dr. Rob. He just didn't have any money and he didn't know what he was going to be doing. but as they talked they said well maybe we can try to help somebody else so they went down and found another guy lawyer and they just trial and error they're going to the Oxford group they're staying sober and they're picking up an alcoholic every so often and after a while Bill went back to New York to try and further his career and attended Oxford groups there and they hadn't broken away from the Oxford movement yet They hadn't formed AA, they were just, there were certain alcoholics in the middle of all the non-alcoholics and of course they bonded very closely. And soon they would form an alcoholic squad out of the Oxford group itself and that little squad might meet in Bill's house, his townhouse in Brooklyn. And so this went on. Now, Bill was out there in 1935 in Akron and Dr. Bob had his last drink after he was the first one to have a slip. After 30 days, Dr. Bob went to Atlantic City to a medical convention because he had a thirst for medical knowledge. And he got drunk as a skunk and came back and get off the train in the wrong place or was poured off the train. They had to go find him. Bill gave him a couple bottles of beer so that he could perform surgery, and he went in and performed the surgery with the shaky hands, and that was his last drink, June 10th. So that's why AA's anniversary is then instead of Mother's Day when they first met. So anyway, they kept this up. He's working in Akron. Dr. Bob Bill's working in New York. They're getting a few people sober. It spread over a little bit into Cleveland where people who got sober in Akron went up there and they talked to a few Oxford groupers up there. And in 1937, Bill came back out to talk to Dr. Bob and they sat in Dr. Rob's living room and they started counting up the number of drunks that were sober. And they suddenly realized that there were 35 or 40 who had significant amount of time. And as they did that, they said, we are on to something. It was then that they realized that they had something that had to be preserved, that hadと be shared on a very large scale because there's millions of alcoholics. And so they started talking about, well, what do we do? It's taken two years plus and we've got 35. At this rate, we won't sober up Akron for 50 years. So what should we do?" So they sat there and Dr. Bob wasn't the big Hollywood-type guy like Bill. And Bill is sitting there and he'd just come from Wall Street where the 5 and 10 chains had just started and a couple department store chains had just started. And so he just said, it's clear to me what we've got to do. Bob, we've Got to Get a Chain of Drunk Tanks. That's top priority. That's the way this message has to be promoted. And maybe we can get some of these guys to take a year off from their job and we'll assign them each a city and they will go there and carry the message out there and Dr. Bob, they can't afford to get off from Their Jobs. Well, then we're going to have to have a bunch of paid missionaries. And so they came up with the plan. We need a chain of drunk tanks because the hospitals don't like drunks. They throw up and they do all this stuff in there. So we've got to get a place just for drunks." So they called in the local AAs to have a group conscience on Bill's idea of a chain-of-drunk-tanks and paid missionaires and a book. Eventually we're gonna have some instructions that we're going to have to put together and by a vote of a narrow two votes they voted to go that route most people said i don't think that's going to work that doesn't sound like it's a good idea but bill took it as a mandate and they said okay if we have to raise a lot of money you're in new york you raise it so that was it bill went back to new york and all he was after was i'm going to raise money for this new project. And as he went around, you know, he knew New York pretty well. He went to institutions and people where you could get money. And he worked and he worked and he raised no money. No one would give him any. What? Dirty drunks? We've had that before. Why don't we give to the Boy Scouts? I don't think we need this. And uh, he just got so desperate. And his brother-in-law was one of his great supporters. His sister had married this doctor, Leonard Strong. And he stuck with him all the way through. He helped pay for his treatment. He was just a genuine friend and gentleman. And he was crying on his shoulder one day. I can't raise a nickel for this cause. and his brother-in-law said I had a friend who had an uncle who works for John D. Rockefeller and I met him once would you like me to call him and Bill said well I haven't been to the Rockefeller place yeah so he called up and he remembered the man's name and the man remembered him. The man's name was Willard Richardson who happened to be John Dee's executive secretary and when his brother-in-law said we'd like to come over and talk he said come on over and they went right over to the Rockefeller building up to 56th floor right into the Rockefellers suite and as Bill walked in there he went we're getting close to of money now god is finally shining his light on us now right in john d's private office and he sat down and mr richardson was fascinated with the aa story and he said well would you like to come back and have lunch with me oh yes of course i wouldn't he had lunch and then he at the end of the lunch he said Well, I'd like to set up a bigger meeting. So Mr. Rockefeller has a lot of advisors, some of the big wealthy people in New York, church people, engineers. I'd like you to talk to them. So he had Dr. Bob come in for this meeting and they sat down and they told him all about it. And these men were definitely impressed. They were so impressed that they sent one of their members out at his own expense to Akron to watch and see all of this. And he wrote up a long report together with Willard Richardson and gave it to Mr. Rockefeller. And Willard Richardson told Bill later on that when John Dee finished reading it, he called him in. And he said, I'm very moved by this report. I think we have something incredibly important here. I just feel it in my bones that this is something of incredible value to the world. but as i look at this it looks to me like money would ruin it so i don't think i'm going to support this organization with money now i'll give a few bucks i think he ended up with five thousand dollars that he put into the riverside church which is where one of his board members was the head of the church the head OF the board at the church and these two gentlemen can draw on it, because they're broke, but the committee approves. And that's all I'm going to do. But I do want to be kept abreast of the situation. And so they were happy to get the money. That could save Dr. Bob's house from being foreclosed on. It helped Bill and Lois with their groceries and they continued to sober up drunks. But Bill couldn't take no to his plan. He disagreed with John Dee that money was not the way to go. And he just was insistent on pursuing money. As he talked to this group of advisors, some of whom later on became members of the board of the General Service of Alcoholics Anonymous. They got that close to us. And they said, well Bill, what you could do is to form your own foundation. And He said, oh I like that. Yeah, we could set it up like the Rockefeller Foundation. Oh yeah, well he'd get that kind of money. So they formed the Alcoholic Foundation, and it was only formed to raise money. That was why the foundation was formed. So, they formed a foundation, and now Bill is out raising money for the foundation. And he's getting nothing. Everywhere he goes, he's giving no money, no money. And, he came back to a board meeting. He's commiserating with everybody how they're not doing this and he brought to the board meeting two chapters of a book that he had been putting together and he put these two chapters together as a fundraiser he had written his story and something about alcoholism and he took it in when he went to talk to people about donating money and he Put these chapters on there and one of the board member says, you know, I know the religious editor over at Harper's. I'm going to take them over and let him look at it. The religious editor loved it. Invited Bill over. He said, can you write a whole book like this? Oh yeah, I can write a wholebook like this. He says, well, I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll give you a $1,500 advance on the book. And when it's finished, we'll represent you. We'll sell it. And then you will get 10% like all other authors. And Bill was so flattered. My God, they like it. We're on to something. All fundraising went out the window. Now it was book sales. Book sales was how we're going to get rich so we can have the chain of drunk tax, the paid missionaries and get this AA plan going. So all the attention went into the book. And he had a sidekick named Hank Parkhurst, who he was in business with in New Jersey. And Hank's secretary was named Ruth Houck. And it was the humble oil. And they were trying to form a co-op for gasoline dealers where they'd buy their oil cheaper by buying in large amounts. And Hank was a promoter of the first class. He had one time been a big shot at Standard Oil. He had 5,000 people working for him and he wrote the chapter to the employers, which is a brilliant chapter. He's the guy in there that says, I used to have 4,500 people working für me. And Ruth Hout became AA's first secretary. And she typed the big book in that little office as Bill would dictate it. But they didn't know this when they were getting together here. They're just going to go out and make a lot of money so they can get this program off the ground. So they thought about the 10% deal, and Bill said, you know, we don't want this fellowship's book to be owned by somebody else. We'll publish our own book. Well, people tried to discourage them, but they went ahead. And they talked about this, and Hank said to Bill, Bill, what we've got to do, we form our own publishing company, and we raise money by selling shares of stock in the publishing company. Yeah! Yeah. Well, how do you do that? Oh, it's easy. And he went into a stationery store. He got a pad of blank stock certificates. They wrote in. They came up with the name Works Publishing because this book was going to be the first of many great works that were going to come out. And they wrote in there, Works Pubishing Company, par value $25. And they brought the stock pad into the AA meetings and started selling the certificates to the drunks. and at the end of the meeting they go okay boys, now before you go home we want you to consider buying stock in the works publishing company and of course the guys are going you want us to buy stock in a book that isn't written yet? I don't think so so Bill said well we got to get something else to motivate the boys so he went out and he did a little checking on the cost of publishing and he found out that they could do a 400 page book for $0.35 and they were going to sell it for $3.50 so at the next meeting they called the boys in and they said boys we did some checking we can print these books for $ 0.35 each you left out all the other costs and we're going to sell them for $ 3.50 it's a thousand percent profit now I'm going to take 33% as the author Hank's going to take 33% as the promoter you guys can have 33% if you just buy your stock certificates and start paying up. And again, they got the stony stare. You know, I don't think we're going to be buying into this. Well, they're working on it, but they got to get the money to keep it going. So the two of them came up. They said, you know who would like this? The Reader's Digest. This is the perfect human interest story for the Reader'S Digest." They went up to Pleasantville. They met with an associate editor, and they told him the story of this fledgling drunk's three years sobriety and weren't they interested and the editor was very interested. He said, this is exactly the type of story the Reader's Digest loves. And Hank said, now Mr. Editor, you will put a thing about the big book in there, won't you? You know, our book. He says, well how soon will you have it finished? Oh, about five or six months. Yes, we'll put a thing about the book in there. Well, they left there on cloud nine because the Reader's Digest at that time had 12 million subscribers and they just envisioned the book, it's being printed and we get a free advertisement to 12 million people. They're going to need trucks to haul the books out to meet all the orders that they're going to get. So they went back to the guys with this one. The Reader's Digest tipped it over. Now they started signing up. Well, we might get rich ourselves. And they sold something like $3,000 worth of stock subscriptions. They got about $3.000 from the owner of Charlie Towns from Silkworth's Hospital. And, they managed to get enough together and they really started the book project and they're writing chapters and assigning them out and doing all this and then they wanted to have the stories in the back and they had the drunks writing their stories and then out in Akron they had a they sobered up a newspaper guy who knew how to write and he wrote a lot of the stories for the other guys and this thing is all being assembled and they finally got a multi-lift thing and they would circulate these things and Bill said it felt like being a referee in a fight because the AA's would get this stuff and they'd go, we don't like that, we ought to have more of this no God, New Yorkers wanted no God we just want a philosophical book, we need any God whatsoever and the Akron Cleveland crowd is going what are you talking about? We need Jesus so now we got Jesus or no God and the fights, you can imagine You know, the difference between those two approaches and it's just round and round. And finally, Bill had postponed forever writing how it works because he knew if there was controversy over this other stuff, wait till he tried to put down the steps. And so they had a six-step thing that they had gotten from the Oxford thing, but he didn't like it because there was too many loopholes for the drunks to wiggle through. And he was sitting in his bed with a terrible ulcer and just dying and started scribbling on a pad, closing loopholes that the drucks were sneaking through. And he got through and he looked what he had written and he loved it because it was 12. He thought it was very biblical that it ended up 12 instead of 6. So he brought that and threw that into the mix. And then all hell broke loose. What do you mean? This isn't even close to the program. You know, you got them on their knees. Stand them up. God's supposed to come at the end. You got God way up in the front. What are you doing? And there was all this fight. And out of all of this fight came the greatest thing. That's why we're all here because it includes everybody. Came the praise, God as we understand him. And somehow, some way, this thing was hammered out and they were ready to go. And they said, well, let's go back to Reader's Digest now because they don't have enough money to pay the printer. They had gone to Cornwall Press. They had good relations, but they needed money to get this book going. They just wanted to get 5,000 copies. they went back to readers digest and they said mr pain we're ready to shoot he said shoot what he said you know we were up here about six months oh yes i remember you boys yes yes oh yes i remember that idea i love that idea but you know i took it into our board they didn't like it at all and i forgot to call you now there's no gonna not gonna be any readers digest on and And the drunks are wanting their money back. And there is hell breaking loose. And he's struggling. He borrowed a little more money somewhere else. And it just looked like it was going to be the end of the world. And one of the drunk, the Irishman, the only Irishman in New York at the time, hard to believe. He knew Gabriel Heater, who was like Walter Winchell, was a big-time radio guy. He had a radio. And everybody in America listened to him. and he did human interest things and Ryan said I'm going to call Gabriel Heater I think I can get on his show and then he'll interview me and I'll talk about the book and Bill said alright call him up and he called him up and Gabriel Header agreed in two weeks to have him on the show well Ryan was barely able to stay sober and Bill was terrified that he wouldn't make it with all this pressure to appearing on the Gabriel Heater Show. So he put him in the downtown athletic club with a day and night AA guard so that he would make it to the Gabriel Shearer show. The Gabriel Header Show. And they got down to the last, they had $500 left and that was it. Bill had already been in that last month they foreclosed on the townhouse in Brooklyn dumped all Bill and Lois' furniture on the street they put the furniture in storage on credit some AAs gave them a place to live and $20 a week they loaned him a car so you could see where he is in the middle of all of this turmoil and they had $500 left And Hank, the optimist, said, Bill, I know what we should do with this $500. We should have a postcard shower of all the doctors between here and the Rocky Mountains because the guys that are going to buy this book are the doctors. They are going want to treat their patients. So put the postcard. Hear all about it on The Gabriel Heater Show. Sure cure for alcoholism. The big book, Alcoholics Anonymous, $3.50. And they mailed out this incredible number. You could get a lot of postcards for $500. And it went out. The Gabriel Heater Show went with no problems. And they waited about three days. And then they went down to the post office box. And they looked through the little window and there's just like five or ten in there. and Ryan says to Bill, Bill, they can't put all the postcards in that little box. They got mail bags back there. Call the postman out. So they called the postmen out and the total number of replies they got from the entire postcard shower was 12 and 10 were illegible. They were written by drunk doctors and they got two orders and it was looking real bad because the printer was not going to print them and a guy who owned a tailor shop in New York he was one of the few guys that still had any assets left even though it was totally hocked had a good customer down in Baltimore and he put the touch on him for $1,000 and that's where AA got the money to get that book printed and all this time now Bill knew there was a magazine Liberty Magazine article coming out and that was going to help and it did get 800 inquiries that came out and that helped a little bit but all this time they'd heard nothing from John D. Rockefeller and suddenly Willard Richardson said Mr. Rockefeler would like to meet with you and Bill went oh god thank god He said, finally we're going to get our money. And he went in there and Mr. Rockefeller said, I've been following your organization with immense interest. I am absolutely convinced that you are doing something remarkable, all of you. And what I want to do is to throw a black-tie dinner in your honor here in New York and I'm going to invite all of my wealthy banker friends. And he showed Bill the list. Wendell Wilkie was one of them, the head of Chase Bank. And Bill looked at the list, and without, you know, just in his head, he figured there was at least $2 billion on that list. So they had Dr. Bob, they had Doctor Silkworth and Harry Emerson, Fosdick and all the celebrities they could get. And then they put a drunk at each table. You know what I mean? An AA members. And the bankers in Ryan, the Irish guy was at one table and the bankERS turned and said, Mr. Ryan, are you in banking? He said, no, sir, I just got out of Greystone Sanitarium and it livened them up and it drunk at each table, got them fascinated with these stories that they were hearing. They thought it was a wet, dry thing. You know, we're going to have prohibition. And so they had the dinner and then Bill talked, Dr. Bob talked, and finally it came time for John D. Rockefeller, who was very, very ill, and he sent his son out, Nelson Rockefeller. And Nelson came out and said how sorry father wasn't there, but he knew what he wanted him to say. He wanted them to know that this was a wonderful movement that deserved the support of the country, that alcoholism was a disease and there was no stigma to it and that drunks were not bad people. They were simply overpowered and they were working their way out and he just wanted them learn about this. And then he said, and it requires no money. and Bill felt the $2 billion went out the window. They left and he got notified about a week later that Mr. Rockefeller wanted to send a big book to everyone who had attended and he sent out 400 books with a letter, a personal letter from him telling him what this organization was and that it was temporarily the founders were struggling to keep it going and that he was going to give them $1,000. And so the guys that cut the letters did read it and they go, wow, John D. Rockefeller gave $1.000. I've only got a couple million. I'll give $10. And they got something like another $2,000 from the list. And they solicited that list for four years. And at the end of the four years, Bill was able to go to John D and say, we will never solicit again. We are now on our feet. Because the Saturday Evening Post Jack Alexander article had come out where Alexander was an investigative reporter that loved to uncover frauds and schemes. And he thought AA was putting somebody on, so he was going to investigate it and then expose it for what it really was. and he came and he investigated AA and he fell in love with AA and he wrote the most glowing story about AA and that magazine story implanted in the American public the realization of what they had and there was just thousands and thousands of inquiries, the book started selling and Bill reflected back on what Rockefeller had done was to save the organization by not following Bill's plan and depriving us of all those monies. That was not the way that it was supposed to work. And that Rockefeller had removed the stigma. He was laughed at. People made fun of him for having a black tie thing for drunks. But he didn't care. He knew that this was worth saving. And so the story comes to an end as we realize that no human could have written this story. And the people in it were just instruments. And it has a happy ending. And where are the reasons? I mean, where are they ending? The story just leads right up. You could tell your story, I'll tell my story. But it's all the same. It is that we came up against something that caused us to be desperate enough to stop following our own plan to reach out to this help beyond ourselves that gave us this program. There's no way that I see this story any other way that this was just our higher power said you guys aren't going to be able to figure it out so I'll be lending a hand we're at the end of the time I want to thank everybody for coming I hope you enjoyed the story