He Got a Crew Cut So Nobody Could Grab His Hair Off the Bar Stool Again – Sandy B.

About This Speaker Tape

Sandy B. speaks at the Greenwich Friday Night Group's 52nd anniversary, one of the three oldest AA meetings in the world, founded in 1939. The evening opens with John B. recounting the staggering growth of AA from fewer than 75 recovering alcoholics and three meetings in 1939 to over 93,000 groups worldwide by 1991. Brooke traces the origin of the AA Preamble back to the foreword of the first Big Book printing.

Sandy describes himself as a primary alcoholic who drank socially for about ten minutes before crossing into alcoholic drinking at age 19. He grew up in New Haven, Connecticut, attended a nearby university where he felt painfully inadequate socially, and discovered that alcohol transformed the hostile world in his head into a warm, welcoming place. He became a Marine Corps fighter pilot whose entire drinking career unfolded in school and the military. After thirteen years of flying, withdrawal symptoms in the cockpit — lost peripheral vision, sweating, heart palpitations — forced him to the doctors, who misdiagnosed him with a childhood fear of flying and pulled his wings.

Reassigned as an air traffic controller overseas, Sandy drank around the clock, lost forty pounds, and barely functioned. Back stateside at Quantico, a grand mal seizure landed him in a military psychiatric ward for six months. There, AA members talked the head psychiatrist into holding a meeting on the ward. A small redheaded man from Bethesda delivered the first dose of AA honesty Sandy had ever received, asking him bluntly which of them would be going home and which would be going upstairs in a bathrobe to get locked up. Sandy called AA himself in 1964 after a brief relapse, and his sponsor Bill — still his sponsor decades later — started him on a journey he describes as completely different from anything he imagined.

The heart of Sandy's message centers on the phrase from Chapter Five: old ideas availed us nothing. He describes the painful, tugboat-slow process of changing an alcoholic mind — admitting wrong, surrendering self-centeredness, and moving a Higher Power to the top of the priority list. He insists AA does not try to prove Higher Power exists but rather demonstrates the need for a power greater than oneself by forcing each person to confront their own powerlessness. He closes by telling newcomers that sobriety is an endless series of discovering the magnificence of their true selves, buried under the garbage alcohol piled on top, and urges them simply to stick out a hand and follow the people in front of them.

Topics

Timestamps

• 0:00 Blair opens the Greenwich Friday Night Group's 52nd anniversary, introduces the tape recording and format for the evening
• 3:30 Brooke traces the AA Preamble's origin from the 1939 Big Book foreword to its 1967 Grapevine publication, then leads the group in reciting it
• 7:00 John B. shares the history of the Greenwich meeting as the third oldest in the world, and AA's growth from three meetings to 93,000 groups internationally
• 12:00 Sandy B. takes the podium, reflects on the miracle of AA growth becoming so commonplace we miss it, and the gift of a horrible past as the connection to the next suffering alcoholic
• 18:00 Sandy's first drink at 19 — the room of hostile strangers transformed into fifty of the nicest people he had ever seen
• 27:00 Buying a bottle like checking out an adventure book from the library — you never knew if you were going to Wiggins, Mississippi or jail
• 34:00 Flying career ends: withdrawal symptoms in the cockpit, misdiagnosed with childhood fear of flying, stripped of pilot identity
• 40:00 Grand mal seizure, six months in the military psychiatric ward, crazy patients telling the drunks to stop drinking
• 46:00 The redheaded AA man's hard truth — which one of us goes home and which one puts on a bathrobe and gets locked up like an animal
• 52:00 Old ideas availed us nothing — changing an alcoholic's mind is like turning the Queen Mary with fifty tugboats, the need for a Higher Power, and closing message to newcomers about discovering the magnificence of their true selves