He Thought the Alcoholic Was a Detective – 1948 – Archie T.

We're going to be scrolling on December the 25th, 1948. The speaker whose talk we are about to hear was Arch T, looked upon by the AA members of Detroit as the founder of AA in this city. Ladies and gentlemen, in the words of that great Galilean who lived almost 2,000 years ago and whose birth we are commemorating this Christmas day. When you are well, you need not a physician. I come here to heal the sick. And of all the channels at his command, he chose as his instrument one alcoholic helping another. And tonight's speaker, ladies and gentlemen, is one of those instruments that has carried the message of AA to the alcoholics in Michigan. So it's your privilege and it's both my pleasure to turn this meeting over to Arch Trowbridge, our founder. Thank you. This is a wonderful place to be on Christmas night. I can think of a lot of places that all of us were on other Christmas nights that didn't turn out as well as this occupation of ours tonight will turn out for us. In fact, I only have to think back to 11 years ago this Christmas night to think of things that were not sitting in proper for Christmas. I remember distinctly that I was very drunk and was not doing any of the things that I had been asked to do. However, I won't go into that or very much of my drinking career because I've been asked to speak particularly tonight on the history of AA in Detroit, the early history. In order to do that adequately, I'll have to skim over my own story down to a point where I approached the necessary condition to join AA. In my case, that meant because I was stubborn and headstrong and conceited sort of a guy. That meant getting myself completely down and out before it occurred to me, even vaguely, that anything might be wrong with me. Before I launch into that part of the story, I'd like to say that your chairman used an expression which I hope you will bear in mind when I'm talking about my story and what little part I played in the development of AA locally. He used the expression the instrument of God. And I wish you to remember that I am very well aware in speaking of anything that I have done, that it was done as the privileged instrument of God, and not because I was any world leader. Necessarily I have to talk about myself, but I want to approach that talk in the spirit that I've just outlined to you. Eleven years ago last summer, I was winding up an 18-year career of drinking. I was 39 years old and I had started drinking heavily at 21. My drinking between the ages of 21 and 30 was what most of us feel was social drinking. Of course, once we're in AA, we're not so sure that it was so social. Because I was the guy that always got drunk, especially if the whiskey was free. I think I used to really sincerely feel it was my bountiful duty to take all I could consume in the way of free whiskey because it was free, and I'm half scotched by parentage. From the age of 30 to the age of 39, the latter half of those 18 years, I was definitely an alcoholic. I marked that division of time because of my changed attitude toward drinking. I looked from the death of my mother and father when I was 30 years old, I began to look on alcohol as a crutch, as a solution for every problem. It proved to be such a wonderful solution that at the age of 39, I had reached the point of, and a common one for all of you, or almost all of you, of no job. I hadn't been fired, I just quit. I didn't even quit, I just walked off the job. No money, no place to live, no health, no morale left, no will to live left. That was my condition in the summer of 1938. It caused me to hurt myself on an unsuspecting friend whose family were out of town and who didn't know much about my career for the past, or the previous several years. And he unwittingly invited me to stay in his home because I was homeless. He had me on his hands for 19 days. Every one of those days I was drunk, continuously. I would come home, sleep off the effects of several hours drinking, call out of bed and go back to a saloon and get drunk again. I managed in that cagey way that alcoholics have of avoiding him pretty well, or at least I thought I did. In fact, I was quite sure in my alcoholic way that he didn't even know that I drank. How wrong I was about that, I would like to say that I went to him after I returned to Detroit a long time afterwards and was sober and was in AA and said, Ralph, I had an idea that you... that I was keeping my drinking pretty carefully concealed from you, didn't I? Outside of the time that I slept on the back stairs because I couldn't find the room, did you have any idea how bad I was? And he said, did I? Because I carried you up from the front doorstep twice and put you in bed. You'd pass down at the keyhole. I didn't even know it. I give you these few details merely to qualify myself as a legitimate member of AA. Something went wrong with my drinking schedule on the 3rd of September, on a Friday night. Instead of getting drunk in the morning, being asleep in the afternoon, and being out and getting drunk in the evening and coming home after Ralph went to bed. I got tangled up somewhere and found myself at home in bed at 10 o'clock at night, and he was home too. The time was drawing near when his family were returning from their vacation, and I was going to have to get out of there. I was incapable of finding myself a room because I couldn't stay sober long enough to face a prospective landlady, and I had no money with which to pay room rent, although in that marvelous alcoholic way I always had money to drink with. Now, don't ask me to explain that. I lay in bed thinking about approaching him and I thought, no, he's been very good to me. He's done a great deal for me in the past. I don't want to bother him. I can't find the solution to this problem by next Monday. This was Labor Day weekend. I'll put an end to everything. But I finally concluded that before I did anything like that, I'd better go in and talk to him. I went in with nothing on my mind for a solution to my problems except to ask him if he would lend me $50. He got out of bed where he'd been reading and walked up and down the floor He said, you don't need $30. You need a great deal more than that. Well, I agreed with him on that. But he said, you need a new lease on life, a new interest. And he said I can't give you those things but I know someone who might. And he asked me if I'd be willing to go and talk to this woman. And I knew her very slightly. And I said yes because I would have said yes to anything or anybody who might have some answers for me because I no longer had answers for anything. So he grabbed the telephone and started to make a date for me for the next day. and I started to back water. But it was too late, he made an appointment for me to see this woman the next day at four o'clock in the afternoon. He took me out, bought me some drinks, brought me home, put me to bed and I lay there somewhat quieted by the drinks wondering how I was going to keep an appointment at four O'clock In The Afternoon. and be reasonably sober. I finally hit on a marvelous solution. I would get up a little earlier than usual and make an effort to get drunk faster so that I would come home knowing my own habits and sleep off the first of the day's drinks and then go straight over and see her and keep this appointment. I did these things, and they weren't dealt that way. I don't know when I had my last drink. It was on a Saturday morning on the 3rd of September before Labor Day in 1938. What time of day it was in the morning, I don' t know. I blanked out. I got in this bar at 25 minutes after 6. At about half past 7 is the latest my memory serves me. What time I left there and went home and passed out, I don't know. I saw this woman, and to be brief, she offered me a chance to go down to Akron and meet some men who had found the solution to their problem, which was my problem. She offered to take me. she and her husband offered to take me there and to do it the next day if I were willing to go. She, however, insisted that I make up my own mind about it perfectly freely and without any pressure from her. This took me quite a while. I spent a long time in her house sitting there thinking about it. But I finally made the decision I left her house With a full intention Of hurrying as fast as my car would take me To the nearest saloon and getting a drink Halfway To the saloon Something stopped me I can't tell you what it was. I know what I think it was today, I'm sure of what it was. I'm sure that her prayers which were all that were left to her to do after she left, after she let go of me, that her prayers did that. However, I went home and went to bed After 18 days of continuous drinking I went to home, went to bedtime And sweated it out all night I don't need to describe that part of it to you It makes me shudder to think of it It would make all of you shudders But I was on deck the next day, pretty much of a wreck, but I was there to start the accident. In that time, I was turned over to Dr. Bob and his wife and put in the hospital. Well, at that time, the City Hospital of Akron was where we put the occasional prospect who was interested in AA. And I say occasional because in those days, we only had a prospect once in a while. Now, I spent Labor Day in the hospital reading Emmett Fox's Sermon on the Mount. It changed my entire outlook on life. It changed my direction. I was visited both in the hospital and in one of the homes of the members of AA by 15 or 20 men who came to me with their stories, each one as different as could be from the next. Every one of those men were clear-eyed, neat, purposeful looking, full of confidence, not cocky, and they impressed me because they had all the things that I last. And I knew that whatever it was that they had, I wanted some of it. And whatever they could tell me that would help me gain the same sort of look that they head, I was going to try those things that they told me. My health was found to be practically... Well, I don't know how to tell you about my health. Dr. Bob says that there wasn't much left of it. At any rate, it was ten and a half months later before I could go to work. And I lived with Dr. Bob and his wife during those ten and the half months. Many times during those months, I felt that it was very wrong for me to impose on them. They were poor. All members of AA in those days were poor, by the way. In the 30s, you didn't go out and get a job just because you were willing to and were going to reform. but I had to learn to accept their goodness in the spirit that it was given to me but I often rebelled in my own mind against having to impose on them looking back however However, in later years I've seen that time and time again as an example of how much better plans our higher power has for us than we make for ourselves. because what I thought was wrong, that is to say my being delayed in Akron and left on the Smiths' hands, was part of a plan under which I absorbed AA from one of its two oldest members where I learned to stand on my own feet where I gained the strength and spiritual courage to go out alone. I don't think I could have done these things that I had to do later without those ten-and-a-half months. In March 1939, Bill Wilson was in Akron. He frequently stopped there whenever he could get some business excuse to come west, and he was sitting in the Smith kitchen with me drinking coffee, and he was on his way to Detroit. And I said, I certainly would like to go up there and see what the lay of the land is, and look around and see whether I can take hold yet or not. And he said, why don't you? I said, well, why don't I? Bill said, let's go now. This was Sunday morning. We were going to start right away. Well, we decided to wait until Monday morning. We came up from We went up to Cleveland And came up Detroit on the Mercury Bill spent Monday And Tuesday here with me We stayed at a hotel We visited some of my old friends and told them my story. Bill tended to his business. Some friends of mine asked me to stay on here for a while. Bill went back to New York, and I stayed here and worked entirely on trying to make some AA contacts that would later on produce prospects. In order to get this picture, you've got to realize that at that time, alcoholism was, with the exception of a few advanced men who had spent time and study on it, such as Dr. Silkworth in New York, alcoholism was unknown as a disease. The alcoholic in the public mind was an ornery cuss who didn't want to stop drinking and had no willpower. however by talking to people on street corners and anybody who would listen to me and by talking to personnel men in factories and to ministers and to those doctors that I could get hold of I got a seed planted amongst a number of people not themselves alcoholic prospects but people who were likely to come in contact with the problem of alcoholism I should explain that my disposition was such that I couldn't and would have been no good at running in and out of bars and trying to sell this business, cold turkey, to some drunk. I had to go about it in a roundabout way of getting prospects where they were most likely to cough up. However, I did get that spring in March my first prospect and he was a Lulu. I was staying with a doctor one of my closest friends and he came home for supper one night and he said I've got a man for you Well, he's down on Park Avenue in a dollar-a-day hotel. He's tried to commit suicide twice this week. Does he know anything? Does he want to stop drinking? I don't know. Has he ever heard of us? No. Well, it was my duty to go and see him. I took a bus from the east side downtown and went through a lot of torture for half an hour on the bus. What was I going to say to this fellow? Every time I got all wrought up about it, I finally said to myself, wait a minute, your job is to get in the same room with that man and see what happens next. This wasn't a 24-hour program. This got down to be a 5 or 10-minute program. I got in the room with him, and he certainly was a cold potato. I found out afterwards from him that he thought I was a detective. trying to find out whether he was drinking or not. But as every one of you know, there's something about being an alcoholic that will win over another alcoholic if you've got ten minutes with him. And in ten minutes I had that fellow asking me if he could produce his bottle and go to work on it. And I said, certainly. Then he felt easier about it. Fifty minutes later, I had his consent to go to Ackman amongst his former friends to send him to Aackman. I'm afraid that most of them gave me donations of five and ten dollars with the thought that it would be fine to get him out of town. They didn't understand what I was talking about, but they were willing to contribute one last $5 bill or $10 bill after they'd already thrown a lot of money down the sewer helping him. I shipped that man out of the Union Depot the next afternoon on the 530 Red Arrow to Ackman. All dressed up and looking pretty well with a pint of seat rooms in his pocket. I gave it to him to keep him happy. Dr. Bob was waiting on the platform at the other end to take him off the train. But the point is, I walked out of that station on a cloud. My feet weren't touching the ground. I'd done the first 12-step work all by myself and under pretty difficult conditions. And I just was up in the clouds somewhere. After three weeks in Detroit, I found that it was impossible for me to stay here and work, find a job, because my health was not good enough yet. And I returned very exhausted to Ackerman. And, I stayed there until July. And on the 10th of July 1939, I came back here to start life over again. I had no place to live when I came here. I had no plans, I had no job. My health was still very poor so much so that during those first few months I had to spend as much as three days out of seven in bed. But I came back full of a new attitude toward life and a tremendous desire to live differently than I'd ever lived before. I made my living the first six months selling hosiery and men's make-to-order shirts. I did this partly because it was very difficult to get a job and I had to have a job that I could go to work at right away and bring home the bacon every night in order to pay room rent and partly because it left me the freedom to do the AA work that I wanted to do In the fall of 1939, the Liberty Magazine published the first national article on A.A. that had been published, and it furnished me with a few prospects. prospects. During the summer, I had had some other prospects as a result of the calls I had made in the spring. Thanksgiving rolled around and I went back to Akron to visit Sir Smith. And I was very ashamed, because I had nothing to show of AA group or AA activities. There were four people who had come, five people who Had gone through my hands between Between the spring and Thanksgiving, four of them were sober. Period. Of the four who were sober, one had no interest whatsoever in even talking to me. He just was sober and he'd gone his own way. Another one was living in a different city, although he had hailed from Detroit. The third one was doing very nicely, but, and the fourth one, both those were doing fine as far as staying sober was concerned, but they were not going to commit themselves to anything as definite as starting an AA group and being involved in something that might keep them sober too long. One of those two men was Mike Eshelman, and I have Mike's own statement today, and I've heard him make it in his talk that that was the catch. He thought that being sober was fine, but that if he got tangled up in anything like starting meetings with me and doing AA work, that next, the following summer, when he went fishing and he was away from home and he wanted to pitch one, maybe this thing would stop him from doing it. How difficult that picture was, you can imagine that Mike got sober about the middle of September, and it was at least the middle of December before he finally agreed to start having a meeting of some kind with me so that we could work on prospects together and have a regular weekly meeting. he and this one other member and I finally in December and I can't tell you the date I was too busy to keep a diary sat down at our first meeting together with one non-AA member Sarah Klein who was our moral support. I had an idea that until we had such a meeting every week that we would never have a nucleus from which to grow and appoint a center toward which people would gravitate. And it worked out that way. We no sooner began to sit down once a week together than we began to get prospects. And we held the meetings in my bedroom in a rooming house on Merrick Avenue near the public library. By February, our meetings were so big that my bedroom was crowded. We were borrowing all the chairs from the third floor At this time, the Bensons A very wonderful couple Offered us the use of their recreation room Out on Taylor Avenue For our meetings And we, in February of 1940, we moved in there for our first meeting. All six of us huddled down in a little circle at one end of this recreation room. That was a wonderful year. By fall, we had, counting wives and friends and non-alcoholic members who were interested with us, we were able to muster a party for Dr. Bob and his wife who came here to visit us, of 25 people. By February or March of 1941, February I believe, we had grown to the point where we were packed in tight in that recreation room and were sitting on the basement stairs and in the furnace room. And we moved for a moment or two to Doty Hall and found it unsatisfactory, and then located what for a number of years was a very popular meeting place of ours, 4242 Cass. In the first week in March 1941, just as we were settling on Cass Avenue, the Saturday Evening Post published Jack Alexander's article. and we began to grow by leaps and bounds. Luckily, we'd had a slow growth up to then that enabled us to have the people on hand to cope with the growth that suddenly came on us. That growth was relatively so great that by fall of 1941, we split our one Detroit group into three groups. The Northwest group, the East Side group, and one group, the Central or Downtown group remaining at 4242 Cass. We were so lost to leave each other, however That we set aside one week each month When we'd have no meetings of our own in our own group But would have a general meeting Back at the old home stand on Cass Avenue Out of those three groups which were, I might say, very, very small have grown all our present groups in the greater Detroit area and have grown into Windsor and through Ontario, this part of the near part of Ontario. So much for the statistical data on what happened in the early formation of AA in Detroit. My dates are not very sure on a lot of these things, except approximately. way. But the thing I would like to point out to every one of you who are members of A.A. and who sometimes become discouraged with the behavior of your prospects, your babies, just remember that I had to have half a dozen of them before I got one who stayed continuously sober. And that there are only a handful of all those who came to us in the and basement days, there are only a handful today who are with us. It took a lot of work and a lot prospects to produce some permanent members in those days. That was particularly true because of the lack of acceptance of AA by the public and by the alcoholic who needed help. Today, we're almost a household word. It's hard for those of you who've come into AA more recently to conceive of the conditions that I've tried to picture. I gave a talk at a Rotary Club when I was first back here. And when it got all through, I thought I'd explain alcoholism and our work in AA. And one of the members of the Rotary Cup came up and said, you know, that just proves what I've always thought. You've got to have willpower. And that was just what you were up against all the time. It has been a very great experience and a great privilege for me to be part of this story. It has meant more to me than anything ever meant before in my life, and I hope that it will always mean more, strike down of the last day of my life. In AA, I found the things not only that enabled me to stop, but I found those things that enabled me to meet the problems of life instead of running away from them. A.A. offered me a chance to give myself to other people in order that I might save myself. And I want to mention one thing. In that connection, when I came back here, I thought for a little while, I struggled with this for a while. I began to find that people wouldn't accept what I was telling them. And I began wondering what they were going to think of me. And I began wonder how that was going to impair my chances of getting a good job one of these day. And I thought, why can't I go ahead and do a word when the opportunity comes, but just keep my cap closed and get a decent job? Why advertise myself as an alcoholic? I don't know how long I toyed with that, whether it was an hour or a day. But I finally was forced to the decision that if I wanted to stay sober, I was going to have to put AA up at the top of the list and that I was gonna have to do these things that I had been doing and keep doing them if I want happiness and sobriety. I never once in these past ten years have regretted that decision. I not only got sobriety from it, but I got a degree of contentment, happiness and joy which is simply impossible to describe. I couldn't begin to tell you what AA has meant to me and what the privilege of belonging to AA has met. I came into it as an unwilling prospect who had no place else to go. And at the risk of telling something that many of you newer members may doubt and may wonder about, I'd like to say that if I could drink today I wouldn't want to drink If I had to forfeit my membership in AA Because it's the grandest thing That I know of Thank you No history of AA growth in Detroit Can properly be recorded without mention of Sarah Klein Sarah Although not alcoholic has a very deep insight and understanding of the alcoholic problem. And as you heard mentioned in Archie's talk, it was very, very helpful to Archie in the beginning. In the beginning when he needed a little help and encouragement, in those early days there were no members to meet with Archie and Sarah, in the first few meetings, held those meetings with Archy in his room on Merrick Avenue. I imagine, Sarah, that listening to Archies' talk that we just heard must bring back many memories to you. Yes, indeed. First of all, I have listened to the man who has done the things which I have been unable to do. God has allowed alcoholics the inestimable boon of bringing to them healing. God can work for an alcoholic only through another alcoholic. So I feel very humble when I hear, as I have just heard, the remarks of a story told by men who have done the all-important part of taking to God these people who needed him. and that has resulted in eventual healing for them. Now, Arch and the early men connected with him were so busy in helping others that they really didn't think of many other things. True, they had to make a living but this other work was all important to them. There were many developments that came out of these early efforts, developments which I think had a major part of importance in our lives. That is the life of our city and our community. First these men and women became healed of their alcoholism. They were returned to their places in the community. Also the community became aware of what was helping and immediately tried in their way to help. For instance, the Detroit News offered us facilities at radio station WWJ. For a long time we had weekly programs, men and women talked over the air, not revealing their identities but telling the story of their own sickness and of their eventual overcoming overcoming of that sickness. In that way, people listening in had a hope for themselves and a great deal of our growth came from those radio programs. I think you'll be interested to know that at one point, a man, a colored man, was one day very dejected, sick, afraid of losing his job, afraid of losing everything because of his constant and heavy drinking. He listened to the radio program that was always on Saturday evenings, and he got some hope. At any rate, he sat down, he wrote a card to WWJ. At that time, the calls were being relayed to me, a man was sent to call on him. And the pall of beloved memory right away accepted the AA program and founded what is now our interracial group, a very large group. And from its inception it has been interracal. There has been no distinction of any kind, and that's the way it should be because one of the steps of AA is to carry the message to alcoholics without qualification male, female, black, white, older, young or rich or poor democracy as it works here democracy in its finest sense because all All differences have been erased. The banker, the businessman, the laborer, the housewife, the society woman, and also the persons of all creeds and of all nationalities. Here we meet as one, and I repeat, we find democracy at its very best. Returning to our civic responsibilities, of which we became aware after the disease of alcoholism had been arrested, I watched the men and women of the early days of AA take their message into the penal institutions, into the state hospitals, into the jails, into the missions. And out of those efforts, many, many despondent people, More despondent, perhaps, than the first men who had come into AA of their own volition. For many of these people had been committed by families or by various officials. I remember distinctly in the early days men going out to jacks and prisons. uh the book of a.a was already in the prison library and as inquiries were made by the inmates the word came to us in detroit of those inquiries and men readily dropped their work and went out there were allowed by the chaplain to hold meetings and to talk with men who were interested. Now that was true of other Michigan prisons too. It was also true of our Detroit houses of correction, to our state hospitals at Ypsilanti and in a very short time AA groups were formed in all those institutions and every month at first later on every week Men and women from the Detroit group went there, had meetings, told their stories, offered their help, gave their literature and gave their names and addresses where men could find them at any time. Yeah, it's good to think back of the few men that I distinctly remember who on leaving Jackson Prison and coming to Detroit first looked after AA. Also with people who were, I suppose we would call them mentally ill but who had been afflicted with alcoholism. In the state hospitals, they didn't progress too well, but the doctors in there learned of the therapeutic value of AA and had the men from Detroit come out, tell them about it. Patients recovered where patients who were thought to be there for the rest of their lives were released. Others were released much earlier than had been hoped for. And that way, the wonder of it spread. As I say, these men and women who had returned to normal life had taken upon themselves all the obligations which they owed to their community. Of course, then the work was spread into the churches, and the ministers who had known nothing about it became aware of it and were able to do much more effective work their counseling, particularly as it affected alcoholics. I like to think back to old this one man for instance who found sobriety before that time was was not at all prosperous, but he went ahead, worked, got a small plant, a very small plant. And in that small plant he took a few members of AA and they all worked very hard. I think they interrupted their work in their plant by having AA meetings, talking over their needs and also in praise for their new help that had come to them. Well, in turn, that factory grew. It grew to a very, very large place, employed a great many people. And I like to remember that the man who started that factory took into his employ other AAs. Also took out, took into its employ men who were released from prisons and from hospitals until it became, and it remains for years, a place that was manned almost entirely by people who had mistook the way he had been. They in their way became successful. They earned good money and were able to reestablish their homes and became happy members of the community.