How AA Actually Worked Before Meetings Replaced the Steps – Clarence S.

With a great deal of pleasure that I introduce to you now my friend Clarence. Thank you very much, Ennis. Can you all hear back there? I don't want you to miss anything. This meeting here today has been billed as a meeting of reminiscence. A lot of people have been wanting to know some things about the early days of Alcoholics Anonymous, how it started and some of the things that happened. happened. I might say over these years there's been a good many changes in our fellowship, and I will endeavor to go into some of these things and show you just what has happened over the years and what changes have taken place. Some of them are for the good and some of them for the no-good, but with anything that has growth to it, you have to expect that. Let me start off this way. I am rather a freak in this fellowship. I've often mentioned this, that I came to a fellowship that did not yet exist. That may sound a little confusing or what have you, but here's what happened. During my drinking experience, my family my wife and all of her brothers and sisters and mother and the whole caboodle, they finally threw me out of my own home for good. And I wound up in New York City without a dime in my pocket and without any clothes, without anything, period. And And I only knew one person in New York City, and that was another sister of my wife. And this gal lived out in Yonkers, and I felt that Virginia would help me because I felt she owed me something. So I made my way out to Yonker's, and then I went to Virginia's. And I remembered where Virginia lived. I'd been there on my honeymoon, and she lived way up on top of a hill in Yontkers. And instead of getting up on that hill, I went down the hill. And I got into the Italian section down there. And this was in Prohibition days. And all the Italian families made wine. And they were very sociable with their wine. Some of them sold it and some of them gave it away to their friends. And I went back down to the hill and I said, I went downtown to this neighborhood and I made friends. And by the time I got up to Virginia's house, I was quite a mess. And I can only remember a few details of this visit. I was rolling around on the floor with her two little kids. They were little babies, three or four years old, little girls. And I was drunk and I was dirty and I smelled bad. and Virginia took a dim view of this performance and she put me in her car and drove me back down to New York where her brother had thrown me out originally and left me there. I say, I tell this story for a reason. I don't know how long I spent in New York City it was a long time but while this was going on something happened. Later on, Virginia had the doctor over to her home to see about one of the kids, I guess. And they got to talking about drinking. And Virginia related the story of my visit to her home and what a nice guy I used to be and what a dirty stinking drunken bum I am now. And this doctor said that's odd because I had had a brother-in-law who was a lush, and he was always getting drunk and in trouble. And he has met some strange cult of people. And since he met these strange cults, he no longer drinks. And he runs around New York trying to fix drunks. And it says there's another rummy. He's a doctor, a medical doctor down in Akron, Ohio. And And he belongs to this strange cult also in Akron, Ohio. And that doctor spends all of his time fixing drunks. And he says, if your brother-in-law ever gets back to Cleveland, maybe he can go down and meet this doctor and maybe this doctor can fix him. We used to call it fixing. And believe me, we fixed him. It was a lot different. Today they talk about this being a program of attraction, which is the biggest bunch of hot air I have ever heard. I always just want to ask you, who wants to be attracted to a bunch of drunks? There was no attraction then. This was a terrific sales job. But what happened about this doctor in Akron? And I eventually came back to Cleveland, and I didn't get in the house, but Dorothy told me about this doctor in Akron and asked me if I'd want to sit down and meet him. And I told her I'd be glad to. There was nothing else I could do. I had no place else to go. So she put me in the back of her car and took me down to the bus depot, and she bought me a one-way ticket to Akron and put me on the bus with Doc Smith's name and address in my little paw. And that's how I met my sponsor. Eventually, Doc put me in Akron City Hospital. This was long before they had St. Thomas or any of those other hospitals. He used to put his patients in Akroon City Hospital and I was in that hospital for a week And here are the things that happened to me in that hospital. I was scared to death, I was sick, I had been drunk a long time, I was not a periodic, I was a chronic. There are two types of drunks. There's the periodic and there's the chronic. Those periodics are the birds that give us a bad name. But a fellow like me, a chronic, I'm drunk all the time, I am dependable. And I've always had some resentment toward these periodics. They really screw things up, but we don't. People know what to expect of us. Well, anyway, that's a little aside here. I landed in this hospital and what happened was after a couple days of shaking it out, I'd been drunk for several years. Now don't, this wasn't any of this drunk and sober business over several years, I was drunk these several years. I was unemployable, I were sick, I weighed 130 pounds. And I was broke and I didn't know where I'd be going when I left that hospital, really. Well, after I was in there a couple days, the men who had preceded me in this fellowship into which I was about to enter came in to visit me and they told me the stories of their life, what had happened to them through booze. None of them were sober very long at that time. Doc was sober about a year and a half and Wilson up in New Yorkville was sober probably a little longer than that. But the fellas in Akron, some of them were just a few weeks and a few months and a couple of them a year. But they were all older men than I was. All of them are considerably older. I was only 35 years old when I landed in that hospital in February 1938. And these men were all 45, 56 years old, and they'd been through real terrific alcoholic experiences. And they told me about it. And these fellows, they just hit me right. Those fellows, I wanted to belong to that bunch. I I wanted to be one of them. They were real 24-karat rummies. And they told me that they had the answer to my drinking problem after they told мне их истории. But they never told me what this answer was. And they tell me as they were leaving, they told меня они имели ответ на мой питьный вопрос и на этот счет они сделали их выход. it. After I was in there a week, Doc used to come in every afternoon to see me and talk to me, and of all the people in that bunch, if I was afraid of anybody, it was really Doc. He had my number. I scared the death of this man. And I had a great respect for him, but he always frightened me. He frightened me the first time I ever met him, because Because he, I went down there to tell him all about my symptoms. You see, I'm a sick man. And instead of me telling him anything, he took the ball away from me and told me all about myself. And I couldn't figure this out at all. And there's quite a story in connection with that. And the reason I did fear him so was this. Some years ago in Cleveland, Ohio, there are people here from Cleveland. I see a couple of them here now, and they'll remember this incident. There was an incident going on in Cleveland they called the Torso Murder Mysteries. There was a hobo jungle down in Kingsbury Run, and a lot of these hobos—this was way back in prohibition times, and people slept wherever they could. There was an awful depression on at that time. And a bunch of the drug heads used to live down there in Kingsbury Run, down there in the weeds. And they got to finding bodies down there. There were bodies found. And these bodies were all cut up and they're dismembered and they were wrapped in newspapers. It was a gruesome thing. To my knowledge, recollection there was at least seven bodies found and what only one was ever identified through fingerprints. And the newspapers had more fun with this thing than they had with Watergate. Every time they'd find a dismembered body down there, they had headlines and they were referring to this killer as a mad butcher of Kingsbury Run. And they were trying to figure out, they figured it was either a butcher doing this or a surgeon because, as they remarked in the paper, this fella had a fine technique and he knew something about anatomy. He knew how to cut things up. He did a masterful job, so he was a professional man of some kind and they thought perhaps he was surgeon gone wacky and getting his jollies out of doing things like that. So this thing was going on and when I met my sponsor doc Smith dr. Bob as people call him one of the things that he after he told me all about myself I forgot this blubber got working I got thing holy smokes this guy something's wrong here somewhere how does he know all this day and then the crusher came when he made the remark that he wanted to put me me out in a goomy roost out here in Cuyahoga Falls where nobody could get at me. And it came through to me that I have met the Mad Butcher. He's been following me around and now he is ready to do his little thing. And that goomy loose business where nobody could get at me killed it because about that time I wanted everybody to get at me and I waited my opportunity I up and ran out of that man's office he I had three different doors I had to go through to get out I never stopped for any elevators I went down those seven floors and gone that is my first meeting of my sponsor. So you can see why I feared this man. Later on, I had to go back to see him. I had no other thing to do. I was lying around with these jugheads one day and we got to talking about quitting drinking. I think I instituted this conversation and I can still remember here's what drove me into this fellowship you we come from all directions that chap last night talking about we all come to some extremity we come to an end i'd come to mine and as proven by this one statement i can make we were lying around there talking about quitting drinking in this flannel mouth irishman everybody's drunk there you want to remember there's no sober ones around some of Some of them were passed out, other ones were up and around. This Irishman, he says to me, you quit drinking? He said, you'll never quit drinking. He said you don't have guts enough to quit drinking He says, look at you I said, I'm going to quit drinkin' He said You don't Have Guts Enough He said to quit Drinking takes determination And he said to have determination you need a chin He said, you've got a chin like Andy Gump. You're no damn good. Well, do you know, that man goaded me to the extent that what little bit of left in me, what little spark I had left, I had to make the bet good. I says, I'm going to quit. I know a doctor at Akron can fix me. he says nobody can fix you you're no damn good i said i'll show you so you show me and do you know that i got a hold of someone's telephone i don't know whose phone because we didn't have those facilities where we were and doc told me i called him numerous times i only remember calling him once and he told me to meet him in city hospital the next day in akron ohio the next morning and I was there, and he put me in the hospital. That's how I started. Then I met these men. The day that we left the hospital, the night we left a hospital, Doc took me to a meeting, a meeting of the Oxford Movement in Akron, Ohio. I didn't know what it was, but I knew there was an awful lot of people there. there, and I saw these rummies there who had visited me in the hospital. And I knew these people, these fellows, but the rest of these people I didn't know. And there were a lot of ladies there, a lot of women, and they kind of scared me a bit. I'm glad over the years I've gotten over that. I was making up for it. But I didn' t know what I was into to and I watched the format of these meetings and I couldn't catch on what was going on much at all. As the weeks went by, I finally got through to me that I belonged to the Oxford Movement. And that's where A.A. was born. He was in the Oxford Group. Doc Smith had been in the Oscar Group before he ever met Bill Wilson, but he never stayed sober. Bill Bill Wilson was brought into the Oxford Movement by Ebby Thatcher in New York at Calvary House. And that's where Bill got his start. So Bill was meeting with Oxford Group people as well. And whatever rummies he picked up along the way, they were attending Oxford Group in New York. Then something else happened. I want to show you what happens to the development of this fellowship. fellowship. Something had to happen. I thought, you know, my sponsor told me I'd have to spend the rest of my life fixing drunks as an avocation, not a profession, as an advocation. I was supposed to go out and make my own living some way and fix drunks along the way. And first things first, the drunks were to be fixed first. If I depended on God, I would always find a way to eat and this is so true. I didn't have anything to offer an employer and I had to eat. My wife let me come back home for a while and I was one of these unfortunate people that the marriage didn't work out after I got got sober for too long. I got back home and, boy, I got busy AA-ing or chasing drunks all over the creation and spending all my time chasing them. And Dorothy had always been accustomed to being the social secretary of the family and taking care of those matters. And everyone coming to the house used to be coming looking for her. They weren't looking for me and this situation changed when I start chasing all over making contact where I could find rummies these people were coming to the house looking for me and some of them were pretty important people and she just couldn't take this she couldn't get with it and I don't blame her because after all I had been been drunk so long she'd had to run everything. So finally she said to me, this is worse than when you were drinking. We better try this apart again. So she packed my little suitcase and away I went and I never did go back. But that's just what happened. That happens with some people in this fellowship. The marriage don't work out after you're sober. But I suppose every case is different, but that was mine anyway. Well, I had to go out and fend for myself and find a place to live and something to do, and I did. And I lived in a cheap boarding house down on Euclid Avenue. I paid $20 a week room and board in this boarding house, and I got two meals a day and one on Sunday. So I had other, I had a few meals I had to buy on the outside and I had clothes to buy and other things and on twenty bucks a week whatever I had left I used to squander on women. It was some deal. But let me tell you that boarding house has some stories to it. But to talk about what happened there, I was living there and there were probably a half a dozen other rummies living there, sober ones. And then there was a lot of other people. There were about 35 people living there. We used to always eat together in the basement. We had a big table in the basin that was the kitchen and the dining room combined. So we ate at certain hours there, certain hours for breakfast, certain horas for supper. and if we were good and we didn't start any fires in the place or anything like that every once in a while the old Irish landlady would let us bring a guest to dinner it would cost us 50 cents to do that I tell you this for another reason I invited a guest one night I was going with a gal and I wanted her to come over sometime to this boarding house and meet some of these inmates and see where I was living and how I was living and all about it and lay out for a little while rest I'd walking down the drugstore I guess to get something here comes Catherine down the street and Catherine is so drunk she can't hit the ground with her hat so Catherine's been out to the Warrensville workhouse so many times that she was serving a life sentence on the installment plan and she knew every a brick on the way out there. And I grab ahold of Catherine and says, Catherine, let's get out of here. Get off this street. You're going to get picked up. You'll be back there at Warrensville again. Okay. So I start taking her home. She lived a couple blocks away from me. Lived over in Cedar Avenue. Bad section then. But Catherine decided before she went home, she wanted something to eat. Well, she made a big hullabaloo about this. You'd have to know Catherine to know why I cave in and give in to her. She was very persuasive. She had language the likes of which I've never heard anyplace. I think Catherine used to teach sailors how to swear. In fact, I think she made up words. She with something else, No kidding. And she was young. She's in her early 30s at the time. And she's skinny as a match. And so Catherine wants something to eat. So I try to take her into this Greek joint on 81st and Euclid there. And she looks at me, and she says, I wouldn't go in a dump like that. I want a place with a tablecloth. I'm used to eating like a lady. There you are, a lady, she said drunk, she can't find her mouth. Well, she's raising a lot of hell and I want to get her off the streets so to humor her I made my first big mistake. I took her down the street to 79th and Euclid where that nice spaghetti house is down there that Italian restaurant and all the business and professional people around there eat there at noon and it's a quiet place. They have a carpet on the floor and tablecloths and male waiters with tuxedos and as soon as I brought Catherine in there I knew that I had done the wrong thing because she is dirty she stinks she's loud and she is profane and we go over and sit down at this table and she right away has a tate-a-tate with the waiter they're having trouble already and she's telling him a few things about his ancestors sisters. Everyone can hear it, you know, the whole people stop and looking over there. And the next thing you know she finally, she orders, and she ordered spaghetti. Well she has about as much chance of eating that spaghetti as I have flying to the moon, see? But the spaghetti came. And in the meantime the head waiter had come around and tried to shush and she don't like him at all I think she had something against his rule of authority and this fellow was head waiter he was authority in her book so she told him a few things too that she hadn't told this other guy well she's still making an awful fuss and racket and she starts working on his spaghetti coming up here and she's got it all over get it on or she don t get it in her it's all over and it's dropping back down in the plate and this waiter this head waiter come back again and he was giving her the word real good and she'd had enough of him she want no more of this guy at all she'd gone her limit with him so this little gal doesn't do anything but pick up this plate of spaghetti and throw it all over this headwaiter right down his dickie well it was about two minutes the wagon was there and Catherine and I are both in the wagon. We get down to that police station and they put me in one coop over here and they took her someplace else. And I'm rattling those bars and telling them I don't belong here. This is a mistake. The guy said, no, no one belongs here. This place is full of mistakes. so I get this treatment and I get no place and I guess at 3 o'clock they change shifts and another bunch of keepers come in about that time and I start my rattling situation all over again and one guy finally listened to me and says you call Crowley the probation officer Ed will tell you You're all about me, and he'll tell you that I don't belong here. The guy says, You know Crowley? I said, Yes. Call him, for God's sake. Get me out of this place. And he did, and Crowley thought this was great. This is the funniest thing that ever happened to him. But he got me out, but they kept Catherine, and they sent her out to the slammer again. I didn't see anything at Catherine for some time till one day I'm home again walking down the drugstore. I should stay out of that drugstore and here comes Katherine again if anything she's worse shape than she was the first time I saw her. She just got out of a coop and she's all drunk up again so I said Katherine you'll be back in Lawrenceville by this afternoon let's get off the street let's go home but I says Katherine we don't eat today So, okay. So we got to 82nd and Euclid. As you know, there's a Jewish temple on one corner and the Unitarian Church on the other here. There's a traffic light there. So I thought I'd cross at the traffic light. I didn't want to risk trying to get her across the street where there wasn't any light because she was pretty unsteady. so we get to this light and we're waiting for the light to change and here's high noon and all these business people are out heading for their lunch again, the street's full of people and Catherine feels the call of nature and she don't do one damn thing but squat right there on 82nd and Euclid I'm standing there holding her by the hand I tell you, this is something to be said for sponsorship. Well, don't you know, some of these interested passersby stopped and they looked and they had a few words and she had some words for them too and don't you know it wasn't another minute or so do I wagons her again right back to 21st and Central is right away we went well in decent exposure oh I don't know what all they had but they had us and intoxication. Of course, they assumed that I'm in the same shape. Why would I be with her? And back I go. Start all that stuff all over again. Crawley had to get me out the second time. He thought this was really rich at that time. This was entertainment by now. I didn't think it was so funny. I do now, but looking back on it. But you know, what did we do to that girl? Between Mooney, Miss Mooney and Crowley and myself, we arranged to put her in Warrensville for a year. Put her in jail for one solid year. A year and a day she got as a habitual. Now that's taken people, taken a lot for granted when you take their freedom away for a year. I told them that the only way we're ever going to do anything with Catherine is she's going to have to get completely reorganized and they're going to have get her well and sober and get some meat on her bones and everything else. So she couldn't, I didn't see how they could do anything but give her a year and they did did. Took her out there for a year. Well, of course I didn't dare go out and see her right then because she knew I had a hand in this but I knew she'd send for me eventually which she did. So when I went out she sent for me and I knew the matron out there and she called me and said Catherine wants to see me. I went down to the dime store and and I bought her some little stink water the girls like in a dime store. And I bought here some cigarettes and some, I think, a little candy and stuff like that. I spent about 60 cents on this broad. This was really plunging, and I had it all in a bag. So I went out to Warrensville to see her, and I'm sure glad they had that screen up out there because when I came in there, boy, I heard something. The air was blue and the only thing I could do is stand there until she got through. Eventually she ran out of gas and all she wants to do is get out of there. I told her, Catherine, you're not getting out of here. You've got a year and a day and you're going to be here all that time so make up your mind to it. That's the end of it. You're goingto be here. they put her in the hospital out there. I can assume that Katrin had everything from dandruff to fallen arches with the kind of a life she was living and the things that she was exposed to. So, they kept her in a hospital. They started building her up. She started getting some fat on her bones. After she quit hollering at me that day, I gave her my bag of goodies and she accepted them. I went out to see Catherine every week, sometimes two or three times. Sometimes twice a week I'd go see her. But she quit yapping about getting out after a while. She resigned herself to it. When she came out of there a year later, Miss Mooney took her out of that neighborhood and got her a room with some old people way out by Yucca Beach Park. And these were some Slovenian people. They knew nothing about AA, never heard of it, knew nothing about drunks. And she went out there to live and I tried to bring her to a meeting and they threw her out. The women would not accept her in an AA meeting so she couldn't go to AA. But I took her to some picnics and things where we had a big bunch of people and she didn't have any identity but But she couldn't get into the AA way of doing things. But she did one thing very important. She went back to her church. She was a Catholic. And she went back into her church, she hadn't been there for a long time. And she was interested in working with kids. And she had very good at working with children. When he came out of there, Mooney got her a job. in one of the hotels, first on a bathing beach as a lifeguard. She could swim like a fish. When the bathing beach closed in the fall, Mooney got her in a hotel as a floor clerk. And Catherine went back to school and started getting a refresher course on her typing and shorthand and things like that. And don't you know she finally got a job as a sonographer? She became a private secretary. She wouldn't spend a dime to see the original crucifixion. She's the tightest babe I ever saw in my life. She saves all her money. These are stories, I'm going to write a book on a lot of these people. They're terrific stories about what happened to their lives. I have notes here of an awful lot of them here I could mention here, but it'd take too long, I don't have the time. But I just wanted to give you an idea how things were in what they call the good old days. Those good old ways weren't all good. There was a lot of problems and a lot things we had to overcome. There were some tragic things that happened in those days, too. The hospitals wouldn't take people, and I had one fellow die on account of that. They thought he was drunk, and he wasn't. He'd been hauled into one of these hospitals on numerous occasions before. And the East Cleveland police called me one day and told me they had this fellow in their garage. They left him laying on the floor of their paddy wagon. They picked him up on the street. He was unconscious. They took him to the hospital, and the hospital people there recognized him as a drunk. And they said he's drunk. We'll get him the hell out of here. So take him back to jail. the police didn't put him in jail I knew something was wrong with this fellow so they called me and I I went out and took him over to the post shaker and the man had had a cerebral hemorrhage but because of his history of being a rummy going into this place in this emergency room they wouldn't take them when he died if they'd have known about this cerebral hemorhage maybe they could have done some massaging or something and maybe saved his life. This is one of the tragedies. I've seen a lot of tragedy in those days, but there's a lot of great stuff too. So you have to take the bitter with the sweet. I had people commit suicide right in my face in this thing, right there in that boarding house too. Oh brother, I don't want to talk about those things, but those Those things happen, but you look at the great things that have happened. The thousands of people who have been affected by this and the wonderful things that are happening in their lives. I had one of the greatest things happen to me just this last November. A great thing. I was invited back up to Cleveland to speak at the anniversary of two groups. they were having their 35th anniversary, 35 years, these two groups. The group on the west side and the Borton Group. I spoke at one Monday night and one the other and I see some of these people still alive over 35 years sober. Great. Then you look out and see all those hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of new women that have come in because these other people did stay. It's really something. But I like to think about those things that happened rather than some of the dismal things. But we all had a great time. The advantages we had in those good old days is with everybody, just about everyone was broke. And we had no televisions to compete with our meetings. We had no money to buy season football games or baseball games, we had no activity except ourselves. We stuck together. Our fellowship there was tremendous. We all knew where everybody was all the time and we worked together and we never worried about the hours or how many of what we had to do, we did it. This is the way those people did, all of them, all of them. I don't single out any single one of them for any virtues, they all had them. But it was great. We had nothing else to do. That's the way we put in our time. We didn't have clubs as you notice, as you see clubs today. We used to meet in hospitals where we sponsored people. You go out, you want to see somebody, you go out to a dry-out hospital or a rest home where we had patients and you could visit all the bummies you wanted. There were plenty of patients there to talk to and plenty of other people there. There was always some place to go. our time was filled working with one another and this was our life and I think people miss an awful lot of that today but it's still available and you and I are the most fortunate people in the world I say this for this reason for many centuries there was no No, no, the alcoholic had no solution to his problem. This has been going on as long as time has been recorded. Up until the last few years, the last 30 some years, now there is a solution for the alcoholic and you and I have been able to be invited into it. You and I. You and me have this opportunity. Millions and millions of people never had this opportunity and you and I have. It's great. I have lived most of this century. I was born in 1902. I've mentioned this before. I've seen some great things happen in this century I saw the beginning of the automobile industry. There were very few cars when I was a kid. I sawthe beginning of radio. Saw the beginningof television. I saw a man sent to the moon. I've seen all these great things happen the atom busted I've seen this and all these wonderful things and finally we come to this solution to the alcoholics problem this is the greatest thing of the whole bunch I say say this is the greatest thing that's happened in the 20th century. And you and I, we have a stake in this and we have responsibility of it. And you are the people who are going to carry it on. And we can't carry it on unless we believe in what this stands for. Alcoholics Anonymous is not a booze cure. You heard very well last night what it was. This is a way of life. And you and I are fortunate enough to have been introduced to this and have the opportunity of serving in it. We don't need a lot of organization. We just need love. That's it. Thank you.