I Am the World’s Shortest Speaker: They Use Me for the Ten-Minute Spot – Ebby T.

I give you my friend, and your friend, our founder, Ebbets. Thank you, Dick. Well, as Dick told you, my name is Ebbet, and I'm an alcoholic. alcoholic. I don't know just how to start this off. Dick asked me over here. I was very glad to come, as I wanted to meet some of you Memphis people. But I had an idea. I was one of two or three speakers and I didn't know I was going to hold this thing down for 40 or 45 minutes. Back home in Dallas, I'm known as the world's shortest speaker. They They used to meet back there around a different close with a 10-minute and 15-minute spot. So I don't know if I'm going to go about holding down for 45 minutes, but I do the best I can. In fact, I've been living in Texas for five years now. Maybe I've gotten enough of that Texas braggadocio somewhere in my system. Maybe I was so-and-so that I can pull some of that out of the hat. There was a story I heard a year or two after I got embellished. Oh, let's take a walk, Frankie. I hope you'll embellish me and let me tell it. There was this Texas rancher who drove over to his nearest neighbor. It was about 15 miles. He said, what do you say we go to town and make a day of it? Yeah, I said, all right. Got his hat and he got in the car And they started out As soon as they got out of sight of the ranch house They opened up the first of bourbon Had a good long pull on the bottle And the first guy says, you know They shipped 2,000 bulls from Fort Worth The day before yesterday Nothing was said They drove on a while They came to a gate And they had to open that They had another pull at the bottle And the second guy said You know, I shipped 2.500 bulls from my siding four or five days ago. It was going along just before they got to the main state highway. They stopped for a third good hooker, and the first rancher said again, you know, I think we're the two biggest bull shippers in Texas. And I hope I've acquired a little of that so I can spread it out tonight. I know that Dick and Jim Drake and some of the other boys wanted me to tell you some of my beginnings of AA as I experienced them. And, you know, I think that I appreciate the things that Dick has said and other people have said about me, but I sometimes think it might be claim to fame as if I'm Exhibit A in the antique division of Alcoholics Anonymous. That's about it. Well, I got to go back to some of my beginnings. I started drinking when I was in school. I come from Auburn in New York, my native town. Went to a private school there. I started ranking them last year. I seemed to hold it under control pretty well. Well, I did get off on a wild party one night at the military school. We had a competitive drill and after the drill we all went out and maybe some of us were out in the bronc. And we got in a mess and the principal of the school heard about it. But nothing was said. But I wasn't very well that spring and they took me out of school before. before school was over and that son of the principal wrote to my father, and he always called me Ed. He didn't call me Ebby or Eb. He said, I don't think we can do anything more for Ed. Which meant that he was just selling her from the school. So that fall, my father said, you're going to work in the foundry. My father happened to be in the iron foundry business. So I went to work that fall. and I confined my drinking to Saturday nights. Naturally, I had to get up at 6 o'clock to go down. I worked as a motor helper, which is fairly rugged work, as you may know. And I did that for a year and I confined most of my drinking to Saturday night except around Christmas time when all the dances were going on. Then I really stepped out and I remember I tried to go to work with drinking and dancing from getting down to work at 7 o'clock in the morning when I was young and just shake it off and work it off for a night. And I managed to get away with it for a while. But as I look back and remember those times, I wasn't a very successful drinker from the start. There were times, too, when I'd take some of the older guys around all the way home and other times I'd be climbing the chandelier after three or four drinks I never knew what was going to happen. The fact of the matter is, when I was about 15 years old, I remember putting a lot of thought into this business of drinking because it was in my family. My brothers drank pretty heavily and my father did. And I kind of figured that if they drank that way and it wasn't any good for them, then it was no good for me either because I was just about the same temperament as they were. But it was that first drink that I ever took on my own when I walked into the bar of the hotel tonight and ordered a glass of beer all by myself, and I was a big shot. And I still say that was the best glass of tea I ever tasted. Sometimes I can almost taste it again. And somehow that just gave me just the same glow, and that beer was a lot stronger in those days and it was real beer. That was about 1914, I think. Yes, it was 1914. And I know that I said to myself, this is for me. And soon after that, when I started drinking, I kept it down pretty well at two or three drinks. I used to grab an evening out spring spring. And this friend of mine, I went to school, he called me up and asked me if I had my lessons done. I said, sure. I guess it's just a small because the family was sitting in the room. And I said sure, Andy, I'll go out and have a chocolate milk with you. I got time. And we were far from chocolate milk. But I managed to get home by 11 o'clock so there was nobody knowing about it. But now I know that the effect and the taste of of alcohol are fascinating to me from the beginning. And later on, I read a book called The Common Sense of Drinking, from which a lot of AA was taken by Dick Peabody. He's not dead, but he was one of the first of the late therapists that had a tremendous following of alcoholics. A lot of other books have been written by a lot of his pupils. A glass crutch is one of them by Dutch Chambers, and I can name half of those, and you can't think of them right now. But he said in that book that the difference between an alcoholic and a heavy drinker was that the heavy drinkers might drink just as much on a given night as the alcoholic, but the next day was another day to him, and he He went to work, and his first thing in the morning was the office. Well, the first step that the alcoholic had was on the night before, and where could he get the next drink to bring that party back again? And that always appealed to me because that's the way I was. I'd forget business and want to get somewhere I could get with a gang again. And it's of the effect of alcohol on people of your type. It's too fascinating. You can't handle it. I won't pick up. Don't pick up? No. He's talking to the other people. All right. But I knew that but I knew then that a couple of us were drinking in my family and I figured out that I better lay should stay away from what I never did once I had that drink. By the time when I and I of course got into a lot of to more trouble. And the family business broke up, as one of those things do. It's been running since 1852 and it broke up in 1922. And I was more or less on the loose and going from one job to another and getting in more trouble all the time. My drinking was increasing. increasing. I didn't get overseas in World War I, but I was in the outfit that was stationed around right in my hometown of Albany. And then the state army there, I got to be a second lieutenant in this outfit and we always had a jug in the officer's quarters because it was a drugget in one of the corners right near the armory. And I somehow managed to get a bottle of whiskey and we could get it because those were the days of prescription. The doctor would issue you a prescription during probation. And you'd go in and get this pint of whiskey, but we got it all we wanted. We got that gallon jug filled repeatedly. And there was a pretty two-fisted drinking crowd, and they were all older than I was. And finally, uh, we got into a jam one night. We got in a taxi wreck. and I, oh, just got superficial cuts in my both wrist and face. But I was kind of a bloody mess or just bleeding a lot and my father came in and I was sitting on the bed and he says, you get out of that mess and die tomorrow morning until you leave my house. Well, I didn't feel like leaving this house last night so late that afternoon I walked up and told the captain I was going to resign request to be put on the reserve But that ended my National Guard career and that phase of the drinking. But things got worse, and my father and mother died in 27, my father in 29. And I was kicking around then pretty bad. I inherited some money from my father. I should have had sense enough to take care of it, but I didn't. I lost half of it overnight in a stock market crash, and the rest I just downed the drain. over a period of a year, a year and a half. And we used to summer in Vermont. And it was there that I met Bill Wilson. But it was longer ago than 24 years ago. I first knew Bill about 1910. I went to school with him in 1912. Which has taken us back quite a few years. Fine Well, as I get back We went to Summers And the match at the Vermont Well, that's when my father died The house was vacant up there We bought a house After all the years My father spent money at the hotel for all of us He bought ahouse in 1923 And in 1929 he died And the house was empty All my other brothers were married Father died without a will so they just divided up the furniture and that's done for me and I had one room furnished in that house and the rest was bare. And I was living there, all alone. Drinking heavily all the time. Got a red and then we jumped now and we're going to get up to the summer of 1934. This is 24 years ago. And I'd been on the toils of the law twice that summer. I'd gotten Drunk Gotten arrested for being drunk and disorderly Signed five dollars or something like that And it seems that in Vermont at that time I don't know whether the law still on the statute books them out But If you got arrested three times There's only one given year for drunkenness It meant six months in Windsor State Prison Well, I was getting drunk that long One time I got drunk and I still don't know exactly how it happened but I was in my own house and finally somebody got out a wire for me. I still do not see yet what I was doing as I was on my own property. But one of the boys, a boy that was a constable at the time was a guy that I had gone to school with in 1912 the same year that I went to school with Bill Wilson. I forgot to say that I wanted to go to private school in Albany me. But this one year, I went up there in Vermont in 1912, in the fall of 1912 to go to that school for one year and then back to my other. And this other boy was John Jackson. He was a constable. And I walked uptown the next day. Well, I wound up sitting on the store, the steps of the hardware store to talk to the owner of it. My son John drove roll up and says, sorry, he says, everybody got a warrant for you. Got to take you down to Bennington, which is a county city. He took me down and saw the judge. And the judge says be back Monday. I said, well, let's see what we can do about you. Well, I've gotten ahead of my story because before that, I'd say late in July or the first part of August, Two men came to see me Two fellas that I had Drunk with awesome One of them happened to be The son of this judge His name is Steve McGraves And he's now living in Paris, France And the other one is Shep Cornell And I don't know just where he is I think he's somewhere in Ohio I had a hangover Of course And these two guys Wanted around I was out and back Somewhere In the kitchen I guess I remember they came up the back steps And they They didn't know exactly how to begin Because they remembered me And had a lot of fun with me drinking And I thought I had something on their mind So I said What do you got on your mind? What's cooking? And they said Well, we kind of come and see And so we're going to Get some ideas in your head About some things I said, what do you mean about my drinking? They said, yeah, you're not getting anywhere. You understand you're in wrong all over town. We just sort of... Well, we just sort it. We got mixed up with a group called the Oxford Group. And we think that you'd get help if you joined up with us. and I said, do you ever think of letting God run your life instead of Eddie Thatcher trying to run it all the time? And they really talked sense the way I figured it and it seemed to me that they were just telling me things that I had been taught in my childhood about the right way of living. And I said well dear, if these two guys have got something out of this Maybe there's hope for me, because I just about give enough hope. And I tell you, I was willing to quit drinking, but I didn't know how. Excuse me. I didn' t know how to do it. So I listened to them, and they left me a book by one of these men in the Oxford group. I don' t recall the name of that book now. But in it, I could see myself staring out at those pages. it. Now, the Oxford Group, let me explain, was not concentrated on alcohol, alcoholism. It was a spiritual group that was founded by a minister from Pennsylvania named Frank Bookman, B-U-C-H-M-A-N. It got its name, Oxford Group because Bookman got a lot of people interested, and they in turn went abroad and they went to England and Oxford University and they got a lot of people interested over there. And from there they went into South Africa. And they got up quite a big meeting down there. I don't know if it was Cape Town or one of those cities. And the reporters referred to them as the group from Oxford and their damn name stuck and it had no more to do with the group or its findings or anything in the world. But just like those things happen, that's the name that stuck with it. and it was called the Oxford Group. And they were really trying to find something at that time in 1929 when the crash had come on Wall Street and the nation was kind of a low point economically. A lot of people were hopping out of windows in New York and that's no joke because there were a lot of them hit those manholes head-on from the 30th floor and a lot OF people were drinking terribly and they wanted to find something in this Oxford group. A lot of people came around to it, and, of course, a good many of them happened to be alcoholics. And don't ever let yourself think that nobody but an alcoholic can help an alcoholic because there were a lot of men in this group who were very understanding and had a damn good knowledge of the thinking of an alcoholic's mind. And I sometimes think I think that our minds are no different than anybody else in this world. We just give in to things that other people do not. Well, anyway, that idea appealed to me. I read the book and I sold it up for a few days and I started to paint the house, but I had a ladder that was too short and I couldn't get up to all these places. And I made a deal with a boss painter and he sent around one of his men with some equipment and the two of us finished the house. I didn't touch a drop all that time, but the minute that job was over, sure, I went right back to the bottle because I had nothing more to interest me. It was a letdown. And it was then, on that means after the painting of the house that I was picked up and taken to this county judge, there's one thing that sticks in my mind and it always will. I knew it was at that time. You may not mean nothing to you, you may not get what I mean by that, but... As we drove home that afternoon, this constable, John Jackson, left me off at the house that I was living in. And he said, well, I'll be around to get you Monday. This is Friday. And he says, remember the judge says be sober? I said, yep, I will be sober. over. So I went in the house, and I remembered that down cellar I had about a half a dozen bottles of ale, and my nose was going to be nice and cool. And there's one thing I like in this world, it's Valentine's Ale, and that was it. So, I went down cellars, and I said to myself, I can't possibly get drunk between now and Monday on six bottles of the rail, and I know that nobody in town is going to sell me anymore after they've heard that I... You know what a small Vermont community is. Everybody from ten miles up and down the valley knows all about anything like that. And I knew another... I mean, the bootlegger wouldn't sell me anything. And when I got down and I reached one of those barrels, and uh-uh. That ain't cricket. All right, the judge said you'd get there sober, but would you be there sober? No, that isn't... That's cheating. That's somehow... And I walked back I go upstairs, and that damn devil's up on my shoulder. Get off, go on down there and take it. I couldn't take that damn angel. That's just not... That's not the spirit of a thing. It might be... Technically, I might be all right. I'd get there sober a second ago. That's exactly what he meant. He didn't say don't take a drink, but that's exactly what he mean. So I took them and put them in a basket and carried them over to my next-door neighbor and I said, here, they're yours. And that minute, I had a victory. I know that. I had something that was just like the weight being lifted from my shoulders. And I've often thought about it. In later years, when I started drinking again, why, I couldn't recapture that feeling that I had then. But perhaps that's where the sweet pink cloud And later on, you get a more mature, if I may use the word, outlook. But I don't think if you have a slip, you can ever go back again. Well, as it turned out, I went down there Monday, and there had been a third man come to see me, too. His name was Roland Hazard. He was a pretty slow gent, too, but I never knew him. him. I'd never met him before. These other two guys I had. And he was there on Monday when I was brought for the judge. The judge tagged me, gave me a little lecture and he said, Hacker, will you take this man? And he said, sure. So I was released and my own the charges were dropped and this guy took me and he took me back home and left me there and a few days later I closed the house up went down and stayed with him we lived about 15 miles below south of the town and then we went on down to New York and I stayed with Chef Cornell one of his other chops that had come to see me I stayed there about a month I guess and during that time we made trips back to Vermont, Hazard and I and two weeks after I was connected with this Oxford group by which there's a much looser membership than Alcoholics Anonymous I really think they got me out speaking. The first weekend that I went out speaking when we went up through Vermont I spoke in a junior college two churches, town meeting hall and someplace else all in two nights. Two afternoons and two nights and I still don't know what I talked about but I just thought good about the whole thing and really figured that these guys must have something that there must be a higher power because they were the ones that originated the phrase believe in a higher God or a higher father as you understand them and while I was doing this and going back to New York and I heard about Bill I hadn't seen Bill I don't believe for over a year although Bill you see was born and raised in a town six miles north of this town of Manchester, Vermont where I used to summer also spent quite a few winters there and I heard that Bill Bill was in pretty tough shape, drinking bad, and I had been downtown on Wall Street and seen some of my old friends. One of whom I'd built a sister-in-law. And he said he was in tough shape and he said, why don't you give him a ring or telephone? And I said, well, I will, but I want to think this thing out a little and get myself a pretty good store and a pretty great place to go for it. And I can truthfully say now that I believe that if I went over there Bill would either go for it lock, stock and barrel or he would have none of it He wouldn't just play around with it for a little while I thought that if he put his teeth into it once, he'd stick to it Yes, I thought I knew him pretty well I've been going to school with him and seen him over the years So I called him up one night And I didn't get to Bill, but I got lost us, his wife, and told her what had happened to me, that this must have kind of shown me something. Well, I don't ever sober myself in about five, possibly six or seven weeks. But I think sometimes the initial effect that we get from a thing is we're more powerful for when and where we are later on. We get stale. Well, anyway, Lois said to watch me over to dinner that night. And since it's much of a date, I said fine. So that night I went over at half past five, I guess, in the evening. And I rang the bell at 182 Clinton Mountain Street. The only person home was an old colored man named Green, who I've known for years. He'd been with the family. And Lois' family, that is. And he said they're both out. Both Mrs. Wilson and Mr. Wilson are out, but come on in. So he found Bill up there, and he'd been drinking, but he wasn't too bad. And said hello, and said that and everything, and he's kind of hedging around. Then he made me stew. He had to go out and get some ice cream, something else for supper. Well, if I knew what he was going after, I would have done it for money time and stuff. So then Lois came in. And there was another girl invited. There was a girl invited because she lived upstairs and had made the place an apartment. apartment. So we all sat down to dinner, and Bill's got a little garbled in the book about the game across the kitchen table, but it don't make any difference, the idea is there. So, we had dinner, then we all moved upstairs, and those houses, and back there in the eastmost living room was on the second floor. So when we moved up on the second floor, after a little hammering and hawing, Laura said, well, let's hear care about yourself. So I started in. I guess they got me wound up and I guess that talk was put there at one o'clock in the morning. And I remember Bill said I walked the subway with her. And then I knew that he wasn't going to go for a drink or that he had a bottle in my house anyway. And on the way over, he put his arms around my shoulder just before I went in the subway and said, I don't know what you got, kid, but you got something and And I want to get it. Well, he didn't stop drinking right away any more than I had stopped drinking back there that summer when my ex-group boys came to see me. But the idea was in there. The idea happened to get in Bill's head. And at that time, I had moved to a mission on 1st Avenue and 23rd Street in New York City. It was run by Calvary Episcopal Church and called Calvory Mission. and it was run under the offices of this Oxford group. It was just a typical so-called Bowery mission. We had 12 men who were running it, and we only had available beds for about 35 men, and there were four every night. So when I was living there, and about two nights after I'd been over to see Bill, Well, he appeared at the mission just as the meeting was about to start. He had a guy in tow and they were both visibly drunk. But not too bad. I'm wrong about... Those meetings there were called testimonial meetings. We had a man up on the platform and he would call on various men in the audience. They'd get up, say what they'd found. Now, of course, most of them are doing it just to get a place to sleep. They're called taking a nose dive for God to get aflop. That's the way they express it. Well, in the midst of all these proceedings, Bill gets up and walks up to the platform, and he's about 6'3", you know, and he leaves his elbow on the piano, and he starts to pout. And the superintendent says, Get him down! That's your friend. Pull him down out of there. It's a long go. Let's hear what he's got to say. The guy gave you a dirty look, but he let Bill talk. And then two or three days later, this was sometime late in November, as I had been talking to Jim and Dick and some of the other boys, I wished that either Bill or I or somebody who kept a diary back there so that we could remember dates and have some continuity to our stories because you go back 24 years and you count out from the left if you recall things accurately. at least. Well, this was sometime late in November of 1934, and it's a few days later that Bill got himself a taxi cab and two or three bottles of beer and went up to Towns Hospital in Central Park West. And when I heard he was up there, I guess it was the next day I went up and see him. Because I made up my mind that having started this with it, Bill. It was up to me to take it out, which I think is a true thing in every A.A. 12-step case you go on. If you're going to do it, don't spread yourself too thin and take on 25 or 30 people. I'd rather see you concentrate on one or two. I don't know whether I'm my brother's keeper or not, but I do think that if you start and put something in a man's mind and possibly in his heart and soul. You've got to stick with him through his tough spots as well as his victories. You're the one who started it, and it's up to you to see if he gets on the street. So I followed Bill up up there, and we had some talks, and he got out and went back down around Wall Street, and they make a few little moves in there, and I kept But I hadn't heard on him, as they say out in Texas. Well, I wrote hard on him. And he came around when we began to attend Oxford Group meetings, which, I might add, are exactly the same as AA meetings. They had a speaker, I mean a leader. That's what they called it. They didn't call it chairman. They called it the leader on three or four speakers. And Bill spoke many times from Calvary House and Gramercy Park North in New York City And later on, when we slipped from the Oxford Group and became Alcoholics Anonymous We went back to that place And had our meetings there up until about two years ago The original Manhattan Group Now of course Ohio, Cleveland, and one of the other cities to claim that they are the original A.A., but, well, I don't know. I kind of dispute that a little bit because there was a clear succession right through from the Oxford Group meetings until the time we broke off and the meetings went to that and Bill's house and then they went to Steinway Hall on 57th Street and from there to Burke Taylor's shop on 5th Avenue and we occupied one of the floors of his tailor shop Let's see, the men, it was a direct succession. But I don't care whether Truman or anybody else claims their first group. It makes little difference if something gets started. So, Bill and I were together a great deal that first winter. And then I went back to Albany. in 1936 and Bill went on to found AA and he's really the one I just had something to do with giving him the idea he went on to go back to Bob to found AA and in 1937 I had a slip it. I fell off the wagon after two years and seven months, which is slightly different from that DuPont film. The DuPront film had me falling off a month after I talked to Bill, but that wasn't so long. It was two years six months later. And I've had to go through the trouble off and on. If I want to go back and count the years, I can count possibly to be 15 years of complete sobriety out of the 24, maybe 16 years. But they were the longest of 16 months and 8 months and 7 months and so on. And the summer of 1953 I was again in New York City drinking. And I walked into the intergroup one day and Hazel Wright, one One of the secretaries there said, I think I've got a man that can help you. He's got something real and something tangible. And she said, I'm going to call him right away. And she called this man who came down to see me. He says, where do you drink? And I said, around 3rd Avenue. He says to her, let's go. And he said, well, I ran into Steve McGregor, the man who originally came to see you over in Paris, France. He said, how's old Evie doing? This guy says, I don't know of him, but I fear he's not doing it all. Well, he says, Steve told me that you didn't have a chance here in New York and we don't think you have. I said, I know damn well I haven't. Then look, I can't throw it off. He says, how about going to Texas? Well, I said I don' t know about that. Well, you expounded on the virtues of Texas and the good old American ways of living that were still down in these parts of the country. He gave me $5 and bought me another drink and said, I'll see you tomorrow night. So he did and approved the performance and, of course, I worked him for another $5. That's for sure. And a few more drinks. And that was Thursday night. Now, he said, I'm not going to see you anymore but the office still holds good. Saturday morning, I walked over to his apartment building and he was outside. side. He was coming in one door and I was going in the other. I said, Charlie, here I am. His name was Charlie Milton. And he said, here I am, or he said you ready to go to Texas? I don't know about Texas, I said but I'm ready to quit drinking. I'm not a drinker. So he took me up in his apartment and got me some clean clothes and a shower which I barely needed. That night he called up Odie Lancaster and Dallas and said, how about taking this guy down there? All right, he says, send the Yankee son of a bitch down. I could hear Odie booming it out. So the next day we got a reservation that night at American Airlines for Sunday evening and it was the Sunday before Labor Day September 6th. And the dirty so-and-so so never even gave me a drink. After three months drunk, I got on board that plane and I didn't know whether it was on a plane or a ferry boat or where I was. And I got off the plane as a nonstop when I would have been offshore in hell if it hadn't stopped when it was. So I got of that plane, and I was the first person out of it. Then no sooner had that thing rolled up and I zoomed, I was down on the steps. I had enough flying for for one night. And I got down there and I looked around and I saw two big guys and of course I was having hallucinations all over the place and I said, they're either a couple of G-men or they're a couple o' goons from some gangster squad. And then I heard that boomer voice again, there's the achy bastard! There he is, I've seen him in New York. So, they got a hold of me and I pulled me in a car and put me down at the Texas clinic. And I stayed there, I guess I stayed here altogether about two or three months But the first two or three weeks, it was pretty rugged because I'm going to tell you right now, I had hallucinations all over the place. I didn't believe I was in Texas. I didn' t dare go out of the place One of the girls there that was taking care of the books and sort of running things took me downtown one day and I couldn't get back in that place fast enough. I was scared of the car, the traffic, I was afraid of everything. And it wasn't until I was there a few weeks later The guy said, I'm going out to mail some letters to the airport. Do you want to go out? And I said, sure do. I want to see this airport and see if I'm really in Dallas. When I got out then, I got Out of the car, and I walked up to this tracker that said, Love Field, Dallas, Texas. I put my hand on it, and I said all right, I am in Dallas, I believe it. Well, as I stand here, I did not believe I was in Dallas because there had been a pretty rugged drunk and a pretty hot someone. I hadn't been much to eat in those three months. I was drinking everything I could lay in my hands, than them to be cut short like that. Furthermore, they gave me a few goofballs down there and I hate those things anyway. I hate the effect of them. They just make me... Well, I'm sorry that I've taken up so much time telling you it's all been to myself but I didn't know how to bring the history of A.A. in. You've all seen how it spread, how it worked. work. I know that if it hadn't been for A.A. when I got to Texas, I never would have been able to survive. And just coming out here alone, I'd have been lost. It was tough enough as it was because I was among strange people, slightly different ways than ours. It would be enough evil to get from the bowery down here in six hours and change yourself all around. But if it hadn't been for those good Texas people and the people in the suburban club, if I hadn't have been able to go around there and stay there and shake after two weeks before I went in the club, a little over two weeks, I walked by it one day and started up a set block when I went back to the clinic. Almost like a guy going back and hiding under the bed. And I know that several times they said, well, I heard him talking. I don't know what we're going to do with this guy. He's gone goofy. And then I had a colored girl that worked there. She's quite an old, dorm woman. And she said, don't you worry about that man. You just leave him alone and he's coming out of it. He'll stick. And that's just what I was. I was sick. Mentally and physically. And gradually I worked out of it. Nature took over. And now I was able to go around the club and get into the activities. and maybe I got in on too fast. That was the hottest summer that had been on record in a Texas weather bureau. I went down on the ranch and I was out working the sheep with this man and he put me in as a chute man and that's kind of rugged work on a 95 degree day and I got mixed up in an oil deal and I sold some insurance stock and every one of them flopped. The insurance company did almost most. I was still struggling to get back on the street, and I got in another deal, and that's when I was sober a year, and one month after the year was up, I flopped. And that was in October 1954. Now, that 13 months, I only had a few days drinking then, and it was over three weeks later, but I got slapped in the county jail for ten days, and that and Mr. Bill Decker is in for you. And I came out and some friends took me in their house and I sobered up and I haven't had a drink since. In other words, I've had about five years of sobriety in Texas. Out of five years in one month, I've been in the hospital and I've never had five years sobrietry. Totally. And I know and I'm grateful to Seba Graves over there in Paris and Charlie for following it up and for the people in Texas and over here, all of you people, who have given me another chance. I couldn't have done it by myself. It isn't under my own spiel I did it. And I know that my sobriety in these four years, these last four years that I've been sober, it hasn't been my sole effort that's kept me sober nor do I believe it has been entirely the friendship and the help of people. I think it would send the help of a higher power. And while I've lost that idea at some times along the way of life, thank God I got it back again. Because I know that I couldn't exist without it. There are times when I am not like great many people I hear thought that they say there isn't a day in their life that they don't fight the desire to take a drink. Well, I'm telling you right now, flat out, I'd go get drunk. I couldn't be that much of a hero to fight it every day and every hour. I don't have that. But I do have periods every three or four months when it's maybe two or three days at work and that's all I think about is taking a drink and if I haven't got myself conditioned to the correct way of thinking and knowing that if I take that drink, well, I'm going to end up... And I have no doubt that this time I don't know that that last drink that the liquor knocked me so badly physically and mentally too that I'd never survive another one. And I get that in my head and I keep it there in spite of the fact that I want to go out and I get sick of this being in harness every day and going to work and I'm getting along in years, right? I like to have a little rest once in a while but I got to go and work. And I often think if I come home tonight if I could take one good fudge of whiskey or one bottle of Valentine's Ale and go eat it would help me a lot and it probably would help my physically and give me less but I know I can't do it. So what is the use at the time of the idea? here. I don't quite get from what the other, I used to, and I'd like to get drunk, although that occurs once in a while because I think in every one of us there's another person who's an alter ego. And that old drunk, those Eddie Thatcher are still in there. He may be dormant, but he's there just like a volcano. He takes his top off and he goes zoom! Or Or in this time, it goes boom, boom, and they'll be all over. And I haven't got anything much more to say except stick to your A.A. and stick to God. And I think that you'll find that if you're having any trouble, you'll get help there. I want to thank Dick, and I want to thank the other members, and all you people who've entertained me and I sure have enjoyed coming to Memphis. Thank you.