Jack S. at the 1st Blue Ridge Retreat – 1965

As your chairman told you, my name is Jack Sargent. I'm an alcoholic. I am a member of the Echo Point Group in Wheeling, West Virginia. This is the finest AA group in the world. If you don't believe that about your group, you better find another group. I'm not a philosopher, I can't tell you why AA works or how it works, I only know that it works. I have no great words of wisdom for you, I haven't any gems of wisdom to drop for posterity, but I have an experience to share with you and I will do that, and I hope in so doing that I may help a new person to identify themselves with the program. And if you aren't new, maybe like me it might remind you from whence we came. And I need to be reminded because I suffer from short memory. I know that because I am in Alcoholics Anonymous, I haven't gained any great suit of armor. The best that I have is a veneer. And if I don't stay on the ball, it doesn't take much for the old me to poke through. I'm going to tell you something of my drinking, but more particularly how it affected me and where it took me. I did all the rationalizing I drank for a period of 17 years. I started to drink when I was 18 years old and I came into AA when I was 35. I did all the nationalizing that many of us did and I don't say all of us because I don' t think we're all the same. I don't buy that statement because we're all human beings. We're all different, but we had many things in common. But I did the rationalizing. Excuse me, I quit smoking about three months ago and I haven't been able to stop coughing since. I used to say to myself I can't be an alcoholic because I'm a beer drinker now I was a beer drinker and I love beer I even like the label I like the sweat on the bottle I like everything about beer but I couldn't become an alcoholic because I was beer drinkers I couldn't become an alcoholic because I wasn't and never was a morning drinker I couldnít be an alcoholic because I never went on a prolonged binge I drank daily and I always got home at night some way somehow now naturally if I never had blackout Iíve never had DTs I have never been hospitalized I have not been in jail I have been hospitalized I have ever been jailed the only reason Iíve ever been in prison was it? I never got caught. But I've learned in AA that the DTs, the jail, and all the rest of the bit is out there waiting for me the day I choose to go back up to this point. I haven't chosen to go to it. What you have taught me in AA is the thing that has stood between me and returning to that kind of a life. Because up to the point of my coming into AA, I never knew what to do about it. I didn't really know what was the matter with me. And much of what I have to tell you tonight is not something that I have reconstructed because somebody told me. It's sort of an inventory that I've been able to put together since I came in here. I left Pittsburgh which has been my home most of my life I was born and raised in Pittsburgh and I left Pittsburg in the early 40s and I went out into Ohio to work for a company and we had a very large machine shop and I worked there and I enjoyed it I made some progress with the company this made sense to me because I had the tremendous ego and I'm not so sure but what that wasn't necessary in order to survive because under it all I had a very low opinion of myself the feeling of inadequacy lack of confidence I don't think that really I ever drank to escape I think I drank to get even I think I drank to get up to the other guy's level, I felt inadequate. I felt inferior. And I got out into Ohio and I look back now and I remember that if I finished work at 5 in the evening by 5.15, I was getting a drink. If I worked that evening and finished at 9.30, probably 15 minutes later I was having a drink and yet this stuff wasn't really catching up to me at that point but I can see now that it was there I was not satisfied too long in one place I greeted things with a tremendous burst of enthusiasm and then it would taper off things happened for me and I can see now they really didn't do me much good it only prolonged a thing but I would start on a new job within the company great enthusiasm would make some progress with it and then the unrest would set in and I'd start picking it apart and picking apart the people who worked for me and my superiors. And I used to believe that my superiors ought to get down on their knees and thank God they had as good jobs as they did on as little ability as they had. I felt I was the guy that could do it. Somewhere, I had the notion that God had given me a talent, just as he has given people great voices and has created great artists. he had given me the talent to run a great corporation and it was only for somebody to discover me I'm telling you is the thinking of an active alcoholic and so if I had a promotion I figured this is this is the way it ought to be I didn't stop to think that in those days the talent was in the army and there was a shortage on the outside. It never occurred to me that if someday I were going to run a great corporation, I ought to know a little something about corporate law and corporate financing and taxes. And these things I didn't know. I went back to Pitt, as a matter of fact, at night at the tender age of about 38 to get this stuff that I thought the good Lord had endowed me with. But Diego was a great thing with me, and as I say, maybe it was necessary. But I went through a period of about four years down there, and the drinking increased but no real problems. The war came to a close. I went back to Pittsburgh, and And now I began to build a great career, and I had a great pattern for living that I developed. The whole thing was developed out of alcoholic thinking. I decided that God had played a dirty trick on me. I felt so sorry for myself, I had tremendous cases of self-pity. My father died when I was nineteen, and my sister and I inherited a family of seven. This was the beginning of a great resentment with me because I resented not the responsibility of trying to guide a couple of younger brothers, I resent the financial responsibility that went with this thing. It seemed to me that I never had the money to do the things that the other fellows were doing and this I resended. I felt I had been denied a great many things in life, and I would get them because I felt whatever you want in life you can get it with a buck if you've got enough of them. And I figured I was the guy who could make the buck. So I went back to Pittsburgh and I had this philosophy, I had this plan. I felt that in order to get anywhere, the right person had to discover me. And when they did and they put the finger on you, they'd put you at the top of the pile. And so I drank only in the hotels in Pittsburgh. Those of you who might be familiar with it, I drank at what was then the Keystone Hotel and the William Penn and the Nixon. and I felt that it was here that I would meet men of stature in business and I did but these were men who would have a drink or two and go home I didn't I wouldn't cross the street for anybody unless the buck was on the other side I measured things in this way if you can write a deposit slip for it fine if you couldn't I didnít touch it And so, of course, I ignored people who had been my friends for years. I didn't drink in saloons because in the saloons were the peasants and they couldn't do me any good. And so I avoided them—only the people who could help me. Now, interwoven through all of this—but I gave very little thought to it—was a great disturbance a mental disturbance and this most of this was based on on this feeling of inadequacy of of inferiority I don't quite know how to put it into words I tremendous unworthiness I was afraid to succeed and I was afraid to fail. If I succeeded, I wasn't worthy of it, and if I failed, well, I'm no good anyway, and this only confirms what everybody else thinks of me. So I was in a real squirrel cage that direction. I didn't really know what was the matter with me. I didn't know that it was the first drink that did it to me. There were many occasions when I stopped on my way from work to have a drink, a cold bottle of beer. And I might add that all through my drinking, I was a bachelor. Thank goodness I never dragged a wife and kids through it. But I would stop for one drink, one bottle of beer, and I would have another one and another one. And once again, once again I was drunk And I didn't want to be. And if I had said to my brother or sisters at home the next day, I didnít mean to get drunk last night, they would have been too polite to laugh. But my intentions then or since have never been any more honorable than that. I didnís mean to go to bed. I didníd mean to drink, but I did. I didní know until after I came into Alcoholics Anonymous that it was impossible for me to carry my sober thinking into my drinking. My brother Don can say, I'm going to have a martini and I'm gonna have dinner. And he'll have a Martini and he has dinner. And I could say, I'm gong to have Martini, and I am going to Have dinner. That's my sober thought. But once I take that drink, I don't know what's gonna happen. couldn't guarantee my conduct to you or to me to anybody but I had to learn this in a and so now I'm about to get into this great career I went out in the field and I was doing application work with tungsten carbide cutting tools which meant that I was tooling machines and production lines and while I wasn't involved in sales if I didn't put more pieces off the end of a production line line, and the next guy, they didn't sell any tools anyway. And again, I went into this thing with tremendous enthusiasm, and I would go back into plants at night and work with 3 to 11 shift or 11 to 7 shift because I wanted these fellows to think, well, he doesn't consider us an orphan, he's good enough to come in here and work for us. And in that manner, they would give me a good test and might go overboard in recommending the performance of these tools. I thought it was good merchandising. I still think it is. However, I began to get away from that. And as this thing began then to grow on me, I didn't go back into plants at night and I began the knockoff at, say, four in the afternoon. I am I began to call home occasion in the evening and say I won't be home tonight I have a customer in tow in most cases I was lying because now I'm at the point an hour and beginning to skip supper and this of course as you know gets worse and the thing progressed I began to have a little bit of trouble sleeping it would take me a while to get to sleep at night there would be occasions when I would awaken maybe three or four in the morning and I wakened in a very deep depression and I would be worried so worried I couldn't sleep and I was afraid that I would take an inventory of the situation at that time and there wasn't anything startling happening. I wasn't overdrawn at the bank, the job was still safe and that sort of thing and yet I couldn't sleep because of this depression. I reached a point where I began to skip more than just dinner. I gave some thought to cutting down on the drinking I wasn't going to quit. Because here again, I rationalized this thing. I said, I have all this entertaining to do. I have a lot of time. I have this pressure of business. I have to do this. You can't do business and not drink. It took AA, of course, to prove otherwise to me. But this is the way I rationalize it. And at one of these periods, in order to perhaps just feel a little better, I decided, I got into some experimenting. and that is the first thing I believe was that of trying to schedule my drinking, and so I decided that just for a while I would drink just Saturday night. And I'm not sure but I think it worked one week, but I'm not sure of that. But let's say that it did. Let's say that it worked on me because I remember rationalizing the next week, I'm going to drink a little Friday night because I don't have that much to do in the office Saturday morning. Just clean up a little mail. I'll drink a little Friday night. And so I went from there to what we in AA know as the English weekend, which runs from Thursday to Wednesday. So this, of course, is the miserable flop. Now things are not going well for me. I'm knocking off earlier in the day, I'm eating less, and I reached a point where I would go days without eating, promising myself tomorrow I'm going to eat. There were some occasions, not many, when I would be dressing in the morning and I was so weak from a lack of nourishment that when I tried to put my trousers on, I couldn't support myself on one leg and I fell to the floor. And somebody downstairs would hear this, and my sister or somebody would call upstairs and say, are you all right? And I would say yes, I just tripped. And I'd crawl over to the bed and get up on the bed, and sit on the edge of the bed and slide my trousers on and get dressed that way. I wouldn't have admitted to anybody at that point that I had a drinking problem. If anybody had even hinted at it, if he'd have been little enough, I'd have hit him. If he'd been bigger, I would have just resented him. Now, to promote this career that I felt was going to happen for me and I know I was destined for this. I want to tell you about one man, and this is just typical, of one man that I tried to cultivate in the Keystone Hotel in Pittsburgh, and he came in every afternoon. He was and still is the vice president of one of the big banks in Pittsburgh. He is the head of their industrial loan department. And my thinking was this, that one day his bank will get enough money into Company X, and they're going to come back to the bank and say we want an additional million or whatever it may be, and the bank is going to say to them, and I'm sure some of you have carried conversations with yourself, the bank has said to them we'll go along with this one additional loan, but when we do, we want our man in there managing the business. And this is where I figured this guy, I guess, was going to light up like a light bulb or something and say, I've got just the man for it. You see, in the stupid alcoholic thinking, it never occurred to me that if somebody is looking for somebody to take a position of responsibility, surely they aren't going to look in a bar room for them. But I was there and I was available and I had it all planned out. Things, of course, got worse. I made another attempt to do something about the drinking just because I wanted a little relief and not because I had a drinking problem. But at this time I tried changing what I was drinking. I stopped one day to figure that I was averaging a case of beer a day sometimes a little more sometimes a lot less and don't let quantities fool you because what 20 does to one guy 6 does to somebody else but I'm I multiplied 12 times 24 one day and it came out to 288 ounces every day and I thought this is a tremendous amount of fluid to go through a human system every day and it is no wonder i don't feel well and so i decided that i would switch from whiskey or from beer to whiskey i don t like whiskey i don ll like the taste of it and i don l like the smell of it but i love the effect and so I killed it with ginger ale and this would be the answer and I don't need to tell you what happened and then came what I was certain was the answer to drinking I walked into the hotel one day and this scene actually took place it was about four in the afternoon as I crossed the lobby and headed for the bar the idea struck me and I was half mad at myself that I hadn't thought of this before because I thought I was pretty sharp. I had the answer, and I went to the bar, and I said to the bartender, Hutch, let me have a shot of Lord Calvert and a glass of water with a lot of ice in it. And the coal would kill the taste of it. And before I ever took the drink, it was sitting on the bar and I looked at it, and this was my thinking. I drank water I drank very little of it in those days it was sort of like the shock treatment but I drank and it hadn't hurt me any I hadn't sprung any leaks or anything so here is water and here was the whiskey whiskey is grain I had eaten cereals never hurt me now I have the answer grain and water I don't need to tell you what happened and as I've told a lot of guys I've done a lot of research since I've been in AA and I have yet to find a joker who got a good buzz on with a box of Wheaties I think that that is just as ridiculous excuse me as you do but it's important it's so important for me to remember that these were the dead serious thoughts of an active alcoholic like. I honestly thought I had an answer to drinking and I was a long way from it. Depression got greater for me. Financial problems began to develop, but the depression kept getting greater and the sleep got tougher and I went through financial problems. I had at one time tax bill for I think four hundred and fifty dollars and I went to the bank and they loaned me the money. And I went down to the tax office in Pittsburgh to pay it and I meant to pay, it and here I talked the guy into taking $50 and I take 400 back out with me. And this only meant that the bill was was just reduced by 50 and another bill would have to come along, and it did. I wrote checks that weren't quite in order. I lay claim to this. I had the answer to synthetic rubber long before Goodyear got it. I'm talking about the second step restore us to sanity God knows the way I was living wasn't the same way to live I would be drinking in the hotel and I would run out of money and I would write a check and go over to the cashier and my favorite amount was $50 I guess I thought it was impressive and I guess I was always trying to impress somebody. I told you that I told the bartender, give me a shot of Lord Calvert. I don't know one whiskey from another one. But I'm sure I can tell you why I asked him for Lord Calbert. Because I think at least if no other way, subconsciously, I associated myself with a man of distinction. And $50 I felt was an impressive amount and I would go over and throw a check down to the cashier's cage and get $50 and I didn't have 50 cents in the bank. And the next morning, I would get up and I would head for Newcastle, Pennsylvania, some 60 miles away because I knew it took three days for a check to get in from there. And I would cash a check there and this time I would got 75. That meant I had an extra 25 to go. And I would get back to Pittsburgh and be there by 9.30 or 10 o'clock and walk into the bank as though I owned it and deposit $50 to cover the no-good check from the night before, and now I had three days to raise $75, and I'm probably ten days from a payday. This is step two to me. This is part of it. I didn't know what I was going to do. I couldn't tell you how many times I've contemplated suicide. I don't say this as an attempt at sensationalism. I have made four actual physical attempts at it. I damn near killed myself trying to. Now, I built a tremendous case of self-pity because I was so down, I was so down that somebody must feel sorry for me. Anybody that felt as low as I did, and this whole business of the unworthiness had plagued me. I remember across from Gimbel's in Pittsburgh, there's a German Evangelical Lutheran Church. And every day they put a pedestal out on the steps going up into the church, and it says open daily from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., for prayer and meditation. and i used to go past there and i and i knew i was in trouble with booze and i said think well maybe if i went in there and sat down there'd just be me and god and maybe it could work it out and i never went in because i felt that god had no he didn't have any time he had more things to do he had better things to doing than to spend time with a guy like me because I wasn't worthy of it. And the unworthiness plagued me and still does. I started in this tremendous self-pity thing. Oh God, I went through diseases, the likes of which you never saw. I had a group called They. I'm not sure who they were. It was more than just my family, and I remember they didn't come necessarily in this chronological order, but lying in bed, and some of you have experienced this where the heart gets to pounding and you think it's going to bust a rib cage, you know. and I would lie there and say, yes, the heart's going and some morning they'll just find me in bed. I'll be dead of this. I'll have a heart attack and then they'll feel sorry. I told you I would go days without eating. Now, you know what it's like. You know what to do. You know how it's liked to go to church Sunday morning without breakfast and you experience those rumblings abdominal, well, you know after two or three days without food, you've got them. And I used to hold myself and I would lie in bed and I'd say, that's the cancer eating right here. And then they'll feel sorry. I have in my rib cage a slight depression here due to an accident playing ball the ribs never set quite right it's been with me for years it doesn't mean a thing but I used to lie in bed and I would say that's getting deeper now now I had TB and I was saying there's about that much of this one lung left, and then they'll feel sorry. They say there are no firsts in AA, but I haven't met one yet who, as I did, suffered from elephantiasis because I have lain in bed and the lights are out and it would seem to me that my arms were that big And I was afraid to reach over and touch him for fear it was true. And after a while, I would work up the courage and I'd reach over to find that it was normal. This is step two. This is Step 2 for me. This is nuts. This is booze. I remember one other, and this is a dandy. I was driving along the highway one day, and all of us at one time or another have had a little sinus, and you get a little mucus in your eye, and it's a little cloudy. And I was going to turn a curve or something. I saw the curve sign, and it was a little clouded. And I brushed my eye, and it didn't quite clear, and there was still sort of cloudy. And I said, This is the stuff from which cataracts are made. I'm going blind, and then they'll feel sorry. And then I became unemployable. I resigned my job because I knew if I didn't, I would get fired. And now the road got deeper, and it got steeper, and it got faster, and I started to seek employment elsewhere. and in many cases I had favorable replies to my inquiry and would be invited to go to visit a company. This I would do, and in any case, in many instances I knew the interview went well, I knew that the job was mine, and I was interviewing at the level of a company officer or maybe a superintendent or somebody like that, and I knew that they would then have to go back. Of course, the personnel would go back and check references and that sort of thing. So when they said to me, you'll hear from us in about a week, this was normal because I knew we'd have to get back to personnel. And I would hear from them in about a week and they all said the same thing. We're not quite ready yet to open that job up. We'll let you know. And again, I wouldn't face it. I thought somebody was putting to fix in, and if I could find out who it was, I would go to court and I'd straighten them up. It never occurred to me that I was the guy who needed the straightening up. I sought then employment in foreign countries. Darn near wound up in India. And this was a job where Chicago Nomadic would have been out in the jungles where they were building railroads, and I just thought, oh, I'll be off in a steaming jungle somewhere, and then they'll feel sorry. And I finally reached a point, and by this time my youngest brother was carrying the load at home, and I've never seen such a demonstration of faith. He never got on my back, and the poor guy had mortgaged himself to the hilt, but he never got after me, but there came a time when I had to do something to get some money. And so I had to go over on the north side of Pittsburgh to an unemployment office and file for a $20 a week unemployment check. And I couldn't, to bring it into today's terms, at that time Ben Fairless was the head of U.S. Steel, but to use today's turns, I couldn�t picture me a potential Roger Blau in an unemployment line, yet I was there. And when I went over to file for that thing, I got drunk. It was the only way I could get in line with what I thought were peasants. I didn't get drunk when I filed the papers because I didn�t want them to tell me to come back someday when I was sober, but every time I went back to report I was drunk. That�s the only we could get into line with these people. Hell, was the bum in the line they were good people twenty dollars doesn't go very far by now I was able to create a job for myself such as it was because there were some people who didn't know that I had a drinking problem and they had businesses and I started to work as a manufacturer's agent and one of them was machine company in Wheeling West Virginia and they said we'd be glad to have you and it was a straight Commission deal I had a lot of good friends in the trade I had never called on the customer with a drink in my breath I don't know why I kept that rule I broke the rest of them so I could go back into trade but in the business that I was in it was mostly with the steel companies and they only interview sales personnel from 10 in the morning till 12 noon and two in the afternoon until four. So it's really a four-hour working day, and I had two hours to kill at noon, and for a little while I got through those two hours. But it wasn't too long until I started to drink at noon. And what had not been a very good business to start with was even worse. And so now I realize that this is no good. Poor me. What God has done to me shouldn't happen to anybody. And, so, I decided I'd end it all. I went down—this is one of those contemplations—I went down to a bus stop in Pittsburgh. I was going to off a bridge out near Westinghouse Plant this time. Well, I stood there. Those buses run every hour and a half or every 30 minutes, and I stood here for an hour and a half and never got on one. And I left there and I went to a saloon on Liberty Avenue in Pittsburgh. It was nothing much more than a plush lined sewer. And by this time I was drinking in saloons and I was drinking 10-cent beers, and I was glad to get them. And furthermore, if I'd had the money to drink with the men that I drank with before, I couldn't have done it. I was so ashamed of myself. And when I walked down the street and I saw somebody come toward me, I couldnít face him. It could have been a guy I went to school with. I hadnít done anything to him or he hadnít anything to me. I WAS ASHAMED. I would duck into a building and grab an elevator and ride up and loaf a little bit and come back down, or go up an alley or something. I couldn't face people. I felt every neighbor was pulling that curtain aside every time I walked out of the house. By this time, I had learned to hide at night. There was a comfort in the blackness of night for me because after 10 o'clock, it was pretty sure that the phone wouldn't ring, that there wouldn't be anybody calling to ask anything of me, and so the few hours of peace that I had came at night when I would lie in bed awake. I didn't want to go to sleep. I wanted to enjoy the few horas of freedom from the hell that I had and stayed awake to try to enjoy it because the next day might come the pressure of normal life, and I wasn't ready to face it. And so I stood in the saloon drinking a 10-cent beer, and I thought, it's been a long time since I've had any fun drinking. I've hadn't any lift. And I thought the only thing that I know that would give me a lift would be reefers, marijuana. And I said, one of these days I'll get drunk enough and I'll give up enough false courage and I go up in the Hill District in Pittsburgh and I will get them. And this frightened me. And I thought, I'll be on dope. And this was on a Tuesday and I went home and I stayed home that week. And I went out Saturday night and I drank all night. And I came home about 7.30 Sunday morning sober. I couldn't get drunk. Sober but pretty out of my mind. I might have been and didn't know it. Today it doesn't matter. And I finally got to sleep and about 2.30 that afternoon I awakened and this was no celestial disturbance. But for the first time, I was willing to admit that I had a drinking problem. I knew I had an awful drinking problem and I knew it was a terrific problem. I knew if I had to find a way out or I would die or go crazy. It had to be that way. I worked on that problem that Sunday, that afternoon and that night and the following day, Monday, I stayed home from work such as it was and I worked on it that day and that night and the following day, Tuesday. During that period, I took what was the fourth step. I didn't know it was the first step and I hasten to add I took this inventory being as honest as I was capable of being honest which wasn't very honest in those days but I realized that I had to find a way out. I had stop living all for me. I thought of things in my life that had been decent And I knew I had to do a 180-degree turn. I didn't know how to do it. I knew instead of living for me, I hadto do things for somebody else. I remembered when on a few occasions in my life I had taken the time to help somebody else, I felt good about it. I feltgood with me. And Iknew I hadtoget back to this, and I wasn't sure how. I didn'know anything about alcoholism. I never read it. I didn''t want it. I didn't see The Lost Weekend for the same reason, because I didn' t want to see me. And so I knew there was an AA because I had a cousin who preceded me into the program by about four years, and I always thought it was a great thing for him because he was an alcoholic. I finally came up with what I thought was a workable plan. I knew that just being sober wouldn't do it. There had been times when I was sober, not many, because I can tell you when I was in AA for two weeks, I broke a 10-year record. That's the longest I had been sober in 10 years. And so I knew that just being sober wouldn't do it because being sober for me was like serving a sentence. I couldn't follow the continuity of a story when I tried to read and I got to paragraph 2, I couldn' t remember what was in paragraph 1. This was before I had a television set, and if I turned the radio on, I had it on and off five times in five minutes. I paced the floor. This was no answer. And so I came up with what I thought and hoped would be a workable solution. I had heard, I didn't know, but I had read that there was a problem and I had learned that in AA they had something more than sobriety to offer. and I thought I will go into AA because I knew I had to have sobriety as a starting point and if there was nothing more than sobriery in AA then I knew fellows I had gone to school with who were doctors and I though maybe two or three nights a week I could work with spastic children or maybe I could work for the community chest I didn't care what it was but I knew I had to do something for somebody else and so that afternoon that Tuesday afternoon I called AA in Pittsburgh now you've heard many times in AA that there's a time when we're ready for AA I can tell you as of tonight when I was 20 minutes away from being ready because that's how long I sat at the phone before I got up the nerve to take it off the hook and to call a total stranger and tell him I was a drunk, that there was something the big I.M. couldn't handle. I said it was the worst thing I had ever done in my life. I know today it was the finest decision I ever made in my wife's life. And I could never make a bigger one. The call was answered and the secretary in Pittsburgh arranged for somebody to come and see me that night and I got a call that evening early and this man said he'd be down would it be already if he got there at 10 and I said fine he said are you drinking and I says no he said do you think you will and I say no I won't drink and so that night at 10 o'clock there arrived at my door two men and they were well dressed men they were nice looking men and I was impressed with their appearance and I Was Impressed With Their Willingness To Help We Talked For Probably An Hour Or So And I Don't Remember Too Much About It Not Because I Was Fogged Up I Wasn't But The Thing That Impressed Me Was Their Appearance And The WillingNess To Help I Was The Guy Who Had Torn Up The Pea Patch It Seemed To Me That The Least I Could Do Would Be The Guy Who Was Doing The Going and yet they were bringing it to me. I was the guy, as I told you, who wouldn't cross the street unless the buck was on the other side and here were these guys coming to help me who was no good. I'm a no-gooder and these guys are coming to helping me. They're taking time from their evenings from things that I was sure they would far rather do to help my life. They came to help and this made a tremendous impression. They told me a little of their drinking and I told them a little mine and they invited me to go to a meeting the next night and this I did. And again, they came to the house and they picked me up and they took me to a meet-up and we had a meeting. When I went into that church that night to that meeting I felt as I'm sure others have felt I was unworthy I was no good I had hurt people I was convinced by this time I couldn't stop drinking because I was a weak-kneed sister i was a no good s of a b and so that's the way i went into the meeting the chairman opened the program it was a discussion meeting he said i will ask the question why did you come into aa and he said I will start the ball rolling by answering it myself and he began to talk of how he drank and some of the things he had done and when he started to talk I thought I was the only S who would be in a business and he started talking and that made two of us and this is where I was able immediately to begin to identify myself with these people and as that question went around that table these people talked freely and openly and honestly about how they drank and what they had done and I don't mean to be corny but I'll tell you I knew I knew I had found an answer I knew I was home I knew I was with people who understood me and so before I left the meeting that night they gave me some pamphlets and I had sworn that whatever it took to do it I would do it and I didn't care what it was I had been an angle guy I had cut corners there'd be none of this I was embarrassed about going into AA and I thought I could call my cousin it might be maybe not so embarrassing to walk in with somebody you knew and I said no I'm not going to do that I'll do it the way everybody's supposed to do it call the office and this I did when I went home that night these men had given me maybe four or five pamphlets And I said, all right, I will read every word of that before I go to sleep tonight. There'll be no manana business with this thing because I knew this had to count. And I read every pamphlet and it's by now probably 1.30 in the morning or maybe a quarter of two. I turned the light out in my bedroom and I had the door closed and I was going to do everything they did and everything they said to do and I'm about ready to go to bed to sleep, and I keep saying, no, there's still one thing you haven't done yet. And you're going to do everything. And I remember they said that they prayed in the morning and they prayed at night. And i was embarrassed to pray, and i was ashamed. And my bedroom was in the front of the house, and there was a streetlight out there, and through the blinds did cast a reflection on the wall. And I thought, I knew this too. If you're going to pray, there's only one way to do it, and that's on your knees, and I was ashamed to do it. And I said, well, if I get up, maybe I'll cast a shadow on the Wall. And I tell you, I slid across the bed on my belly and got on my knees, and for the first time in years, I prayed. And I slept that night, the first night in years straight through, and I've had no problem since then. I've been going to AA regularly ever since, and I love to go. I go to AA because I want to go I've made tremendous friends in AA. I could stand up here and talk for hours about the blessings, things that have happened to me far beyond anything I can imagine. I still, and i've been in this thing a few years, go through the problem of trying to adjust myself to it. I've talked to you about the feeling of unworthiness. I still get that. I have a difficult time, for instance, letting people do something for me. And I shouldn't do that because people like to do for other people. But I always want to say, oh, don't bother, don'T bother with me when I should say, no, let the man do that. He'd like to help me. I have trouble with that. I'm not so sure we're very good takers. I found in a friendship a love that I have never seen ever anywhere else. I learned something about love one day at Blackstone, and I still work on this thing trying to figure it out. And this business of trying to let people do something for me as a result of having heard Tommy say at Blackestone one time, if love is going to grow, you've got to respond. and I was a poor guy at responding and people wanted to love me and I wouldn't let them not because I didn't like them it was because I did not think I was worthy of their love I have learned something about it I can tell you I got three friends sitting back there that know something about love Ken and Dot and their daughter and I am grateful for them you can multiply my blessings by a thousand times or ten thousand I don't know because I am not very good at counting blessings I don' t count them often enough but there's something in this thing that I've never seen anywhere and I'm going to repeat a story that I have told before because it's made a tremendous impression on me I've been in AA meetings all over this country because business takes me there and one day I had to go to a little town in Oklahoma called Gene Autry and it's about 12 miles out of Ardmore and it's at an airfield that used to be an Air Force base in World War II and there are two or three companies that have moved in there and they've turned the airport over to the city of Ardmore and one of our customers had a plant there at the airport and I flew in there and got there about 1 o'clock in the afternoon and I saw them and by 2 o' clock my work was finished and I now had to wait until 7.30 that evening to get a plane back to Dallas and so I took the limousine station wagon they had over to Ardmore and I looked in the phone booth and there was the AA number and I called it and there were no answers and so I walked to that address it was an office building and I went up and the office was empty and so I left there and I started down the street to do what I've done before I have located an AA contact through a cop and I looked for a cop because they're always a good contact because I don't care how big or little that town is there's always somebody that he used to pinch he isn't pinching anymore and I know this works because I've used it and I couldn't find a cop but I saw the chamber of commerce office and I went in there and I said have you got a contact for A and the lady said yes and she gave me the number and I just called it there is nobody there and another lady said I've got one and she called a number and she held the phone out to me and I told this guy who I was he said I'll be there in about three minutes I'll pick you up and in about three minutes you could have pretty near set your watch she was there. And he, I got in the car and we introduced ourselves and, and he said, I'm going to take you over to Ted's. He said, I've got an ulcer and I got to go to the doctor and I'll come back and, uh, in about a half an hour or so. And they took me over to Ted's place. Now Ted had a little tin shop and it wasn't much of a shop, but he was just working his way back too. And Ted and I had a wonderful time visiting. And then presently the other fellow came back and the three of us had a ball. We had a wonderful AA meeting and the time grew late. And I said, I better get back uptown and get that station wagon back to the airport. And Don said, i'll take you back. And he started to drive me uptown. And he said, are you pushed for time? And I said, well, not really, not critically. Well, he said I want to show you where I live. He said it's just up the other street here. And then he took me up and he showed me his home And he said to me, now, the next time you come down here, he said, just come to the house. And he says, if I'm not there, my wife will know where I am and you can visit with her and she'll get in touch with me. And I thanked him and I got the limousine and the plane and back to Dallas and on to Houston and to San Diego and so forth. And this thing kept bugging me and I kept thinking about this and I thought, here's a man who was saying to me, a guy who four hours earlier had been a total stranger, come to my home. If I'm not there, come into my home and my wife will be there alone with you but no harm will come of her because I trust you. And for me the wheels turned rather slowly and it finally dawned on me the most beautiful qualification I've ever seen. He believes me to be practicing these principles in all my affairs, and that's what happens between us. And when you and I believe that each other are practicing these principals in all our affairs, boy, there's a love that I've never seen anywhere. And I want to say to you, a guy who without AA would tonight be dead or crazy says to you, thank you and God bless you.