Sandy B. on the History of AA — Bill W., Dr. Bob, and the Oxford Group

well good morning everybody my name is Sandy Beach and I'm an alcoholic I'm trying to gonna get comfortable up here you don't mind somehow I agreed with Fred to be participating all day today I gotta go back and look at that conversation I feel that he must have got me at midnight or something but I'm I'm very happy to be here this morning, and I hope we all end up having a good time. Get a watch out so that we finish on time. I brought a few, since we're talking about the AA story, I was just going to share a few of the things that have been meaningful for me in organizing this. A couple of books that, if there's new people, I would recommend, and you may have seen them from general service. one is Pass It On, came out in 1980 and it's the story of Bill W., Bill Wilson. And then in 1984 they came out with Dr. Bob and the Good Old Timers. And I really think these two books are just wonderful for those of you that enjoy seeing photographs and stories that go back to our origins because that's what we're going to talk about this morning is the AA story, and I think it's kind of exciting. And as you listen, try to see how this story was really put together by God. And we had all these human beings trying to go in this direction and that direction and over here with all their wonderful ideas, and we just kept getting guided back in to the steps and the format and the traditions and all the wonderful things that are holding this fellowship together and make it such a sacred and wonderful organization. And so I suppose that the story that I would like to talk about begins on Mother's Day in 1935 when a securities analyst from Brooklyn, New York, found himself in Akron, Ohio and had a meeting with an alcoholic surgeon out there. And since that day, the last Sunday in May in 1935, the lives of alcoholics around the world have been vastly improved. And, of course, we know these two people, these two men, Dr. Smith, Robert Smith. He was born in St. Johnsbury, Vermont. His father was a judge. He had a very nice upbringing. He went to Dartmouth. When he got through Dartmouth, he knew he wanted to be in medicine, but his family wanted him to be in business, so they made him work for a couple of years. He had started drinking in college. Dartmouth still is a big drinking school. And it was causing him tremendous problems, but he was continuing on his career. He had a terrible time getting through medical school outside of Chicago because of alcoholism. Had to take final exams a couple times, but somehow managed to pass that and end up in a hospital as a surgeon in Akron, Ohio. And he married Ann, and they had a nice family, a boy and a girl. Both of them married alcoholics. I don't know what that says. and his alcoholism had progressed to the point where it was about to totally interfere with his work, with his standing in the community when he had this meeting with Bill Wilson. Now Bill Wilson was born and grew up a hundred miles south of Dr. Bob in East Dorset, Vermont and his upbringing was a little more traumatic than Dr. Bobs. He had a lot of things that happened in his childhood that left deep scars on him. His father was the manager of a quarry, a marble quarry. And a lot of the buildings in Washington got their marble from there. And later on, as just for Florida trivia, both Bill's mother and father ended up in Florida. His mother ended up in Fort Myer, and his father ended up, in the 20s, down in Miami, where he was in charge of getting all of the stones that were used to build the highway from Miami to the Keys. And here he came from Vermont. But when Bill was nine years old, and he loved his father, they just got along, they hunted, they fished, they just climbed the mountains, he went to the quarry with them, and they just adored him. And when he was about nine years old, his mother called him in one day and said, your father is gone, and you're never going to see him again. And they had separated, and his father went up to Canada to work in a quarry up there, and Bill didn't see him for years. And, you know, New England is kind of stiff-lipped, so that's like the whole discussion, you know? Of the issue. Your father's gone, you won't be seeing him. And she was a very strong woman and very ahead of her time. Number one, just to be going through a divorce at that time was almost unheard of up in New England. And a few months later, she said to Bill, you're going to live with your grandparents because I'm going off to Boston to become a doctor. And off she went and ended up becoming an osteopath. Now they did stay in touch and Bill always loved his parents. But these were very traumatic things to have happen in your childhood. Now, Bill attended school in Manchester, Vermont, and then went on to join the Army in World War I. He was a coastal artillery officer, handled himself very well. He had started his drinking, and it was the most wonderful thing in the world. Alcohol just made life absolutely delightful. he had married um lois burnham right before he went overseas in world war one and when he came back the two of them went off to new york to gain the fame and fortune that he knew he could get he knew he was going to be a leader that he was a manager and he just wanted to get down there and take on the big city and he was doing a pretty good job of it in spite of having both hands tied behind his back as a result of alcoholism he attended brooklyn law school at night and actually completed all of the courses, but kept getting drunk when he'd go back to take the final exam. And then he finally even took the final examination, but failed to pick up his diploma. And even after he'd been sober about 15 years or so, he said, you know, I ought to go over and get that diploma. But he never did. And so I don't know whether we can call him a lawyer or not, but it's very close. But he didn't end up in the legal profession. He found Wall Street extremely attractive. and became one of the first people to go out and physically examine companies that investors were putting their money in. And there was this wonderful period when, and Lois loved this because she thought it would keep him sober, and it did a little bit. They got a motorcycle with a sidecar, and they took off up into New England, and they investigated General Electric, which is a big corporation that a lot of people wanted to put their money in and build, was working up there. They had run out of money, so he's working on a farm during the summer. And it was right next to General Electric, and he got to drinking with some of the guys who worked in the secret plant out back. And the next thing you know, he's in there with his newfound drinking buddies getting all the secrets about what's coming down the road in terms of inventions and new products. And of course, when he pumped this information back to Wall Street, people made a lot of money and his reputation grew and people said, get that Bill Wilson boy. If he writes something up, it's safe to put your money in it. And they would give him a participation in some of these things. And so the money was flowing in. He had golf fever. He loved golf. He's joining expensive country clubs. And except for getting drunk all the time and starting to lose the trust of the very people that his whole career was dependent on, life was going pretty good. He even came down on the motorcycle all the way down to South Carolina, across Florida, and down to Cuba to look at the sugar situation down there for investing in that. But his alcoholism caught up with him and eventually, as like all our stories, nobody would work with him. His word wasn't any good. He'd stop showing up at meetings. He started getting hospitalized in Towns Hospital in New York, one after another. And it appeared that he was going to indeed die of alcoholism when he had a remarkable spiritual experience that we'll talk about a little later, which led him into a spiritual path that preceded that of Alcoholics Anonymous and led him on out into Akron. So that's a little background, very, very brief about who these two men are that we talk about all the time in Alcoholics Anonymous. But the real set of dynamics, if you go back and look at it, and I got this from Ray O. Kaye from Miami. I love the way he presents this, and I think it's a wonderful way of looking at AA. He likes to think of the real story about AA as starting around 1910 in Manchester, Vermont. And Manchester was a great vacation home. Anybody who had any dough would have a summer home in Manchester. It was absolutely charming, and people came from all over to vacation there. And we had a cast of characters that was assembled in that town as teenagers. And these people were, one of them was Lois Burnham, who was to marry Bill and found Al-Anon. And she came up with Dr. Burnham from Brooklyn, and they had a summer homo there. There would be social events. She got to meet Bill and some of these other people that we'll talk about. And they just were put all together in this mixing bowl. The next one was Ebby Thatcher, who came over from Albany, New York. And the Thatchers had a summer home in Manchester, Vermont. And Ebby would be there and got to know Bill and became a crucial part of the AA story. And then over from Rhode Island was a gentleman called Roland Hazard. And the Hazards were probably the most wealthy of all of these people. They had a beautiful home in Manchester, a summer home. And Roland's father was a huge executive, owned a company, and he wanted to turn the company over to his son. And so this was the cast of characters that got meeting in Manchester. and all of the men turned out to be alcoholics and they all went down the road that we all are familiar with and the first one to hit his bottom to start the story was Roland and his father wanted him to take over the business and so he was taking him anywhere he wanted to get his son sober he had unlimited money so he'd send him to the best place he could find in the United States and Roland was unable to stay sober it's just not working so someone suggested to mr hazard that there was one man if this man anybody in the world could do it it would be this man and it was carl young the famous psychiatrist in switzerland so they made arrangements and uh mr hazard sent roland over to carl jung to spend a year an entire year in treatment with Dr. Young. And during that year, Dr. Young tried to cause this huge personal emotional displacement, personality displacement that we in AA call a spiritual awakening. At that time, he called it a personality displacement. And at the end of the year, having done as much as he could, he said to Roland, we've done everything. I've just done everything that I can. I wish you Godspeed. You understand your situation. Drinking is going to be fatal, and this is your new perspective, and good luck. So Roland came back to the United States, but he made it as far as Paris where someone asked him the wrong question. They said to him, would you like a drink? And he said yes. So he just barely made it two weeks after this year treatment, and he became very discouraged after getting drunk, totally depressed. His father's all upset, so he went back to Dr. Young. And this, I like to think of the sentence in the big book where it says at the end of chapter five, in the middle of chapter five, no human power could have relieved our alcoholism. Because when Rowling came back, Here we have an unlimited supply of money, and we have the world's best psychiatrist. And what does the psychiatrist say to Roland? He says the words that all of us had to hear in order to accept the spiritual way of life. He said to Roland, there's nothing I can do for you. And symbolizing the top of human power being this is the ultimate, he says to Roland it's like saying there is no human power that can help you. There is absolutely nothing that I can do. It's just sent him into absolute despair. He said, you mean I'm doomed to die an alcoholic? And he said, probably. He says, I have heard of a few cases like yours where people have been able to achieve this transformation in a spiritual setting. So if I was you, I would try and go out and find some spiritual program, something spiritual to have this happen. So Rowling came back, and lo and behold, the spiritual path he happened to choose was the Oxford Movement. And the Oxford movement was very big in the United States at that time. It was groups, like little small groups, like AA groups in many, many states where people were getting together in their private homes trying to live by first century Christianity principles. In other words, they were eliminating the middleman, the church. They were just going to get together on their own and talk about spirituality and God and talk to one another and confess and share and try meditating and praying together. And most of them were not afflicted with fatal illnesses. They were simply trying to become better people, which I don't relate to at all. I mean, I just have a, you know what I mean? Like if I didn't have to be here, I wouldn't. You know that feeling like. But they were just wonderful people just trying to improve their lives and the lives of the community they lived in. And it was into this environment that Roland went and he got sober. And by God, pretty soon he's helping out in soup kitchens and he used his summer home in Manchester as sort of a halfway house and having meetings there. When the second in the cast of characters hit his bottom, and this was Ebi Thatcher. Ebi has pretty much almost been disowned by his family. He was a notorious drunk in the Vermont area. He had been out drinking and driving one Saturday morning and lost control and drove his car into a farmhouse, into the kitchen, and came to a stop near the kitchen table and asked the farmer's wife if he could have a cup of coffee. and he got arrested. And so people knew Roland, you know what I'm talking about? They just, he had a reputation. And the final straw came when his family had lost a lot of their money and he was, had fixed up one room in the family's summer home. He was pretty broke, pretty much ostracized from the family, just drunk all the time. And he decided, like we all do, I've got to get my life together. I've Got to do something about this. So he decided to paint the house. And he got out there and got part of it painted, and then he stepped back to admire his work, you know, maybe 20 square feet of painting, and sat there looking at it and just imagined the whole house painted and his whole life straightened out. And some birds came by and messed all over the paint. And that did it. So he went and got a couple of fifths and a lawn chair and sat out in the front yard with a shotgun guarding the paint job from the birds. And gunfire is blasting the neighborhood and so they call the sheriff and come over and he's in jail and the judge is, you know, saying this is real serious. We're going to have to really you know, you're going to have to go to jail. I mean, I've reached my limit. And he was allowed one phone call and he called Roland, who he had had some contact with and had heard that he was sober. And so Roland came over and being a very wealthy, prominent family, he struck a deal with the judge and said, would you release Evie in my care? And they said, oh, yes, I'd be glad to do that. So Evie was taken off to the Roland Hazard home up there and started into the Oxford movement. And he took to it like a duck takes the water and just loved it. All excited about it. And pretty soon they were down in New York working in the soup kitchen, carrying the message, staying sober, telling their story, going out and finding other people to talk about, praying. When he thought about his boyhood friend, Bill Wilson, just a thought came into his mind. He said, you know, Bill drank like I did and we had some pretty wild escapades like the time we opened the Manchester airport. Bill and Abby and a couple of their buddies, one of whom was a drunken pilot, were up in upstate Vermont and the Manchester-Vermont airport had just opened it was open like one or two days nobody had ever landed there but they had finished it and they called down there and said we're going to be the first plane to land at your airport and so there was a lot of excitement and in comes the plane little group out there to meet them and after the plane bounces a few times and comes to a halt the three of them or four of them fall out drunk and lay on the ground and no one can move and so that was the grand opening of the manchester vermont airport so that had quite a bit of notoriety around there and so bill and ebby had had some good experiences together but evie had a sense that he was in deep trouble with his drinking and he wanted to share this good news and bill indeed was in deep trouble he had been hospitalized a couple times in town's hospital dr silkworth from town's hospital had been talking to bill's wife lois and had been they had been discussing committing bill You know, that was the ending for alcoholics. When you finally felt like they're going to kill themselves, you just committed them for the rest of their lives. So that was a talk that was going on. And Bill was home Saturday, drinking a bottle of gin, sitting at the kitchen table. Lois had a job in a department store. Bill had no job. He was trying to put together big deals. You know what I mean? I'm going to get us all that money back at once. And he was sitting there when the phone rang, and Abby said, can I come over and talk to you? He said, oh yeah, my drinking buddy's coming over. He was all excited until he saw Ebi and then he got quite nervous because Ebi looked wonderful. What's the matter, Ebi? Ebi said words that struck terror into Bill's heart. He said I've got religion and Bill said oh God, forget that. Have a drink and everything will be alright. We can get you over that. It's not permanent but Ebi just stuck to his guns and told Bill how excited he was in his newfound sobriety and Bill drank his gin and listened to Ebby and they met a few times and Bill couldn't get out of his mind how good Ebby looked. He could see inside that something had taken place and it captured him like our program of attraction. There was something there that you couldn't deny and they had a long discussion and Bill was explaining how he couldn't believe in God. He'd had a lot of problems with a kid as a childhood conception of God, and it just was a big problem. And Ebi was suggesting that he could just try something that was acceptable to him. And it took away Bill's ability to fight about this issue. And on his next hospitalization, he thought about Ebi. He was in the hospital. They were detoxing him, probably going to go through the DTs, and Dr. Silkworth was close with him. and he sat there and he thought about this and all of a sudden he felt like surrendering to God and he just said if there is a God let him show himself now and all the sudden the room lit up the light was so bright he couldn't see the wall anymore he had a sense of a mountaintop he had the sense of wind rushing and he had a sense of well-being at the end of two or three minutes which he called later on his hot flash but at that point in time it was a huge personality displacement that was occurring quickly, and Bill was free from alcohol and never took another drink in his life. And that occurred on December 11th, 1934. And the amazing part of this story, we already had the psychiatrist with all the money who said he couldn't do anything in all humility. When you think about you're the greatest in the world and you say there's nothing I can do, that's pretty humble. And so now we have another psychiatrist is going to play a key role in this story, and that's Dr. Silkworth. When Bill calls him in and says, here's a guy who's going through detox, okay? And he calls the doctor and he says, you're not going to believe what just happened. Great white light came into the room and I was up on a mountaintop and I heard voices and I'm convinced it was God and I don't think I'll ever have to... What do you think, doctor? And Dr. Silkworth took a look at him, and he felt the presence that Bill felt, and he said, I've never seen you like this. I don't know exactly what happened, but I would go with it. And so instead of giving him a bunch of pills and telling him to ignore it, he said go with It. What a wonderful thing to happen. So Bill got all excited, and He went and started going to the Oxford Movement and started to try and sober drunks up. He's going into bars, pulling them off the bar stools, you know. He didn't know, you can pretty hard to stop people in the middle of drinking spree and talk to them about a spiritual awakening and a burning bush. And he would try to tell these guys at the bar about the white light that came in the room and the mountaintop and all that and how wonderful it was. And they'd look at him and go, well, that happens to us when we drink rum. You know, so I don't see where that's a big deal. and he just kept trying and trying and trying. There was an interesting conversation after about four or five months. Bill felt totally discouraged, and he was talking with Lois one night, and he said, it isn't working. It just isn't working. I go out, and I talk to one person after another, and none of them get sober. It's just not working. And Lois said, yes, it is. You're staying sober. And it just started this little awareness that the way we stay sober is to go out and try and give it away. Whether the other person gets sober, we don't know, but we stay sober. So it's a wonderful observation that Lois made. After about five months, Bill was back in Wall Street to a limited extent. People were trusting him again. He was trying to put some deals together, and lo and behold, a group called them in and said, we've got a deal for you, Mr. Wilson. There is a proxy fight going out on a machine tool company in Akron, Ohio. Akron was the center of the tire business, a lot of rubber plants and automobile tires, et cetera. And there's a machine tools company out there, and there's two groups that are trying to take over the company in the proxy fight. And if you can go out and get our group to win the fight, we'll make you president of that company, and we'll give you a lot of stock, and we'll get you a great salary." So he took off for Akron. Man, he saw I'm back at the golf course, the country club, the new car. I mean this was all of it was going to come true in a hurry. And he checked into the Mayflower Hotel and started in on this proxy fight and worked around the clock. All of a sudden the company made a decision, and the other group won. So here we have a drunk all by himself in a strange city and his big deal falls through. And he really felt discouraged. He was down and out, and he's pacing the lobby of the Mayflower Hotel, and he could hear the bar over here and the music playing and the glasses clinking. And he thought to himself, I ought to get a bottle of gin and be king for a day. I mean, that was the feeling that came inside of him. And all of a sudden, he said to himself— and many people think this may have been where A.A. really got started— He said to himself, I've got to go find another drunk to work with or I'm going to get drunk. So he looked over and there was a church directory on the wall listed all the local churches. And he picked one called Reverend Walter Tunks who was to later on save the graveside service for Dr. Bob. And he called him up and explained who he was. I'm a drunk from New York. I'm looking for other drunks to try and help. You know, he said, well, I don't know any myself, but I'm going to give you the name of 10 Oxford group members. And if you call them up, I know they work with alcoholics. There's some of them. So he got this list of names and he called, called, calls. And there it goes. No, I'm out of town. He's not here. No,I can't get together with you. What are you crazy? That drunk from alcohol, you know, from New York. We don't knows what that is. And he was almost ready to call it quits. You know what I mean? He just said, I am calling and calling. Nothing is happening. and he got down to the name of Henrietta Seiberling. And the Seiberlings were the multimillionaire good year rubber company and she had married the eldest son of that company and gotten divorced from him and lived in the gatehouse of the big Seiberlingen estate. And if you go out to Akron, Ohio, they have a wonderful Founders Day and you can tour all around and see all the things that the first AA group and Dr. Bob's office and the Mayflower and Bob's home, etc. And then the AA tour always goes up to the gatehouse of the Cyberling estate. Now, the Cyberlings estate itself is on tour, this huge mansion. But when the AA little bus comes up, I don't want to see the mansion. I want to stay at a gatehouse. You know what I mean? And they just want to say this place where Henrietta lived and where Dr. Bob and Bill met, where that meeting took place on Mother's Day of 1935. So Bill got a hold of Henrietta and Henrietta was very active in the Oxford movement out there, and Dr. Bob was in her group. And they loved Dr. Bob. They knew how hard he was trying, but they knew that he was a terrible alcoholic. And he had recently decided part of the Oxford Movement was if you have a problem, something you're struggling with, you should confess it so the group can pray for you. And Dr. Bob had kept his drinking a secret from the group for quite a while and had only recently told the group, you know, I know you're all going to be surprised at this. But I have a drinking. Oh, really? Well, then we will pray for you. And so Henrietta was just a devout and real believer in this spiritual world. And she had been praying every day for a solution to dr bob's alcoholism and um her son her grandson ran for congress and was a congressman john cyberling from ohio in the um if i recall in the 80s and i got to talk to him one time and he said that his mother had told him that when she got the call from or his grandmother had told them that when she got the call from Bill Wilson, she had muttered to herself, I've been expecting this call. You know, as a result of her prayers, she just felt, of course I'm getting this call, this is how it works. And so she got The Call and Bill said he was a drunk from New York, he was looking for somebody else to help and he had a little way of staying sober and he thought he could help somebody and she said, I have just the person. And this was Saturday. So she called up Ann Smith and she said, get Dr. Bob over here. I got a guy from New York. It is the answer. I just have a feeling, Ann, this is it. And Ann said, well, I don't think that we can have the meeting today because Dr. Rob has been out all morning getting me a Mother's Day plan. And he and the plan are under the dining room table right now. And so AA can't get started yet. You know what I mean, it'll have to wait until tomorrow. And so tomorrow was Sunday and Dr. Bob had a hangover and now he's hearing from his wife, there's this guy from New York. Now, he didn't want to talk to anybody. You know how when you're hungover, the last thing you want to do is some stranger. So at around 5 o'clock at night, he agreed to have this meeting and he said, I'll give this guy 15 minutes. So they drove over to Henrietta's into the gatehouse, and the two of them went inside, and the women went in the other room, and they talked for five hours. There was that immediate connection of one drunk to another. Dr. Baum knew that he had met someone incredibly important in his life. Now Bill is broke. You know, the deal fell through. He can barely afford to stay in the Mayflower Hotel, So he moves in with Dr. Bob and Ann, who are also pretty broke. The AA story, if you look at the early AA history, everybody's broke. I mean, you're talking about really broke. And so Bill moves in, and they are going to the Oxford movement out there. Bill's talking about helping other alcoholics. They're starting to look for other alcoholists. And after about two weeks of sobriety, Dr. Bob announces to Ann and Bill, you know, because of my drinking all these years, I have neglected my medical training. And there is a medical convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and I have a tremendous thirst for knowledge. So I'm going to get on the train and go to that convention. And so he took off. They were a little apprehensive and they took off or he took off and went to Atlantic City and was drunk on the train going there. So our co-founder had AA's first slip right off the bat, got drunk as a skunk in Atlantic City, came back, passed out and was put off the train at the wrong town. It was outside of Akron. They had to call and get Bill to go over and get him off the station or in somebody's home over there, bring him home. And he had to perform surgery the next morning, perform an operation. And so Bill got them in and they were developing their own ways of detoxing and tapering off and coming up with all this. Later on, they came up with the tomatoes and sauerkraut and k-rose syrup and all these things that were designed to help alcoholics detox. So Bill was trying to come up the correct formula to have dr bob be able to perform surgery so he gave him i think three or four shots of whiskey during the night and then gave him two bottles of beer for breakfast on the way over to the hospital and that was dr bob's last drink and that's why a and that was june 10th 1935 and that'S aa's birthday every year we celebrate uh aaa's birthday on june 10th. And Dr. Bob went to perform the surgery and he said he would be home as soon as he finished. So Bill and Ann are waiting there and waiting and waiting, and waiting. And it's about five o'clock in the afternoon. And they're terrified that the operation didn't go well. And he went out and started drinking again. And when he came in, he was very tired, but he was sober. And they said, how'd it go? And he said the operation was a total success. And when I got through the operation, I thought about all the people in town that I've lied to about my alcoholism that I have offended and the people whose lives I have adversely affected weighs heavily on my conscience and I went and saw all of them and just made amends to everyone he could think of in Akron and told him the truth about himself and came home with a burden off his shoulders that was immense. And that started the chain of events that I thought we'd take a break now. We've sort of discussed all the events that led up to these two gentlemen meeting. And if we take a 10-minute break, we can come back and we will discuss how AA evolved after these two were together. Thank you all very much. Your seats, if you can hear me out in the hall, we're going to go ahead and crank up the second part here. Everybody's gotten a cup of coffee, gone to the bathroom, done all those things. So where we left off was we had our two co-founders in Akron, Ohio with newly found sobriety. And they immediately set out trying to find other drunks. and it wasn't long before they were able to locate a steady supply and Dr. Bob was able to smuggle them in to his hospital where Sister Ignatia became one of AA's true saints out in Akron and they started out using the floral room They didn't get official permission to have this detox room because they didn't like drunks in hospitals. They threw up on everybody and they made a lot of noise and it was really a mess. And so one of the early rooms that they had in the hospital was where they sold flowers, you know, for the patients and they had a little thing in the back there where they could sneak a drunk in and detox them and start telling them all about AA and getting them off to the Oxford group. And AA didn't really become AA for a number of years. It was just we had members of the Oxford group in New York and in Akron who happened to be alcoholics, but they were starting to band together because they'd go out and bring in another one, and then they'd attend the Oxford meeting. And there was a lovely couple, the Williamses, and they're big in AA history, and they donated their home every week for a meeting, and it kept growing and growing and more and more alcoholics came and there started to develop a very natural split between the alcoholics and the non-alcoholics in the Oxford group and the Oxford Group was too heavy on insisting on a certain type of a God and we had certain Bible things we had to do and the drunks would resist that when we are newly sober. I don't want to hear all that stuff and so the alcoholcs were going, look, we got to back off on that. And they're going, we don't back off. You know, you come in the group and now you're messing things up. But everybody loved each other. But you could sense this difficulty that was taking place when you had this specialized group within the more generic group of just people trying to improve their spiritual lives. So this started evolving and eventually um they pulled away from the oxford groups in new york uh before they did in akron but they still hadn't called themselves alcoholics anonymous and if you go back it's hard i think clarence from cleveland clarenced snyder claims that his group in cleveland was the first group to say the words alcoholics autonomous at their meeting the name had started springing up probably in 1938. And nobody's exactly sure whether Bill thought it up or one of the other people, but it was starting to just happen. Probably the most crucial event in the history we're going to talk about now took place in 1937. Bill had gone back to New York. The groups in Oxford, Akron, Ohio were continuing. Cleveland had a group, and Bill had started a couple in New York. And he came back out to see Dr. Bob in 1937, and they sat down in Dr. Bob's living room, and they were discussing the status of this new organization. And they started counting how many people had significant sobriety. And they came up with 40 people who had five to six months or more. And they suddenly realized there was an awareness, we are really on to something. This is more than just a fluke. We have really found something. So they sat down and they thought about Bill was always a tremendous visionary. And he said, you know, we are responsible for preserving this, for developing it, and for getting this out to the millions of alcoholics who need this. So they had this discussion about where do we go now? What do we do? How do we organize this? What is the plan? Is this just going to continue word of mouth? already different groups are coming up with different ways of staying sober we have the six principles of the oxford movement but already somebody over here is adding this and somebody else has taken this one out and nothing's been written down anywhere we just have this word of mouth stuff that we're running around telling the new drunk look you're going to have to totally surrender you're gonna have to take some kind of an inventory you're to make a confession you're going to go out there and make some amends and you're really going to learn something about prayer and meditation and get close to God. Sort of those general parameters were out there, which we all realize are part of our steps. I mean, they're integral parts of them. And so Bill being possibly the more creative, adventuresome, he was just wild. And Dr. Bob was very conservative. And I've heard Clancy, you all know Clancy from California, he said they were the perfect match for each other. They were the perfect balance, because if there had just been Bill Wilson, he would have sold the rights to A.A. to Hollywood in 1943. And if it had just been Dr. Bob, A.I. would just now be getting out of Akron. You know, so... They had this wonderful balance to get this moved on, but Bill was the one with the ideas. I mean, he just had these things. So he came up and he said, well, as I sit here, Bob, this is the way I see it. It's taken two years and we've only got 40 people. It'S just not moving. I MEAN, at this rate, WE'RE GOING TO GO NOWHERE. SO THE WAY I SEE IT, WE DEFINITELY NEED A CHAIN OF DRUNK TANKS. THAT'S OUR TOP PRIORITY. WE'VE GOT CHAINS THAT JUST STARTED on wall street chain of drug stores chain of five and ten cent stores and they were big and they were successful and so bill's vision was we need a chain of drunk tanks that was the number one thing the second thing is this word of mouth stuff just too slow it just isn't going to go word of month we need paid missionaries we got to get dough as this thing this organization needs dough it's clear that we need dough and a lot of dough and then we need a manual we need some kind of a how to do it book so the three-pronged plan chain of drunk tanks paid missionaries in a book so they called in about 16 of the local because even then bill says that dr bob and he knew that they may be the co-founders but they weren't in charge you know what i'm talking about there was the groups. And the group conscience would get up and talk real loud when they didn't like the idea. So they assembled, I think they had about 16, and they told them what they were doing, that they had decided AA really was for real, and this was the initial meeting for the future of AA. And so Bill got up and took the floor and said, here's the plan, guys. Chain of drunk tanks, paid missionaries and a book. And they looked at him like, what? No way. Come on, this is a labor of love. That's going to screw it all up. Well, Bill was very smart. He's a heck of a salesman, and he knew how to play the guilt card. And he said to them now within gunshot of this meeting, there are hundreds of thousands of alcoholics who are going to die. If we just keep moving at the rate we're going, you're going to be personally responsible for the death of millions of people. So they started, they still didn't like the idea. And it was by a very narrow vote of maybe one, a majority of one that Bill's idea prevailed. And they said, well, you're Mr. Money Man and you're from New York. So go on back to New York and raise the dough. So he went back to New York, and he said that's all he needed. Boy, now I can go out, and I'm free to just hit up all these big-shot rich people. I'll tell them the AA story, and we'll have so much money. Won't be long before we'llhave thousands of these drunk tanks. And so he spent a good part of 1937 going around, seeing everybody that he could think of, important people in New York. And no one gave him a nickel. Why don't we give to the Girl Scouts? Why don'T we give it to the Red Cross? I mean, what is this, 40 drunks? I mean... What's that? I mean you know we're not going to give him... And he was very, very discouraged. He was just down and out. And throughout it all he had a very close friend his brother-in-law Leonard Strong who was a physician and he had stuck by Bill. As a matter of fact he would pay when Bill went into town's hospital. He would foot the bill. He just had faith in him and he loved him and he just knew what a good guy he was when he was sober and if they could just find a way. So he was talking to Leonard, and he said, you know, I'm going around. Nobody will give anything. And Leonard said, You know, I knew a girl once who had a cousin who worked for John D. Rockefeller. Maybe I can get us in there. Would you like that? And he said Yeah, I'd love that. And so he remembered the name of this person in the Rockefeller office, Willard Richardson, and then called up Mr. Richardson, Bill's brother-in-law, and said, This is Leonard Strong. Oh, yes, of course I remember you. How are you? And he said, I'm fine. He said, my brother-in-law is involved with a group of men who seem to have found a cure for alcoholism, and we'd like to come up and tell you. Oh, I'd love to hear about that. So next thing, they're in Rockefeller Center up on the 50th floor right outside of John D.'s private office. And Willard Richardson is one of the top advisors. All projects went through Mr. Richardson to get John D's approval on whether he would donate a million bucks to this or a million bugs to that. So Bill sat down in there and started feeling pretty smug because he was getting closer and closer to the bankroll here. And he talked to Mr. Richardson and he thought it was wonderful. He just said, That is the most wonderful idea. Could we have lunch, Mr. Wilson? Yes, of course. So they sat down and set lunch and Bill told them all about what's going on in Akron and this and that. We said, Well, could you get together with some of our advisors here at the Rockefeller Foundation? We have some of the top people in New York, the big engineering company that had a Riverside church. We have a top lawyer, a big banker. We could gather all of them and you could tell them the stories. Oh, I'd be glad to. He told this group of men who were advisors for the Rockefeller Foundation about AA. A couple of these men were later to become trustees of Alcoholics Anonymous. I mean, that's how these relationships started. He just sitting was telling them this story, and they really liked it. And one of them said, but I have a question, Mr. Wilson. Don't you think money might spoil this whole thing? It seems to be a labor of love, one person telling another one. And he said, whenever anybody said that, Bill would just go, there's 100,000 alcoholics dying as we speak. We can't keep going at that speed. We need the dough. And it would generally quiet them down. And so they said, all right, well, we're going to send one of our people out. And one of the gentlemen at his own expense went out to Akron, spent time with Dr. Bob, went down to the hospital and saw the AA meetings and just wrote a report for John D. Rockefeller. Brought it back. The rest of the group signed off on it. They sent it in to John D., and later on Bill found from Willard Richardson that Mr. Rockefeller read this report about this new organization, and he told Mr. Richardson, I am profoundly moved. I think that something of great importance is starting here, but I think the money will ruin it, and I'm not going to be the one to spoil it. I'll tell you what I will do. You say these guys are having a hard time. Dr. Bob and Bill just can't even make ends meet. I'll put $5,000 in the Riverside Church and the committee that you all have formed can draw on it for appropriate things and keep me posted. But don't come back asking for any more money. Well, the $5 ,000 was better than nothing. They needed three of it just to prevent Dr. Bob's home from being taken away from him. And then they had 2,000 left, and the two of them were sneaking, you know, I need to eat, we need this, and pretty soon it's disappearing. and so Bill got this group together and with his persuasiveness he once again convinced them of the need for vast sums of money and so they said well John Dee won't allow it but we could form our own foundation similar to the Rockefeller Foundation and Bill said fine and sothey formed a foundation called the Alcoholic Foundation and this was going to be the fundraising arm of Alcoholics Anonymous the Alcoholics Foundation and they got some lawyers to come in to draw up the papers on this and they had an interesting situation and Bill way back then had decided that he wanted non-alcoholics and alcoholics on the board and that the non-alkoholics should be in the majority of one and he wanted that written into the foundation and the lawyer said well how do you say that legally what is who is an alcoholic and who isn't and they have the damnedest time trying to come up with language legal language as to what is an alcoholic but they eventually got it started and bill used that foundation to go out with his fundraising and as part of the fundraising he had written the introduction and his own story and he had a few letters from doctors and he would take these stories or his story and this mimeograph stuff which was the beginnings of our big book but he primarily put it together to go out and get some dough. And he went around and spent most of 1938 trying to get money, and he raised not one cent. And they just came back and they'd have these meetings of the trustees of this new foundation, and it was just a commiseration session. They just sit there, I can't believe that nobody will give us any dough, etc., etc. And at one of the meetings, he happened to bring in the mimeograph stuff he was taking around to fundraise. And one of the directors said, gee, this is pretty good stuff. I happen to know the religious editor at Harper's and I'll get you an appointment. Why don't you take it up there? So Bill took these two chapters up to Harper's met with the religious director who said, this is very good. Can you write a whole book like this, Mr. Wilson? He said, sure, of course I can write a whole book like that you know he said well we'd be willing to give you a fifteen hundred dollar advance royalties against the royalties and then you'll get a percentage as we go along because boy this is pretty good so all of a sudden the book project takes off forget the fundraising we're going to get the book and we'll sell millions of copies of the book and this is how we're gonna get so the focus for money now was the book he came up with the idea with his promoter he had a promoter named Parker and he said how can we get some dough here and he says it's real easy what we'll do we'll incorporate the trustees of the foundation didn't want to get involved in the book so the two of them were going to incorporate outside of the Foundation and they decided that they would incorporate their own publishing company that Harper's, we didn't want the book that was going to be the Bible of this new fellowship to be controlled by another publishing company. We'll just publish our own and we will form a publishing company and Bill named it the Works Publishing Company which was the original publisher of the big book and the Works publishing was named Works because the big would be the first in a series of great works that were going to come out of this great new publishing company And they needed money. So his promoter said, well, it's real easy, Bill. We'll just incorporate the World Works Publishing Company and we'll go to the meetings and we will sell stock subscriptions to the drunks. And so they came up with this plan and he said, isn't that complicated? And the promoter says, no, it is a piece of cake. Watch this. And they walked into a stationary store. They got a pad of blank stock certificates. They wrote up the top, Work Publishing company, par value $25, brought them to the meetings. They never bothered to incorporate. They just had the certificates and brought them in. Started telling the drunks, listen, boys, this is the chance of a lifetime. We know you guys are broke. And here's your chance to get in on the ground floor. Here's the deal. Par value $25. You can pay $5 a month. We'll get you a share of this. These books are going to go out in carload lots. Harper's has already read it. They said they'd give us $1,500. So that's a clear sign that this is going to be a success. We've got this deal where the promoter will take a third. I'll take a Third as the author, and you can have a Third for participating in this. And they sat out there just staring at him. Come on. You want us to invest in a book you ain't written yet? No sales going on. And so Bill knew he had to get some more in order to convince the boys to cough up some dough, as he said. So they went out and studied the cost of printing and they decided to make this a very big book. They were going to use thick paper so that people were thinking they were getting more for their money. You know what I'm talking about? That's where the term big book came from. They wanted to make it big and thick. And they came up with the idea that, or the rough cost that a book like this, 350 pages, something like that, would sell for $3.50. And they checked with the printers, it cost $0.35 to print. So they went back to the guys. They said, guys, Harper's is $1,500. We checked with a printer. It cost $ 0.35. To print this book, we're going to sell it for $0,350. It's 1,000% profit. They didn't mention all the other costs that were involved in this. so you ought to invest and nobody was coming up with the dough so they went back and they sat there and they said how are we going to get people to convince to invest in this and the promoter had an idea he says why don't we go to the reader's digest up in pleasantville so they called up there and got an appointment with the managing editor of the readerís digest and and they went up there and they felt that they had a natural story typical readerís digest story group of alcoholics getting themselves sober. And they went up and told the story to Kenneth Payne, the managing director, and he loved it. He said, this is exactly what we're all about. It's just wonderful. And they said, well, we're writing the book, Mr. Payne. Well, he said, when will you finish it? Well, let's see. This is November, probably about April 1939 should be. He said fine. I'll talk with the board of directors. You give me a call back when you're going to shoot. And the promoter said, now, Mr Payne you promised you will mention the book in the store. Oh, yes. Well, at that time, Reader's Digest had a circulation of 12 million readers. So boy, when they came back to the boys in the groups and they said, boys, we've just been up to Reader'S Digest. They've guaranteed us a story, 12 million circulation. You're going to miss out if you will. Now they started getting interested. People started investing in the works publishing company, par value $25, $5 down. And the promoter's biggest job was going around making sure the drunks paid the other $5 every month so that Bill could have his little office. He now had an office and Ruth Houck was his secretary and she was typing away on the manuscript and Bill is frantically working in more about alcoholism. There is a solution and they're talking to the various drunks who are going to put their stories in the back of the big book and they are getting them to write their stories and those that can't write, they had newspaper guys that were sober and they would help them write it and all these things are going on And when they didn't have money, Bill would pay Ruth Houck in stock subscriptions. You know, he said, well, here's a month's salary and tear off a couple of those and hand them to her. And they just were always struggling to have this money. I think Charlie Towns from Towns Hospital donated a couple thousand dollars and they got about $2,500 or $3,000 from the drunks. And Dr. Silkworth put in some money. And I think they had a total of about $6,000 they were able to raise for the book project to pay Bill, you know, a salary so he could eat and stay alive and help drunks in Brooklyn. Their house was filled with drunks. It always was. And they just struggled along writing and writing. And, of course, it became a nightmare. Bill would type up a chapter. He'd bring it to the AA groups in Washington. They'd look at it. And the holy rollers on one side, there isn't enough God. What are you doing? and the people on the other side, this is a psychological program. Get that God stuff out of here and tear it out. And he felt like he was a referee in the middle of all of this. He said, look, I'm just going to write stuff and you guys fight it out, and he would just write drafts and then there'd be arguments back and forth and slowly but surely this process was evolving the big book. And perhaps the most contentious of all and Bill just dreaded writing chapter five because he knew he had avoided writing how it works. You know what I mean? Because he knew he couldn't possibly please all these people no matter what he did. But he sat down one night when he finally came to the steps themselves and he had the six Oxford principles in front of him. He had a legal pad and he said, I got to bite the bullet. I mean, that's basically what he had an ulcer. He was just having a headache. So it was just awful. So I got a bite the bull. I got the bullet here and do this. so he started thinking that the principles were allowing drunks to wiggle out there were like loopholes so he just set about closing the loophols in those six principles just scratching ideas down on a pad and when he got through he counted them up and there were 12 and he just said that's great that was like biblical i lucked out i hit a good number i got 12 of these things he noticed that he had moved God up towards the front. There wasn't any God, and that was only in the sixth principle, and he had snuck it up into the second and third step. But he didn't think too much about it, and he finally produced this, and he said it was pandemonium broke loose. I mean, nobody liked it. Nobody liked it! I mean they just said, there's too much God. Where do you got God up front? Move God back to the back. You've got people on their knees. Stand them up. We don't want that. And just arguing, And it was just one of the most contentious things. And Bill says that out of that raw debate and emotional argument came God as we understood him. That was the compromise. That was The Thing that finally shut everybody up. And he said, that has saved more AA members than almost anything else. because that little phrase allows all of us to come in because it's pretty hard to argue against. God, as you understand it, you know what I mean? It's like your own definition will be fine. No, that's not satisfactory. You know what i mean? It's just hard to argument against that. And so that wonderful process and eventually they got this together. So now they've got all this put together and they go to Cornwell Press. They want to get a printer involved and they go up and talk, oh yes, we'll be glad to do that. How many copies do you want, Mr. Wilson? Well, I don't know. We need all the people that wrote their stories. They're going to get a free copy, so we won't sell too many in AA itself. But we think there's a big market out there for the doctors. There's, you know, a lot of people want them in libraries. So I think 5,000. 5,00 will be enough. So what kind of a down payment do you have on this book? And he said, well, you know, we know Mr. Rockefeller. We're traveling in pretty good company around here. I suppose a couple hundred dollars down and the rest will come out of the sale of the book. And it was not too acceptable, but somehow he was able to talk them into printing the 5,000 copies for $200 down. And they decided it's about time to go back up to Reader's Digest and let them know we're ready to rock and roll. So they set the appointment. They go up there and they see Kenneth Payne. He said, oh, yes, I remember you boys. yes, yes, you know it's amazing I thought that was the most wonderful story in the world that you all had but when I went into the board of directors they didn't like the story at all they said we're not going to do it and I forgot to call you so now they're absolutely broke they owe the publisher they got no dough there's not going be any story in Reader's Digest and they are down and out and the drunks are mad where's my money where's mine stocks are you know want to get that dough so they had to come up with something and they're scratching their head and there was an irishman named ryan he was the only irish or catholic in at that time we certainly made up for lost time later on but at that times there was a little aside about ryan uh he when bill was had the mimeographs that he decided to circulate it outside of AA to get the opinions of psychologists, professors, and he sent it to the Catholic Committee on Publications, the big book. And it came back with only one change, one recommended change. At the end of Bill's story, Bill had said, I forget the exact line, said, we feel that we have been set on the road to heaven. And the Catholic Church felt that that's what they were offering was the road to heaven. And they had sort of a monopoly on that. And they were a little uncomfortable with Alcoholics Anonymous promising the road to heaven, so Bill changed it, the road, to utopia. And you all remember there's utopia in the end of Bill's story. So anyway, the fellow Ryan knew Gabriel Heater, who had a big radio show, big thing, and it really got a lot of attention. He told these little personal interest stories. He said, I'm going to call Gabriel Heater and see if I can get on his show. That'll get us a lot of publicity and we'll be off and running. And Bill said, that's wonderful. And then after Ryan left, he was talking with a couple of the other guys and they said, geez. So, you know, Ryan's only been sober about three weeks and he keeps getting drunk all the time. What if he gets that? Be too much for him to handle. And lo and behold, about a week later, he comes back and Gabriel Heater agreed to interview Ryan on the air. Well, now they really were worried. So they got a room in the downtown athletic club in New York City and they put Ryan in there and had AA guards on him for 10 days until he appeared on the Gabriel Heater show to tell the great story about Alcoholics Anonymous. They were down to their last $500 and the promoter said, you know, I'll tell you what we ought to do. Now we're going to have Gabriel Heater. We ought to take the 500 bucks and have a postcard shower to all the doctors that we can afford. So they got every doctor east of the Mississippi, and they sent him a post card. Listen to the Gabriel Header show, learn all about alcoholism, and buy the book Alcoholics Anonymous, $3.50, your cure for alcoholism. And mailed it out to all these doctors the radio show went off and they were all excited they could hardly wait three days after the show they said that's time enough the stuff is in they went down to the post office box and looked through the little glass and it just a few little cards in there and the promoter said bill don't worry about it they got big bags full back there get the post officer manager out here And he said, no, that's it. What you got in that box is the total thing. And there were 12 postcards. Ten of them were totally illegible from drunk doctors. They could not even read it. And they had two orders for the book Alcoholics Anonymous. And at that stage in time, they foreclosed on, well, they didn't foreclose. They just threw Bill and Lois out of their townhouse in Brooklyn, put their furniture on the street, and he was broke. And they put the furniture in storage on credit. AA, some AA loaned them a car. another AA gave him a summer place up in the mountains and they decided that amongst all the AA members they could come up with 50 bucks a month for he and Lois to live on and that was the financial status of Alcoholics Anonymous and the Big Book in 1939 and Bill was desperate and they came down, he had talked to Liberty Magazine, Fulton Ausler was the editor, and they agreed to do a story about Alcoholics Anonymous. But they needed another $1,000 in order to get through till that story, and they felt that that would certainly generate some interest. And Bill went to a clothing – I had a clothing store in New York, and he said, we really need $1.000. He said, well, I don't have it, but I have a customer down in Baltimore. He's involved with the Wets and Dries, you know, the prohibition thing that was going on. and I could call him and see if he'd loan it to us and Bill didn't mind well, I don't know he says you're not going to get fussy over a thousand bucks are you and so he said all right, make the call so he called him up and he asked him if he would possibly buy some of these books and donate them to libraries that was his first attempt no, I do not think I want to do that well, would you loan us a thousand dollars to the works publishing company he said sure tell me the balance sheet of the works publishing company and when he heard about that he said no he didn't think he'd loan $1,000 to the Works Publishing Company. And so finally, he agreed to loan $ 1,000 dollars to the guy who owned the clothing store. And that thousand dollars enabled him to keep the police away from the office, to make a few more payments to the publisher so they didn't pull the books back. Liberty Magazine came out. There was some dribs and drabs that came in, just enough to keep the office going. And all of a sudden he got a phone call from Willard Richardson. Mr. Rockefeller would like to see you. It had been two and a half years, not a word out of Mr. Rockefeller. Mr. Rockefeller had been following AA very closely. He'd been following everything that had been going on. And he called him up and he said, Bill didn't see him. willard richardson came to see bill and he said mr rockefeller would like to throw a dinner for alcoholics anonymous and he's going to invite all of his friends to attend and this is the list of the people that are coming and wendell wilkie and the head of the chase manhattan bank and all the bankers in new york and all the insurance executives and bill looked down the list and quick did a little quick tally figured there was two billion dollars coming to that dinner and it was a black tie dinner with fancy hotel in New York City so the bankers were all there and Dr. Bob was there and Bill talked a little bit about life among the anonymai as he called themselves and the bankERS thought it was probably something to do with prohibition you didn't know what they were being invited there but there was a drunk at each table you know what I mean they spread the drunks out with the bankERs and they started livening them up with their stories and all of that and Mr. Ryan, the Irishman, was at one of the tables with the bankers and one of them said, Mr. Brian, I presume you're a bank? And he said, no sir, I'm not. I was just released from Greystone Sanatorium the other night. So they started warming up to the drunks and having this time and it came time and John D. Rockefeller was ill and he sent his son Nelson and he got up there and said, my father's very sorry he can't be here. He feels that this is one of the great movements that's being started. We wanted all of you important people in New York City to see this and to know what it is and to be aware of this wonderful movement. It is a movement that requires no money. And Bill said, and the two billion dollars went out the window. You know what I mean? It is the labor of love. It is just one person to another. And at the end of the dinner, the newspapers all wrote about it. Some of them said John Dee was crazy. They criticized him. They thought he was off his rocker inviting drunks to a black-tie dinner. But John Dee ordered 400 books. He wrote a personal letter to all the people who attended and all the People Who Didn't Attend, told them about AA, told them that AA was a little strapped right now and he was going to donate $1,000 to AA. And if they felt like they could contribute, well, you'd get a millionaire who would look at that and he'd go, wow, John D gave $1.000, I'll give $10. And, you know, percentage-wise. And out of that group, they got about $3,000 and they desperately needed it. This group was the only time that A.A. took money from outside sources, and for the next three years, Bill solicited that list and got roughly $3,500, and that kept them going until the Jack Alexander article came out in Saturday Evening Post, and then all heck broke loose. The people are writing in faster than they keep up with it. The revenue's coming in from the big book. The A.R. groups are finally sending some money into New York on an organized fashion. they're able to hire somebody else to work with Ruthie Houck and AA is definitely starting to move and the interesting part when Bill looks back was what John D. Rockefeller did what he did, he gave AA dignity he removed the stigma of being an alcoholic and that was why he had the dinner that's why he has all those important people so that they could personally have experienced Alcoholics Anonymous and understand what it was because he knew what a stigma there was in society. And that was his wonderful contribution, that and not donating any money to it. At the end of three years, Bill was able to write to Mr. Rockefeller and say, we will never need any more money and we will ever take any more. And we'll talk about that when we get to the traditions. So there's this great debt of gratitude that's owed to Mr. Rockefeller for this. In closing, and then we'll just take another quick break and do the traditions, AA, of course, took off. It started growing in leaps and bounds. They started going to other countries. They would find people who spoke these other languages and translate it into their language and have the AA literature in different languages around the world. 1946 bill was always looking ahead the organization he knew that dr bob and he were not going to live forever we had to prepare for the transition of turning over alcoholics anonymous to all of us that's that was really what was symbolized in 1950 when bill wrote the traditions in 1946 and believe me in 1946 nobody wanted to hear about the traditions just like it is today but he got him through he got them through he knew how important they were and we'll we will talk about that when we get to them and so at the convention the first worldwide international convention in cleveland ohio in 1950 the traditions were adopted uh 1953 the 12 and 12 came out where Bill gave more in-depth to the Twelve Steps and presented the Twelve Traditions. So those two books, for me, are both sort of biblical because they contain everything that we need in terms of understanding our program. And Dr. Bob's last talk was at the 1950 Convention, and he died shortly after that in 1950. bill lived until 1971 and i regret to this day i got sober in 1964 and every year my friends in washington would say are you going to go with us up to the bill wilson dinner in new york and no i don't have enough dough i you know i can't afford it i can'T do that and every year for seven years i refused to go and then bill died and of course i wish that i had met him, but I didn't. I've met Lois and some of the other people, but it's one of my things that I wish I had done. And Bill's last talk was in Miami, Florida in 1970. The International Convention was held in Miami and he was on his deathbed, although he had emphysema and pneumonia. He just couldn't stop smoking. And he was scheduled to speak at the big meeting Friday night and couldn't make it. And so he came Sunday, and he spoke for three minutes. They brought him up in a wheelchair, and he just was able to stand, and the historian said for about two minutes he was the old Bill. He had the whole audience in his hand, and then he just had no strength left and sat down, and they took him back up north and then about January, January, and that was in July of 1970. In January 1971, he died, and his anonymity, you know, all the obituary columns had his picture, and it was just wonderful to just see the story so freely told all around Alcoholics Anonymous. And so I hope that this little, if you're new to AA, I really hope that This Has Helped You Understand what I suggested at the beginning, that there was some hand of providence behind this fellowship causing a chain of events that has transformed our lives, everybody in this room, and over 100 countries, I don't know, it's 80,000 groups, 3 million people. It is just absolutely remarkable how this has been handed down and given to us and it's one of the great gifts that I think is going on in the world today. So I thank you for your attention and we'll be able to do the steps in 35, 40 minutes so it's not going to be a painful session. It's going to быть funny and let's take a 10-minute break and come back and we will just go through the tradition. Thank you.