Step 3 Hit When He Surrendered the Intellectual Mountain – Art S.

Here now, I don't see anyone else outside. I didn't want to start over again until we were all in here and seated because the next speaker, I know that we don't want to miss a word of what he has to say. I have some announcements to make after Art gets through talking, but one of them I think I had better make now is about your cigarette. It's perfectly all right to smoke in here, but let's please put our foot on the cigarette if we put it on the floor because this is a wooden building and could catch a fire. Certainly, we wouldn't want that to happen. So let's put our feet on our cigarettes if we've put one on the floors. I'm not going to take up any more of your time now. Our next speaker, I know that we all know or have heard of, he is the educational executive executive director of the State of New Mexico Commission on Alcoholism, has done a wonderful work in the educational program throughout the state of New Mexico on alcoholism. He's going to have to leave immediately after his talk here and go over into Oklahoma to make a talk there. He is in demand wherever he goes. He has done a lot of work through the educational program of alcoholism, indeed a great man. But most of all, he's here this afternoon not as the executive director of the State Commission on Alcoholism in New Mexico but as an AA. He is going to give you an AA talk and without further ado we're going to give you Art Stein from Santa Fe, New Mexico. Thank you, Ross, and good afternoon, folks. It is a pleasure to come down to Ruedozo and attend this tri-state convention. All tri- state conventions are very important to me and have been for the last seven years. the program of Alcoholics Anonymous needless to say is very important to me too because it was through the help that I got from AA members that I was able to find a new way of life eight years ago I was in the middle of my last episode of drinking. I happened to get on a drunk that time that I just could not get over. I tried every day. I bought my last half pint. I guess I've bought a thousand last half pints in my life. Anyhow, I never somewhere or another here in New Mexico we don't have Sunday sales liquor. I never had any liquor on Sunday because on Saturday night I swore I wouldn't drink anything on Sunday. That was going to be the end of a drunk in every case. But by 10 o'clock or 11 o' clock the next morning I was around begging certain proprietors to open up and just let me in for one drink. And, of course, after I got in and got that one I talked them out of the bottle in everycase and sometimes two or three. and in some cases there were stores that didn't mind selling a little bit on Sunday, too. I found those places quite rare. Alcohol has been a problem to me ever since I was a kid in school, I guess. Somehow or another it exercised an allure for me. It produced in me an excess of gratification that I couldn't get in any other way. It didn't do that for the rest of the kids going to school with me that I shared a bottle with. They could take a drink or two, and it didn't call for any more. But with me, that first bottle was the start of several others. I always got sick, but I always somehow or another went back to that thing, figuring the next time I could lick it. So, after about twenty-five years of trying, I did wind up on this last drunk. I had all the usual experiences that most of us who have worked at this thing for twenty- five years generally have. I landed in the drunk tank in jail on several occasions. or another, I managed to fall off the bridge into the river, a 15- or 20-foot drop in the middle of the wintertime. How in the world anybody could fall off that bridge, I never have been able to figure out since, but I made it. I fell right there in the middle of it, and thank be to God there was enough snow and ice on the rocks down there to kind of cushion my fall, and I didn't break anything. But that last junk that I was on was a dilly And I could not get over it I was laying on the floor of my office in Santa Fe Where I was able to stay Because my wife had kicked me out of the house She sued me for divorce and gotten one I had no home to go I'd exhausted my credit in the hotels in town there. No place except the floor of this office. The only reason I had the occupancy of that place was that the man I was subletting from was out in Sacramento, California in the Army and completely occupied with his Army affairs and he didn't have time to send me enough dunning letters. He sent me quite a few, but they weren't strong enough to do anything. I knew that I could get by there in an alcoholic fashion, and I did. The money that should have gone to him for rent went, of course, into this thing. I had to have this medicine that I must have if I were to live, I felt at that time. So after about four months of this particular drunk promising myself that tomorrow would be the last day and tomorrow I'd shake it out, Finally, I did come to a realization that here I was truly headed for complete and total disintegration. I guess I must have done a little bit of praying at that time, praying for help. I had surrendered in my way, and there was help came to me. Out of a clear blue sky one morning, a total stranger walked in the door of my office, presented himself, said, I understand you're having a little trouble with alcohol. I said, I certainly am. I'm on one now. I can't get over it. He said, Well, I'll tell you. I've had some experience with that myself. And I'd like to tell you about it. And he did. he told me about his experience. Then he said... He told me about his experience. Then he said, I'm down here from Kansas City on a week's vacation trip. And this was Wednesday the middle of his week's vacation trip. And he'd heard about me and right square in the middle of that attempt to get away from Kansas City in a medical practice that he was working on, and a lot of AA practice that he had broken into his vacation, like an old fire horse going to a fire. And he said, I'll tell you what, I've got an extra room and I've got an extra bed in my apartment up there, and if you'll agree to come on up, I will get you well before I go back to Kansas City. I've got to go back on Sunday. Got some operations scheduled for Monday morning. Well, I'll get you well. Doc, you can't do that because it's going to take two weeks to get over this junk. No, he said, I'll gets you well." Then I got to thinking, I'd never had any experience with anybody offering me help like that. There must be some catch. What is this guy going to do? What kind of a guinea pig is he going to make out of me? There's something wrong in this deal. But I had a bunch of excuses and I gave him all those excuses and demurred from accepting his offer and he finally saw that he wasn't getting any place and he said well I'll tell you here's my phone number if you change your mind you come on, call me up and I'll come down and get you well he left with that and I had remembered that an attorney across the hall had sent him over to see me. He'd mentioned this fellow's name, so I called him up, called the attorney up, and I said, What's the matter with this guy? Is he crazy or what's the matter? What's he trying to do? And this attorney said, Art, this is a chance I've been praying for, for you, for weeks now. Please take it. This man is on the up-and-up. He means business, and he's everything he represents himself to be, go ahead and take this. For God's sake, please do. I said, George, your opinion has always been good, and I did highly respect his opinion, so I called this number. Then in a few minutes, Doc and this fellow he had with him came down, and they got me and carried me down the stairs and loaded me in the car. And you know, they carried me into that apartment, and I discovered one thing right away. He didn't have any extra room. He did not have any bed in that apartment. He lied to me. He took the dining room of that place and moved a cot in from another apartment. That is how he had an extra room and an extra bed. He moved me right in on top of the whole family who was down there enjoying their vacation trip. But he did go for the next 48 hours and kept constant watch on me. He didn't come in and preach a bunch of twelve steps of AA to me. He came in and he told me stories about people in his group, experiences that they had had. He made them interesting. He dressed them up. But every one of those stories he told me packed a message from me. He told me about himself and his experience, how he had been locked up in the alcoholic Ward of an insane hospital in Chicago. Now, his wife had come up one day and said, Miles, I guess this is goodbye. I just came up to say goodbye to you. The judge has just awarded me what's left of the community property. What's left is all in my hands now. He's awarded me the custody of the kids. And the judge is going to sign papers tomorrow morning to send you to an insane asylum for the rest of your life, or at least for an indefinite period. And I guess this is a good vibe. But she said, by the way, here is a magazine I was reading last night. It tells the story of a bunch of alcoholics that have gotten well. Now, we've spent $100,000 trying to get you well. We've had you in 17 different sanitariums. We've given you the best of everything there was. Here's a bunch of people that have gotten well and the story is all here in this magazine. It's just a five-cent magazine Saturday evening posted. That's all it cost in those days. And I thought just as a parting gesture, I'd leave you with this story. and so she did she left him the magazine and went he read it and it was that Saturday evening post reprint that we distribute in AA now it's a thrilling story somehow or another he caught the idea and he went down and talked to Judge out of committing him the next day and he hopped the next train back for Kansas City. He set about to do what was suggested in that story. And up to the time he called on me, which was five and a half years later, he'd had tremendous success. Now, he's gone home. When he got home, there was dust a quarter of an inch thick on his desk. He didn't have any patients. They'd all quit him a year before. He had no business to take care of. He owed everybody in town. Kansas Medical Society had even written him and told him to appear before them and show reason why his membership shouldn't be revoked. So he went downtown, as the story suggested, and started working with other alcoholics. He took them home to the basement of his house and he sobered them up one by one. But in doing that, he kept himself sober. And in the course of time, why, these ex-patients that he had saw him sober on the street and saw him in good health, sane mind, and they started coming back to his office for treatment. and he told me then that in less than a year he had all of his old patients back plus a bunch of brand new ones that they had brought back to him. Now there was a story that I needed to hear because it was a big burning question in my mind if I do sober up what have I got to look forward to except all these bills I've filed up all of my clients had quit me I was in the public accounting business. I didn't have a client left. No way in the world of making money. I was sick. There was no future ahead. So a story like that was a big help to me. It gave me hope that I could do what he had done, and I think that's what all of us do a great deal of good in doing, telling what we used to be like, what happened, and what we're like now. If we can give some hope to a fellow that's laying there in bad shape, one of the big burning questions, I think, in every unrecovered alcoholic's mind is, if I do sober up, my God, look at what I've got to face. I just can't stand it. I'd just as well go ahead and die. And most others have contemplated suicide. for the very reason that we couldn't see any daylight ahead. So the offer of hope through stories like those is of a tremendous amount of help, and only we can give them to other people. Well, it was easy for me to follow his example. It was a clear inspirational thing. and somehow, too, I caught a glimpse of something miraculous at work in my life. Who would have dreamed that out of the clear blue sky, a man from a thousand miles away, a total stranger would walk in my door and save my life? And surely he did that. I know now, after these years of working with other sick alcoholics, But at that particular moment, I was less than 24 hours away from a mortuary slab. So now over eight years have passed. Every day that I am sober, I owe that much more to a program of recovery such as is suggested in the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous. There's an obligation there that I'll never be able to pay. Every day piles up just a little bit more, but I'm glad I've got that obligation because it does give me something to do that I can have some satisfaction in doing. Actually the things that I had my mind set on before, the values that I have set in my my mind were pretty false values, as I can see now. They consist of money, power, and position. Now I have one set of values which I think are true values. Those things have been taught to me by a study of the program as suggested in the big book through my observation of other people who have made the program and the lives and examples that they have set before me. So I've gotten a great deal out of the program. As Ed was telling you, it gave him some new things to think about. Early in AA, and thanks be to God, ever since, there's been a lot of new bulbs lit up in my head. I can see to walk now where before I used to stumble around in the darkness over all sorts of obstacles. Now I can, at last, walk in that sunlight. That's something to be very grateful for. That has been something, like Ed says, you can't describe just what this is. It takes hold of you and guides your footsteps from there on. There are some hints of it in the big book. But I'd been in A.A. battling along, trying to adapt myself to this program and these principles that are set out there in the book a whole year and a half, and I'd have been making pretty hard and tough going of it. You see, I not only had an alcoholic addiction, but I had for six years been using sleeping pills to sleep, whereas I'd been using Benzedrine to wake up in the morning on and alcohol to keep leveled off during the daytime with. It was a nice merry-go-round, but it didn't go anyplace except like a whirlpool does down. So I had a triple addiction that had to be broken. Alcohol was pretty easy to get rid of. For some reason or another, I didn't have a bit of trouble with the alcohol, But these sleeping pills that I'd been depending on to allow me to get some sleep at night were still pretty important to me, even after I'd gotten sobered up. It's been a dream to get myself up in shape so I could work after slugging myself to sleep at nighttime with sleeping pills was pretty important. Finally, my sponsor came down from Kansas City. I guess he must have realized I was still taking those pills this was about a year and a half I think after I'd gotten sober I lie in the world I didn't slip during that year and half I don't know for sure but he suggested that in his experience he had never seen anyone recover from a double or triple addiction except through a complete spiritual conversion, as he termed it. I hung on to that phrase, complete spiritual conversion. That sounded pretty good to me. Little did I know what it was going to get me into. But I set about to find somebody that could tell me about how you could get a complete spiritual conversation. well i can correspond to a spanish boy out in california that had something i could tell by his letters he had somehow established a conscious contact with god as he understood him the way that appealed to me i could read the lines in his letter that he had and dependents on, a power greater than himself. And his father, as he termed him, would help him out of difficulties. His father would show him the way. So I made a special trip out to Los Angeles to find out what this guy had on the ball. Here was a fellow that had been raised in Los Angeles on the Lower East Side, never made more than a sixth-grade education, and most of that in special schools down for the incorrigible kids. He just pictured and mingled the English language to pieces. He had been a gang leader for the little Al Capone of the east side of Los Angeles. And somehow or another he had finally discovered AA and gotten in it and been in it about four or five years at that time. He told me how he'd gotten hold of some ideas that had helped him and what was working for him at that times. He talked to me for eight hours solid, like a good enthusiastic A.A. will do sometimes, eight hours salad in my hotel room one day, And eight hours the next, I got those ideas from him. And something happened. I found a sense of peace, serenity that I had been looking for. I found the faith in and dependence on the power greater than myself that I needed. And indeed, I was fortunate there. And I didn't need any more sleeping pills or Benzedrine to carry on with. Now, the big book has got this, but I didn't know that was so. I prided myself on a very intensive worker with other alcoholics. I'd read that one phrase, that the safest immunity against drinking is intensive work with other alcoholics. It's insurance against taking it yourself. I figured that if I'd do enough false death work, I'd keep myself sober. Well, that wasn't too inaccurate a thinking because the dead in my case keep me sober. I didn't have any inkling of what this program had in it even after a year and a half of trying, until this Joe had shown me some of the things that he had found. Now, in order for him to read this big book of Alcoholics Anonymous with the meager education that he has, the language difficulty that he hath, he had to look at the words in that book and go to the dictionary and look at the meaning of each and every one of those words up. Anything that had two syllables in it, Joe had to look it up in the dictionary and he did. And he did get himself an education that way. He did get himself an understanding of the program. Well, we brought Joe up to Santa Fe to help us organize a Spanish-American group and we took him around Roswell and Las Vegas and Albuquerque and Clovis so that we could get the ball rolling because he is an interesting talker and he does know what he's talking about. But while he was here, he said, you know what Bill Wilson says in his story? And I said, sure, yeah. You betcha I do. He said, what did he say? Well, you know, the way he said that, he actually called my bluff. I'd read what Bill Wilson had to say in his story, but I actually didn't know what was in that story. I didn't Know What was in That Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous. Well, he pointed it out to me that on page 22 and 23 of the big book was the meat of this program, in his opinion. And it's the meat for this program in my opinion. Now, that's my personal idea, and you're free to accept it or reject it. But he pointed out that Bill had been sitting there in his kitchen listening to this old-time drinking pal of his tell how he had recovered from alcoholism through this miraculous new attitude on life, the change of thought that he'd achieved through these ideas that had been presented to him. Now, Bill was sitting there and he said, No, there's too much God in that stuff. There's too many religions. and I don't like that. And he didn't like any of the words and phrases that his friend had presented to him. They just wouldn't fit Bill's language or attitude. And finally, his friend said, well, now listen, why don't you choose your own concept of God? And Bill said, that statement struck me hard. It melted the icy intellectual mountain in whose shadow I had stood and shivered for so many years, and I stood in the sunlight at last. Well, that was sheer poetry as far as I was concerned, that very idea of melting that icy intellectual mountain, because surely I had been standing in that. I'd read books on religion and philosophy galore. I'd taken home five of them at a time from the Los Angeles Public Library. I tried to read every book in that philosophy and religion section in the Los Angels Public Library, and I tried that for three years solid, trying to find something that would work for me. But the ideas just weren't there in a way that I could grab hold of. I have no doubt that the ideas are there. Since then, I've been able to use some of those books to good advantage. but Bill's idea there was that I could choose my own concept of God as I understood him then Joe says how about testing your thinking now Ed made a lot of reference to thinking and it is the thing we have to work on it's our own thinking i never thought about controlling my emotions before or my mental processes it was a new thing joe says now look at this thing bill says i must test my thinking by this new god consciousness within common sense would thus become uncommon sense when in doubt i must sit quietly asking for direction and strength to do as he would have me do never must i pray for myself except as my prayers bore upon my usefulness to others and then only might i expect to receive but that would be in great measure and my friend promised me that when i had done these things i would enter into a new relationship with my Creator, that I would have the elements of a way of life which would solve all of my problems. Now, as far as I'm concerned with this concept that I have, that all can be underscored thoroughly and completely because I believe in that word all. Now, I've had a lot of experience since Joe pointed that thing out to me that's proven that Bill Wilson knew what he was talking about when he suggested, testing my thinking by this new God consciousness, sitting quietly asking for direction and strength to do as he would have me do. Some great things have been created seemingly out of thin air. One of the first things of, I think, major size going along. In 1947, having been doing a lot of very intensive work with other alcoholics, I found out I was spending about 90% of my time and I was really obsessed with the idea that I was going to sober up all of these alcoholics in Tennessee and other places in the state that I could get to. I wasn't making any money then. There were days there that I didn't ever get a key in the office door. One time, we went 11 days without even putting a key in the Office Door. But these people needed help, and it was a life-and-death matter, and didn't I owe my life, my very life, to help that I'd gotten? So it seemed a tremendously important thing to go ahead and do this work and depend on somewhere or another being taken care of and that my wife, who I had remarried, and my daughter would have a living too. Well, somehow or another I did get jobs that paid off better than those jobs that used to pay off while I was drinking. And somehow or another, those income tax reports that used to take me five hours, I got them down where I could do them in 45 minutes. And those jobs that used take five or six days, I could due in a half a day. My thinking gradually was clearing up and the pay was getting better. I could charge for my work without flinching because I knew, stone cold sober, it was good work. At least I thought it was. And I was able to charge for it on that basis. I got enthused with the idea, well, let's get this thing on a wholesale basis. So in 1947, I took a copy of the State of Connecticut's law setting up a commission on alcoholism and got a hold of Judge Chavez up in Santa Fe and another lawyer up there named George Graham. And I said, I want some help on this thing. Will you help me adapt this Connecticut law to the way we do things according to statutes in the state of New Mexico. So they were enthused about it. They'd seen a miracle before their eyes, and they'd seen several of them by that time. They thought this was a good thing, and it was really working and working good in the State of Connecticut. This Commission on Alcoholism was doing great work there. So they helped me, and we got a law written up. I took it down and got it introduced. It passed the Senate unanimously, and it got down in the House of Representatives, and it Got Bugged Down. It got buried, and it died in committee in 1947. Well, I went on down the line until 1949. Business was good with me by that time. I didn't have time, I thought, to pursue this idea anymore, but something kept urging me to go ahead and do it. So with a few more changes we made in the law, I had that thing presented again. Again it passed the Senate unanimously and got down into the House of Representatives and got referred to two committees. Well, finally by just sheer bulldozing I got it out of one committee and over into another one. But there it was stuck, and days went by and nothing that I could do would jar that thing loose until it came to the very last day of the 1949 session. I thought, well, now we've got to get it through this session. I went to the chairman of the steering committee. I went with all the influential members of the House of Representatives, all of the lobbyists and everything else that we could get. And they told me, no, there's nothing can be done about this bill in this session It's dead, and you just as well recognize that. There is no hope. The steering committee this morning agreed to bring out four bills, and those four bills are very important bills that do have to be passed at this session. Nothing else is going to get passed, so you just well go on home. Well, it was pretty sad news because by that time I had gotten emotionally involved in the passage of that bill. So I sat down on the Senate steps and did what Bill Wilson suggested, sit quietly, asking only for direction and strength to do as he would have me do. i was completely surrendered i couldn't do anything only a far greater than myself could do anything and i asked for that direction and the direction did come he said go see the governor well i went down to governor's office and his secretary said why he's up in the senate listening to arguments on the House bills that have been sent up. He's sitting up there on the dais or the platform with the President of the Senate. So I went up there and looked, how in the world am I going to see the Governor? There he is tied up. You can't get in the front door, there's Sergeant Arms. You can'T get inthe back door, Sergeant Arms will let you in there and the governor's sitting up here on this raised platform. There's no way in the world to talk to him. So, again, I said, well, I'll surrender here. We're up against it. Do what Bill Wilson suggested, sit quietly asking for direction and strength. The idea come to me, write him a note. And so I had a copy of the bill in my pocket and I wrote on there to the lieutenant governor sitting beside the governor on this platform. I said, Dear Joe, please ask the governor to have this bill put on today's calendar. This is truly a life-and-death measure that must be passed at this session. So there I was stuck with a note in my hand how to get it in. and I couldn't walk in there and give it to them. But just then a little page boy went by. I said, here, give this to Joe. And he did. And Joe was sitting there reading this thing, and the governor looked over his shoulder, and he said, Joe, what do you got there? He passed it over to him, and he says, Governor, this is really something that should be passed at this session. It is a life-and-death matter. The governor says, all right, give me a scratch pad. And he grabbed over there and wrote a note. Chairman of the Steering Committee, House of Representatives, please see that Senate Bill No. 6 and 7 put on today's calendar. Signed, Thomas J. Mabry, Governor. Give that to Page Boy. He says, take that down to the House of Representative. Well, I followed him down. I wanted to see what was going to happen to that note. I was afraid it would get there too late. And the patient boy rushed down there with it and gave it to Sergeant Arms. Sergeant Arms took it over to the chairman of the steering committee, and he read the note, and his neck started turning red, his ball head started turning Red, and he was mad. But he did rise to his feet, and said, Mr. Speaker, a message from the governor. Read the message. So he got up and read this note the governor had sent. program job for the next two years we traveled the state made speeches to service clubs and churches and so on showed the movies to educate them to the idea that alcoholism is a disease the alcoholic is a sick person who can be helped and is worth helping that this is a public health problem and therefore a public responsibility. We hammered that idea across sufficiently so that we got some support. But we had to get some money if we were going to operate a commission on alcoholism. It does cost plenty of money to treat sick alcoholics, as we've subsequently found it costs twice or three times as much as we thought it would. Well, in 1951, at the very last moment, again, that you could put a bill in for introduction, that morning I sat down and wrote up a law which levied a tax on alcoholic beverages. One cent a case on beer, four cents a gallon on wine, and ten cents a gallon on distilled spirits. I estimated from the report of the Liquor Control Division from taxes they were already collecting for the Department of Public Welfare that that would bring us about $160,000 a year. And that was somewhere or another the idea we got in our head that But $160,000 is just what we need. That'll do the job fine. We'll have some left over, we thought. So I took that up, dumped it in the Senate topper, and it was passed unanimously and went down to the House and got into a couple of committees there. Well, just by shirt bulldozing, we did again get it out of the Judiciary Committee and over into the Revenue and Taxation Committee. But there was something that seemed to be going uncommonly slow, and it did go uncommonly slow until again the very last afternoon of the closing afternoon of that session. And it looked like, again, it was sunk dead and buried. They had other really important matters that should have been handled that afternoon. Well, I went home that noon, lay down on the bed, and I said, Father, here we are again. We're sunk. There's no out on this one. But give me some direction on it. Let me have an idea that we might try. and I again was totally and completely surrendered to the idea that only God could help and pretty soon the idea did come the idea is to call up Chet up there on the hill in the Atomic Energy Commission he's the personnel manager up there now he can make a phone call and explain this thing to this other personnel manager in a language that he can understand. I'd already learned one thing out of A.A., that one alcoholic talking to another can succeed where other people fail completely. So I figured, well, one personnel manager talking to Another can do the job. The chairman of this Revenue and Taxation Committee was Virgin McCollum, who's with the United States Potash Company down here in Carlsbad. He's the personnel manager. And this personnel manager up at Los Alamos he'd had a lot of experience with alcoholism and he had a lot of alcoholics up there on the hill despite the fact the FBI had checked each and every application for employment there they had trained these people they knew they knew just what the background was was. Goodness. But anyhow, I explained the situation to Chet Campbell, and he said, what do you want me to do? And I said, you call up Virgin McCollum. He's down at the, we'll find a hotel eating lunch right now, and you can make him understand why we have to have this bill passed this session. So he called him up, and we talked to him 20 minutes, and when I came back up to the House of Representatives and stood there on the steps waiting for them all to come back that afternoon, Virgil came up to me and he patted me on the back and said, quit worrying about your damn bill. We're going to pass it this afternoon. Well, that was good news. And they did pass it. There was another instance of doing what Bill had suggested there, quietly asking only for direction and strength. Well, we've had a lot of things happen to us since that time. Electric dealers brought suit against us to enjoin the Bureau of Revenue from collecting the tax. They said the thing was unconstitutional, it was such a vague, general, broad wording that it would be unenforceable and that it wasn't practical. Well, we thought we'd been struck a terrible blow there. The liquor dealers would hold up against us that way. But they got in the district court, and the district court ruled that the law was constitutional. So what did they do but take it on up to the Supreme Court and delay this another year before the Supreme Court handed down the decision? And we thought that was pretty terrible, too, that we should be held up in this good work, this life-and-death thing that was so urgent that it needed immediate attention and tied up that way. It was a crime, we thought, that they'd stand in the way of just sheer murder, we even put it, to stand between us and that money. Well, it was the best thing that ever happened to us. If we'd have gotten that money month by month as it came along, it wouldn't have served the purpose that it did later serve when we needed it. Because when it was finally released, it had been faded and under protest all this time. We had $173,000 backlog turned over to us to work with. Well, we've been able to take those dollars and put them to work. We have now a rehabilitation center just eight miles south of Albuquerque that's handling on an average of 15 patients at a time. Sometimes the place is loaded up to its full capacity of 22, and other times it'll drop down to 10. and at least we're graduating out of that turquoise lodge a good bunch of prospective members for Alcoholics Anonymous. Now, all we can do in that place is get those people on their feet physically and get them cleared mentally to some extent. Now, when they leave the lodge, they're not all clear, as anybody that's been working on this program for some time can tell you. It does take time to get the bad habits of thought erased from our mind and new habits put in. Those people, when the leave the Lodge, they need a strong sponsor. They need an enthusiastic sponsor. They need the help and encouragement such as you and I got when we came into AA. That's something that they need, and need awfully badly. And without it, they're going to fall flat on their face. They need a group, a good strong group, who takes its own inventory constantly and continuously to see if they are doing sponsorship in the way that they used to do sponsorship in days gone by. They need a fallow field to fall into and seeds to grow into good members of alcoholics. These newcomers really need help, and they need it worse than anybody could put into words. They need strong sponsorship, continuous sponsorship, and understanding and a helping hand that only we who have fought the battle and won ourselves back to some measure of sobriety can give them. You see, the commission on alcoholism can't turn over to any group of Alcoholics Anonymous a guy who is guaranteed to stay sober from that moment on that he comes back to his own hometown. all we can do is turn him over to the group well fortunately with the treatment facilities that we have now we've got a new building down in Roswell that we hope to have the money pretty soon to be able to staff it we had a rehabilitation center down in Silver City but we discovered in almost too late that we were spending more money than we should have been spending and we did have to shut it down. The volume of business was not in that particular area. Population-wise, it was not wise. And we had to move over into an area where the population was heavy. But it takes also, on doing this particular work, education of the public as to the fact that alcoholism is a disease. so that everyone who comes in contact with the disease will advise and counsel the sick alcoholic to go and accept treatment. Further than that, when he is released and he's back in his own home grounds, that he will find acceptable employment and people who trust him so that he can go back to profitable labors again. And that does have to come through public education. The stigma of alcoholism, bear in mind, is over 3,000 years old. We do have to change the attitude of the public toward this disease. It cannot be done overnight. It can't be done with just a few simple talks. It's going to take years, many years, of continuous, persistent effort. We publish a bulletin that's got a direct circulation by mail of 13,000 people. The 13,00 people on our mailing list are people who do come in contact with people who have the alcoholic problem. Their lawyers, their doctors, their nurses, their pharmacists, they are school teachers, public health workers and public welfare workers, and the heads of various large organizations and employers generally. Those people, in reading those bulletins, and we put them in such shape that they can broadly read them, and we're not choking something down their throat. We're giving them just a little bit so that they look forward next month to reading the bulletin. They're gradually getting an understanding of the fact that the alcoholic is the sick person. We're getting a lot of lip service now from people and a lot at bats on the back, but I want to assure you that at this stage it's still, for the most part, lip service. It isn't an absolute, full-hearted realization of the fact that the alcoholic does not belong in jails or penitentiaries or insane asylums because they are still treating them in our jails today just like they did before we ever started this program in a good many instances. as new chiefs of police have come in and been appointed new sheriffs have come in and been appointed we've had to go in and try and re-educate those people to this same idea central idea we're trying to put across we have to keep working at that because as I say they'll give us lip service but they don't give us the cooperation that a full realization would bring about the public attitude is not changed overnight it takes that persistency of effort and we i hope will be in a position to continue to give that persistancy of effort in this direction until the public does accept alcoholism the same as it accepts diabetes the same as it accepts cancer, tuberculosis, and other diseases, and that the person who is afflicted with that disease will be sent for treatment. As it is right now, our referrals are coming in, but we're only scratching the surface. Actually, the work we're doing is just surface scratching. We've treated about 1,500 people through our commission facilities since we set them up. Of that 1, 500, I know in all certainty there are about 750 of those people that are on the beam and doing well. There's about 750 that are flopping around. Now, I think the percentage is just the same as the percentage we find in the statistics of Alcoholics Anonymous. It must necessarily be so, because after all, if a person is going to remain sober, they have to join a group of Alcoholic Anonymous and work at it. So our percentage has been pretty good. Now, in New Mexico this last year, there has been a 30% increase in the membership of AA. In a lot of other states, there's been a decrease in the membership in Alcoholics Anonymous. There are some states here, we got the new directory the other day and compared it with the 1953 directory, there has been an increase in Alcoholic Anonymous in this last year nationwide of 1.4 percent and that was a shocking thing as far as i was concerned when i read it i became quite alarmed about it since then i've kind of taken a little bit better perspective of it there's a lot of states here that the membership in aa has fallen off considerably california had a 21 drop colorado had a 15 and a half percent drop it says here according to the statistics to make a comparison in numbers. There was a 25 and 8 tenths percent drop in Michigan. Minnesota had a 6 and 9 tenths drop. Missouri had a 4% increase, Montana had a 31.7% drop, but in New Mexico we come up with a 30.9% increase. The average AA group today that I've observed in the state meetings that I have attended it has composed just about 50-50 people who have graduated from the lodges and these rehabilitation centers that the commission set up. And yet we've only come up with a 30% increase. I wonder sometimes what has happened to the rest of the membership of AA. I was talking with the executive director of the Utah State Commission on Alcoholism, And he said, well, Bill Wilson was worried something about that thing too. And it came around to one conclusion, and that was that the sponsorship of new members in AA is not being practiced to the extent that it should be practiced. Somehow or another we have seemingly developed a bunch of armchair philosophers who sit back and deter any enthusiastic people from going out to help the guy that's in need. Now there is a measure of that, we know, and there always has been. and AA does depend for its lifeblood on new people those new people do have to have strong enthusiastic sponsors at a convention like this that new ideas are developed new enthusiasms are brought into existence well we can go out and do that kind of sponsorship and I know that when you get through with this convention and you will be working on your sponsorship in your group as a whole a great deal more than you did before you came to the convention. There's hardly a group that can't stand better sponsorships. I know up in our group in Santa Fe, that's one of the subjects that comes up from time to time. Somebody's yacking about, well, we're not sponsoring them right, and so on. But generally the people who are doing most of the hollering about sponsorships sponsorships are the ones that when we call on the phone are too busy to go call on somebody, and it always falls back on the set few that are willing to actually extend themselves that really believe that going out and working on a sick alcoholic is the safest immunity against drinking. As Ed said, he didn't relish the idea of going out and calling on some of these people. Well, perhaps one of those things we see when we do go out to make a call, aren't pleasant. But by gosh, it is awful pleasant to go back into that same home a month or two later and see the difference, not only in the home, but in the kids and the family. There is the big payoff. Those kids who didn't have clean clothes, who had dirty faces, who were starved, who were bewildered, worried, and tear-stained, now have blossomed into what they were meant to be. beautiful creatures of god and then that's the thing that tugs at everybody's heart that has that experience that's a big fail we don't make any money doing this work but we certainly get the payoff in seeing those kids so they can go back to school face their playmates study their lessons and really have a joy in living and playing something that alcoholism had robbed them of in the past. Now that's the big payoff that I know a good many here in the room have found. I found it, and I wouldn't take a million dollars for the experience in seeing some of those people and those kids at play. now most of this as you recognize has come out of clear blue sky the whole idea there of phil wilson's suggestion when in doubt sit quietly asking for direction and strength we've done some other marvelous things there i saw a big two block long shopping center created by exactly that same method up in santa fe by a bunch of ex-drunks starting with absolutely nothing except a few sketches on the on some butcher paper no money nothing except the faith in and dependence on a power greater than themselves and i had a party in that using exactly these same things and i helped finance that thing we were able to move the shopping center of Santa Fe from where it had been around the plaza downtown a mile and a half south into a totally new area which is now the new heart of Santafe. This thing does work, and it works concretely in business, in family relations, in spiritual relations, and in every area that I've ever put it to the test. That's why I want to suggest that you do take that page 22 and 23 of that big book and really work at it. There's a lot of things in that big look that we learn new ideas from. Over in Chapter 5 up in our group, we always read the first two and a half pages of that and get past the reading of the 12 steps and wind up that we are not saints and do not claim spiritual perfection and so forth. But going on into the discussion of step three, where we made a decision to turn our will and our life over to the care of God as we understood him, we find some wonderful discussion there and we go into that and it's done all of us a world of good there because I do like that phrase and it's a promise to each and every one of us that says as we felt new power flow in as we enjoyed peace of mind as we discovered that we could save life successfully as we became conscious of his presence we began to lose all fear of today tomorrow and the hereafter we were reborn. Thank you very much for listening to me. Art, I think I can speak for the entire group that we certainly appreciated that fine talk.