Step 1 Is Not Saying You’re an Alcoholic — It’s Admitting You Have No Power at All – Ray O.

About This Speaker Tape

Ray O'Keefe speaks at Founders Day in Akron, 1976, bringing greetings from the Mamaroneck Group in New York. He grew up Irish in a rough New York City neighborhood where his mother drank and his brother Billy was the neighborhood drunk. Ray took his first drink at 14 or 15, loved everything about it instantly, and was thrown out of high school a record number of times before escaping to a New England college, then the Navy, then law school, where he briefly became a grind before Wall Street introduced him to the very dry martini.

By 34 he was a law professor, married to Stephanie, living in a semi-authentic colonial in Larchmont with five or six children, and a terrific daily drunk. His mornings began kneeling over a toilet bowl with every faucet running so his family wouldn't hear, then carrying his own wet sheets downstairs because his wife refused to wash a 34-year-old bed-wetter. He kept a quart of vodka in the refrigerator his children called daddy's juice, stole twenty dollars a morning from petty cash at the law school, drank through Grand Central's tunnel saloons, and wept every night when the Star Spangled Banner played at sign-off.

Locked in a Stanford, Connecticut mental hospital on his 35th birthday, he conned three psychiatrists with three different childhood stories until a tall man from the Darien AA group walked in, told him to sit down and shut up, and took him to his first meeting. Ten months later he was drunk again and stayed out for a brutal period that cost him his tenured faculty position and nearly everything else. What he now calls the real damage was a terrible wasting of his spirit.

His day finally came in his office when he called his sponsor John, who told him don't drink, go to the meetings. John put him on a train to Larchmont where his mailman Al, chairman of the Mamaroneck group, was waiting on the platform. He hasn't had a drink since. The back half of the talk walks through the Twelve Steps as the early members actually lived them — powerlessness, belief, decision, inventory, amends, prayer — closing with the John the Baptist passage from A Member's View, reporting only what he has seen and heard: the blind see, the lame walk, the sick are made well, and the good news is brought to the poor in spirit.

Topics

Timestamps

• 0:00 Opens with greetings from the Mamaroneck Group, 11-to-7 vote, and Pete Mixon the pigeon
• 4:00 Irish New York neighborhood, mother Kitty, brother Billy, first drink at 14 or 15
• 9:00 New England college, Navy minesweeper, wet bunk and nephritis attacks
• 14:00 Law school grind, Wall Street firm, discovering the very dry martini
• 19:00 Marriage to Ms. O'Keefe, law professorship at 26, trying to control drinking
• 24:00 Daily drunk at 34 — wet bed, daddy's juice in the fridge, stealing from petty cash
• 30:00 Crying every night at the Star Spangled Banner sign-off, weekends saved for binges
• 34:00 The shrine room confrontation with his wife and the obstetrician's diagnosis
• 38:00 Locked in Stanford CT mental hospital on 35th birthday, conning three psychiatrists
• 44:00 Darien AA man visits, first meetings, ten-month slip and wasting of the spirit
• 52:00 Sponsor John: don't drink, go to meetings; Al the mailman at the Larchmont station
• 58:00 Walks through the Twelve Steps as the early members lived them, closing with John the Baptist passage