Step 1 Is the Only Step You Take One Hundred Percent — Everything Else Is Decision and Action – Joe M.

About This Speaker Tape

Joe McQ. opens by celebrating the gift of being invited to speak at home in Arkansas, noting his sobriety date of March 10, 1962. He frames the talk around the AA formula of what it was like, what happened, and what it's like now, but insists the most important piece is the 'what happened' miracle. He confesses that for years his real problem was that he was an alcoholic who didn't know it, and that ignorance, not just alcohol, nearly killed him.

He walks through a drinking history that produced no success, only wreckage: a first marriage that failed, repeated returns to his father's house in Louisville, his father loaning him money only to leave town, and a trip to Little Rock by Greyhound to mooch off his sister. There he met Lou Bell at her church, oversold himself as a stable young man, married her on Christmas Eve, and within a week of the honeymoon checked himself into the old Arkansas State Hospital nut house, where no one on staff ever mentioned alcoholism to him.

The turning point came on a barstool in March 1962 when he simply gave up on himself. He went back to the state hospital, and a fellow patient named Oral handed him a Big Book and a carton of Camels and told him three AA men would come Wednesday night with coffee and cigarettes. Joe went for the smokes and got a new life. He met his sponsor Charlie, who refused to meddle and only told what he himself had done. As a Black man in 1962 Arkansas AA, Joe describes Neil quietly asking him to come to early-morning meetings but not to linger over coffee, and the Marin Hotel state conference where Jim and others surrounded him after the meeting and made him part of the fellowship.

He closes by tracing the lineage of the program from Dr. Rush in 1787, through the Washingtonians who had fellowship but no program and collapsed, to Silkworth, Jung, Rowland, Ebby, and Bill, and the Oxford Group action steps that became the Twelve Steps. His charge to the room: AA is a vessel, and our job is to make sure the message of recovery is still on board for the next alcoholic when we get off.

Topics

Timestamps

• 0:00 Joe introduces himself, sober since March 10, 1962, grateful to be invited to speak at home
• 3:00 The unique illness that tells the victim he ain't got it; years of suffering from ignorance
• 8:00 First drink on Thanksgiving 40 years ago; ease and comfort pursued to the gates of insanity
• 13:00 Father lending him money only to leave town; prodigal son who wasn't welcomed
• 18:00 Arrives Little Rock broke at Greyhound station with a suitcase tied with a necktie
• 22:00 Meets Lou Bell at his sister's church, oversells himself, married Christmas Eve, in the nut house within a week
• 30:00 Wino named Van pouring level glasses of wine tells Joe he's drinking too much
• 36:00 Surrender on a barstool March 10, 1962; gives up on himself and returns to state hospital
• 42:00 Patient Oral gives him a Big Book and Camels; three AA men come to the ward Wednesday night
• 55:00 Neil asks him to come to early meetings but not linger; Jim surrounds him at the 1962 Marin Hotel conference