The Celebrity Alcoholic Who Just Wanted to Live the Story – Lyle P.

And so today we have the special privilege of Lyle coming to read his story for us. And we don't limit this to an hour. It's going to be however long it takes for him to do that. And then as an extra special treat, Gay, whose story is Winner Takes All in the fourth edition, she's goingto be interviewing Lyle at the end. And like I say, if you have questions, put them in the chat to me and we will ask them at the end, and after he reads his story and after the interview, then we will unmute everybody and open the chat, and then you may thank Lyle, our speaker, and share whatever you'd like with him after. Does that meet your approval, Lyle? Sure, I'm fine with that. All right, and dann when you start, would you please say your name, maybe where you're from, your sobriety date, what your story is, the page in the fourth edition it's on um you're welcome to share how it got in the book whatever you would like to and then as your story just share whatever you'd like or if it says a city you're welcome to put that and i don't know about anybody else but you know when we had somebody do it a couple weeks ago i wrote a lot of notes in my in my big book that filled in the blanks in the story So, Lyle, I am turning it over to you. Thank you so much for sharing with us. Okay. My name is Lyle. I'm an alcoholic. My sobriety date is March the 7th of 1990. I live in Stockbridge, Georgia, which is on the outskirts of Atlanta. I'm not from Georgia. I grew up in Kansas and Oklahoma. mention a little bit about the Big Book story I had listened to Karen's story and the mechanical process that she went through as far as her story was concerned is totally completely different from mine it was the summer of 1998 and I was not aware that a fourth edition was coming up. I just didn't know about it, and a number of people here in Georgia were pushing me to write my story, and even though I don't have any qualms about writing for some particular reason that I'm not even aware of, I really didn't want to do it, and uh so the summer was progressing and and um i'm going to meetings and this keeps coming up and i i thought there was a publishing deadline looked into it a little bit there was publishing deadline and i was kind of trying to drag my heels until the publishing deadline got here then i could just say well it's too late to do it and what i found was i started kind of avoiding certain people at meetings because i didn't want to really talk about it and i wasn't eager to write the story then instead of hanging around and talking after the meetings i'd i would kind of clear the area because i couldn't lie to him tell him i'd done it and I was tired kind of tired about talking about it. And finally I told my wife I said you know what i said this is i'm making too big a deal out of this thing and i said it's the easier softer way really is just write the story send it off and then it's done and over with and and it's out of my hair so that's what i did i just sat down and zipped off the story and sent it off and it was done and i had um zero expectation of it being published and beyond that i really didn't care. I'd just basically done it to kind of get it done and over with so that I could say that it was gone. And I'm not sure when it was. I think maybe it was about a month later. Maybe it's a couple of weeks. I don't remember. I got a call from a lady in New York City, and she said she was with the GSO, and they had received my story and she was calling people to let them know that the stories had reached the gso and they they had them and she said it was going to take two or three years to sort through all the stories and select the ones that were going into the big book and she would call me back when and if my story was eliminated and i thanked her for calling me i said i'm sure you're making a lot of calls a lot of stories and i appreciate the time you took but i said you don't you really don't need to call me back i said um i i just wrote the story really to kind of get it done get some folks here in georgia off my back and uh i i said I I really I said I got to live the story I don't really need to read about it but i said thanks for calling me anyway so we concluded the conversation and i forgot about it i completely forgot about um for reasons i've already mentioned and so nearly three years had gone by and um an event took place that was not in the story it was a huge event um and and i'll talk about that in a minute but a couple of weeks later uh barbara comes in and she said i have a letter here from alcoholics anonymous in new york city she said you know what this is about i said no i have no idea what it's about i says i know they don't send mail out so i said i'm i don't know what their what the letter's about so anyway barbora went inside i opened the letter and the first sentence i've got the letter framed over here and the letter says greetings from the gso in new york and the second sentence says we're pleased to inform you your story has been selected for publication in the fourth edition and i almost fell over i just almost fell over i completely forgot about it i had zero expectation that it was going to be published and i really didn't care and i walked into barbara and i there was a kind of exploit expletive i can't say here but i said do you believe this stuff i said look at this letter And that's how it came about. So I didn't, I mean, it was a really pleasant surprise and I was stunned by it, frankly. But if I'm talking someplace or at an A conference, always ask that there be no mention of that. I know how we react to people whose stories are in the big book, but I don't believe any of us are celebrities. After I'd gotten this information, it was in May when I got it, I didn't tell anybody. I told two or three people. I told a sponsor, and I told one sponsee whose meeting was south of me in another short distance from the Atlanta area. And I was at that meeting. I went down there at a meeting one time with him after this had happened, and some guy came up to me, and he said he was an old-timer. And he kind of looked around really furtively. He's kind of looking around and kind of cozies up to me. He said, and he almost whispers. He says, is it true your story is going to be in the big book? And I said, well, I said I got a letter saying so. And he looks around again like we're having this top secret conversation. And he kind of whispers again. He says gosh, he says I've never known anybody whose story was in the big book. So I did what he did. I started looking around like we were in a top secret conversation. And I whispered back. I said, neither have I. So that's kind of, you know, that's the big book story. It's nice that it's in there and it's pleasant and it was pleasing, but it doesn't make me anybody special. And I don't believe in a celebrity stuff. Fortunately, we don't see it very often. I've seen it a few times. I've sent several times, usually from a particular part of the country. But I'm just not a celebrity. I'm glad the story is in there. Like I said, it came as a complete shock and a surprise. Now, the part that's not in there, the story had gone in in the summer. It was June or July, somewhere around in there of 98. And I retired from Northwest Airlines in September, the last of September 29th, 1998, when I turned 60. And within a day or two, now the story has already been sent in. And within a day or two of my retirement, I got a phone call from the attorney who had defended me eight years earlier in this massive trial up in the Twin Cities, Minneapolis, St. Paul. He's now my friend. He's not my attorney, but he said, I just got a call from Judge Rosenbaum. Judge Rosenbaum was the judge who tried me, sentenced me and sent me to prison. And I'll get into that. But he was probably the toughest judge up there, at least one of them. My attorney says, I don't know if you're aware of it, but Judge Rosen Baum is now chief judge of the Minnesota Federal District. And I said, no, I wasn't aware of that. he said judge rosenbaum just called me and told me that in 16 years on the federal bench he has never ever supported a petition for pardon but he will support yours if you're if you want to make the attempt i had never even considered such a thing Judge Rosenbaum wrote a three-page affidavit that sits over here to my right it's in my safe and it is an amazing document it is chokingly emotionally powerful and I read this document and I can't believe that they were penned by the man who sent me to prison and I have read that document probably 30 or 40 times if I had to sit here and read it in front of you folks I would have tears in my eyes by the time I get to page 3 it's that powerful it's an affidavit on my behalf and there was a two year investigation by the FBI on me and two years later I came walking in And there were eight telephone messages telling me I just received a presidential pardon from Bill Clinton. That's an amazing thing if you've got a federal felony conviction. It's just mega huge life changing. Everyone sitting here knows that a felony conviction is bad, but unless you've Got one, you have no idea how bad it really is. And that's not in the big book story because it came afterwards. so having kind of told you about that part of it let me go ahead and read the story that I sent in I don't remember how I entitled it but it wasn't what the AA folks did this call grounded the other thing they changed a number of things in there but I didn't care once I give something to someone once it leaves my hands it's no longer mine it's theirs and they can do with it what they wish uh i had put my name in there i'd said that my name is lyle and i'd even used uh my wife barbara's name because i remembered uh dr paul's story where he talked about his wife max and uh they took all that out i had said that i was from the plains of kansas they took that out that's okay but anyway the entitled Grounded. It's on page 522, the fourth edition. Grounded, and they put this little thing in there. I just almost can see this coming. Alcohol clipped this pilot's wings until sobriety and hard work brought it back to the sky. Now here's my story. I'm an alcoholic. I am part Comanche Indian, and I grew up poor but in a loving home until alcoholism took both of my parents. Then the divorces came, three for each parent. And I learned the anger that such an alcoholic family life. I vowed I would never be an alcoholic. Active in my Indian community, I saw what the alcohol did there also. And I was repelled and disgusted by it. I graduated from high school at 17. This was in 1956. I graduated high school. I graduated form high school, 17, and immediately left to join the Marine Corps. I found a home there, relishing the tough discipline, camaraderie, and esprit de corps. I excelled and was one of three who were promoted upon graduation from boot camp. Four and a half years later, I was given an opportunity to go into flight training. Success at the end of the 18-month period would mean pilot wings and an officer's commission. But with regard to this, I had always excelled. My parents both died from alcoholism. But prior to that, before all of that happened, I saw a work ethic that they demonstrated to me that is part of my genetic makeup. I'm willing to work. I'll do whatever I have to do. I don't care how dirty you have to get, how sweaty, how hot, how tired. I will do what I have to do in order to get the job done and I'm deeply in their debt for having that. This program that came out after I'd been on the Marine Corps four and a half years was a program called Marine Aviation Cadet and my commanding officer called me in and he said you're the only Marine in the unit whose entry score which was at that time called the gct score general classification test i don't really know what that means or why it's there but he said you're the only one whose gct is high enough to go test for this flight training program if you care to do so and i'd always wanted to fly but that was not a that was Not on my real reality radar scope i pilots i knew had to have college educations and they didn't come from a world war ii housing project they didn'T come from an alcoholic home and they Didn'T come from the Native American segment. But he's telling me that if I want to go test, I can do so. And I said, I'd like to do that. So I tested and it was pretty much an all day affair and I passed. He then said, I need to tell you a little bit more about this. He said, this is an 18 month program. And he said, on average, plus or minus, about half don't make it. And he says, the other thing you need to know is you're coming in the back door as an enlisted Marine. And he said, everyone coming in from the civilian side, which will be about 98, 99% of the people in this cadet program must have a minimum of two years college. And those will be the, and most will have more. And those would be the people you'll be in there with. Well, I could do the thinking part of that. I knew that if he's telling me that about half don't make it and that everyone else has to have two years college to enter this program, I know that I'm on the high probability end of not making it due to the educational deficit that I was in. That's what I'm starting off with. But I said, I want to try. So I went home to Wichita, Kansas, my hometown. I was getting ready to go to Pensacola the next day. they were having a powwow I'd been active I was a dancer been active in the powwows and they asked me to come out and lead an honoring dance because I'm going to Pensacola the next day to start this grand adventure and I did so for the next 18 months the driving thought in my brain was I cannot return to the native community as a failure that i can't i'm the only one in this community in wichita it's got the opportunity to get this set of gold wings this beautiful set of golden marine corps navy navy marine corps wings and a commission that goes with it and a career that's exciting and glamorous and prestigious and i i just simply could not go back as a failure and that that was at the front of my mind the entire 18 months i was in flight training let me see where i'm at here success at the end of the 18-month period would mean pilot wings and an officer's commission again i excelled there were four flights of four phases to flight training and i was the number two guy in each one of those phases and i And I was always surprised by that. I was a little bit stunned. I didn't believe that I was doing as well as my grades indicated, and I'm watching my friends wash out weekly, sometimes daily, and I just didn't believe that I was doing as well as my flight grades tended to indicate. And I was really scared I was going to wash out. I just knew that it was going And although most of my peers had college educations and fear of failure constantly plagued me, I graduated near the top of my class. I excelled in something else also. Drinking was encouraged and the pilot persona was one of hard, gutsy flying with equally hard drinking. And attendance at happy hour was considered a duty. I did not need any encouragement and reveled in the squadron camaraderie, good natured joking and competition at these events. One year into my training, I reported for the final phase and met a young beauty. I was drunk the night I met her and she would have nothing to do with me, but I could never have approached her without the false courage alcohol gave me. It was an interesting night. I had gotten drunk with a bunch of my friends at the officer's club, the training base, Kingsville, Texas. And they said, let's go into town. We've got kind of an inside track and there's some really good looking South Texas girls. And there were. And so I went in with them. And I was never very gutsy with the gals, but I'd had lots of drink. I was really pretty drunk. and i hung back until they had gone after this carload of girls i noticed the driver wasn't talking to anyone and finally i approached her i'd stood back there and drank and i'd rehearsed a whole bunch of things to say that i thought exceeded my norm and um so i went up to her and the minute she turned to me she was very pretty i saw big brown eyes and that was struck me and i made a comment about her eyes but i hadn't been doing any talking i should have been practicing because it came out all sideways and was slurred like sometimes we get when when we're really really loaded and i did my words were so slurring i didn't even know what i was saying i kind of like as as around something like that and and i didn t i couldn't even understand what i'm saying and she looked at me like i just urinated on the side of her car and i was embarrassed i just turned around walked away and um keep losing my place here i could never approach her out the false courage the alcohol gave me the next day i saw her again this time sober and we began to date i graduated from flight training on her 20th birthday and she pinned my gold wings and second lieutenant bars on me that was on february 25th 1963 she had just turned 20 that day and it was a it was an incredible day. Hollywood couldn't have scripted the day any better. I'd finally completed this monumental task that I'd taken on, flight training, 18 months of really intense training and achievement and accomplishment and I was done. I was done. And I could now go home. I had those wings. I had that commission and I had this good looking girl who thought I was okay. And I graduated from white training on her 20th birthday and she pinned my gold wings a second lieutenant bar zombie. We were married two weeks later, we've just celebrated our 35th anniversary and she's the most wonderful person I could ever have found. Well in March coming up here next month it will be 61 years. We immediately had two young sons and I left to go to war in Vietnam. 13 months later, I returned. I spent 11 and a half years total time in the Marine Corps before deciding to get out because of the family separation my military career required. I had seen enough family chaos to know that I could never allow that to occur in my own family. So reluctantly, even painfully, I resigned my commission and joined a major airline. I had gained a reputation in the Marines that I was proud of. I had many accomplishments, to my credit, a good combat record with decorations and skill as a pilot. Some of you know Sandy Beach. Sandy Beach and I were very close friends. Sandy was another Marine pilot. And I was so grateful that my alcoholism did not destroy my military career like it did Sandy's. that I was able to get out and maintain. I had a military career that I was quite proud of 11 years before the alcoholism hit, but of course it took me when I got into my airline career. Slowly, I worked my way up within the airline structure and finally became a captain after 20 years. It had been a strife-ridden company and our family endured some tough times. During one of the lengthy labor strikes, we adopted a baby girl she completed our family nearly half Chippewa Indian and she was a beautiful baby of 17 days when we took her home with us my drinking continued to escalate let me just hold here Barbara had wanted a daughter we had the two sons and we decided to adopt and it was difficult because we had two biological kids and we fought really hard for 14 months and we got this little girl and I had friends who had daughters and I always frankly I felt kind of bad for him. I had two sons. I really relished my sons when Dawn came home to live with us. I then learned what little girls do their dads. She just absolutely became the center of my universe. My little girl was so, so special and adoption was only a word for me. She could not be more my daughter than if she'd come from my bloodline. I just, I loved her so much. My drinking continued to escalate, but I did not believe I was different from my drinking comrades. I was very wrong. I had two charges of driving under the influence years apart, which I wrote off to bad luck. I paid handsome legal fees to get the charges reduced. This was years before the Federal Aviation Administration began cross-checking driver's records against pilot licenses. On this second DWI that I got, it was in 1975 and the DWI at that point in time was not the end of the world. It certainly wasn't a fun experience, but I had friends who had DWIs. And I knew that what I needed to do was get an attorney who would represent me. I would pay a $300 fine if things went according to routine, and I would end up with a careless driving ticket. So I went to court. I did this. I went into court expecting this to occur, and it didn't. The judge ordered me to go to AA for a year. I had never heard of that or seen that happen before, and I was absolutely furious. First, I wasn't going to do it. Then I changed my mind and decided to do It. As I just mentioned, the FAA was not cross-checking driver's licenses at that point in time with pilot licenses and driving licenses. But I just decided that I didn't want DWI on my license. I'm not on a record as a pilot. So very angrily, I agreed to go and I figured out a way to thwart the system. Every time we landed someplace, I didn't care what city it was in. I pulled out the hotel phone book of the room phone book and I wrote down the address, the name of the facility there. And I created this meeting around supposed to, I think, attend three meetings a week or something like that. And so I'm building this list of fictitious meetings, none of which I'm attending. And about once a month, I tell Barbara, I guess I better go to one of those meetings just in case somebody has to say they saw me. Now, I'd gone to one meeting after I was ordered to do this and I was in the meeting about five minutes. And I looked around and I listened to people talking and I decided that it was a cult. It was an absolute cult. I was convinced of that. And these people that were talking were foaming at the mouth cult members. I thought, God, if somebody has two beers in one week, they think they're an alcoholic. They need to go to AA. And I hated AA and the people in it. I just just detested it. And i had an attitude that exhibited that. And so I'd go to this one meeting once a month and I'd almost get in a fight with somebody. And I had a quick temper because I didn't like them and they didn't like, well, they would call me on my stuff and I didn'T like that. And I would come home really angry. And I tell Barbara, that's the most screwed up bunch of people I've ever seen in my life. I'd say, my God almighty, they lose their homes or cars or wives or kids or jobs. They can't figure it out. And I sit around and I talk about it for a whole hour. And I'd said, God, let's just have a drink. And I've mixed the strongest drink I could possibly choke down. I didn't like booze straight, but I would mix a horribly strong drink, choke it down sometimes too, right after my AA meeting, just so I could chill out after an hour with you folks. One night after a hard afternoon and late evening of drinking, I and my two fellow flight crew members were arrested. We were charged with violation of a federal law that prohibits the operation of a common carrier while impaired. It had never been used against airline pilots before. I was devastated. Suddenly, I was thrust into an experience beyond my worst nightmare. That whole day that I was arrested, I spent 12 hours being questioned by attorneys, FAA officials, airline pilot association union people. It was surreal. this could not be happening to me this was not how I had lived my life this represented the very antithesis of everything that I had struggled to achieve and believed was good and worthy and worthwhile my whole life I felt like sometimes I was suspended in space watching this happen to somebody else that it's just not possible this could be happening to me and yet it was and then I have those moments of just what I call gut grinding reality where I'm sitting there looking around at all the activity going on all around me and it was all I could do not to get sick and throw up it was incredibly devastating to me but it's good that it was because otherwise I would never have gotten sober it took something like this for me to actually hit a bottom I would have died exactly like my parents did and I've got two suicides in my family an uncle and a cousin from alcohol and drugs had this not happened to me I would've joined them I arrived home the next day sick at heart and unable to look my wife in the face ashamed and destroyed I saw two doctors that day and was diagnosed an alcoholic I was in treatment that night going in with only the clothes on my back The news media had picked up the story and it was blared all over the world on all the major television networks. And my shame and humiliation were beyond words because I was the first airline pilot in the United States ever arrested and tried, convicted and sent to federal prison for flying a commercial airliner into the infants. This story generated massive, massive, massive media attention that went on just relentlessly. It's not a big deal today. If you see a pilot's name show up because TSA pulled him out, he smelled of alcohol. You don't see him on day two of the news cycle. It's an old story now. His life is never going to be the same again, but it's not in the news. I was on the news constantly, relentlessly the late night comics had it all the tabloids had it I couldn't escape it excuse me all the light in my life had gone out and I entertained the idea of suicide I could not envision ever smiling again or having a day with a bright horizon I was hurting more than I ever knew a human could hurt and I just wanted the pain to end I became notorious in commercial aviation, and the media had a field day with me. I lost my FAA medical certificate because of my diagnosis of alcoholism and the FAA's emergency revocation of all my licenses. I thought about my parents, now both dead, my Indian people, and all those I had previously considered alcoholics, and I knew I'd become exactly what I vowed I would never become. I learned my career was over. We had the six o'clock news one week after entering treatment. I refused to watch TV. Treatment center had two TV sets, so I wouldn't go near either one of them. But my fellow patients kept me informed. I was the lead story on the news for weeks. I was joke fodder for the late night TV comics as they ridiculed me, my profession, and my airline. I was a kid another part of the story that's not in there is that, and I don't have time to go into here is that in June of 19, this happened in 1990 in June of 1996 Jay Leno called me and apologized to me for all the monologues that he had done about me another story that I don' t have time for I also learned I was going to federal prison the sentence was mandatory of convicted and there was no doubt in my mind that i would be with nothing left i dedicated myself to learning about recovery i fervently believe that the key to my sobriety and hence my survival lay in the power of all i was being taught and i spent no idle moments in treatment every night we had a relaxation hour out in the certain commons area But there was TV set out there, and I wouldn't go out there. So I stayed in my room, and counselors would come in. They'd say, are you isolating? I said, no. There were exercises in this treatment workbook that nobody did. They did a first-step exercise, and they did a life story. But all these other exercises went undone, and nor were they actually required to be done. I did every single one of them because I had nothing to do but work on recovery. I did not want to be in front of that TV set. I worked as hard as I had worked to get my own my wings, but this time my life was at stake. I struggled to regain a spiritual connection, so I underwent, as I under went one legal crisis after another. In Vietnam, I saw people die. I was aware of my own mortality. i felt i had connected you know i grew up in the native culture so i had a spiritual connection that was that was kind of co-located with organized religion they they blended and i used both of them but somehow or other i had lost that and in treatment i'd seen step three and i was trying i know it just says made a decision but i was showing trying so hard to make that connection come true again. And it seemed like I just couldn't bridge the gap. I underwent six legal crises while I was in there. Excuse me. When this incident happened, And I knew that I was going to have real serious problems with FAA. I knew I was gonna lose my career, but none of the lawyers believe there was any going to be legal consequences. They didn't know about this law that was on the book. And during my treatment, they would come take me out of a group every day and a half to two days and give me the latest bad news. Minnesota first indicted me. I'm looking at 90 days in jail as a misdemeanor. I couldn't do 90 days in jail. I'd never been in jail the only time I thought I would be locked up was as a POW in Vietnam if I was shot down but a POW at least had a noble purpose to it and I didn't have that here then North Dakota indicted me then it bounced back and forth two more times as they doubled the penalties then the magistrate and then my federal marshals were going to take me out of treatment so I could appear in magistrate court for an arraignment Then finally, the last time they called me in, there was a doctor there standing by the door as I exited the group. He took me to his office and I sat down. He made me sit down. My counselor was there. He said, I have to tell you, federal government has just indicted you. You're looking at 15 years in federal prison. A $250,000 fine. And I just learned he's coming in Sunday with $50,000, which I didn't have. We went broke within 30 days of my arrest. then the doctor looked up and he said I have to ask if you're going to do anything to hurt yourself and I said no but it felt like every nerve ending in my body had shorted out, I had no feeling, I was numb I couldn't fathom 15 years in federal prison and I left and I went back to my room and I collapsed in my room and my head was on the side of the carpet, I'm crying for the second time in treatment and I didn't talk about the first time I'm not going to right now because I don't have time. But I was trying for the second time in treatment. I couldn't believe 15 years in federal prison. And the only prayer I could get out was, God, I don'T have anything left. I can't do this anymore. I've done it six times. I can'T do it even one more time. Please help me. And I slept that night. I got out of treatment, determined to complete 90 meetings in 90 days and was afraid my court date would interfere. So I completed my 90 meetings and 67 days. The first time I had gone to AA. And I heard them talk about 90 meetings at 90 days. I was appalled by that. I was and I thought, are you serious? I have never heard of anything more punitive than doing 90 AA meetings in90 days. Who would do that? By the time I got out of treatment. That was near and dear to my heart. I knew that I had to get those 90. I wanted to do those 90 meetings. Massive changes had taken place inside my life as a result of Alcoholics Anonymous, this program, and the fact that I was now buying into it. I went through an intense media cover three week trial on most evenings after the day in court I sought refuge in AA meetings and renewed my strength for the coming day I was the only alcoholic in the group I didn't have much recovery but I had some and I could go to a meeting at night to try to get some strength forthecomingday And when I walk into a meeting, it was scary because I'm all over TV. And the minute I walk in the room, they know who I am. And it would take me a few minutes to settle down and understand I'm in a safe place. And I never shared. I never share it, but I sat and I listened. And I absorbed the power that's in the air of a room full of alcoholics. It was palpable and I could feel it. And I would take it to the courtroom the next day. recovery and all I had learned allowed me to handle things much differently than my two co-defendants. Many spoke of my serenity throughout the experience of horror, which surprised me because I did not feel what others seemed to see. I was found guilty and sentenced to 16 months in federal prison. My two co defendants received 12 month sentences and choose, chose to remain free pending appeals. while I chose to go into prison and get it over. A day and a half before sentencing, I received a phone call from my then attorney. He said, Judge Rosenbaum has notified the other two attorneys and the media that he's going to go beyond the sentencing guidelines, which were 12 to 18 months at that time. I knew I was going to get 18 months because I was the captain. But he could go all the way to 15 years. he had that discretion and he had strong feelings about this case. And I saw him every day for three weeks and I did not begrudge him those feelings. I knew that I represented the greatest example of a betrayal of the public trust that had ever taken place up to that point in time. I knew it. I accepted the responsibility for it. I didn't make any excuses for it and I knew he was entirely justified in the way he felt. So when this, I got this phone call the day and a half before. That feeling of horror and terror that penetrated all the way to my bone marrow hit me again. And I'd had that experience many times since the arrest. And I told Barbara, I said, this is step one. I'm powerless. I am powerless over what's about to happen tomorrow. I said it's a serenity prayer. I have to accept the things I cannot change. and I sat in that and I absorbed that and that's exactly what I went into the courtroom with the next day I did not think I would be coming back I gave my personal effects to Barbara and I said I think we will be let off in handcuffs the let me see where I'm at here oh Now, when he sentenced us, he surprised all of us because I thought we'd all go to prison immediately. And he said, this law is a complex law. It was not written for aviation personnel. And he says, there'll be legal appeals. I'll let you three men remain free pending the appeals. And I knew I could stay out for another year, year and a half if I did that. and uh i was shocked that he would allow us to do that and i said no i've been convicted and i'll go on in now one other thing that happened here is there was a federal judge that i was in treatment with and he cornered me every time he got the opportunity because of what was going on with me and he said one of the things you need to understand is he said when you go to when you go into the sentencing he said that's a charade he said you'll talk maybe you'll have your attorney will talk maybe you'll even have witnesses but he said that's a charade he said we never change from the bench and over the course of the years i've spoken all over the united states and canada and other places uh judges there have been some judges all of them have corroborated that so i knew that this judge was going to go to a big sentence he was going to disregard the guidelines which have since gone away and he was gonna impose a sentence that he felt personally was appropriate and he could do it. And I knew that nothing that was said during this procedure was going to alter or change that. So when he gave me a sense of 16 months, two months less under the guidelines, after all this publicity, I knew something had happened that morning in the courtroom. I knew a miracle had occurred and I never thought I would know what, why or how that took place. A year or two years later, a year later, I guess my attorney was in chambers with him and he said that morning uh and and when i sentenced lyle he said i was going to sentence him to four years in prison until he said what he said and i thought more about him from the bench and i changed the sentence from the bench the thing that never happens that i was told never happens happened that morning not only did he not send me to prison for four years as he originally intended he sent me to prison for two months less under the guidelines. I learned about that later. I chose to go into prison and get it over. I had learned to live life on life's terms and not my own. From somewhere back in my high school days, I remembered a poem. It wasn't a poem, I was later told it was Shakespeare, that says something to the effect of Cowards die a thousand days, a brave man only one. I wanted to do what had to be done. I was terrified of walking into prison, but told my children that I could not come out the back door until I walked through the front. I remembered that courage was not the absence of fear. It was the ability to continue in the face of it, something I'd learned in the Marine Corps. On the day I entered prison, nine of my fellow pilots began making our family's house payments, which they did for nearly four years. After my release from prison, I made four attempts to get them to let us take over, and they refused each time. So many came to help us from places we could never have imagined. Barbara came in to the prison visiting room two weeks when I was in prison. She laid down a list of nine names in front of me, all of which I recognized. And I knew all of them except two. I knew who they were, those two. I'd spoken to him, I'm sure, but I had no personal relationship with him. And I said, what are these? And she said, those are nine of your fellow pilots. She said, they have gotten in touch with me and they are making our house payments. And I sat there feeling very much like I am right now with tears in my eyes. i served 424 days in the federal prison system i started an a meeting in prison which was opposed by the prison administration and they hassled as weekly as we came together to meet the weekly meeting was a quiet oasis in the desert a few moments of serenity and a prison full of bedlam My prison term was followed by three years of probation, which restricted my travel and had 13 other conditions. When the judge sentenced me, it was clear that I was never going to fly again. Because of the example that I had set, the betrayal of the public trust that I had been engaged in, every conceivable thing was done to make sure that I never ever flew an airplane again. The FAA had done everything they could, and on top of this, the judge put sanctions that made it impossible I would ever fly again. A year later, he lifted those sanctions. That's another story I don't really have time for, but it's another impossibility that took place. And let me see where I am. Upon release from prison, no longer a pilot, I returned to the same treatment center where I had once been a patient and I worked full-time with other alcoholics. Pay was minimal, but I found I was effective at reaching others and I wanted desperately to pay back some of what so many had given me. I did that for 20 months. I made $14,000 a year working in the counseling department at Anchor Hospital. I don't know how we lived off of that. Barbara was working in an office supply place and she was making $6 an hour. Pilots were sending us checks and money sporadically. They did it a lot. It was not anything I could count on, but we had massive support from the pilot and flight attendant group. I still don't know how we lived off of $14,000 a year for nearly two years. For a long time, I did not consider flying again, but I could not purge the dream of doing so from my heart. One of my meditation books had said, before any dream can come true, there must first be a dream. I had been told if I wanted to fly again, I would have to begin at the very bottom with a private license. even though I had previously held the highest license the FAA awarded, the Air Transport Pilot License. Initially, I thought if I could achieve, once again, the rigorous exam, the written exam and the rigorous flying part of the highest licence the FIA had, they would waive all the lower licences. That was my hope. They said no. If you want to fly again, you will start with the lowest license we have, the private. And then you will literally earn your licenses from the ground up and from that point on. I didn't think it could be done. None of my fellow pilots thought it could been done. And then I thought everything I do in here is one day at a time. I will do the licenses one license at a times. And that's what I did. Ten and a half months later, I passed the written, which was not an easy task on all four licenses. Let me see where I am here. I had to go back. Let's see. Yeah, the previous license. I studied for and took all the lengthy FAA written exams. I hadto go back and relearn things I'd learned 35 years before and had long since forgotten. I had unexpectedly been able to reacquire my FAA medical license after approving the quality of my sobriety for more than two years. The trial judge, let me tell you a little story about that. There's a program called the HIMSS program. Every major carrier has it except for the airline carrier I work for, Northwest Airlines. They didn't have it at the time. They later acquired it, but they didn'thave it atthe time. And their motto was, we don't have any alcoholic pilots. If we did, we'd fire them. So they didn't engage in this program, which was highly successful, averaging 88 to 92 percent success rate among pilots, which is pretty phenomenal. The. See, I had a point I was going to make here. Oh, so I'm not part of the HIMSS program. I'm terminated from an airline and I don't I'm adrift. I'm alone. I have no access to any of this. so the only thing I could do was the best I could do and I was trying to stay sober the FAA said you have to have two years of demonstrated sobriety and no one could define what that how do you how do You Define Demonstrated Sobriety no one in the FIA could tell me so a doctor I was in treatment with came out to the prison once a month and after inmates would gather and there was a crowd he would go into the restroom I had two stalls, and I would go into the other stall. He would pass a blood test equipment vial to me or a urine test, and I Would urinate, make sure it was clean, give it back to him, and he would run a random urine test on me. And I was making $0.12 an hour in prison. That was $19.20 a month. The random test cost $35, and Bob would pay that out of his pocket. I didn't know if the FAA would accept that or anything. I had no idea. The only thing I could do was the best I could do, and that's what I tried to do. The trial judge had put sanctions on me that made it impossible for me to fly again because of my age. My lawyer had become my friend and worked for three years after my conviction without taking a cent from me. I didn't have anything to give him, but I would have signed a promissory note. And every time I offered to do that, he would say to me Lyle I believe in you and I'm staying to the end wherever that is he was one more person who entered my life in a manner I could only ascribe to some kind of divine providence he took a motion to the judge to lift the sanctions and the tears came flooding down my cheeks when he called to let me know the judge had approved it with the lifting of those sanctions The impossible became slightly less impossible. An extraordinary amount of work was left to do, but at least the attempt could now be made. None of my friends thought it possible to regain licenses literally from the ground up. But I had learned how to do many things one day at a time, one small step at a time, so I went after the licenses in exactly that manner. Had I chosen to view the whole panorama of licensing requirements, I would have quit. They were simply too overwhelming. But one day and one thing at a time, they were doable. So I did them. I knew no one would ever hire me to fly passengers. I was an ex-con, a convicted felon that drunk. That had been put in the headlines all over the place. I can spell the word anonymity and I can pronounce it, but I never had any. My alcoholism was in the headlights. I had doubts as to whether anyone would even allow me to flight cargo. It took several months for the FAA to process my licenses and mail them to me. On the exact day they arrived, another miracle occurred. I received a phone call from the head of the pilot union who informed me that the president of the airline had decided personally to reinstate me. Their grievance had been automatically filed because of my termination. I did not activate that grievance with the union because I had no basis for it. I knew that Northwest Airlines was 100% justified in terminating me for what I did, and I was not going to fight it. This man, when he called me, said to me during the course of my time as head of the union, there were many things that I wanted to do, and I was unsuccessful in doing almost all of them, and I knew that what he was getting ready to tell me was getting you back to work was one more of the things that I'm disappointed in, and I'm just not able to do it. So, I had mentally, emotionally loaded myself to hear that, and then when he said, but this is the best phone call I've ever made because he said in three hours, three hours ago, John Dasberg, President and CEO of Northwest Airlines, man, I'd never even met or seen, made a personal decision to bring you back and put you into full flight status at Northwest. I couldn't believe the words coming through the phone. I was on this emotional train going down the track. And it was like I had to put the brakes on the train and get it to stop and back up before I could process what I just heard coming through the phone, if a pilot's airline is mentioned one time publicly, one time he's done, that's the standard rule. If you bring the airline into publicity one time, you're done. My airline had been dragged through the mud dozens of times, egregiously through the muddy because of what I had done. And this man is going to bring me back and reinstate me. Anticipating a huge public backlash, which did not come, except from Jay Leno. anticipating, and in the face of anticipating a huge backlash publicly, he's still going to do it. And then beyond that extraordinary level of courage, I thought to myself, does he understand that most alcoholics relapse? Someplace I read that seven out of 10 alcoholics relapse. I don't know if that's true or not. I know it's hard. And if I go back and I have a relapse and another explosive incident, the board of directors will not tolerate that. They will boot him out so fast he can't pack his desk and he is in effect gambling his career on mine if I come back and do that he's lost a career why would he do that why would anyone take that kind of gamble and then later I learned that his father's an alcoholic and his father doesn't stay sober. His father stays sober a year or two and goes back out and has all of his lifetime, which added another element to the equation that just stunned me even more. And I said to him once, if that was your picture of sobriety, why would you dare take a chance on me? And he said, I knew some people got sober. He said, I knew something about you. Some people got silver. And he said, I thought you were going to be one of them. I had not pursued the legal grievance process I was entitled to because I knew my actions could never be defended or excused. I had steadfastly accepted responsibility in front of TV cameras and in the treatment center because my recovery demanded rigorous honesty. It was almost beyond my ability to believe that the president of the airline could ever consider having me work for them again. I marveled at the courage of such a man and such an airline. what if I relapsed? What if I flew drunk again? The media would have a field day. For days afterwards, as I awoke each morning, my first thought was it had only been a dream, that it could not possibly have occurred. About four years after my arrest and my explosive devastation of life, I signed my back-to-work agreement, restored to full seniority given the retirement I had lost and once again an airline pilot. A large crowd gathered to watch me sign the document. So much has happened in my life. I lost almost everything I had worked to acquire. My family suffered public shame and humiliation. I'd been the object of scorn, shame, and disgrace. Yet much more had also happened. Every loss had been replaced with rewards. I'd seen the promises of the big good come true in a magnitude I could never have imagined. I'd gotten sober. I'd regained my family, and we were once again close and loving. I'd learned how to use the 12 steps and to live the wonderful program that was founded so many years ago by two drunks. It took several years, but I learned to be grateful for my alcoholism and the program of recovery it forced me into, for all the things that had happened to me and for me and for a life today that transcends and far exceeds anything I had previously known. I could not have that today if I had not experienced all the yesterdays. My back-to-work agreement said I would retire as a co-pilot, but the miracles in this program have never ceased for me. And last year, I was notified that the president of my airline had granted permission for me to once again be a captain. I had just spoken on a Friday night at United Airlines. They had a massive three-day recovery program for their pilots. And I had been the keynote speaker. And I'd said, I will never be a Captain again. But that's okay. That's okay, I cannot believe that I've been given back the right to speak. the gift of flying once more and and the remnants of a career that i'd lost i'm okay with that that night two hours later barbara and i lay in a hospital room it was late it was dark and the phone rang and it's the same pilot and he said john dasberg knows that you're approaching your final year at northwest airlines and he thinks that you should be be a captain again he is changing your back to work agreement so when you come home you're to go to training and you're going to check out as a 747 captain and that's what i did i spent my last year in the left seat of a 7 47 giving back the first thing we lose and the most golden gift of all trust trust he put me in a mega million dollar airplane with 18 flight attendants and 400 passengers and trusted me to fly all around the world because he knew I was sober. There's some stories, there's this beautiful story that goes with that, but I'm not going to go into it right now. I retired at age 60 and I checked out as a 747 captain, which means my final year at my airline concluded in the left seat. The circle, so sacred to my Indian people will once again have been completed. circle represents many things the colors in the circle are red, yellow black and white they represent the four directions they represent the four winds they represent the four seasons of the earth of the of the world and when you look at the colors they also represent the four major races so it's a big deal and and I felt the circle close again when I moved to the left seat. I take little credit for all that has happened. I suited up and showed up. The truth is, I take no credit because I didn't have any power. I didn' t have any power from the moment of the arrest forward. I couldn' t stop or alter what was coming my way, or I would have. And after prison, when I was broke, stripped of everything, I had no power to manufacture, orchestrate, or create any of the miracles that came later. I had no power, and I'm very, very clear about that. I suited up and showed up, but the process of AA, the grace of a loving God, and the help of so many around me have been far more responsible for all the events in my life. Today, one of my sons has more than three and a half years of sobriety after nearly losing his life to alcohol and drugs. He is truly one more miracle in my live for which I am so deeply grateful. I return to my Indian people once again after a long-shamed absence. I'm dancing once again and returning to the old ways I left behind. I've spoken at two Native American AA conventions, something I never thought I'd see when I was a youngster growing up. Adversity truly introduces us to ourselves, but we need never deal with our adversities alone as long as we can find another alcoholic in a meeting of alcoholics and honors. My son stayed sober for a while. And then he went back out. and he was lost to us for about 17 years. He's now, he called me. We had no contact with him for the last nine of those 17 years and he called my dad and he said, Dad, and I said, who is this? He says, Jay. And I said what can I do for you? So I started talking to me and he'd been through four treatment centers and detoxes and was once again trying to get sober. March 19th coming up, he'll have 13 years. He doesn't go to AA, and that's a concern. And his thinking and his attitudes about a lot of stuff reflect the absence of the 12 steps. And I think there's a big difference between being abstinent and being sober. I'm glad he's not drinking. uh his his program is his it's not mine i have concerns about it and their life would be a lot better for everyone if he was going to a and heavily involved but he isn't so i'll take what which is not within my power to dictate um i was going gonna say something else the um he's remarried he's got a beautiful marriage no children he just turned uh 59 this past year but uh and my daughter isn't doing very well she's made a lot of bad life decisions uh the one that we adopted but she's it's not alcohol and drugs one of the things that i learned is that life happens whether we're sober or drinking and uh my job is stay sober no matter what there are a lotof reasons to relapse but i don't see any excuses. I've never seen an excuse and I was sitting exactly where I am right now two and a half years ago, I got a phone call neurologist says I have to tell you that Barbara's spinal fluid came back she's palsy for Alzheimer's and the bottom of my world just dropped away from me she walked in, she was over this door, just as I was still on the phone and I had to tell her She didn't say anything, but I saw tears in her eyes and rolling down her cheeks. And I put my arms around her. And she said, I just hope this isn't something I've passed to our children. March will be 61 years of marriage for us. And she has always put others first, always. And I was pretty raw. And I said, honey, I'd give anything if it was me instead of you. And she hugged me really tight. And she says, I'm sorry. She said, oh, no. she said you'll be able to get along without me but I could never get along without you we're doing some things to fight this that are outside the normal protocols of modern medicine which has nothing to do they have about four or five drugs you take those and then you die I don't know if we'll be successful or not I'm not into snake oil I don' believe in magic bullets but I do believe in this protocol that we're engaged in but nothing's 100% successful nothing I mean there's some people don't make it and we're going to fight the fight and then we will accept the outcome just like courage to change the things we can surrender to accept the things we can I'm grateful that I'm sober because 33 almost 34 years ago when this event that I just read about exploded all over this country Barbara never flinched she never flinched and now it's my turn to be here for her and I can do that because I'm sober I can be a hundred percent available emotionally mentally physically and spiritually I cannot do that if I'm drinking so it's my honor to be able to be hear from her and i'm grateful for that I usually close the talk I'm going to do it right here right now saying with It's something I've learned. I do not wish you joys without sorrow, nor endless day without the healing dark, nor brilliant sun without the rustle shadow, nor tides that never turn against your bark. I wish you faith and strength and love and wisdom and goods gold enough to help some needy one. I wish your songs but also blessed silence and God's sweet peace when every day is done. my Comanche name is Yesetanapa means flying man but you know me as Lyle and I'm an alcoholic I got pretty emotional reading this sometimes I do sometimes I don't but very clearly I felt it today so thanks for sharing with me letting me be here with you folks that's all I've got thank you Lyle so much for doing that on behalf of everybody we thank you but to keep a smooth flow i'm going to ask gay whose story is winner takes all in the fourth edition and she's going to interview and ask some questions that we kind of have and if anybody has any questions they would like to ask lyle if you put them in a chat to me after gay asks her questions i will ask them of lyle and then after that we will unmute everybody and let y'all thank him and make comments and all that okay so if you have questions send them to me in the chat gay i'm going to turn this over to you now and thank you again lyle so much thank you hi everyone my name is gay and i'm an alcoholic and lyle you have absolutely touched my heart i cried with you i thank god with you as you were speaking beautiful share thank you so much The first question I have to ask you is, how has having your story in the big book increased your understanding of humility? I don't think it's had much effect. I'll tell you what. You know, when we start talking about how much humility we have, we don't have it. I learned humility from another form of word. That's humiliation. I had tons of that. I had tons of that. Marine Corps fighter pilots are not recruited for their humility and we don't have it. We're recruited for our ego, our arrogance, our bravado, the belief that we're better than anybody else, can beat anybody else. That's what we, and I'm very typical of that and my attitude when I talked about my meetings in 1975 when I was ordered to those meetings, That was exactly the attitude I had when I walked into AA and looked around and listened. Humility, to me, was a character defect. When I was young, I remember a comic strip character called Casper Milk Toast. They spelled it M-I-L-Q-U-E Toast, and he was a little man, and he walked around, and there was a cloud over his head. It was always raining on him. And that was my picture of humility was some, you just walk through the world and let the world just tromp all over you. That was humility. That's what I found it was. I got a new vocabulary the day that I entered treatment. I thought powerlessness was helpless, hopeless, and weakness, just weakness. I had to learn new words, new definitions for those words. And then later when I looked back, I thought every great Indian leader in history, everyone that I'm aware of, and I'm pretty well steeped in Native history. Every one of those leaders was not the Hollywood kind that you see on the screen. They were people who cared more about their people than they did themselves. And that was humility. And I saw that humility was something to be sought. and humility to me means a very quiet inner strength and peace it's something so different from my walking up to a bar and elbowing people to either side and letting them know that I'm here and if you screw with me I'm going to pound your butt it's complete opposite of all of that and I just think I don't see people get sober that don't have some modicum of humility. I think it's an absolute requirement. And like I said, when I read the story, I phrased it a little differently. I said I'm grateful now for all the things that happened to me because without those, none of the rest of the things could happen for me. I couldn't sit here this morning with the attitude that I've got now without all of those things that I just read about. Thank you. The next question is, other than yourself, who do you believe was most affected by your alcoholism? Well, I believe my kids were. I believe the family is. I believe The Al-Anon approached this whole thing. I believe they approached it as a family disease. years ago there was a guy by the name of bradshaw he made a great big splash publicly bradshaw on the family he had books out videos out and i went to see brad shaw one night barbara and i did there must have been six or eight hundred people in the room and up on the stage brad shaw had this prop out it was a mobile the little thing that hangs over a baby's bed with all the little pieces around it hanging down Bradshaw says let me show you what happens in an alcoholic family and he reached over and he grabbed one of the pieces he said this is the alcoholic and he tugged on it and all the other pieces started moving up and down he said these other pieces are the family members and I thought what a vivid visual representation of the alcoholic family in ways that they don't even understand. They are moving around my alcoholism. One of the things I had a problem with as far as defining myself as an alcoholic was I didn't beat or abuse my wife or kids. I didnít mistreat them. But when I do a first step look back, I see things I didnís do that I could have done. And I do see some things that I did that I would not have done had I not been drinking. but my family was affected by my alcoholism by my attitudes one of the first things I did was I went back to my two sons and I left a lot of this out of the story I would not subject myself to pain if I was in a relationship or any kind of situation I get angry and when I get anger it comes up quickly there's a big wall and it's thick and I'm not going to feel pain. And I had told my sons repeatedly, when you get into a relationship, you better be in control of it because if you're not, you're at risk. And I believe that. I believe you had to, I had to be in controlled of a relationship and I was controlling. I was controlled. One of the first things I did when I got back to my family was I told two sons, I said, that's not true. One of them, And I don't remember which one said, Dad, I never thought you'd lie to us. I said, I didn't lie to you. I said when I told you that, I thought it was true. It was I believed it to be true. But I've learned better. And my job is when I learn something is not true. And I learned that I have a responsibility to come to you and tell you that. And what I told You about that is not True. So my family was affected. Certainly my employer was affected God knows my employer was affected. Big time. The pilots, the entire pilot profession was affected, I heard about it. Some passengers get on the airplane and ask the pilot, maybe I better smell your breath. The stuff that I heaped on them was just bad, it was just incredible. No pilot has ever done the damage that I did. You know, one time I was introduced He said Lyle's incident was a 9-11 commercial aviation. That's accurate. So a lot of people were affected by my alcoholism. I hope that a lot of them have been affected by my sobriety. The next, thank you so much. The next question I have, which is kind of the opposite of that one. How do you think your children's lives are richer because of your experience in AA? One of the biggest elements of shame that I had that immediately hit me at the restaurant during the arrest was throughout my kids they were grown and gone when this thing happened. Throughout the entire time they were home, I was the standard bear in my family for duty, honor, country, character, honesty, integrity. And in the massive blast from this thing that I had done and the consequences and the explosion, I knew that everything that I had said during their childhood was rendered void. My personal example negated all of it. excuse me, in one of my meditation books one day I opened the page and it said my father didn't tell me how to live. He lived and let me watch him do it. And I thought everything my kids have watched me do. Go to prison. They have visited me in the prison visiting room. They've seen me stripped of everything. They're seeing me living hand to mouth. They've also seen me get back in the left seat of a boring 747 and regain everything that I had lost. Not everything, not materially, but all of that. What they have seen me do and what they've seen me have to do is greater than anything that I could ever tell them. My oldest son said that one day to a reporter. He said nothing was given back to him. He had to earn it one little bit at a time. And he said we got to watch that. So it wasn't part of my plan. This was not the way that I intended to raise my family and have things work out. But that's the paradox of Alcoholics Anonymous, that takes the worst things in our entire life and transforms them into the greatest blessings if we work and do our part in this whole thing. Thank you. and I'm going to combine the next two questions I have. If you could change something about AA, what would it be? And what is your favorite line in the big book? Well, I don't think I'd change much of anything. My favorite line, the one that stands out to me, the one always has, it says we are a group of people who would not normally mix. And I look at the people that I have come close to And the places I've been, and I go, man, that is a massive understatement. I wouldn't change anything. And I'm a little disturbed by this movement that's currently underway to change things so that they're politically correct. Sometimes I'm reading and it says saying we're a group of men and women. Now it says we're in a group with people. I'm going, just leave it alone. You know, it's like the people want to rewrite the first hundred and sixty four pages because some of the language in there is old. It's outdated. I don't refer to my my fellow fellow people as chaps and I don'T do a right about face and I DON'T do A lot of things that that language in there, but the language is simply the language. The message is absolutely perfect. i i'm just not and i'm not i'm not 85 years old and opposed to change that's not that doesn't come with age i love new things and innovations i learned i love learning new technology stuff i love learning but i also don't think we need to change what doesn't need to be changed and and and i am certainly not a person who would change anything in aa but the one line you know we're a group of people who are not normally mixed i look around and go what a massive understatement that is sometimes yes sir we probably would have never met no and i'll come also combine my last two questions because i know there might be others who want to ask so how were you able to support barbara during this time and how has your experience increased your capacity to love and forgive others the one thing that put me on the edge of suicide was the inability to forgive myself I could not forgive myself for what I had done my counselor one day said to me he said can you forgive other people I said yeah he said do you believe that God can forgive you and I said yeah he said then where does that place you when you cannot forgive you you know and like most things you know I couldn't sleep at night I got maybe an hour or two hours of sleep at first So and I lay there and I saw the questions themselves become answers. And so and I struggled with that part of the promises, it says we shall not regret the past nor shut the door on it. And I was working in treatment, co-facilitating patient class. When that question was asked to the girl who was leading the class, she had seven years sobriety at that time. I thought that was an amazing amount of sobriety. Seven years. And her answer to that, and I had sat on that for a long time because I thought, I just don't know. I can't reconcile it. And Her answer was this. She said, when I look in the mirror today, she said, I like the person I see looking back. But she said, that person is the sum total of all the experiences I've had. The ones that were shameful and degrading and disgusting. The ones there were hateful and angry. The ones and I'm so ashamed of along with all the other experiences, she said I'm the sum total all of those and if I could go back and if i can extract those experiences If I could if I could eliminate those, she says, I don't know who I would be, but I would be somebody different from who I am today. And I like who I are today. So I take that as exactly the way it said. And I thought, wow, that just opened the door for me. That just completely opened the drawer for me so. Now, I'm not even sure exactly how you worded the question. And so, well, exactly what did I don't know if I answered that or not. Good, beautiful, absolutely beautiful. Because God's in charge here. Thank you so much for opening up your heart and sharing so much of yourself with us and sharing your experience, strength, and hope. And I think Carol is going to read some other questions from other people that have asked. Thank you. So much. Sure. My pleasure. Thanks, Gay. You asked a great question. Lyle, I have a few in the chat and then I have a couple more. One of them from somebody they said they saw you do an interview on a morning show and you mentioned that you had a recovered pilot program you started and in all the years the program was in existence no one relapsed and they said do you want to mention that program? Yeah, that's not exactly correct but I mean we see here things and then we take them in and it's, no, I didn't start the program. This program was started in 1973. Prior to what is called the HIMSS program, H-I-M-S, any pilot who was deemed or diagnosed as alcoholic had an automatic lifetime revocation of the license. It was gone. It was automatic, it was done, and it was arbitrary. There were pilots in AA during that time, my current sponsor is one of them, who had to go to AA under their radar. He could not, as a pilot, he could not be in an AA meeting and let anybody know that he was a commercial airline pilot. If that got out of the meeting, his license was revoked forever. And I thought how difficult it had to be for in a program demanding rigorous honesty where you've got to exclude that part but some pilots who had recovered were recovering met with some doctors who went with the went to the faa and they said this is a treatable disease we are this is an attributable disease could we get somebody to look at this in the FAA. This was a very sensitive, delicate, dicey idea. The idea of putting an alcoholic pilot back in the cockpit and letting him fly at 30,000 feet with passengers was not something that was just openly embraced. They needed funding for this program. So they went to Congress, but they can't go to Congress and say, we want X millions of dollars for alcoholic pilots to put them back in the cockpits. That isn't going to fly, literally isn't going to apply. So they disguised it and they said we need funding for a program called the Human Intervention Motivational Study which doesn't say anything. You can't, Human Intervention Motivation Study, what does that mean? Nothing, nobody knows but they got the funding. They got the funding and they began this program and it has evolved and it is so successful that the medical profession has now adopted it. The doctors are the next most successful group of recovering people, and their program is patterned almost exactly after the pilot program. Police and fire departments are using our program, but it started in 1973. And on that CBS Sunday morning program that I appeared, a doctor by the name of Lynn Hankus, who's got a lot of sobriety who worked solely with pilots in the South Miami hospital for I think 25, 30 years. He's a good friend of mine. He's tremendous guy, psychiatrist. When he's being interviewed by Tony DeCoppo, the same guy that interviewed me, he said, I was not going to appear. Let me back up. I was never going to be interviewed I was always not going to appear on that program. I said, what you're going to do, I talked to Tony DePoe. I knew his heart was in the right place. I knew it was aimed in the wrong direction. I've said no to all kinds of interviews because they want it. They love the sensational aspect of it. That's all they're there for. And I say, no way. But I said, you're going to draw attention, public attention to a program that's been in place since 1973, quietly under the radar that has put more than 6800 alcoholic pilots back in the cockpit. And there's going to be a public reaction backlash to it. It's goingto damage the program. I said, I'm not going to do it. He said the FAA is going to come on on camera and talk about it being the most successful program they've ever had. I said are you sure about that? You promise that? He said yes. I said if the FIA is going to do that then I'll participate which I did. But Len Hanka said let me tell you how successful this program is. Since 1973 he said there's never been a single. He was very forceful about it. He said there's never been a single. He said not one single HIMSS pilot that has been involved in an accident or an incident since that time. And and that's true. And then when he interviewed this gal, Peggy, she had an Irish name, Peggie Riley, Pegby O'Reilly, Peggy somebody who was head of the FAA group that monitored this. He said is that he said, let me understand this. He says, first of all, he cited the relapse rate, which is very low. And he said, and even in that relapse, they relapsed one time and then they're back. And she said, that's correct. I don't remember the data on that. But the relapse rate is very low. But the Relapse Rate is just a short relapse most of the time. Now, not everybody makes it. I know pilots who have not gotten their licenses back. But it's been because, you know, we get into it says rarely have we seen a person fail. Well. It's a matter of being willing to do this. If you're not willing to doing it, then you're going to fail. You know, if you want to negotiate your own recovery, and I tell sponsors, if you're still in the place where you want to negotiate you own recovery then I'm not your guy. You're not ready to do it. So there have been failures, but they've been eliminated and to their great loss, they've lost their licenses. But that's as it should be because we are the gatekeepers for the safety of the American flying public. The recovering pilots, and I will tell you this, are the best in the industry. Len Hancock said one day before 9-11 when they kept the cockpit door closed after that, he said, I get on the airplane, he said when I'm boarding the airplane he said I look up at the cockpit. He said if it's a face I recognize, he says I sit there and breathe a sigh of relief. He said, if it was not, I sit in the back and wonder. That's how strong we are. And the same thing is true of the recovering doctors, recovering attorneys, recovering plumbers, recovering electricians, recovery. I don't care who you are. If you've got a foundation of recovery underneath you, you're the person I want to deal with because I trust you. I know what it takes to get there and stay there. So, yeah, we enjoy a really high success rate. But it's because Tony DeCoppo said to Len Hankus, well, why doesn't everybody use this program? He said, because when you threaten to take a pilot's wings or a doctor's stethoscope, he said, that's enormous leverage. And DeCoppo said, yeah, but everybody's got something to lose. He said. Yeah, I do. But not to this degree. And we know that you only get sober for yourself. But the impetus to do this is if you want your career, you're going to do it. You're going do this. And we say keep coming back. And there's a reason for that, because I've seen pilots who come in and they're going to dot the I's, cross the T's. And I can spot them. I can see right through them. Compliance is not acceptance. But if they comply, they're gonna get their licenses back. What happens is they've got a long monitoring period. And in that period, they begin to identify. And once that happens, they go, you know what? I really do belong here. You know what this isn't about my career. This is about my family. This is about a lot more than just my career. And I see that all the time. So that's what the HIMSS program is. And I did not start it. And it was not available to me because of my termination. Thank you, Lyle. There's a couple more questions in the chat. One of them is, did you find it difficult returning to work following your legal issues? Did you feel a sense of having to prove yourself? Someone is having to return to work and they're worried about people. No, no, I didn't. We had, I had a huge base of support. Barbara used to say to me when I was in prison that when somebody would call or they would send a check, she said she would thank them and they would say to her, this is what Barbara told me, If it had been me, Lyle would have been the first one to do this for me. We had I'm not saying I'm that really good guy. I just said we are those of us who are alcoholics didn't come from a lifetime of being an a-hole. You know, I mean, we're just like I say, we'RE NOT good people or bad people trying to become good. We'RE sick and we need to get well. And so when I went back to work. I had a huge as a matter of fact, John Dasberg would call me in once a year for the next five years. I go in there and sit and talk with John Dasper. Totally free of fear. I had nothing to fear. I had no secrets. I'd used up all my fear. And I got to know him like no other pilot on the entire airline property did. And we had great conversations. He always had one senior VP who was his right hand guy who sat in with us. So there were three of us. John Daspert asked me one time, he called me in there. He said, how are you being treated out there? I said, great. I said, great. I said I never fly a trip, which is usually an 11-, 12-day trip. But when at least six and maybe eight or ten people don't come up to me either in operations, flight operations, a restaurant, hotel, lobby, or someplace and introduce themselves and tell me they're glad I'm back. I said that happens every single trip. I said as a matter of fact, before I came up here last night, there were two people in the Atlanta airport that came up to him in the gate area and said that. And he just beamed. He said, that's great. I said, well, I know that not everybody is pleased that I'm back. I said, I'm told that there's a faction. And I said I don't know if that's 2%, 5% or 10% of pilots who are very distressed and unhappy and angry that I am back. But I said that I don t see those pilots. I have no contact with him and he said oh that's great twice i got on the airplane to go someplace on a trip and i could tell that the captain was really unhappy that i was in the cockpit i mean i can feel it's in the air he didn't say anything but i could just feel it we're going on 11 or 12 day trip so there's three of us in the cockpit captain co-pilot me and the second officer hmm and excuse me and every time that happened or any time I was around something like that I stayed calm and pleasant and accepting because I knew that if I had been where they were instead of where I was, my attitude might very well be the same. And in both of those situations where I got in the cockpit, I read the checklist pleasantly. We had on these long eight or 10 or 11 hour legs. I didn't try to generate conversation. I did not try to patronize anybody. If somebody asked me a question, I talked with them pleasantly and calmly. I would talk as much as they want to talk. I stopped when they stopped. I didn't try to garner favor. I just did my job. On both of those occasions, on about day three somewhere in there, I'd be in my hotel room some layover point overseas in Asia and the captain would call usually and I was senior to him. Numbers wise, I was senior to not chain of command wise, but seniors and say, you got any plans for breakfast? I said, no. You want to have breakfast tomorrow? He said, sure. We sit down there and he's go, well, when this trip started, I wasn't very happy that you're here. I go, I know that. I know of that. They said, I just want you to know that you do a great job and you're fun to fly with. And I want you feel free, please, to be in my schedule anytime you see my name on it. I said okay, thank you. That was AA. That's not me. because let me tell you what I would have done when I get in a cockpit like that and I sense that attitude. When I sense that attitude, the first thing that comes to my mind is I want to say, listen, you candy ass little punk, you wouldn't have made it a week in my moccasins. You would have been playing in the shower with the guys that want to play and you would have been whimpering and crying. So don't give me any of your crap. That's really the first thought that goes through my mind. But I don't act on that. AA has taught me to accept, to meet people where they are, to understand and to try to be a little compassionate that the only person I need to deal with is me. And when I deal with me and I do it in the right way, then I'm able to deal with you with regard to Barbara's situation it breaks my heart sometimes and I have a lot of talks with God because sometimes when this is going on non-stop all day long. Now if you were talking to her chances are you wouldn't even know there's anything wrong but it's constant during the day I'm seeing things that deal with as a result of this thing and I can wear down and I can get short tempered and Ican get frustrated and Icansnap and I have and every time I do it I feel like a piece of crap and Ihave to go off and have a little God talk and I have to and I've gotten much much better much better I live in a whole world of new norms now things disappear I don't know where they are I have no idea where she put them she can't remember anything for five minutes you know and I this goes on and on and on it's just one thing after another after another but no man has ever enjoyed more love from a woman than I have from her. There's never been an ounce of doubt as to whether or not she loved me. She's been the best mom, a better mom than I was a dad, a bitter wife than I was a husband, a butter friend than I was a friend. She outstrips me in all of those things and what I need to do is try to be what she has been to me. And I've gotten much better at it. And I'll never do it as well as I'd like to. And I don't know how this is going to end. We've had some, the other night she made coffee. That's not a big deal for you or me. But for her to go into the coffee maker and pour in just enough for 12 cups of coffee and fill it up to that level. for her to find the coffee filter, put it in and put just the right amount of coffee in it. And for her to rotate the knob over to program and for her to flip the switch up so the green program icon, that's huge. That is absolutely huge. I walked into the kitchen and saw that and I was just stunned. I said, holy cow. I went over and I looked and it was all done right. And I walked around and said, God, you did a great job. You did a good job. You did an amazing job out there, honey. I don't know if she'll be able to do that tonight. But whatever it is and however it is, my job is to be here and love her. And she deserves every bit of it from me. So that's not an issue. I just need the strength and the tolerance and the patience to do it all. And our kids are good. I've gone on a couple of hunting trips and she'll go for a visit. They love her, they adore her. the grandkids absolutely adore her everyone does it's always been that way so this isn't the way I would have wanted it or chosen it or had it happen but I have a higher power if they let go talk to then I do thanks Lyle I have two more questions for you and then we will let people open it up one of the questions I think you kind of answered they will ask what you did after you retired and i guess i know you go hunting a lot and spend time with your family and pretty much that there's something real quick you want to add then i have another question and it says do you relate to tom eye's experiences before aa at naa yeah absolutely yeah yeah i knew Tom, not as well as I'd like to have heard him speak. It was interesting listening to his journey. They wouldn't let me back in the Atlanta federal pen after I'd gotten sober. I thought that's amazing. They let Tom come back in, start a group. I started a group while I was in there, which as I mentioned in the story and they fought it the entire time um but uh yeah tom's tom is his story is just amazing i was grateful i didn't kill two people you know and uh excuse me so you know we've been so blessed and so privileged so honored to have people like tom and and sandy beach and um so many more more that i could i could list a name um they're just such giants i mean i used to want to be like sandy beach i used the thing well when i get 10 years maybe i'll have some of his spirituality so 10 years came i thought well uh maybe 15 now maybe 20 and i decided no there's just one sandy beach and that's sandy beach uh i'll just do what i can and and i'm never it's a good target to aim for it's a good place to to shoot but um we've just been so blessed with so many of these folks that have shown us what a real good example really looks like thank you um another question when i had is how soon did you get into service work get a sponsor work the steps um what are you still active in now after all these years to maintain your sobriety and how did you get that connection to with god and you you shared it during your story about your anger and not like an aa meetings and how did you turn all that around too i think that happens i think that happens when we engage in the 12 steps i think it's transformative it has to be that's the whole idea point and purpose behind it service work i got into it immediately uh i got a home group uh like i said i did the 90 meetings 67 days you tell somebody that they think maybe i I was trying to do it so I could get it out of the way. No, I needed the 90 meetings. At that point, it was critical. It was important to me. It was vital that I get 90 meetings, and I knew the courtroom was going to interrupt that. Service work, I've never smoked. I've Never Done Any Drugs. I didn't do any drugs even experimentally, and I never smoked, and so the meetings, when I got out of prison, and was waiting to go I mean when I got out of treatment I was waiting to go to prison were all smoking needs and so what I made myself do was go wash the ashtrays why? because I hate smoking I hate that smell I hate the crud so my service work was to go do what you don't want to do go wash the ashrays and that's what I did so service work comes in all forms making the coffee opening the door setting up the chairs you don't need to be a speaker or any of this other stuff you know taking the phone calls you know i get phone calls from all over the united every time a pilot makes the headlines i hear from him within a week or two weeks i meet him i i just always see them they always come my way no matter who they are almost always no matter what but um the service work is you know But the other thing about this is AA is not my entire life. I mean, I've seen people who all they do is go to AA. They only go to A events. Their friends only belong to AA I believe AA is designed to make me a whole person once more. I believe AAA is designed to allow me to go into life 360 degrees no matter what it is or where it is I'm supposed to be able to go fit, feel, adapt and be comfortable there. And so I do a lot of other stuff. I do a lot of other stuff. I was still flying until about three years ago. My skills were still good, I just wasn't flying enough. And so I made a very painful decision to sell the airplane and the hangar. But I do a lot of stuff. I believe I'm supposed to live life and that's what I do. AA is a huge part of this life. That's why I'm here this morning. AA is the reason I have this But AA is not all I do. I mean, somebody said to me, define recovery. You have one word. My word would be balance. My word Would Be Balance. If I'm in the woods hunting every weekend, I'm out of balance. You know, and I had to start doing that with some of the AA activities. I had To Start, you know, we say you never say no when you're asked. And I believe that for a long time. And I was running myself ragged. And I had to learn how to say no to AA. No, because I need to be here with the family. I need do this. I need that. I still did a lot of AA stuff. But there were times when I just had to say, no, I'm sorry. You know, I'll do it later. If you call me again, I will. But I can't do it right now. So AA is the key in the door for me for everything. Thank you. I agree with that. Is there something that, if you look back, it's that slender thread that happened that stands out like if you did not take that or you did not hear this, that you might not have gotten recovery? Oh, yeah. The fact that I was out with those other two pilots drinking the night that all this happened, I had become a loner. I'd become a loaner. I didn't go out with the crews. Everybody likes to go out and have dinner, have a few drinks. it's a big fellowship thing after the flight i didn't do that anymore i went to my room changed my clothes and went to the nearest liquor store and got a bottle of alcohol that's what i did i didn'T want to go out with the crews anymore then i just wanted to be alone and you know one of the step one things when i got into treatment i looked i go i knew where the nearest local store was in every city we flew into in the entire united states i knew how long it took me to change clothes get up there get a quart of booze get back to my room, locked the door, turned the TV on. I didn't go to the door if a crew member knocked. I didn' t answer the door. I mean, I didn''t answer the phone as it called. And one thing that is not in the book that I talk about is that the alcohol quit working for me. It quit. All I wanted to do at that point was, and like I said, I don''t drink straight booze, but I make strong drinks, really strong drinks. And by the time the second hand has gone all the way around the clock, I usually can feel it. I can feel the effect of the drink and I like it, I'd go back to my room and I'd start mixing drinks. And instead of getting this wonderful feeling that I had for so long that made the whole point and purpose of drinking there, I didn't get it. I just didn't Get that effect. And then said what happened was, and I didn't get into it a whole lot that it was like i had a fire in my stomach and the booze was gasoline and it hit that fire and man it exploded and up came the hatred and the bitterness and the self-pity and the martyrdom about this little girl that had run away from my home and all the things she had done to me and i played this list of all these things i had done for this little girl over the course of 17 years and look how i got repaid that's that's what i got from drinking again and by the time i get to the end of the bottle i'm emotionally wasted and exhausted i'm tired i'm worn out but the next night in a different city i'll do it all over again and i did it over and over and i got the same effect each time you know we talk about insanity repeating the same behavior each time expecting a different result i did that so if i had not gone out with the crew that night that afternoon which turned into an evening if i'd not been with him and if it hadn't been for this jerk second officer mouthing off to people in the bar, we would never have been discovered. And I probably would have been dead long before right now. I'm convinced of that based on how I drank. So if I hadn't got out with the crew that night and if the second officer had kept his mouth shut when I was gone, he popped off after I'd gone to the restroom, if those two things hadn't happened, I would have successfully completed my career as an alcoholic and I would be dead. I would die. Thank you, Lyle, so much for your time, your story. We appreciate it so much. We're going to stop the recording.