The Disease Concept and the Progressive Nature of Alcoholism – Bob D.

good evening everyone my name is Bob Doris I'm an alcoholic someone said earlier today I guess it was th someone that I always was and I've always have come to believe in over the years that I was always an alcoholic I never was a social drinker I didn't know that for a number of years until I, after I came in the program and learned more about this very complicated illness that we call alcoholism. But the first time I ever drank, I overdid it, and from that day on, I drank what would overshoot the mark, drink more than I intended, spend money I didn't intend to spend, say things I didn'T mean to say, do things I shouldn'T ought to do, and you don't call it social drinking. If it isn't alcoholism, then it's something, whatever anybody wants to call it. I, of course my heart is full tonight. I want to first thank Chet and all the committee for inviting me here, but they couldn't have kept me away come what may because my heart will always be here. This is my hometown. I grew up here. My mother and father are buried here, and I still have relatives here, so Clovis, New Mexico, is my home town and always will be. Most of you are aware, unless there's a few visitors here, that we kind of have a tradition of what it used to be like, what happened and what it's like now. I'm going to spend very little time of my time allotted here on what it use to be like for two or three reasons. First place, I like to think in terms of my recovery a lot more than how sick I once was, and I certainly was that. But maybe more than anything else, I've never thought that I was very much really a gifted speaker, but I started out with kind of the feeling that I didn't have very much to share with anyone in the way of a spectacular drinking career. I just never did get in very much trouble with anybody except me and those who were close to me. I was just kind of whining, whimpering, wet pants, falling down drunk. And you don't get in much trouble that way. The only spectacular thing that I can really point to that I burned up a mattress in the El Fidel Hotel in Albuquerque? I guess I did because they put it on my bill when I was leaving. I wish I'd had Gil's line at that time. I could have said I didn't do it. It was on fire when I got in it. But their claim was that there was smoke coming over the transom and the door was locked or chained from the inside and the fire department was called and that they had to kick the door down or at least the chain loose to get to, and here I was up in the middle of the bed and the bed was on fire but I was okay because I had wet the bed. Seems as though that I brought my own fire department with me. I have been around a long time, over 40 years, and that does seem like a long time. However, at an old-timers meeting in Burbank a little while ago, a few months ago, there was a young chap came up and he said, well, I don't see that that's all that important. All you have to do is not drink and not die, and you'll make it. And I think that's pretty real. I'd like to do a couple of little things here. In these years, I have obviously formed a lot of opinions of my own and what I consider my own learning about this illness of alcoholism in the entire field, but I want to know they are my own ideas. In other words, I've claimed full responsibility for them. If I say anything that's offensive to anybody, why, please, throw it over your shoulder and forget about it. I'm an expert on nothing when you get right down to it. It brings me to a story about this young man that walked into a small-town bank, maybe like Neal Shugill, and he deposited half a million dollars. And the teller was a little bit put out about this, you know, really alarmed or surprised. And after the chap had left the bank, this young man, and he went back—the teller went back to the president of the bank and he told him about this deposit, this man opening up an account, and the president OF the bank just raised hell with him. He said, why didn't you bring that young man in and introduce him to me? because anybody that can make that much money and that young in life and start out like that, he must be very important to us and have a lot to share. And so he chewed him out very royally, and the teller walked out rather crestfallen. A few days later this young man was back in the bank again. He grabbed hold of him and marked him right into the president's office and told him, here, this young men you wanted to meet. So up out of his chair came the president of the bank and bowing and scraping how glad they were to have him there and to have his account, and he got so eloquent about it that finally he said, you know we're going to have a Chamber of Commerce banquet here in about six weeks and would like for you to be the principal speaker. Well, it was just overwhelming that the young man finally said, well, he guessed he would and just felt like he didn't know how to say no and the time came for the banquet and all the city dads and the people turned out. The banker got up with a roll of drums practically and introduced this young man that's just moved into the community and all his great talent and what all he's going to do and introduced him and the chap got up there and obviously very embarrassed. And he said, really, there's really not much to my story to think about, come to think of and not much at all. He said, I never did, I was on the bum in Kansas City, had a quarter in my pocket. And I was depressed, dejected, walking along, and I happened to look down and one of my shoestrings was broken. So I thought, well, I just said, Well, I happened to look up and there was a crest or a Woolworth's sign, thought, Well I just as well spent that last quarter for a pair of shoestring and I went in that sold me two pair for that quarter. So I came out and I had my foot up on a fire plug, and I was putting my shoestrings in my shoes, and here came a well-dressed businessman charging down the street. He said, by the way, that reminds me, I need a pair of shoeststrings. And he said, I sold him that other pair for 50 cents. So it gave me an idea. I went back in and bought some more strings, and he said I stayed out there with my foot upon the fire flood for a day and a half, and I made $50. And he said, my aunt who runs a cat house in Butte, Montana, died and left me $450 or whatever the hell difference was. And that's how things happen. Sometimes you young ones may come in and say, it sounds like all that long length of time. Obviously there's a lot of things that we learn as we go along and we do pick up with additional knowledge. I grew up in this area, the first 12 years of my life on a farm out southeast of this city. I don't remember, there's nothing in my childhood that I could tie to the fact that I'm alcoholic. I came from a loving family and had a loving childhood in that sense. There's nothing I can point to that would make me stand out from anybody else, so I have to believe in that metabolic difference that there is through an inherited factor. Although my immediate family had no alcoholism at that time and I don't know where that came from. I understand I had a drunken grandfather who played the fiddle, I remember that's kind of legion in the family. But the fact remains that the only thing that I can think significant about that childhood was that I didn't feel like I belonged to that family. Now, I've heard from podiums like this how many hundreds of alcoholics who said that same thing. Somehow they felt different, that they didn't belong. They were other than, somehow felt separate from the rest of the family. And that seemed to be, and I don't know where that would come from, but just something that there was nothing in my background that would indicate that. But I used to fantasize that someday in that farmyard we'd drive a big black car and out would come a very handsome, nice young man and a very lovely lady who would tell my plebeian farm family that they had come to claim their child. and we drive off into the never never you know the never never land and be happy ever after now it tells me two things when i look back on that number one that i fantasized a lot and number two that i had not a bit of gratitude for these parents who had born me and was doing their best to bring me up I don't know for sure what that indicates but some sort of a twist and kind of a character defect of a lack of gratitude which I've since learned and Bill W. was always fond of saying that gratitude is an essential part of recovery from alcoholism but I took my first drink that I can recall in any kind of social way maybe not from sip from dad's beer or something but at a country dance about five miles south on the portales highway a young musician i was playing a mandolin if you please and uh my brother and i had watched some of the big boys hide this booze and we thought gee they must be having such a terrible good time with bootleg days of course so we Went out and stole this whiskey and put it over in another place. Then we'd take time about, or turn about, going out and hitting the jug. That night I way overshot the mark. Finally struggled, knowing that I was losing consciousness or going to, going to pass out, got out to the farmer's garage. And that's where I woke up the next morning as the sun was coming up. Now you would have thought, and I was sick, as sick as a dog. and you thought that would you know any common sense which said boy that's enough of that i don't want to repeat that but i can hardly wait for the next time and i have to know as i've heard again hundreds of times in a meetings that that something that alcohol does something very special uh to the potential alcoholic but somehow it affects us in a different kind of way as one researcher used to say it speaks to us and very a very distinct kind of language and that we have come to know that that's true it had a lot of significance and I too like Roland or Gil or any the rest of our DH when I could drink, I would feel quite comfortable. And obviously that was the only way to go. I know now that by the time I was 24, I was a full-blown alcoholic, although I had entered the farm machinery business from which my family had been in a long time when I was working for a large farm equipment manufacturer covering all of New Mexico and part of West Texas considered to be the youngest regional sales manager they had in the United States and that was obviously I was on my way I got drunk on my wedding day and I wouldn't recommend that to anybody it's not a good way to start your marriage I didn't mean to I really didn't I don't think I heard this incidentally anything that I practically say this evening will be something you've probably heard and I know that I heard in an AA meeting someplace my language is totally Alcoholics Anonymous I'm kind of like a skidded old bum you know it said he smokes so many cigarettes his breasts smell like everybody's laughter my language my Hobbit is what I've heard in this program but I know that that I was certainly my behavior was not normal and not average and that is not social drinking and that I never was really a social drinker then I should not I should have recognized that perhaps from the beginning but I didn't the truth of the matter is that I still thought that someday some way somehow I would be able to handle these drinks i know now that of course that's one of the great obsessions that's what our a book tells us somehow some way somewhere we will be able to race up and drink like other people and i was absolutely determined that was going to happen i still believe to this day that that no one i don't think anyone in this room would wish to you know, in a sincere sort of way. I like for somebody to tell them that they are inferior. And you see, I didn't know anything about alcoholism. I knew nothing about all the things that I've learned since then. And to me, that a person that couldn't drink was somehow weak, no good, character disorder or something of that nature. and I still believe that with all of my heart that anybody that we had to believe that that's the way that alcoholism is would die before they would admit alcoholism by that kind of definition and I would like to digress just a moment to make a point of this because I think when that was brought to me so clearly one time that I too as Roland said I'm a two-hatter I've been working full-time in the field of alcoholism since 1964 as an employee assistance program where I worked as a consultant to companies who would permit us to take employees who had alcohol or drug problems or any other kind of problem that would impact their job life and see that they got the kind of help and to the proper community resource. course, I was called by the medical director of a large aerospace firm where I was working to come to his office one morning and he said, Bob, I have a young woman who is returning for medical leave. And I would have to believe looking at her medical chart that she's an excessive drinker. And he spoke of the terms, you know, the liver damage and things of that nature. he went on to tell me that she vehemently denied having an alcohol problem, and would I come over to talk to her? Well, I would, of course, because that was my job in the company. So I went over, and he brought her in from the reception room, and introduced her, and I asked if she would go back to my office, and of course she would, because he thought I represented some kind of authority, which I didn't have none at all. The truth The medical department had a lot. I took her back to my office, and I think it wasn't more than 45 minutes or an hour that I had her back in the doctor's office, freely admitting that she had alcoholism, or was alcoholic, and wished to have help. And I believe for a long time that that young, and I'm glad to say a very teachable young doctor, I think for the time being though and maybe even yet he thought I had some kind of magic button to push well I didn't and you know better all I did was just do what I'm doing here was share my life with her and somewhere along the line in sharing my experience with her she just backed her chair up from across the table where we were sitting across the desk and said, well, if what you say is an alcoholic, then I have been one for several years. So I said, Well, okay, that's interesting. I'd like to know what you think an alcoholic female is. And you won't be surprised when I tell you that her description of a female alcoholic that it's just exactly a prostitute down on 5th and Main, down on Skid Row, selling her favors for the price of a drink. Now I don't know whether that struck me right at that moment, but it certainly did a little later, that this young and very attractive and very able young woman would have died 25 times over rather than to admit to having alcoholism by her definition. so i've learned over the years that what we thought are the definition or what our opinion of alcoholism can mean life or death to many of us and i'm not not only those who have not yet come to aa but many who still who come in and somehow or other cannot buy the disease concept in its entirety and understand that alcoholism is i think dh again said he had the ism before he had the alcohol, that alcohol doesn't cause alcoholism. I've had some pretty rank, opinionated people want to crucify me for that when I said that, that alcohol doesn t cause alcohol-ism. I had the ism and then all I had to do was add the alcohol to it. The ism was born with me in my particular opinion, may develop in somebody later. Well I ended up my working career in this area from that very nice job World War II had come on and I finally ended up first working at the air base out here and I guess maybe at the time Bob was there or Roland and they were at the Air Base, I was with the Post engineer's office, and I couldn't hack that. So I ended up working with my father in the parts department, and then he fired me. As I said this afternoon, that's like losing your job at a car wash someplace. When your dad fires you, you have to kind of think you have a problem. Well, my wife had already divorced me, and I understood from her very distinctly that it was because of my drinking. Matter of fact, She was the first one that ever called me an alcoholic, and that was one of the most horrible things I had ever heard. I wanted to slit her throat. She could call me anything in the world, and I would like better than that. But the fact remains that there I was, and it's 1943, and I'm left with two little kids and without a job, and my life was down around their shoe tops. and then obviously that geographical cure that you hear about occurred to me that it was all these terrible people including my ex-wife and my family who was always on my tail trying to run my life and all those terrible things as I look back on it now I was trying to shape up all the rest of the world fix you rather than take care of myself and I want you to know that's really a man-sized job to straighten up the rest of the world. It's a lot easier to work on myself, I found out later. But nevertheless, I landed in California, that great golden land where I was going to become, certainly going to get rid of all these problems that I had here. As I said this afternoon, I was drinking worse than ever, and that really did throw me for a loop. Now what do I blame that on? So it was about eighteen months of the worst drinking career, and finally I was washed up. I had run out of rope, and I knew I was going to lose those children if I didn't do something about it. And I had read somewhere while still living in Plainview, I think, it must have been the Saturday Evening Post article about a group calling themselves Alcoholics Anonymous, and put that back in Section 6. I've somehow come to believe that Alkies will read everything about alcoholism, even if they're not ready to do something about it. They file it away for future reference. And I remember there was such a thing and I didn't know how to find it. I thought it might be Amy Semple McPherson because she was big in those days, and I was ready to beat a tambourine or do whatever is necessary now to do this but I started looking for for this situation and finally in one of those brilliant thoughts that oughta come to had a should have come a long time ago why not look in the telephone directory and I did and there it was listed in two places in Glendale and down in Los Angeles I have to know that DH was already in the program at that time didn't know that then but I went down to the central office I met a very delightful guy and his name was Phil he's long since joined the big meeting upstairs but Phil gave about four or five or six people sitting around in this office and they're all just having a whale of time lots of laughter and fun another well you've got to be a jug here someplace You just don't have that kind of fun sober. And so Phil gave me about a five-minute pitch or maybe ten on the fellowship, and okay, I knew I was going down there to join. Well, let me be honest about it, I was trying to find a girl. I was lonely and I had these two kids and I didn't know how to find the girlfriend. I knew that the bars, I'd get drunk and I knew I couldn't drink any longer. I'd learned that the hard way because I incidentally was periodical drunk. I had lots of sober periods in my life because I drank intermittently and they were vicious binges at times or they got worse as the years went by but I had lot's of periods of sobriety in between every drunk I ever had. So I knew it was going to join because I'd already planned that. So he told me what the program was like, and I was reaching for my billfold. And he explained to me that I didn't have to pay anything for this fellowship, and that really captured my attention for a moment. I said, Uh-oh, there's something wrong with this deal. You just don't get anything for nothing. So I wondered what the catch was, but nevertheless, that was okay at the moment. I went ahead and he suggested that I go to a meeting that night. And I agreed to go because I was in their hands, I was going to mind them. And somewhere during that meeting, and indeed that was at 2200 West 7th where we used to go to big Friday night meetings and several people came from the little old groups they didn't have too many of them in the Los Angeles area at that time but they would all gather on a Friday night and come down to this meeting. and somewhere along in the line somebody said about buying a book. I said, uh-oh, that's what this is. This is a book-selling racket. And I was going to outsmart these people because I wouldn't buy that book, although I had enough money to buy it at the time. I was growing to be smarter than that. I'll always believe that that cost me my last and final big drunk on which I nearly died. But nevertheless, that was a great learning experience. It's the best drunk also I ever had because it brought me in on my knees where I should have been to begin with. But I don't think I ever doubted my qualifications to join this fellowship right from the beginning because I didn't know what alcoholism was, but all the words that they were saying about it I understood. I identified right away. It's kind of like Forrest Forstall's story about the guy that stumbled in drunk to the meeting one night. He heard and said his wife, his life had come unimaginably, he thought, and he said, wife? And he said well I belong here because she sure has. But I identified with about everything that they said, and so I knew I belonged. You know the old duck story, if you quack like a duck and waddle like a duck and swim like a Duck, you must be a duck. And I heard enough other stories that I knew that I belong to this fellowship and I've never doubted that for one moment including up to right now. This is where I belong and do belong and always will. and then I was to do, as Roland kind of mentioned, I was always a researcher and wanted to know how things started, so I wanted to learn as much about everything as I possibly could. So in the meantime, I'd sold myself on a new very good-paying job that traveled across the United States and Canada, and so the first thing I did was plan a trip to New York. I had to go back to see Bill and then try to get to Akron to see Dr. Bob. I never did get to akron, but I got as far as New York and found out that Bill and Lois were up on some vacation in Nantucket or someplace like Cape Cod, and I didn't get to see bill at that time, not for some time later, and never did I get to AKRON, but at least I became fully fascinated by this illness than I still am. I think it is one of the most complicated illnesses that anybody can have. It's spiritual, emotional, mental, physical. It has all those ramifications. And I think I know better this evening than any other prior time in my life that what we're reading is steps far to go that there's no human power that can relieve our alcoholism. and that God can and will, or could and would, if sought. But I had real trouble with God because the only thing that I knew about God and organized religion was a group of holy rollers that used to be out here about 15 miles in the country, and I was embarrassed by them then for them and most of the neighborhood that didn't belong to this particular cult felt the same way and that was my idea of all organized religions as far as that's concerned so I wasn't going to have any part of it and I had a real problem with that until one beautiful guy one beautiful knight said to me Bob if you're having trouble with God put another zero in it may sound quite simple because I guess I am simple but the idea that I couldn't say that I do not believe in good and to me that suffices even today that good and God are one and the same thing. I can even now get up in the morning and have been for a number of years and get up and say I feel good this morning I feel God this morning but that seems to have relieved me from that terrible prejudice and bias that was killing me by degrees. I realized in that sense that I had certainly what you might call a deep spiritual illness. I was deprived, I was spiritually deprived rather than spiritually enlightened as I felt myself to be. Well, okay, moving on with the story, I'd been sober some nine months or so, and my father came out on a trip with my mother to California, and so he saw the change in me, and he invited me to come back and join the family business. And I wanted to comeback and try to make amends to where I'd lost a lot of it and left a lot of it, and I readily accepted. Besides that, I wanted to save all of you back here, you know. I knew you needed me. So I came back, as I told you this afternoon, and I told you how that I met D.H. and I met Pete. But I still contend that this is nothing short of a miracle because when I had left some two-and-a-half years or so before, or nearly three, I guess, at that time. All the people in Clovis were narrow-minded hypocrites. They were ignorant of all sorts of bad things, including mostly my family, who was going to run my business all the time, interfering with me. And I just thought this was the most terrible, narrow-mindered little town in the world. And when I came back here after coming into this program every citizen of this town had changed I don't know anybody that could honestly say that them getting sober had changed the whole city of some 30,000 people but it happened seriously everything was changed the people of course that had seen me sneak out as a stumbling drunk. I was as anonymous here as I am in Los Angeles. I'm about as anonymous in Los Angles as the Los Angeles City Hall. But here, I couldn't be anonymous because everybody that knew me knew that I had a very severe alcohol problem. So I had no use in trying to hide that, and then the good people of this community began to invite me to be back in the country club and the Rotary Club and all that sort of thing, and I've always been prone. You give me about one, you know, half a minute, and somebody gives me any kind of a shot, and I'm talking about alcoholism, okay? And all that soort of thing. I still do. So I could see that one of these days I was going to be invited to make a talk to some of my own Rotary Club. But I had to think about that, whether I would break not my anonymity because I was sticking to the anonymity of Alcoholics Anonymous, but I had learned from Marty Mann and all that sort of thing that it's okay, you know, to be a recovering alcoholic. You can identify yourself as sober or a recovering alcoholic without having to say what your treatment modality was. So I did observe that on all sorts of levels. But in any case, that started a whole string of things, and first thing you know I was on the speaking circuit all the civic clubs of Pertalus and Hereford and Freona and whatever loved every moment of it and then I couldn't get enough of that and I decided we only had one meeting a week here and D.H. will remember and then Gil a little later and I'm going to get to his story later I'm gonna take his inventory a little bit I decided that somehow or other this whole community ought to be awakened to this illness so I'd heard about Marty Mann and her committee for education on alcoholism as before it became the National Council so I managed to get a hold of her and the first thing I knew was one of these great AA members Horace Ford who worked for her at the time came by to see me and turned out to be one of my great educators as far as I'm concerned and so we started here in Clovis if you please the Clovis Committee for Education on Alcoholism what do you know I had to go out of town and I came back and the whole damn AA group had moved away they moved to try to get rid of me but I had a few friends left in there and maybe it might have been Chet because he came along about that time told me where they'd moved so I just showed up at this other meeting you know a new place and went on about my business but I'd like to tell you that in the next three or four years every single one of that group at that time came to me and said Bob, we've got to make some amends but that's kind of how that we looked at in those days. And I promised to tell a story that I told a few people here that I think kind of is appropriate because for that work, I was awarded a scholarship to Yale University at New Haven, Yale Summer School of Alcohol Studies, which I was delighted, and that was by Horace Ford and Dr. Jelnik, the famous scientist who did so much of the research which now brought into being the fact that not only that this was an illness because that's been talked about for several thousand years but for the first time in the history of mankind delineated the some 43 symptoms of alcoholism and I've just got to mention those a little bit as we go along because that was next to my entry into Alcoholics Anonymous the greatest factor in my life when I met Dr. Jelinek and went to the school and he got up on a blackboard I knew he couldn't have ever known me possibly and told the story of my life here was the progressive symptoms of this disease called alcoholism and I'd lived every damn one of them practically not necessarily in the exact order as it came and most of you know those if you see those, the so-called valley chart. But I'm going to digress just a moment and tell you, because I think it's ever so important, and I don't think I've ever heard this from a podium. I've heard it in educational situations that people, very few people know how those things happen. Dr. Jelinek, the same year that Dr. Bob and Bill met in Akron, Ohio, there was a bunch, They started a laboratory of applied physiology at Yale University. As far as I know, at least on any kind of an intellectual level, there was no communication between the two, and you can make of that what you want to. But they started a research program in the laboratory of implied physiology as why some people can drink and others cannot, and all the things that go in, which, of course, has been a mystery throughout all the life of mankind, because you can go back as far in history as there is any history, and find evidences of problem drinking, and people trying to do something with the problem. Not very much individually, but on some sort of a state or governmental level. But nevertheless, as they moved along in their research, that question became more paramount, and it was Dr. E.M. Jellinick which was to make him world famous and probably go down in history one of those never repeated kind of things that the disease concept of alcoholism as he wrote the book but the fact how he did this and I think you'll enjoy this as I certainly did he got to the point where he knew that he had to find out from inside out from alcoholics what happened how was their drinking different from inside up and the way they did it and felt about it and what it did to them, to the rest of the world. So he had his control group easy enough, but he had to find some Alkies. So he did what most researchers would do if they didn't know any better. They'd go down to Skid Row and get a truckload of them. But he went to a local clinic there and started working with these Alkis, these drinking Alkas. He found out soon what all of you Al-Anon members or family members knew from the beginning. The truth wasn't in us. we wouldn't tell the truth about anything about our drinking so he obviously knew he couldn't get any do any good there so he was stumped and one afternoon and I'm fantasizing again that he had his feet up someplace reading a paper he read about a group of people calling this is about now in the early 40s and he read about a group calling themselves Alcoholics Anonymous who had groups in New York and Akron and maybe Philadelphia within Washington or whatever, and he thought, uh-oh, and he could get the information that they were alcoholics, admitted that they weren't, but for the most part were staying sober. And so maybe I can get some information from them. So he got on the train or bus or drove down or whatever he did from New Haven to New York, got a hold of Bill W. and others, and I'm sure he got in touch with Dr. Bob at that time because Dr. Rob and Bill would always play these things back and forth and would they work with the Yale group and Bill and Dr. Bob said yes we would and we think maybe some of the other people would so they agreed to that research program and then in the grapevine as all of you are familiar with I'm sure they put a questionnaire and sent it out to the AA groups around the country and asking any of us who wanted to to fill out that questionnaire well it was pitifully small the first group that the first bunch of letters they got back were questionnaires about 200 and Dr. Jelinek almost dropped the whole thing said that's not enough for a viable research so but he got to playing around with these and he hadn't even gone through the entire 200 when he saw that the here was a desperate trail nearly all of these people certain things that they had done one way or the other that said not in exactly the same sequence, but what was happening. So he knew that this was on a hot trail. So this time they enlarged the questionnaire and sent it out all over the U.S. and Canada, the groups of that time, and then through the National Committee, Marty Mann and that group, as many as they possibly could. And I remember this about 1947, I believe, and I had one of those questionnaires that was sent me and that I filled out. I'm always glad to fill out any questionnaire at anybody, you know what I mean? So I like to answer questions about myself. And when he got those back, definitely, there's just no question. Here was the very definite progressive illness of alcoholism. And I remember it. that he used to just pound the fact that you cannot understand alcoholism unless you can understand progression. Because it is, above everything else in the world, a progressive illness. And he compared it. I remember, maybe I thought of that, maybe it tells something about me. It's pregnancy. Okay? A young woman might not know she's pregnant. Might be 30 minutes or an hour or four hours pregnant, but she doesn't know that. and her husband doesn't know that and her doctor doesn't know that but she's pregnant you wait three months everybody knows and this is the way alcoholism is it starts out undetectable in that particular individual and then it grows and grows and grows and I didn't know these things of course that alcoholism is terminal illness I didn' t know that I didn''t even know it was an illness in the first place I guess I think I suspected that and some of you did from inside that I'm going to die unless I do something about this but it's a terminal illness and will always end in death or insanity or locked up as the saying goes unless treated the treatment means that we got to abstain from alcohol but I started out to tell you this great scientist who loved Ockies I think he went to more AA meetings than many alcoholics so somewhere along the line and Pete and I had D.H. at that time Gil had joined us and Chet we used to have a lot of around Robbins so if they said in Borger they wanted to start a meeting we went there or Lovington or Carlsbad or Odessa or Midland Loveck, Plainview whatever so we were all kind of a part of that in those days. We were afraid not to be. We'd just take out and drive for miles to go to an A meeting. And I had been called by a guy in Albuquerque and said that he's trying to start a group there, and he just got out of the nuthouse up in Pueblo. And so I went over to try to help him. And also I found out that Dr. Jelnik was going to be coming through, and we were able to rope him in and got Horace's support in that. To have him stop and share was kind of an educational program with the group, and he couldn't make it that time, but he promised to be back later, and so sometime later, the troops were going well, and they got enough of them, and they caught fire, and the first thing you know they had four or five or six groups around they were all fighting one another and so when we finally got him booked in Albuquerque later because we were still trying to do that and somebody must have gotten to him it wasn't me, somebody must have told him about all this internecine fighting going on and all these new groups sprouting up and he told a most delightful story that I'd like to pass on to you. I don't know whether he thought it up had heard it. It seems as though that there was a passed away on a desert island, and he shipwrecked, and nobody came close to him for years. He was just alone and sent up his signal fire. Nobody could ever see it, and he just about gave up. Finally one day a ship was close enough and they saw his signal fire and they pulled in the captain lowered his boat, his dinghy and came ashore and walked up to this guy you know and of course he's so happy to see him he'd be happy to be rescued and they walked up to where this guy was living this hut that he made out of driftwood and all that sort of thing and walked inside and there was two big A's over the mantel and out of driftwood and stuff you know the twelve steps and twelve traditions all around the wall of this hut. The captain said, Are you an AA? And the guy said, Well, yeah. He said, That's fantastic. I think that's incredible. You've been here, couldn't have really had any alcohol or gotten drunk, and yet you worked your program all this time. I think it's fantastic." About that time he looked out the window about 300 yards over there there was a little grass hut with two big AAs over the door. and he turned the castaway he said you are alone here aren't you and he said yes he said well what's that over there and he says oh that's that other clubhouse and I don't go to that well after about nine years here and all the joy that a person as I said can ever be given. I decided that I, that time, I guess I wanted from the very first time I came in the program, loved 12-step work, still did it working with others, I just knew somehow, someway, somewhere I was going to end up in this field. So it obviously wasn't going to be in Clovis, New Mexico or probably anywhere in New Mexico and I also knew if I was gonna work in the field that there's more Alkies per square inch in Southern California than any place else in the world. So then with love in my heart and appreciation this time in an entirely different way but I bundled up the children and we went to California in 1954 where I've lived ever since. I've come back here a lot as I said and always close will be very, very dear to my heart because it's where I this is my roots. but it's been an incredible experience I have the time that you don't to share some of those things I could never have believed what was going to happen to me I couldn't put it in words actually even if I started out to try to tell you but that experience has been I could not have imagined all the things that would occur in my life first place as I said I was traveling in California for years, or out of California, all over the U.S. and Canada. And I went to AA meetings in practically every crossroads town for a number of years, and the love and goodwill that I found, as you always do in this fellowship, but it was very meaningful to me, of course at that time still is, but didn't make any difference whether I was in Great Falls, Montana, or wherever, or Peoria, Illinois. All I had to do, and some of my sponsors have told me always that's the first number to call, and I recommend that to any of you, wherever you go. About three or four weeks, about four weeks ago, I was in Paris, France attending an AA meeting there. Had a hell of a time. Matter of fact, I went to two of them one evening, both English-speaking meetings, and then in London and Dublin. It's everywhere you wish to go, and sometimes it just absolutely just warmed the cockles of your heart. I was in Peoria one time, and I hadn't made a reservation. I was sober for quite some time by then and doing well, but I'd forgotten to make myself a reservation, and I ended up at a tank hotel as the only thing I could find, and my habit was to phone AA, and i did, and i said, my name is Bob Doris, and im at the hotel so-and-so. The guy didn't give any time to say, I'll be right there. What room are you in? And he hung up on me. It seemed like ten minutes until the guy puffed at the door. He'd run up to the third floor and the elevator was too slow. Here he came. Come to help. If that doesn't bring tears to your eyes, it does to mine. He didn't know what I was in trouble and he was ready to help me. That's the first time he'd ever. Well, I told him I was okay. I just wanted to find a meeting. So he said, well, the clubhouse is not far from here, so where do we went? I could tell you those stories over and over andover, but I got to tell you this one because it was so signal in my life. In 1970, I had been laid off at Rockwell International as a consultant there, and I got a brand new job with McDonald Douglas Corporation to set up their corporate-wide program, employee assistance program. And I had to go back to St. Louis at their corporate headquarters where I knew no one, that is, you know, in any sense of the word, and certainly in the business world. And, I showed up back there on a Sunday night. I had to go back and take my clothes and rent an apartment and stay six months to set up their program. And I knew that before I could come back to Santa Monica. And so it was just as natural as can be that the first night I hit St. Louis after I'd had my dinner, and I looked up the phone in the local central office and said, where's the meeting? It was one right in a church not far from the airport where all McDonnell Douglas facilities there on near Lambert Field. and, of course, I met a lot of people just like you. I told them who I was and what I was there for, and I must admit at least eight or ten workers, employees of McDonnell Douglas and several family members. Now, I know since my company did not, they knew I didn't know a soul there. I was a total stranger, and I'd come there to plan and set up this program, So ostensibly, they thought I would disappear in some office out in the corner of the personnel department and plan this thing over a period of three or four months and then emerge and say, okay, here's what we do. Well, you know better what happened. It wasn't a week until the phone was ringing off the wall inside and out from inside the plant and the community. And I could see the secretaries and officials around there that began to look at me and say, what in the hell is going on? They didn't say this, but I know they must have said, that's the workingest dude that ever hit town. They just couldn't believe this. So I could tell you all evening all kinds of fantastic stories that happened to me across this nation in all kinds of ways. And that's kind of where it is today. I'm more eager about Alcoholics Anonymous of anything today than I was even then. I certainly don't feel any immediate danger of getting drunk. I don't know how long it's been since I've really, at least consciously, felt in any danger of drinking, but I'm just as aware as anybody could be that my thinking needs this program every day of my life. And that's where my heart and spirit is. But I have had an occasion to mix with some of the finest people in the world, both in and out of AA. I couldn't tell you how much my deep friendship was Betty and Bob, who we'd be talking in the morning. We met all these years because I knew Betty, of course, before she ever met Bob, and I met Bob early at the end of the war, and we've been friends ever since. I see people around this room that I have known over the years all of them are part of my heart and part of what I really am I've had teachers and instructors and spiritual leaders and of all kinds and of face and all beliefs share this is one of the most down to earth kind of things I wouldn't know how to tell you and I guess I'm speaking more now to those of you who might be new and maybe that's who I really wanted to talk to anyway there's what lays in store I heard Dee say that I envy you for just coming into the program because the many wonderful things that's going to happen to you if you'll stay with this program I know nothing like it and I've had an opportunity to travel pretty much all over this continent and somewhat abroad I've never seen anything else that compared with this in any shape form or fashion and from this fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous has sprung all kinds of self-help groups. I don't know what's going on so much in maybe right in close New Mexico, but I know pretty much around the country in the larger cities is the self-health concept all springing from the fellowship of AA originating in this has become the treatment modality in the world today, whether you know that or not. I don't know of any treatment program worth its salt anywhere in America but know that today. And although you hear on the radio and TV and all that sort of thing, all sorts of claims, any program or any therapist, psychiatrist, psychologist or otherwise, that's getting any kind of results are doing no more than just trying to educate this person with the fundamentals of alcoholism and seeing to it that they get into the eternal and final and support of Alcoholics Anonymous. And at least in Southern California, you can find all kinds of therapists and psychiatrists and psychologists who are coming there to learn and they're really trying to learn. Some of them are surprisingly enough are beginning to begin to see that alcoholism is first, last, and always a primary illness. And if you don't know that, please know that. And I don't care how dangling somebody is or whatever it is that they're trying to treat, don't ever try to treat them if they have alcoholism until you arrest the alcoholism, see what you have left. I know there's about 10% of us that are ding-a-ling, we're nuts. But you won't get down to that until you've done something about the drinking problem. And most of the treatment world fundamentally are learning. You have, you know, the screwy ones like the Shadel and all that business, but don't pay too much attention to them. I don't know what we can do about that. They ought to be arrested. Maybe they will be sometime, all those lurid claims. But most of the treatment world in which I've been familiar with years have long since known better and will guide that patient, either outpatient or inpatient, directly into the Fellowship of AA as soon as they get their hands on them. Detox them and begin to fundamentally get them into the Alcoholics Anonymous and all the drinking, driving programs. I don't know what they're doing in New Mexico I can't find out that much but they're exploding Alcoholics Anonymous in California because all the judges insist that they either go to jail or go to an educational program and go to AlcoholicsAnonymous and get their card signed and that has exploded the fellowship there there's lots of leading deacons and I was one of them for a few years I remember many years ago in Santa Monica because the first judge had started sentencing the people to our program. We all said, they can't do that. And I was one of the committee. We were going to march on the judge and tell him what he ought to know. Somehow I was out of town. I didn't get to go with that group, but they came back with their tail between their legs and they said, well, the judge let us know that he was the judge and he could do any damn thing he wanted. And although they had a little trouble at the beginning to get some of the group to sign the card, but it wasn't too long until they began to accomplish what happened. People like me and the others began to see too many people get well, get sober, and stay in AA who were first sent for the judge. And believe me, whenever the judge says you've got to go there or go to jail, you have a candidate for going to Alcoholics Anonymous. You may not like it. and I see many of them when they come in hostile, angry and you know all that sort of thing but as time goes along they begin to hear something and more than you would ever realize begin to say oh I didn't know that oh I see and they stay to get well I want to close by telling my favorite story Gil and I have shared this a lot I said how much I love Gil Lamb I, in many ways, my life is intricately tied up with him because he used to, we used to Pete and I used to say when Gil hit town most of the Alkies here would take the phone off the hook because he was running wild across this country in an old beat-up pickup but we all recognized, seriously we all recognize that somehow that guy really wanted to be sober and he did something which I always admired and still do to this day somehow he never did blame AA for his failure he never if I ever heard him say and blame Alcoholics Anonymous for him getting drunk and I somehow then knew that someday some way that guy'd make it as he told you this afternoon he and I were working together at the time he had his last drunk that was to last him for over 15 years, and all of you know that he became a legend in this area. And I've still walked from here to BUSU to get to hear him, and I mean it. He has the great gift, and he shared it liberally. D.H. was one of the kind who would always sit back along with Pete and not talk so much but kind of guide us. And Gail and I had talked enough to three people. But they'd always kind of keep us straightened out and if we got a little too wild they'd kind of reach out and get us but in any way I'm glad to be back here and be a part of you as I always am I know that at my age and I'm now 74 will be in about five days I'm in better health incidentally I was when I was 30 but this time alone tells me you know that the shadows are lengthening the twilight time in my life and I do look to that with no fear and the final roll call I may whimper a little I'm going to try not to but I know that this is where I belong and always will be I have found an alcoholic's anonymous not only his sobriety but a spiritual life for me might not make much sense to any of you but it fulfills my life and my entire being I believe there is a guiding intelligence in the universe that governs all things and that I'm a part of that and I always was that I never really could be lost although I thought I was that my higher power would wait as long as it was necessary it to help me whenever I reached out. As Gil said, all I have to say is God help me. And my final story that somehow I heard this years ago and it's touched me and I'd just like to share it because I think, because I guess it meant so much to me. Because I always have that deep and tender feeling for alcoholics and I know the humiliation that all of you have gone through, and I may have never seen you before, but I know that humiliation in each and every one of you, what you've suffered over the years, bewilderingly so, not knowing what in the world was really taking place. But my favorite alcoholic, in 1863 there was a war going on between the states civil war not sure that's all settled yet at that time there was a drunk brought in from the valley skid row in new york city with a crushed skull and laid out on the marble slab in bellevue hospital big charity hospital in new York city and the only they didn't know who he was. He had no identification. The only thing he found on him was a little girl's child's purse, a little red purse, but fourteen cents in the scrap of paper that said, Dear Hearts and Gentle People. Probably the beginning of some unfinished song or poem. But even though that no one cared who he was, it wouldn't even take the trouble to look, soldiers on both sides of the opposing forces were marching into battle, singing this man's song. Beautiful dreamer, genie with a light brown hair, old folks at home. Gone are the days when my heart was young and gay. Gone aren't my friends from the cotton fields away. Gone from this earth to a better land I know, I hear those gentle voices calling, old black Joe. Well maybe this man heard the gentle voices, I hope so, somewhere. We know a number of things about him although they didn't care at that time, we know he was only 37 and dying that early he would probably rob the American people of an additional heritage of music although he left us one that will stand as long as we have a nation, I think. I don't think anybody could listen to his lyrics or his melodies or his songs and think that this man was a bad man, an evil man. Yet he happened to have been born and suffered and died in the time when alcoholism wasn't a sickness, it was a sin. And although it may have robbed us, there's a lot of additional abuse of beautiful music that cost Stephen Foster his life. Now I know that the annals of American history are filled with many noblemen, but I think the Prince of the Purple Chamber lay dead when Stephen Foster put his head gently in the lap of his maker and joined the old folks at home. Thank you. Thank you for watching!