The Fellowship That Opened the Gates of Hell and Let Him Out – Bill S.

I want to welcome all of our friends who are sitting in Memorial Hall, watching on closed-circuit TV. I was over there. Chose Bill here as a speaker when he was still actively chairman. So I had the privilege of hosting and being his chairman tonight for Bill. and I've heard his tape and I listened to it in bits and pieces as I was getting ready to go out somewhere and I played it on a tape recorder in the bedroom and finally last Wednesday night I heard the end of it and he had me in tears and of course the last three or four weeks it didn't take much to put me in fears but his message was very, very moving. He has an alcoholic's anonymous message. I picked him up at the airport Friday, and his lovely wife Marlene, his son Scott, and his friend Carol, and I met four beautiful people. And it was my privilege to spend a weekend with them as much as I possibly could, and it is my privilege now to give you Bill Sanders from Atlanta, Georgia. You're an awesome sight. My name is Bill Sanders and I'm an alcoholic By the grace of a loving God And his gift of you to me I'm sober today Last evening after the old timers meeting the family and i sat down on the lawn out here and watched the people come and go watch the power and the love of this fellowship in this weekend and all of these miracles coming and going and as i sat out there on the beautiful green lawn i thought about the majesty and the power of what we're experiencing this weekend and i thought abut what i felt is the responsibility of standing up here before you tonight, and I thank God for the challenge. And I said, God, send me a message that everything will be okay. And at that moment, as my family will confirm, a little bird flew over and pooped right on my arm. I asked for support, he gave me humility. Today I stood in the lobby of the Mayflower Hotel and I've been in hundreds of lobbies of hundreds of hotels and that one doesn't look any different than all of the others, except that a miracle took place in that lobby. And I stood today in a little house on Ardmore that is like a little house on a lot of little streets and a lot of little towns all over America. And nothing particularly distinguishes that little house except that a miracle took place there. And I stood beside a gatehouse. I stood behind a gate, beside a gate house on the beautiful grounds of Stan Hewitt today and it looked like a lot of gate houses and a lot mansions except that a miracle to place there and as I look out at you tonight This arena looks like a lot of arenas in a lot of cities around the country, but my God at the miracles that are in this room tonight. Ms. Bill Wilson slipped into that phone booth and began to make those telephone calls to those ministers. And as those two men sat down in that little gate house. I don't think in their wildest dreams could they have imagined what you and I are looking at as we look at each other in this room tonight. You know, I grew up in a church that taught all things about miracles that took place hundreds and a couple of thousand years ago. And I've heard people say, why don't miracles take place now like they did back then? If they could see us now. When I came to the doors of Alcoholics Anonymous, I began to hear you people in rooms like, not like this, a lot littler than this, but in meeting rooms all over where I went to meetings, people started talking about a thing called an alcoholic personality. And I didn't know what that was, so I began asking questions of people. What is an alcoholic personality. Well, I got hundreds of answers, none of which made any sense at all to me. Until one time an old-timer got tired of hearing me ask that question and he said, son, I'm going to tell you a story. And when I get through telling you this little story, you won't have to ask that questions anymore. And if you've heard this little story, you're going to hear it again. It's the little story of the little drunk walking along the beach one day and he finds half buried in the sand a bottle. And he uncorks the bottle in hopes of finding a few stray drops in the bottom but instead suddenly there's a puff of smoke and there standing in the sand in front of him is a great big guy about nine feet tall with a turban on his head well this little drunks had some bad dts in his time but he's never seen anything like this he rubbed his eyes it was still there it spoke it said i am your genie you have three wishes what would you like well the little drunk didn't think very long and he said i'd like to have a bottle of bourbon that's never empty another instant another puff of smoke and they're sitting in front of him in the sand is a great big jug he uncorked it and took a whiff it was the good stuff he turned it up and took us if looked at it is still right to the top he turned it up chugged it for about five seconds and just to be sure he tilted it down and it was still right to the top. Then that little drunk turned up that bottle and he chugged at it for about a minute and a half, most he'd had in a month. And when he tilted it down, he looked and it was still right tothe top. The genie said, is that okay? He said, that's wonderful. He said you have two more wishes, what would you like? He says I want two more just like this one. Now, that's an alcoholic personality. And this is going to be the only time I'll take your inventory tonight. I will tell you that if you understand that story, you're in the right place tonight. You can go out here on the streets of Akron and you can tell that story to people and they would look at you and say but if this one's never going to be why would he they don't get it they don'T get it and I've quit trying to make them get it because they're never going to understand but when I found you people and these rooms for the first time in my life I knew that I was with people who understood me and I was and I love the sign over the door Dr. Bob's welcome home I was born in a very very small town in the hills of North Georgia I mean little town and my little hometown in the heels of North Georgia they used to say there was three things to do on Saturday night. You could watch them unload the truck at the A&P. You could watch the water tank leak. Or you could drive across the Savannah River into South Carolina and buy beer and drink. I did not arrive at your doors from too much water tank watching. My story has to go back before that, though. My story has to go back to my very earliest memory because my very earliest memory i always felt less than i always spelt like a square peg looking for a round hole i never felt that i belonged i never felt that fit in anywhere now people who grew up with me and went to school with me said that's ridiculous bill sanders was a member of every organization and every group that came along everything in school everything in church everything in Scouts yes I joined everything I felt a part of nothing I always felt like I was on the outside looking in but when I was 15 years old a group of friends said to me come with us we're going over to South Carolina and buy some beer and under peer pressure or curiosity or a combination of both i went with them and i sat down on the banks of the savannah river and someone popped open a beer and handed it to me and i took a great big swallow and it was beyond any shadow of a doubt the most vile putrid god-awful tasting stuff i had ever put in my mouth only drank six that night it was terrible what did you folks see in that stuff but somewhere between the second and the third beer a little click went off right back here in the back of my head and when that little click went off suddenly I was wittier and I was handsomer and I was sexier and I was smarter than I had ever been in my entire life or anybody I had never known in my entire life and in a moment after that little click went off all the fear left all of the anxiety left and I looked at that can oh wow boy have I found a friend I said I have found a friend that is going to be my friend for the rest of my life and it almost was i didn't drink that much in that little town as i went on through high school in little towns that small there ain't no such thing as anonymity everybody knows what everybody else does and if my mother had ever caught me drinking i wouldn't have needed alcoholics anonymous i would have just needed an undertaker but then i went off to college and when i took only a 40 mile ride to the big city of athens georgia at the university of georgian i went to another world and i had my first taste of anonymity because nobody cared how much little billy sanders drank i mean the student population was almost three times that of my whole hometown. And so I started drinking every day. I very quickly discovered that liquor was quicker and some of it even tasted better. So I started drinking every day. You know, there are a lot of people who have wonderful memories of their college careers. I don't have that many fond memories of my college career. I don t remember a whole lot of my college career. I do know that I stayed in trouble a lot of the time during my college career. The dean of men at the University of Georgia, who was the chief disciplinarian, had a bench outside of his office. They got to be known as the Bill Sanders Bench because I sat on it more than anybody else. His secretary—it should have been a clue to me because his secretary when i would walk in the door would lean over and look at the dean and say he's here and he never asked who's he i almost got thrown out of school many many times and some of them were for things that i thought was terrible but one thing i found that they they they have absolutely no sense of patriotism at the university of georgia they almost threw me out of school for singing the national anthem, a Star Spangled Banner. Of course, I was singing it to an empty flagpole in front of the infirmary at three o'clock in the morning and woke up all the sick people inside. There's a grand tradition at the University of Georgia after every time Georgia wins a football game, they ring the chapel bell, stands in a big tower behind the chapel, and they even have a roster of official bell ringers in the library you can go back to 1903 after such and such a game and see who rang the chapel bell from 9 to 9 15 p.m etc i rang that chapel bell my name's not in that roster might have had something to do with the fact that i was ringing it on easter sunday morning at three o'clock. And it wasn't the dean that came to get me that time, it was the mayor of Athens. That's the way my college career went. I didn't tell you earlier that I got into the profession that I have been in all of my life at the age of 13. I became a disc jockey at a local radio station and uh oh okay you were listening back then huh supposedly at that time was supposed to have been the youngest disc jockey in the country there a lot of them have come along a lot younger since then but when i was a junior in college i got an opportunity i was studying broadcasting and i got a chance to go intern for the summer at wsb radio and television in atlanta which was the oldest and the largest, the first television station in the southern United States. Grand, grand old tradition of broadcasting. And I and several hundred other people applied for that internship, and I crossed my fingers and hoped and prayed. And as fate would have it, my roommate and I got the two internships for that summer. And on a spring day of that year, my roomate and I traveled down to Atlanta to meet the people that we would be working with that summer. They were all stars to us. We found a little apartment to rent for the summer, to live in. And I remember thinking all day that day, life can't get any better than this. And we'd of course decided to celebrate and so we hit a few bars and had a few drinks. Then we took the car we had borrowed from a friend back to Athens and returned it to him in his apartment didn't want the day to end top of the world life treating me like i deserve and as two or three o'clock in the morning as i was prone to do by this time in my life i would drink and personalities would change and i would become somebody else and i began to clown around and act like the total imbecile that i was capable of being and the guy's apartment we were in had a big old antique gun collection around the wall and I reached up on the wall and I took down an old long barrel Colt .22 pistol and I pointed at my roommate and I said, stick him up. He threw up his hands. I pulled the trigger and there was a sound like thunder and in a moment my roommate was lying on the floor in front of me in a pool of blood. A few hours later at a local hospital the doctors were to tell us that Wayne would live but that he would never walk again the bullet had severed his spine in the early hours of the following morning a strange thing happened in a hospital room in Athens Georgia my roommate reached up from the hospital bed and put his hand on my arm and said Bill don't blame yourself it was an accident it could just as easily have been the other way around please don't blame yourself he forgave me immediately but I didn't forgive myself for more than 20 years I used it as an excuse to crawl into the bottle and to live I went on that summer to that internship my roommate spent the summer in a hospital in Atlanta in surgery after surgery in a vain attempt to restore the use of his legs unfortunately it was not to happen. And my pattern was a simple one. I went to work every afternoon at three o'clock and I would work through the 11 o' clock news at night and when the 11 O'clock news was over I and all the other people around the station would head across the street to a local bar in the local hotel and we'd start to drink. Now back then the bars closed in Atlanta at 1 45 a.m. I never have figured out what the significance of that was but there were usually a bunch of us radio and tv folks in the newspaper people in there and out of friendship to us or whatever they would lock the door of the bar leave us one bartender turn out most of the lights and then go on home and we would stay there and drink until three or four or five in the morning then i would stumble out of that bar and into a cab and back to that lonely apartment pass out on the bed and sleep it off until the next afternoon at about two. And then I'd repeat the same cycle all over again. It worked as long as there was enough to drink and as long as I had that cycle to keep me going. The summer that was to have been the dream of a lifetime is today for me but a foggy, hazy nightmare. But that fall it all ended and it was back to school for my senior year. And it didn't take but a few days after I got back to school to start putting a plan into motion. I started going to the infirmary at the university and telling the doctors that I was having trouble sleeping. And they'd prescribe a sleeping pill and I'd take it down to the pharmacy and get it filled and take it back and put it in the nightstand drawer at my dormitory. And a few years later, I'd go back and see another of the doctors and I'd tell him I was having trouble sleeping. He'd prescribe the pill down the hall, fill it, take it home, put it in the nightstand. Unfortunately they didn't kept very good record keeping back then so over a period of weeks I am asked quite a supply. And then I waited until one Friday afternoon when my new roommate was headed home to take his brand new car he had just bought and show it to his family and I set my plan into motion. I stood at the dormitory window, and I watched as the car pulled out the driveway of the dormitory and up the hill and out of sight. And I closed the blinds and sat down on the side of the bed, emptied all those little bottles out onto the nightstand of what was later determined to be between 50 and 60 sleeping pills. And one by one, two by two, and three by three, I popped them down and swallowed them, turned out the light, and pulled up the covers. For more than 20 years I believe that it was a huge coincidence that my roommates brand-new car inexplicably broke down at the city limits of Athens and had to be towed back and that he came into that dormitory room and found me and saw all the little bottles knew my frame of mind and put it all together very quickly and called an ambulance I say I believed for 20 years that it was a coincidence because today I no longer believe in coincidences I love the definition I heard a few years ago that a coincidence is a miracle in which God chooses to remain anonymous and I believe with all my heart that that is the first of many many many many times that the God you have under taken to introduce me to through the years the God that you've helped me come to know, looked down and said, big boy, I'm not through with you yet. Incidentally, after my roommate's car was towed back to the garage, I don't think you'll find it surprising that the mechanics couldn't find anything wrong with and it cranked the first time they tried i should have gotten a message from that but i didn't it was soon after that incident that i began the grand american tradition of visiting the neighborhood shrink and through the years i have no idea how many of those individuals that i went to see or how many thousands of dollars that i and my family paid out to them i do know that i left every one of their offices every time that i visited one of those damning them because not one single one of them ever did one thing to help me now this is a program of rigorous honesty so i am forced to tell you tonight that i do believe there is at least the remote possibility that one or more of those people might have been able to help me if i had ever once told them the truth you know somewhere always around the third or the fourth question they they say uh do you think you might have a drinking problem. And my standard answer was, no, I drink fine. And they treat something else. I eventually did exit the University of Georgia. I did it with a diploma in my hand. I have never been completely sure if I earned it or if they just got tired of me hanging around. At any rate, I'm not going to ask today because I've gotten used to that diploma hanging around all these years. I ended up in another town in North Georgia working at a radio station and I knew that I was a so-called adult now and I needed to go up and get my act together and cut down on my drinking and get involved in the community and become a pillar of the community. So I joined the church and I joined civic clubs and I joined the leadership of scouting organization. I joined a local club there that had one of the only bars in town and I don't need to tell you which one ended up getting the most of my attention, I lived in that bar. And it wasn't too very long until I met a beautiful girl. And It wasn't very long after I met that beautiful girl that I knew that I wanted to marry her and it wasn t but a few months after that that she was to become my first wife. I also knew that when I got married that I needed to clean up my act, I needed to cut down on my drinking and I needed to learn how to be a responsible husband. But to my utter delight, I quickly discovered that that woman liked to drink just as much as I did. I didn't have to cut it down on nothing. So every day after work she and I would head to this bar and we'd drink until they closed. Every once in a while we'd stop and ordered dinner. Once in a while, we even ate it. Not very often. And after a few months, we were married. Now, you know, most people when they tie one on the night before and they get up the next morning and they go to work, the person at the next desk or the next piece of equipment or the next office across the hall kind of looks at you and says uh-huh had a rough night last night huh it's not that way when you've got to sign a radio station on the air and try to sound cheerful to hundreds of thousands of people at six o'clock in the morning it's hell's what it is and it was then that i first learned to pray because i would get the first record started in the morning turn the volume down just as low as i could get it drape my arm over the microphone turn the microphone down and say oh dear god thank you that this ain't television i would never have pulled it off my radio audience never knew how many newscasts that i did lying flat of my back on the floor with the microphone pulled down over my face. It was the only way I could get to a room to quit going around and around. It was also about this time that my wife came home one day after a couple of years of marriage and said, guess what? We're going to have a baby. And we talked a lot about it during the months that were to come and said you know we really do need to clean up our act and we need to cut down on our drinking and we need to learn how to be responsible parents. We need not to go to the club every night and drink. And we did that after the baby came for two, maybe three weeks. And then we discovered the great American institution of the babysitter. And we were right back in that club every day every night. I also know today that this was the beginning of the time when my marriage began to come apart to my first wife. I hear a lot of people in AA say they come into the program and that marriages fall apart and they have trouble, and they say it's because of problems of communication. And I never have really understood that because my first wife and I communicated. You could ask our neighbors three doors down the street, they'd say the Sanders communicate. They could even tell you what we were communicating about. our communication sessions usually followed a particular pattern usually on sunday afternoon that's the best time when you got plenty of time you know nowhere to be and you just get into a good knock down drag out and i could hang in there with the best of them as long as i was winning but when it became apparent to me that i was on the losing side i would immediately grab my bottles storm out the back door get in my car peel out the driveway up the hill i'm out of here i don't need to stay here and listen to this crap over and over and oh no i never did i didn't seem to get on the winning end of very many of those arguments happened over and again one sunday afternoon i had all my facts together they came rolling down on index cards i was ready we got into this good knock-down, drag-out communication. About ten minutes into it, guess what? I'm losing. So I grab my bottle, storm out the back door, peel out the driveway, up the hill I'm out of here just like a hundred other Sunday afternoons. Only one thing different this Sunday afternoon, I still had my pajamas on. Well, my wife did what any sweet, caring, loving thoughtful wife would do she sent a friend to come get me and bring me home only one thing wrong with that my friend happened to be a police captain and he found me sitting in the parking lot of the holiday inn minding my own business talking to my bottle he knocked on the car window i looked up at him and said hey harold he suggested i get out of my car and to get into the police car with him that he'd take me home And I told him that he could, I said no thank you. Well, he began to talk to me about his relative size to mine and the impact of that billy club on his belt had up the side of a person's head and his Marine Corps wrestling experiences. And the more he talked, the more it seemed to make sense that I might want to consider going with him. i was drunk i wasn't stupid well i got in the car with him and it didn't take very mental giant to know that about two turns we weren't heading toward my house about two more turns i knew where we were headed because we pulled into the parking lot of the local hospital emergency room before i could protest or say anything i was whisked into that emergency room checked into that hospital and upstairs in a room bam bam bam it's over I mean, folks, you won't believe how fast you can get checked in a hospital when you already got your pajamas on. I spec it's true here in Akron. I spec It was true back in the 1930s in Akran that most hospitals got this thing about drunks sitting in the lobby in their pajamas and bottles in their hand. a few weeks later when i checked out of that hospital did i learn anything nope drunk before the sun went down it was very shortly thereafter that i and my first wife did that thing called the great american drunks cure we moved you know i wish to god that somebody had told me 20 years ago something that i heard a few years ago in a able to save me an awful lot of moving money when he said i discovered that no matter where i go there i am if i'd have known that oh well we moved back to atlanta and i got involved in part of the broadcasting business that involved a thing called public relations and that was real interesting because i didn't even know what public relations was little town where i grew up you didn't have relations in public but there were some things about that public relation stuff that i really did like i discovered that they had a thing in atlanta that that was called a three martini lunch i like six better but if you want to have three that was your business i discovered another thing called a happy hour that's where you go and order one drink and they bring you two, sometimes three. I mean, they'd really set them in front of you. I was used to seeing two or three drinks sitting in front of me, but I mean they were really there. I also discovered that if you took that six martini lunch and you stayed late and you went to the happy hour early and you pushed the two together, you didn't even have to go back to work in the afternoon. By this time, my disease did not allow me to see that my staff that worked for me, the fact that I didn't come back from work suited them back to work suited him fine because you see the guy that came in in the morning could be a pretty nice guy sometimes, but the one who came back from one of those long lunches was different person he was argumentative he was judgmental he was forgetful he was downright mean you see my disease of alcoholism didn't allow me to see that my disease and alcoholism did not also allow me to see there was a little girl at home who by now was five or six years old who avoided her daddy at all costs my disease didn't allow me to see that my little girl didn't invite friends home to spend the night anymore because she never knew when dad's gonna come home in the middle of the night drunk out of his mind smashing furniture putting his foot through television screen dragging her out of bed at 3 a.m. demanding that she clean up her room or some other insane order my disease didn't allow me to see that or the next morning my wife would fill me in on all the details of what I'd done the night before almost gleefully sometime of course I would immediately start to deny it until I looked around at all the evidence not the least of which was a little girl cowering in the corner of the dining room table her face hovered over her cereal bowl trying not to be noticed and what I would do is take her by the hand and say Karen come on you and daddy are gonna take a walk and we go out walking down the sidewalk and I would say to her darling mommy told me what daddy did last night and I'm sorry and I want you to know that it's never never never never going to happen again and my disease did not allow me to see that there was not even a flicker of belief in that little girl's eyes she and I had taken too many walks and she had turned too many promises and too many lies Alcohol was my master, and it blinded me. The marriage continued to go downhill and to deteriorate. I didn't even notice that my wife no longer asked where I was when I didn t come home. I no longer ask where she was out when she was at nights where she wasn't. I didn' t care, and she didn't care. And I began to wake up more and more in strange places, strange beds with strange people, strange cities. Going through that routine of opening a nightstand drawer to pull out a phone book and figure out what town I'm in. Or at the end of the week when you come out of a blackout on Friday trying to line up in chronological order charge slips so you could figure out where it was you'd been that is as long as I had credit cards near the end I couldn't even get a gasoline card or even if I did make it home at night doing that horrifying thing in the morning of getting up and going and looking out the window to see if the cars there and if it's not trying to remember where you left it and Driving all over Atlanta trying to find it. Atlanta's a big town. The only thing worse than looking out and seeing that your car is not there is looking out in part of your cars there. And you don't know where the rest of it is. And the loneliness. All of those late nights in those lonely bars. and i swear i believe that the loneliest lonely on the face of this earth is the loneliness of an alcoholic in those final hours and final months even years of drinking sitting at that bar praying for another drunk to come in and sit down beside you so you can buy around and get him to listen cultivating the bartenders so they'd stand there and listen to you and you know something i realized not long ago and i want y'all to think about this in all those years and all those bars hundreds maybe thousands of them that i was in i don't remember ever hearing one bartender tell me you keep coming back and it'll get better. Of course, if he had have said it, I wouldn't have heard it, but well, life went on like this. A little girl had reached the age of about 11. I didn't see her and she didn't, she could help it see me. My wife was in one direction. I was in another direction and very often there was a little girl at home alone picking up the telephone calling bars from memorized numbers is my daddy there is my mommy there and the bartender would look at me and say it's your kid and hand me the phone and a scared little voice sitting in a little apartment alone would say daddy please come home I'm scared where's your mama I don't know daddy please come home and I would say to her I will I'm just gonna have one more drink and I'll be right home and i don't need to tell you the rest of the story hours in many drinks later I would stumble into that apartment and find cowering in the corner of the bed that little girl crying trembling one night my wife sometime around 7 o'clock in the evening left to go somewhere and I didn't ask where she was going, didn't care. She didn't tell me because she knew I didn't cared. I was extremely busy. I'm sitting in my recliner chair slugging away on my bottle. A few hours later she came back and I was still sitting there that recliner chair, watching the test pattern very intently. And she came and stood in front of my chair and she looked down at me and she said, guess where I've been? I said, who gives a, who cares? And she didn't say anything. She did something really weird. She flipped a white poker chip into my lap and I looked down at it and I look back at her and I said I don't know where you've been but if that's all you won you had a lousy night well I don' t know about here but in Atlanta Georgia when you go somewhere and come back with a little white poker chip with two A's on it it means you surrendered baby and she explained to me well, she explained to me about what that poker chip meant and I absolutely went into a flying blue perfect rage because I knew there was no way on the face of this earth that that woman was an alcoholic. Because I knew if she was then it meant that she just couldn't be an alcoholic. I mean, there's just no way. Didn't stop her. Started going every day to those meetings, something about 90 and 90 and 99. Oh, crap. I kept waiting for the other shoe to fall. I keep waiting for her to say, you need this a whole lot more than I do. She didn't. She didn't try to get me to go. Oh there were little clues here around the house like I go to the bathroom, lift the toilet seat and there's how it works taped to the you know crawl into bed at night to go to sleep and she knew how I slept I shoved my arm under my pillow and there was paper in there I pull it out open it up it's them that little pamphlet with all them questions in it i'd start reading get down about the third one but things started changing all of a sudden she wouldn't communicate like she used to i mean i'd get all my facts up ready to have a rip roar and knock down drag them out ready to go she'd look at me and go turn around walk off you people were getting to that woman i knew it was going to happen sooner or later i knew what was going on what was gonna happen one of these days she was gonna try to talk me into going one of those things and it happened one night she came in and she said or afternoon she said i'm going tonight and pick up my 90 day chip. And I'd like for you to be there. No way. Well, we communicated a little bit and there were some tears. And finally I said, all right, I'll go, but I go on one condition. I go in my car. As you see, she'd be gone two or three hours, sometimes three or four hours to these meetings. And I'd say, how long are the meetings? An hour. Where you been the rest of that time? We went to Coco's drinking coffee. Right. Well, I didn't know where it was she was going. I just knew I wasn't going. So I said, where are we going? She said, we're going to a place called the 8111 Club. I said where's that? She says, just follow me. So we got in our car and we started down Roswell Road in Atlanta and all of a sudden we got to the driveway of this pretty little house sitting up on the hill with a nice curving driveway up in the trees. It was a house that they had converted into an 81-11 club meeting place. That fella knows where it is. Well, I thought this was real strange because I had passed that house every single day going to and from work and back and forth from the bar on my way home and on my way home every night when i'd look up that driveway and i'd see all them cars i'd say you know what i'll really get to know the guy that lives there because he obviously has a party every night well that night old bill went to the party back then at 8111 they had little sliding glass doors at the back door and you walk in and there's posts around the room and they cleared out the petitions of the walls and made one great big meeting room and i slipped in the back door and kind of sat down behind the post. And for the next hour, I witnessed the biggest bunch of weirdos I had ever seen in my life. They read all that stuff at the opening of the meeting. And then this one guy raised his hand and said he was Joe and he was an alcoholic. And he said, and I got three DUIs. I don't know what you call them up here, DUIs, DWIs, drunk, drunk driving. That's what, you know. Well, everybody in the room cracked up. The next guy raised his hand and told him his name right out loud and said he'd gotten 70 UIs and been arrested for indecent exposure. They came unglued. And you know I remember very well tonight the thought that went through my mind that night. The thought that went through my mind was don't they know they have nothing to laugh about their alcoholics and that's ironic because today i thank god every day of my life for the laughter that we share in these rooms. There is magic. There is power. There is healing in that laughter, and I think we need to do more of it. That night, that night though, it didn't compute. Well, that meeting went on and on and on and finally everybody stood up and I started for the door and somebody grabbed me by the hand from both sides and they said the only thing that was familiar that whole night to me and that was the Lord's Prayer. And I started out that door and headed across the parking lot getting out of this place and I got about halfway across the parking lot and something grabbed me by the shoulder that felt like a steel vice spun me around and i found myself looking up into the face of a man that was seven foot eleven i know today that he's only six six but he looked a lot taller that night i also had remembered him from that meeting because you see everybody in the room had said my name's joe and i'm an alcoholic or my name is mary and i'M AN ALCOHOLIC OR MY NAME'S SUE AND I'M AN AlCOHolic AND I NEED THIS GUY WAS DIFFERENT WHEN HE RAISED HIS HAND TO TALK He'd said, my name's Floyd and I'm a grateful hillbilly drunk. Give me a break. Well this guy starts talking to me about drinking moonshine up in the mountains of North Georgia. I'm going, God Almighty, what is he doing? He don't even know who I am. I found out later he knew exactly who I was because she'd been talking about me in those meetings people kept coming out of that meeting place and getting in their cars and taking off remember I went in my car by God so I can get out of here he keeps talking and talking and my wife comes out of the meeting Bye gets in her car and leaves And it's me and Floyd And he talked about getting drunk in the winter time And falling down in the woods And his face freezing to the ground And said they had to pour coffee on him To get him up Now remember I had had martinis that afternoon At the diplomat I didn't want to hear this crap well he talked on there for about oh two and a half weeks finally i got to my car reached for the door handle and he leaned against it well i finally got away from him got in my car went home faster than i had driven in a long time i walked in the house my wife started to say something said don't open your mouth i walked over the cabinet and got one of those iced tea tumblers about that tall threw three ice cubes in it filled it up with scotch and said when we when i get through with this then we'll talk of course when i got through that i couldn't talk but the next day i explained to her the facts of life don't you ever try to make me go back to that place again and she didn't and the days turned into weeks and the weeks turned into months and the roller coaster kept going downhill you know I used to drink in those fancy places in some of those fancy bars in Atlanta that was early in the evening late in the evening and I would end up on a part of Atlanta known as Stewart Avenue how can I explain Stewart Avenue you. Well, put it this way, they ain't real picky with the dress code down there. They don't even insist that you be dressed. But I drank in those fancy places because I thought it was class. And you know, I used to think when I would go in those fantasy places and I'd walk up to that great big padded bar with the velvet seats and the leather thing and I'd sit down at the bar and the bartender go, hi Bill, how you doing? Instead of martini right in front of me. I said, this is a statement about what I am. Yeah, it was all right. Wasn't the one I thought it was making, but it was a statement. I think every bartender in Atlanta knew what I drank, but you know what folks, when you wake up at about five o'clock in the morning and you realize your clothes are all wet and you kind of look around and finally piece it together that you're in a downtown atlanta city park and when you look up you realize the sight in front of your eyes are the nostrils of a policeman's horse that really is not very classy i have also decided that after about 20 years of trying to think of a good comeback when that officer said what are you doing here and I still hadn't come up with one. There's no class when you're splayed over the trunk of a car and frisked and cuffed and hauled away and there is no class when you take another walk with your little girl and you tell her how sorry you are you did what you did last night screaming and yelling at her and smashing furniture again. On the afternoon of July 26, 1982, I came out of a week-long blackout drunk. Disappeared. Week gone. Don't remember where I've been, what I've done. Nothing. And when I came out of that week long blackout, drunk, I was sitting in that old recliner chair and that little dark apartment all alone. And I looked down and in my left hand was an empty bottle And in my right hand there was a fully loaded and cocked .22 pistol. And I had not remembered picking up either one of them. In the twilight of that afternoon on July 26, 1982, I heard a voice. The voice of God? No, not really. of an angel maybe sort of but not really it was the voice of a beautiful wonderful loving strapping hillbilly drunk named floyd i didn't remember much he had said that night in that parking lot But through the fog of that drunken haze that afternoon One line came back One line pierced Through the pain of that hangover And through the pain Of that loneliness And that line went like this When I came to Alcoholics Anonymous I expected God To open up the gates of heaven And let me in he didn't but he opened the gates of hell and let me out when I came to Alcoholics Anonymous I expected God to open the gates of heaven and let be in he didn't but he opened the gates of hell and let me out and if where i was that monday afternoon can be any closer to hell on this earth i hope i never know what it is and i got up out of that recliner chair and i went into the bathroom and cleaned myself up as best as best i could all the dirt and grime that was on me that came from god knows where drank about a half a bottle of listerine got in the car and drove the few miles back up the little winding driveway to that little house on the hill and i walked in that sliding glass door and sat down behind that same post and peeked around the front of the room and folks don't tell me that our god doesn't have a sense of humor because there sitting chair in that meeting was my wife She didn't see me until the end of that meeting When a man stood up in front of the meeting And explained those chips And that white chip of surrender And I got up out of that chair And I took the longest walk I've ever taken in my life And a man pressed a white poker chip Into a trembling, sweating palm and my hand closed around it and the only emotion that I felt was hope. I choose today to believe with all my heart that that night the old Bill Sanders walked to the front of that room and died and that a new one walked away because by the grace of God in the tender loving care of people like you in rooms like this I haven't had a drink since that night and that is a miracle he told me very early in this program that I needed to get a sponsor well you know i thought this was real weird i was in radio and television i had all kinds of sponsors they did the commercials on my you know they said no no no not not same kind of sponsor and you explained to me what it was i said okay i'm gonna do this scientifically i've been to college remember i'm going to look around for the sweetest kindest roly-polyest white-haired old granddaddy that i can find one that i knew would pat me on the head on a daily basis and say i've never seen anybody work this program as well as you so i asked a man by the name of doc crandall to be my sponsor biggest mistake i ever made in my life My sponsor had gotten sober, ultimately in Atlanta, but he also got sober in a place called Dayton, Ohio. My old buddy John back there knew him well. In the years that that man was my sponsor, I don't remember him telling me one damn thing. I wanted to hear but he told me an awful lot that I needed to hear first thing I knew I was in trouble the first day he said yes I'll be your sponsor let's lay the ground rules uh-oh he said the first thing you do every morning not the second thing the first things you do is you do every one of these things you get down on your knees and you ask your God to keep you sober today and the last and the last thing you do before you get back in that bed tonight is you get back down there and you say thank you i said now wait a minute doc hold it i grew up going to church even taught a sunday school class one time had a hangover but you know uh i know prayer is important part of this fellowship i've heard all this praying stuff we do around here last few weeks but doc i really just got to be honest with you i'm not comfortable with this knee business he said i didn't say a damn thing about you being comfortable I said I thought that this was a program of suggestion he says it is son I suggest you do it or get you another sponsor i knew i was in trouble well next thing you do is get you there's give me one of these books and he says i want you to take this book home and i wantyou to spend the next several weeks studying it it's called the big book and iwant you to read it and i want youto read those first five chapters over and over and over again and then a few weeks I want you to come back and we're going to sit down and you're going tell me how you think you can use that in your life. I said all right I can get into that so I left his house and I started home and I stopped at the office supply store and I got me some highlighters and underliners and a couple of legal pads and I got home cleared off my desk and I start it out and I lit into it and man I got that book and I was highlighting and eyes underlining and i struck through the steps that didn't have anything to do with me and and and and i i wrote down the stuff that i thought of that i knew y'all hadn't but you needed to hear and andand i started uh notes my god i had page after page and after about three weeks i called him and i said doc i'm ready he said come on over so i gathered up my legal pads and i gathered out my big book and i headed over and he spread it out on his coffee table he leaned back in his big old chair and he said lay it on me and i said okay in looking at this first step here as i interpret and that's as far as i got he said boy that step don't need your interpreting it needs your doing yeah yeah yeah i know doc but but but what i think it means is son It says what it means. They wrote it in English, in case you hadn't noticed. He said, if you'll look real close, you'll see they put little numbers by those steps so smart college boys like you can follow along. That's how my journey through the steps started. Oh, he was tough. I remember thinking one time, you know, he didn't let up on you. he kept me moving through those steps. He asked me one day, what step are you on? I said, well, I'm kind of just coasting today. He said, you know, one thing, don't you? You don't coast in but one direction. Ouch. But we were moving right along through those footsteps and it occurred to me, we're going to be through here before you know it. And I asked him a question that fell into his favorite trap. I said doc, what do you do when you get through working the steps? and I hope I never forget his answer because without batting an eye he said you lay real still cause you're dead either way Doc doc was so good to me all the people were all the hugs all the love and i couldn't quite get it i couldn'T i didn'T understand what your motive was what was in it for you why why did you you know and i had read that part about bill leaving the hotel over here and going out there to the gatehouse and sitting down and talking with bob all those hours and he said i'm doing it for me and I said well okay but I don't really quite get it what's he getting out of this I didn't quite understand I frankly thought there was another book that after I graduated through these steps you'd give me the secret book that had the payoff in it you know so what one night I went to a meeting at 811 club and just as I walked in doc said hey come here i said yeah doc he said there's a guy here tonight with a similar background to yours and this is his first meeting hang around after the meeting we're going to talk with him for a little while i said gosh doc i really would love to but i got a headache i hadn't had dinner yet this has been one heck of a rough day catch me again another time he said you don't understand i stayed after that meeting and about three two and a half three hours after that meeting as i was driving home i had to pull over the side of the road the tears rolling down my face because suddenly i got it suddenly i knew what your motive was suddenly i knew why bill talked to bob in the gatehouse that night because in those couple of hours this self-centered egotistical drunk had gotten out of himself and cared more for another human being than he did himself and it was fantastic i went home and i grabbed the phone doc had time to get home by then and i called him on the phone and i said doc this is the greatest feeling i ever had in my life just talking to that guy it made me feel good and it makes it and and i can't believe the feeling i got he started saying sometimes quickly sometimes slowly and i'm leaving and i say doc i just had a thought on the way home we got to jails and we got prisons and we got hospitals and and and we can start and that's when he started talking about easy does it doc believed in getting people involved doc had a favorite saying he said get in the middle of the bed and stay there nobody ever fell out of the middle of a bed and i try to do that and i tried to give away i'm gonna give you my secret little secret dr bob said it in his story in the big book in a different way but the little secret of being happier than you ever been happy in your life and I believe with all my heart that if you're not happier in sobriety than you've ever been in your life then you got a hole in your program that doesn't mean that doesn'T mean that tough times are not going to come it doesn'T mean that they are not gonna be tragedy in your life but it means that you can deal with it i've watched this beautiful man all weekend who three weeks ago lost his beautiful wife that he had met in this program and i've washed him involved in giving away and sharing most drunks that i used to hang out with would have been draped over the bar begging for sympathy not us this program gave us a gift of life let's live it that secret i'm to tell you the little secret. Every day of your life, you get up and you try your best to do just a little bit today to pay back the debt that you perceive that you owe to Alcoholics Anonymous. I'm going to tell you a little secret, you won't even get close because the more you give, the more you get. And the more you get, the deeper in debt you are and the more you give away. On November 20th, in the November of 1982 when I was just a few months sober, I had to make my first business trip out of town to Washington, D.C. doc had a lot of savings sayings that people knew him for but one of his favorite ones was if you get into an argument in your head about whether or not you're going to take a drink you're gonna lose he said you can't get into that argument if you get into it you're not going to get into an argument about whether you're taking a drink I heard it up here but I didn't hear it in here when i had to make that business trip up to washington dc from atlanta i fortified myself went to a good meeting had lunch with my sponsor went out to hartsfield international airport in atlana and boarded that airplane and the plane hadn't cleared the ground till the meeting started up here in my head 800 miles from home and nobody up there knows that you're an alcoholic synonymous you could tie one on tonight by the time you come back friday you could have it all out easy you notice i didn't say you go up there and have a drink tonight i've been sober now for almost 12 years and the concept of a drink is still alien in this head i mean what good is a drink better be a real big drink but that meeting's going on you can't you canít you should you shouldn't you get away with it no they won't know yes they will you'll know i looked around that plane see if those people were hearing those voices they weren't plane touchdown at national airport off the plane into a cab headed for the hyatt regency hotel on capitol hill the meetings raging on in my head i couldn't even understand what that cab driver was saying of course i couldn'T understand what he was saying anyway but um walked into the giant atrium lobby of that great big hotel and just like a radar just like bill did in that lobby right down the street down here I heard the music I heard the tinkling of the glasses and it took me less than 10 minutes to check into that hotel room dump my baggage get on that glass elevator and come back down walked across the lobby and I stood in the doorway of that bar for three or four minutes as the meeting played out in my head and Doc's admonition you getting an argument in your head about whether or not you're going to take a drink you're gonna lose was nowhere in sight and I lost and I walked over and I sat down at the bar and the bartender came and walked and stood in front of me and he looked down at me and he smiled and then he said something really strange he said hi buddy how about a coke a what he pointed to my lapel pin and said I figured by that pin you're wearing that's probably what you'd want I'd forgotten to take off this damn AA pen. He served three or four more, went down the bar, served three of four more people, came back and stood in front of me. I'm still sitting there staring at that Coke. He smiled and said, you haven't got any business in here, do you? No. he said where you belong is three blocks down the street upstairs over the furniture store there's a meeting in 20 minutes get the hell out of here I went to that meeting I went to that meet and I've been back to it several times but I did two other things that night, I walked back into a bar and I thanked an angel in the form of a bartender for saving my life. He looked at me and smiled and kind of chuckled and said, you weren't in any real danger tonight. He said, when I saw you standing over there in the door for so long, I thought you were looking for somebody. But when you sat down and I saw that pin and I Saw the look on your face, I knew what you were doing and it was no way in hell you were getting a drink out of me tonight the other the other thing I did that night is I got down on my knees beside a hotel room bed in our nation's capital and I told the God you have introduced me to thank you for saving my life and I said if you went to this much trouble To keep me sober tonight I will never test you again And I I stay out of bars Because I don't belong in bars I've got no business in bars I belong I belong in rooms like this With people like you Because you understand me you know how i think you know how my mind works i'm safe with you i remember one time we were in a meeting and some kid raised his hand and said something about that he and a friend of his were going that night to a bar my sponsor doc said what in the hell are you going to a bar for he said to hear the band he said by their record the kid says they hadn't got one doc said then they're not any good on november 25th 1985 my sponsor doc went on a 12-step call and never came home as he and another man struggled to take a shotgun away from a suicidal young alcoholic that doc had been working with for several years trying to help get sober as they struggled to make the shot gun away from that young boy the gun went off accidentally and doc caught it full in the stomach and he died on the way to the hospital he died doing what he loved doing the most trying to help another drunk in stillness of that evening the twilight of that afternoon as i sat in doc's den the thought went through my mind how can i possibly stay sober how can I go on without the man with me who has been by my side showing me the way guiding my steps how can I do it in the quiet stillness of that evening the answer came you do it by doing the things he taught you to do and that his sponsor taught him and his sponsor taught him all the way back to that night in May when the broken and down doctor and the has-been stockbroker sat down here in the little gatehouse and said do you think we might be able to stay sober if we help one another i believe with everything in my being that god in his infinite wisdom in may of 1935 looked down and said the lowly alcoholic has suffered long enough. I must give them a way out. We are gathered here this weekend to celebrate that miracle of miracles of God. Look at the gift that he gave us the way out could have been that we as alcoholics be shut away away from society so we couldn't hurt people anymore we could have been locked up as many of us had been and many others should have been we could have put in institutions as those less fortunate than us were but look at what he gave instead he gave each other and more love and more laughter and more joy and more happiness than most of us had ever dreamed of having in our entire lives and then he topped it off he topped it off with a personal relationship with him that few people on this earth will ever, ever know. I believe, I believe with all my heart that we are the luckiest people on the face of the earth i thank god for these two men and this woman our heroes i thank God for them every day that God chose them to work the miracle through and he through their miracle they passed it on and it's passed on to us i don't think there's any way that bill and bob on that night after Mother's Day of 1935 could in their wildest dreams imagine what you and I see here tonight but God knew and he used them and he'll use us if we stay out of the way and if we let him now as Paul Harvey says the rest of the story two things I would share with you in closing number one after my sponsor Doc died I learned what he meant when he said the sponsorship thing is a two-way street because I was surrounded by the greatest bunch of sponsorees in the world. They loved me while I was running scared. They took me to meetings when I didn't want to go. They made me talk when I did not want to share. They put their arms around me and they love me and nurtured me until I could get on my feet and go again, and I love every one of them for it. is important to me in this program I think it's something very powerful and something very sacred I had a day about six years ago when a young man came up to me almost seven years ago and asked me to be his sponsor and I looked down at this little long-haired kid said no and he was persistent and said yes and I finally said yes I'll make a long story very short by telling you it was just less than a year than from then that this young long-haired fellow we adopted and took into our home and he was our son and he lived with us for five years and I watched him grow and I watch him change and I thanked God for the miracle of getting to be a part of that and to observe that and see that and I said thank you again for the chance to really experience this whole beautiful thing called sponsorship because I got to see it work over again in a young man that was a dope dealer and a pusher in high school now he's the president of a landscaping company in Atlanta and he's sitting right here scott stand up that that um that by the way was his girlfriend that read how it works tonight and the rest of the story i referred earlier to my first wife because you see i'm not married to the same woman anymore and I thank God she's not married to the same man anymore either you transformed us both no two human beings of the world could have been more alienated no marriage could have been in more trouble no it was you don't want to know how bad it was today that woman is the dearest friend I have in this world. And I love her with all my heart. And in December of 1982, when divorce papers were to have been signed instead, she and I stood in front of the same minister who had married us 16 years earlier in the company of friends from Alcoholics Anonymous and we renewed our vows and we started all over again. She is my best friend, she's my lover, and she's here tonight, and I'd like for you to meet her. Stand up, Marlene. You gave us back each other, and thank you and in closing a couple of years ago I took another walk with my little girl this time it was down the aisle of a church and Oh God did she look beautiful in that long white flowing gown and I looked like a penguin going in that monkey suit and I cried all the way down the aisle at the front of that church I took her little hand and I placed it in the hand of another man and they turned to face the same minister who had married her mother and me 25 years before and the same Minister who had renewed our vows 10 years before and they began their life together we love our son-in-law he's in business with Scott the landscaping business and we love him dearly I worried a great deal the first night that we met him and we took he and our daughter out to dinner the first thing Paul did when we sat down on the restaurant was to order a beer then he sat there and nursed that thing for two hours. And I said, son, you ain't never going to make it in my little club drinking like that. And he won't. But the greatest tears were not to come at the wedding. The greatest tears were to come with the reception that would follow. Because you see, my little girl, you call her my little girl she was 23 years old then she's still my little girl my little Girl had said dad I want to have the first dance with Paul but I want to second dance at the reception with you and I said oh my sweetie you see back when daddy used to drink I used to I used to dance a lot like John Travolta and Fred Astaire put together I don't dance quite that good anymore maybe you'd better tell me what the song is so your mom and I can practice a little bit she said no not gonna tell you so I stood in the crowd along with several hundred people beside that dance floor and I watched as my little girl and the handsome young prince and princess danced around the dance floor together and then their song ended and my beautiful young princess came and stood in front of me she reached out her hand hands and I took hers and we moved on to the dance floor and the music began. And the words of the song were, did you ever know that you're my hero and everything I'd like to be? I can fly higher than an eagle. You are the wind beneath my wings. oh God what a miracle had been worked in the lives of this family ripped shredded torn apart by alcoholism and day by day hour by year our hour year by year and step-by-step you had put it all together with God's help and I thank you for it As we danced around that dance floor, I looked into my little girl's eyes and instead of fear and hate and disgust, I saw love and I saw respect. In my sobriety, a teacher at her high school told us one day, you might want to know this, your daughter is running around school telling everybody that her parents are in Alcoholics Anonymous. and I said no I don't care I thank you for that we are the luckiest people on the face of this earth and I thank God for the stockbroker and I think God for the doctor and I Thank God for this sister you know I think God knew what he was doing I think if Bill Wilson God resting had living left alone with this fellowship would have probably been franchised into oblivion i'm not at all sure that if our beloved dr bob was solely in charge of it you might still be hiding it here in akron but the perfect match of those two god knew what he was doing god knows what he's doing in every one of our lives there are no coincidences just miracles and if we stay out of the way one day at a time if we talk to our sponsor and we realize that these steps are the greatest toolbox that any person on this earth has ever been given we'll stay miracles in closing I would say to you can there be any wonder then that I say to tonight, did you ever know that you, you are my heroes. And you, and you are everything that I have ever wanted to be. And together, together we can all soar like eagles because God is the wind beneath our wings. God bless you and good night.