The Four Absolutes: Honesty, Purity, Unselfishness, Love — How Akron Took Inventory Before the Steps Existed – Paul K.
About This Speaker Tape
Paul Keebler, sober 43 years at the time of this 1985 recording, shares his remarkable story at the 32nd Georgia State Convention. Raised in an affluent German community in Missouri, Paul was groomed as a star athlete with national attention, modeling contracts, and a high-performance car. His first drink came at a college fraternity prom — bathtub gin called Mastika during Prohibition — and that single night shattered his carefully constructed identity. He abandoned athletics, walked away from his family, and threw himself into corporate life and drinking with equal intensity.
Paul rose through an international steel company, gained acute security clearance during the wartime industrial buildup, and traveled constantly — getting drunk on trains between Washington, New York, and Boston. A boss confronted him bluntly: "You don't have any friends. You have acquaintances." He married an exotic European woman after knowing her one week — she needed citizenship papers, he needed a mortgage to look respectable. He made a fortune brokering pipe and refinery materials south of the border, bought a Connecticut estate with a personal check, three luxury cars, and a yacht. Then the FBI called — his wife was a spy. He liquidated everything and walked away.
The descent was swift: spacing drinks from 3 AM through the day, losing days at a time, ending up under a railroad bridge drinking "purple death" — the cheapest wine available. Divine intervention came when two AA men, passing through town on their way to Akron, were directed to his hotel room by an assistant manager. They performed a pure 12th-step call built on love, not confrontation. Paul was taken to the early Akron fellowship and sponsored by Paul Stanley, one of the original members, who walked him through the steps using the Four Absolutes — honesty, unselfishness, purity, and love — inherited from the Oxford Group.
Paul details his spiritual journey through each step with vivid specificity: taking the Third Step on his knees before the group, discovering his Fourth Step inventory contained 37 amends, and spending over a year and a half making restitution. He describes the crisis that came even in sobriety when he confused action with activity and neglected his own spiritual maintenance. His wife Kay pulled him back to the daily practice of Steps 10, 11, and 12. He closes with the full five-stanza Serenity Prayer, calling it the essence of everything he has learned.
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