The Futility of Every Available Cure – 1955 – Bill M.

My third and closing speaker is a man from Niagara Falls. I don't know whether he went there on his honeymoon and stayed, or whether he was born there, because I haven't had the pleasure before of hearing Bill Martin talk. But whatever the reason for his coming from Niagara Fall, believe me, we're glad to have you, Bill, and it's all yours. Thank you, Helen, and thank you, Wynne, for a splendid address. I am quite sure that after listening to you that anything that anyone could say now would only be anti-climax. I am humbly thankful for the privilege of being here this afternoon. It is especially pleasant, too, for another reason. For I can recall, when a few months after I came into Alcoholics Anonymous, that I was privileged to attend in the Royal York Hotel in Toronto, the Ontario Regional Conference. And at that conference, there had come from New York a gracious and charming little lady, who shared with us her strength, her hope, and her experience. And on that evening that I heard her, I and several other members who were desperately groping for sobriety heard an inspiring and instructive talk which sustained and strengthened many of us through those early months. That gracious and charming little lady is your Chairman Helen B. this afternoon and years after, I am proud to acknowledge my debt to her and I am also further happy to acknowledge on behalf of Alcoholics Anonymous in Ontario a further debt of gratitude to her and her successors at General Service Headquarters in New York for the magnificent work that they have done for AlcoholicsAnonymous with credit and honor to the movement and distinction to themselves. As Helen has told you, my name is Bill, and I am an alcoholic, and I was born in the Yukon Territory about 52 years ago, and born with a definite physical allergy insofar as alcohol is concerned, because I can never remember a time in my life when I could use alcohol safely. Even on my first drink, that first and fatal drink would set up the phenomenon of craving. In the Yukon, as a boy, I got into very little difficulty. But when I came to Toronto to university and to law school, I was very difficult. I got in to numerous scrapes, got in jail a couple of times, did everything that I could to retard my success, both academically and otherwise. it. Sometimes there were certain humorous incidents which I now like to recall, but when I look back on most of it, it was a pretty sorry and sad spectacle. There was, however, an amusing incident the night I telephoned the Right Honorable Mr. Winston Churchill. A number of us, it was 1928, and I had a ground floor room in a new rooming house because I had been kicked out of most of the rooming houses in the University District. A number of us were drinking beer, and we were reading a book of Churchill's called The Aftermath, which he had written following World War I. A heated argument followed about some passage in the book, and I was displaying at that time all the alcoholic proclivities that most of us know so well, and I stated to the boys, well, there's only one way to settle this. We'll call Winston up and find out what he has to say about it. So I went to the phone, and I placed the call, and to my surprise, about 20 minutes later, I got the Right Honorable Winston Spencer Churchill himself. I explained to him the difficulties we were having with his book, and he answered my question very politely, and then he said, My, what frightfully keen students you must be in Toronto to go to all this trouble to telephone me in England about this book. And I said, well, Mr. Churchill, the truth of the matter is that we're having a bit of a binge. And, I shall never forget that warm, rich British voice coming back over the transatlantic wire, capital, capital. Have had many a binge myself, cheerio. On finishing school, I went out to western Canada and stayed out there about six or seven months and finally drank myself out of a job. And through the kindness of a friend, I managed to get an opening with a lawyer in Niagara Falls, Ontario, and that is how I happened to come there. I had a promising opportunity with him, but as a result of a drunk, I lost a partnership and found myself in 1932 in January commencing the practice of law on my own, commencing it in the full realization that I was an alcoholic and that if I was to succeed in life, that I could not and must not drink. Four days after I commenced my own practice, I found myself with a bottle of rum in my office one night reading a little law, and a woman came in who had consulted me a day or two before about something, and she had a drink of rum, and that was about all I remember of the evening, but the following morning a local policeman came in and presented me with a summons charging me with a horrible offense against this woman under the Criminal Code of Canada. Now whatever one may say about an incident of that type as a contribution to a rich and varied experience, I can assure all of you that it's no way to commence a law practice. i did at that time what most alcoholics would do realizing as i did that a conviction on that offense would mean disgrace jail and disbarment i got drunk but i took the precaution before i got drunk of retaining a brother member of the bar to defend me and he would appear and get the case adjourned each time it was called on the ground that i was sick this went on for two or three weeks, and finally an old Scotch carter in the city who had been a friend of mine came in and said, the first thing we've got to do with you is sober you up. Have you ever been to Homewood Sanitarium? And I said no. So he drove me about 75 miles up to a little city called Guelph, and he put me in a sanitarium and left me there to get sober. About a week after, he came back and he picked me up, and we started back towards the falls. And I noticed there was a smile on his face, and I said, well, what are you so happy about, Davey? And he said, Well, you remember that woman that made the charge against you? And I said yes. He said, That lawyer you had, by the way, was no good. He was lazy, didn't do any work. And he says, I had this woman checked by lawyers in Buffalo, and I found that she had several convictions against her for blackmailing. So I got her, and I paid her and her shyster lawyer a couple of hundred dollars to withdraw the charge against you they went to the liquor store and bought some whiskey i went with them they got drunk i stole 180 of the 200 from them and now you're only only 20 well it's funny to you and at that time Looking back on it, and even looking back on it at that time, every element that tragedy, stark tragedy could have was there. I knew then that I couldn't drink, and for about the tenth or fifteenth time in my twenty-eight years, I again swore that I was never going to drink again. I had my first year in 1932. I had three drunks, each of them lasting six weeks in the first year of my practice. I went back up to the sanitarium for short trips after each of those, and finally in December of 1932, the landlord of the office building in which my office was situated, himself an alcoholic, came and recommended to me that I take a cure at Homewood Sanitarium, and this time to take a full course of treatment known as the ANS treatment that had been developed by Dr. Lambert in Bellevue Hospital, New York City, a hospital through whose portals have passed tens of thousands of drunks, perhaps the most noted of them being Stephen Foster who lay dying there while the people on the streets of New York were humming the exquisite melodies that he had written and which have come down to us as much-loved songs today. this treatment took three weeks and consisted of two and two or three injections daily and by now regarding myself as a long sufferer in the alcoholic field i was very grateful to know that there was a cure i went down to the medical library of the sanitarium and i read all about it and i did get some hope and some faith and some belief that perhaps here was the answer for the problem that I knew would, unless solved, destroy me. I went back to Niagara Falls and went to my secretary, went to the landlady where I roomed, the old colored fellow that used to keep the restaurant where I ate, and I told him that I'd taken a cure, and I said this thing may work, but if it doesn't work, please don't let me stay on a six-week drunk again. Please get me up to Homewood the very first day. Now, looking back on it all since I came into Alcoholics Anonymous, I realized that then, in 1932, that desperately as I wanted to do something about my drinking, that I had taken the first step of the Alcoholics Anonymous program. I realized that I was powerless over alcohol because I asked these people to help me if I got drunk. I recognized that my life was unmanageable because in asking them to help me, I realized I couldn't be certain as to the things that I would do. And so it went. The cure worked quite well. It worked for 21 months and during that time I laid the foundations of what became and is now a successful law practice. At the end of 21 months, one of my brother barristers in the district was getting married in New York City and had asked me to be an usher at the wedding. I went down to Pell and Maynard with him, and when we reached there, we went to his fiancée's apartment, and I can still see her hand pushing that cocktail across the back of the Chesterfield towards me. And these thoughts flashed through my mind. You're over 400 miles from Niagara Falls where you practice law. You can have a little drink down here and you can get away with it. And before I knew it, that and several more cocktails were down the hatch as we put it. I got away with the wedding the next day without disgracing myself and then went on into New York City where a doctor who had been one of my boondrinking companions at university was waiting for me he and I stayed drunk for about six or seven days in the Hotel New Yorker and I managed to get back to Niagara Falls and back to Homewood Sanitarium later I learned that there was a book written called The Common Sense of Drinking by Richard Rogers Peabody, and that this book would give a surefire method of combating alcohol. It was a method by which the patient trained his mind so that he reached the enviable state that he didn't want to drink. Not that he wanted to drink, but that he wouldn't drink, but that He didn't Want to Drink. And you achieved this result by writing out a complete story of all the disgraceful and disgusting experiences you had gone through. This gave me hope, and I thought that this combined with the Homewood treatments might help me. And I went to work on it, and i wrote reads. But notwithstanding anything that I could do, periodically I had to get drunk. Finally our country was at war, and wanted to get into it. My own physician advised against it. He said, you're an alcoholic and if you go into the service you're going to get drunk and you're going to insult the brass hats and what will happen to you, you'll probably be disgraced and dismissed from the service. I wouldn't pay any attention to him. I said, no, I'm going to have another little bender and go up to Guelph and then I'll join the Air Force and be all right. Well, I did, and nearly everything that the doctor said came true, except through the kindness of brother officers in one thing or another, I wasn't disgraced or dismissed from the service, although I richly deserved to be. While I was in the service I married an officer in the women's division in the Air Force. We got married in Winnipeg, and nine months after we were married our first child was born. I cannot think of that night without thinking of the misery and the suffering that I heaped upon my poor wife on Mattachase. About three days before the child was born, we had had a mass dinner for a retiring group captain and I had got drunk and had disappeared. My wife had to have a neighbor in the apartment in which we lived drive her to the station or to the hospital and it was four or five days before I could pull myself sufficiently together to go to see the wife whom I dearly loved and the little child that I had helped bring into the world. Being alcoholics, you will understand this. Shortly after that, I was posted overseas. Overseas, while by and large I did my work reasonably well, I got into numerous scrapes in Germany and Denmark and other places and could have gotten into very serious trouble on several occasions. However, in 1946, I found myself back in Civvy Street with an honorable transfer to the reserve of the Royal Canadian Air Force and I went back to the law practice. And back, I hoped, to hard, steady, and sober work. But that didn't last. Two months after I was back, I got drunk and I landed up at Homewood Sanitarium again. and this time the medical superintendent came to me and said Bill they've got a wonderful new organization started now called Alcoholics Anonymous they meet here in the basement of Homewood and I wish you would join them because I'm sure you will find the answer to your problem and I said no Fred I'm not going to do it I'm satisfied that I can let this alone so I went back and three months later I was drunk again and then I stayed sober for approximately 32 months outside of one drink, which I managed to get rid of before I got on a bender. However, all that time, or even in that 32 months, my present sponsor came to me. He had been a friend and client for many years, and he said, we've found the answer, Bill, to our problem in AA. And I said, I don't know, but I've been dry a year. I've got a wife and three children and I know that I'm not going to drink anymore however at the end of the 32nd month of sobriety my wife developed cancer by this time we had four small children and being an alcoholic I became surfeited with resentment and self-pity hadn't I worked like a dog all these years and hadn't i done this and hadn' I done that and this is what had happened so i started to try to ease things off with sedatives the doctor even supplied me with them i hadn't read the sedative pamphlet of alcoholics anonymous then and neither had the doctor we didn't know very much about sedatives it invariably ended that i would get on a drunk and have to go back to home however the last nine months of my wife's illness i'm glad to say that I didn't drink, but die she did, and I found myself left with four small children aged two to six years. I was determined again, for I don't know how many times in my life that I wasn't going to drink anymore, that I was going to discharge to these children the duties and the responsibilities which I owed them. so i started to answer the letters to which my friends had written me and to acknowledge the flowers and so forth that i had received on the occasion of my bereavement four days after the funeral i got drunk and i found myself back in homewood sanitarium again when i went in there this time the night superintendent himself a member of alcoholics Anonymous came to me and said, Bill, I found the answer in AA. Why won't you? And I looked at him and I said, well, Ivan, I'll tell you what I'd do. If I ever come back to Homewood again for alcohol, I will join AA. Looking back on it, I wonder how crazy I could get. For as I spoke to him, it was my 39th trip to Homeward Sanitarium for alcohol. I went out and I don't need to tell any of you the answer, I was back in three months. And this time my feet had hardly hit the floor of the institution until I was phoning every member of Alcoholics Anonymous that I knew in the district in which I lived. Finally, I located one called Don B., a successful insurance adjuster who three years before had gone completely haywire with alcohol. And because of the fact that I had disappeared with such promptness when I drank, most of the people in Niagara Falls and vicinity believed that I'd been sober for years. And this wife had phoned me on this occasion and said, Will you do something for Don? I chased over to Gino's, one of the popular local bootleggers, and dragged him out of there and said I know what I'll do with him. I'll take him up to Homewood Sanitarium. So I did, and I bought him a copy of Peabody's book, The Common Sense of Drinking, and took him up to Homewood. It didn't do him any good. He didn't stay there, and he continued to drink for two or three months. In fact, we had to put someone from the law firm into his office to run his business while he was drinking. But he came back, and he got sober. And I knew that he was sober, although he had never said anything to me about AA. When I got him on the phone this time, he said, well, there's a bad blizzard blowing, but I'll leave Niagara Falls and I'll be at Homewood Sanitarium by 7 o'clock. And then I told him, I said, well, Don, before you come up, will you please stop at my house in Queenston? For there on the bookshelves you'll find a book called Alcoholics Anonymous that has been there for six years. I want you to bring that book with you. Well, he landed up there that night, and I had been in the institution such a short time that I was so jittery that I couldn't really carry on an intelligent conversation with anyone. So I suggested that we go downtown and that I would go to one of the beer parlors and have some beer, and when I was steadied out, that I could listen to him. So I did, and after I had had about eight or nine pints of beer, I asked him to let me have the story. And I can recall the very first shrewd question that he shot at me. he said to me, Bill, what's the most important thing in your life? And I said, well, my children. And he said, secondly, I said my law practice because that's what I have to maintain them with. And thirdly, I says, well I guess my home. He said, no, he said none of those things is the most important things in your lives. The most important in your live is your sobriety because without sobriete you won't have any children. They won't let you keep them and you can't raise You won't have any law practice because people won't go to a drunken lawyer, and you won't have any home because drunks just always lose their home if they keep on drinking. So all of that made sense, and I am glad to say to you people today that I have remembered what he has said, and that sobriety to me today is the most important thing in my life. I then asked him, where do we go from here? And he said, well, he said the first thing is first, some of the slogans. He said that's a good one for you because if sobriety comes first and AA4U means sobriete, then you must put Alcoholics Anonymous ahead of professional engagements, ahead of social engagements, ahead of everything. I haven't forgotten that. He didn't touch on the spiritual side that night, But he did review the other slogans, easy does it and keep an open mind. And when I came back to the sanitarium that night, January the 9th, 1952, I was comforted by what he had told me. And the next morning, even though I was still jittery and the attendant brought in a tray, and on that tray, in addition to breakfast, there was a two- or three-ounce hooker of rye, I picked up my copy of the big book that I wrote in the back on the boards where it could never be disturbed or torn out. 10th of January, 1952, went AA. And I said to the attendants, you can take that whiskey away and leave the food because I've gone AA as of this morning. I'm glad to be able to say to you good people here this afternoon that by the grace of God and with the help of this fellowship that I have not had a drink since, that I've had no desire for a drink, and that I am confident and serene in the belief that as long as I continue to work the program of this fellowship that I will have no further desire to drink. Shortly before Don had come up, I had had a talk with the psychiatrist in charge of men in the institution. He was comparatively new. He had been there three years. And I asked him whether he felt there was any hope for me as far as sobriety was concerned. And he said, well, you've been coming here for about 20 years and your file is about a foot thick, but I've read it all. And he says, I can say to you that you have very little hope of maintaining your sobrietry any longer than the six-month period. that at the end of six months, unless you come here for therapeutic treatment, that you will be utterly unable to remain sober and you will come here shortly after as a drunk. Alcoholics Anonymous has proved that psychiatrist, able as he is and great friend of AA as he is, wrong. So that then is my story. and I can assure you that in 20 years of trying to fight alcohol that I took every available cure, a great many that I haven't told you about the Keeley Cure at Bright Illinois and several others I consulted psychiatrists, I exhausted every human agency I could find but I was utterly unable to do so and here with the blessed healing therapy of AA I have at last been able to find sobriety for a day at a time I am grateful to this great fellowship beyond all words, and I often like to think about one of the things that Don V told me when he came to Homewood Sanitarium that night. He said, for you, Bill, Alcoholics Anonymous is the last host on the street. Well, that may be, but looking back on it all and looking at you good people here this afternoon, I think it's much more than a little house. I think its a house of many mansions where there is room for all. thank you bill and what more is there to say you've heard a typical open meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. To Ann, Dick, Wynne, and Bill, my thanks for what you've had to say. Will you join me in the Lord's Prayer? Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil for thine is the kingdom and the power forever and ever Amen