The Primary Purpose of Carrying the Message to Alcoholics – Bill

The assurance of anonymity is essential to our efforts to help other alcoholics, and our tradition of anonymities reminds us that A principles came before personalities. Groups and each of us have one primary purpose, carry the message to alcoholics. So it means responsibility, health. A good AA member always needs help. To know exactly how to work, we need experience from others. This convention offered us this opportunity. I'm very pleased to introduce the first speaker, a man from Louisville, Kentucky, Bill W. Thank you, Conrad. That is a French name, Louisville, Kentucky. I am Bill Wallace and I'm an alcoholic from Louisville. Hi, folks. A long time ago, I was privileged to attend a conference in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1947 to be exact. And I heard a man there talk for a long time about what wonders God had wrought. Those words certainly echo back through the years today as I stand here before you. I understand Canada is noted for its many shrines and therefore for its many miracles, and certainly in my opinion God must be smiling down this afternoon on Toronto for the many miracles that he has wrought, for the many wonders of us gathered here. For I have a firm opinion that I am one of those wonders that was brought to this program. Nineteen years ago today, I was living in a flophouse in one of our most decrepit sections of Louisville, Kentucky, living there in a $3-a-week room, unable to work, and at 37 years old, a complete failure. Now, I wasn't there through my fault. It wasn't my drinking that put me there at all. It was a very misunderstanding wife, it was a few bosses who didn't understand me, friends who never tried to understand. The whole world who was out of step put me in this flophouse, never mind drinking. My wife, I married, and I thought she loved me very much. But I found out many years later that she loved her mother more. It seems like every alcoholic has mother-in-law trouble. She was always running home to her mother for various reasons—that is my opinion. She only had one reason herself, and that was because of my drinking. Ordinarily, I went home with her most of the time. I used to tell her, wait, we'll both go home and get a square meal. This was rather acute saying, but she, I don't know how many times we separated, we lost track. There was a pet saying around our house, don't put anything up too high because we'd be moving pretty quick. If she'd go back to mother, I'd go on my way. We would make up and back again. The few bosses who didn't understand me and who fired me didn't fire me because of my drinking. As a matter of fact, I was never told that I was fired for being drunk. I was hired because I was too sick to work. I had spinal meningitis. I had flu, pneumonia, measles, smallpox. I found out from one place I worked that I had six grandmothers die. A little unusual, they thought, and they suggested maybe that they ought to fire me. But I still wouldn't concede that drinking was a problem to me. My wife many times would ask me, when in the name of God are you going to quit drinking? And I'd say, after I'm dead three days, and I want you to pour it over me while I'm laid out. And I'm sure she would have done it, and she almost got the chance. But of course I had to one day or another come to find out that drinking was a problem. But even in this flop house in Skid Row, as I call it, it wasn't, oh, like the Barry, no. It wasn't like Skid Rows in some of our bigger towns, no, but it was bad enough, a flop house, to come in drunk, to go out to get drunk, to come and drunk, and then the rat race was on. My wardrobe consisted of one shirt, one pair of pants, and as my good friend Lefty Henderson used to say, his patent leather shoes, leather on top of my feet patting the ground. This was my wardrobe. For I had long since before found the round of the hock shops I learned upon. I learned to stand on the street corner and sell shirts. Down where I lived, you didn't have to dress for dinner anyhow, so I sold my white shirts that I had. Matter of fact, you didnít even eat dinner. I sold neckties on the corner for a nickel apiece. I sold handkerchiefs for a nickle apiece just to get something to drink. Iím not bragging about this today, no, because this had to happen to me I suppose to bring me to this. Thank God it did. It was bad enough But because I had never heard the word alcoholism, Alcoholics Anonymous, I had Never Heard Anything About A Way Out. In September of 1946, I reached a stage where I was no longer able to work. Could I have got a job? I was completely unemployable. I didn't have a friend, I thought. I didn't have anyone and like I say I'd be gone the gauntlet of you who've been in Skid Row know what I'm talking about where you learn to steal you learn the bomb you drink in bottle gangs and you do everything there is to get a hold of a drink I wasn't even a good bum I lived in this area down near our main street there in Louisville 4th Street maybe some of you have been there I was on First Street, living in alleys and flophouses wherever the occasion arose to live, sitting on the street corners all night drinking if we had a bottle. And they would send me down to the corner sometimes, or down to Fourth Street rather, when the theater crowd was letting out, to bump. As I say, I wasn't a very good bum. I would go down there, and I would see people coming out into the theaters with their husbands and their wives coming out together, laughing and talking. And I perhaps knew them when I was partway up the ladder too, when I were so ashamed. I would run high in the dark doorway, and I couldn't bum them. I didn't mind stealing, and it wasn't stealing to me. Borrowing, yes, but not stealing. I borrowed many a bottle. Unfortunately, I've never paid it all back, I don't guess. The one drugstore there, I'm almost sure he almost went out of business because of the gang that hung around there. So this is what I found myself in in September of 1946. Having never heard anything about what was the matter with me. Now, I had been called everything else in the book that goes with being a drunk. You've heard those names, I am sure. Drunken bum, slob, SOB and not the initials And everything else that goes with being a drunk I was called Only one time was maybe anything ever mentioned to me That I was drinking too much One of the times that we were separated My wife in an attempt to perhaps try to do something called the family conclave, what I call an autopsy over the drum. My brother, her mother of course, my cousin who was a priest in the Louisville area, the one who had married us, he was very proud of the marriage. It was his first marriage after his ordination as a priest. He wasn't proud of me, but he was proud ofthe marriage. He was called in and they all sat around the table deciding what to do with it. sitting over the corner half-drunk and not caring. Just get off of his back and leave him alone, let him go get drunk. But they all decided that there was something could be done. Now this cousin of mine had studied in Rome, had been ordained in Rome and I suppose he studied every theology and every ology there is to be known. Was considered a very brilliant man. And he came up with a very brillant idea, he said he's nuts. we should put him in Lakeland which is our asylum there in Kentucky well I agreed I said do you think this might help with his drinking he said I don't know and then he came up with a very brilliant idea that he would cure me he didn't know anything about alcoholism and neither did I he suggested that we move down across the street from his church where he could keep his eye on me keep me sober and we tried it We knocked all the family jewels and all the war bonds my wife had bought, and we moved down there, and I signed a pledge. I was sober the night I signed the pledge, and I believe I meant it that night I walked over to his house and swore to God that I wouldn't take alcohol in any form for one year. I think I meant that. But 29 days later, God took his eyes off of me, and so did my cousin. so i decided i would have a drink i did on a friday night planned it very carefully because you alcoholics know how we plan wasn't going to get drunk just a few sociable drinks my wife worked all night she wouldn't be home until saturday i would've gone to work i wouldn't see her anymore till late saturday afternoon and i'd be cold sober and nobody would ever know it. I didn't know anything about alcoholism either, because Sunday I was still drunk and everybody knew it, especially her. She put up with it a couple of weeks, and she called this cousin of mine from across the street. She said, here's your pledge boy flat on his face again. Now what? He walked over, he threw up both hands, and he too walked off. He advised her a little later on to divorce me. This is the only alternative that you have. We had one son, a daughter who had died a short while before. Our son by this time was seven or eight years old. And I often wonder that he is much shorter than I am. He should be bench-legged because he carried messages. You know, you go tell your mother this, when you go back and tell your father that, he would just run from one room to another. The only way we ever had any communication. The poor kid worried himself to death talking to us. We never stayed in the same room together. I still say we sit around and hold hands now. We have to keep them killing one another. We did then. She did divorce me in 1945. That's when I moved into this flop house. Well, I didn't go down all at once. I moved into a hotel there in Louisville on Chestnut Street. Maybe some of you all know the area. But I was thrown out of there to move to a flop house, and I didn�t plan this either. And the day I moved in there was December 7, 1945, and they were still celebrating Pearl Harbor Day. They were still playing White Christmas and all those songs, and I was crying. I had been bombed too that day. After all the hard years I had put in working for my wife, here I was being thrown out in this cold world. So I'd done the obvious thing I planned. I went down to a bar. We sold this house, incidentally. I don't know yet how it happened, but they said we sold it. I guess we did. And I went out of this bar with the proceeds that I had left out of my share of the house, which happened to be five $20 bills. And I don' t know yet ho that happened, and I' m afraid to ask now. But I went into this bar and I sat there and I kept ordering double-headers as fast as I could order And like every alcoholic, I never planned that day. I planned the rest of my entire life, every day of it. And the more I drank the rosier the drinkers become. First of all was a terrible feeling of resentment. Who did she think she was? Running back to her mother and how I hated her mother. Then the feeling of relief. No longer will I have to answer all these silly questions about where you've been. This guy at the hotel didn't care where I'd been. No longer would I have to say, what have you been doing? He didn't care either. She always said I could do nothing longer and go nowhere longer than any man she ever saw in her life. I could be gone three days, come home, she'd say, where have you've been? I'd say nowhere. What have you done? What have I been doing, nothing, and I hadn't. Just been drunk, that was all. So then I decided then that I would get even. Ah, that revenge was so sweet. The double-edges at this time were pouring very rapidly. I decided what I'd do. I was going to take a job. I knew that I would be out of a job in a few days. The war had ended and I was in more work. I knew I'd be out if a job, but this was no worry to me, as smart as I was. I knew there was some industry would probably offer me a job as president of some company, no lower than vice. I couldn't go any lower than Vice President. I was gonna be a millionaire at least by the end of February, and I was going to buy a home way up in our Cherokee Park section one of our better sections of Louisville about a 20 room house and I drank a little more and I could tell you where the bathrooms were going to be and what color the wallpaper and you know how it went and then I was going to move up there when she come crawling back to me and beg me to take her back I might and I might not but her mother wasn't coming with her I knew that Well, of course it didn't work that way. Come the end of the year I was out of work. I never got a job. Oh, I got some petty jobs, sure, all you drunks, we all, all us drunks get petty jobs. And I moved lower and lower. Sometimes I tried maybe to do something about a drinking problem. I can remember walking up the street one night, being locked out of my hotel. I ought to say that reservedly, my hotel, trying to get in the Salvation Army for the night. And the guy at the Salvation Army said, you're too drunk. And I remember walking down the street, and this is a pitiful sort of a street there, about half crying, wondering what in the name of God happened to this guy who just a few months ago was going to move to Cherokee Park. And here he was, couldn't even get in the sally because he was too drunk. Not enough to care about stop drinking, though. This wasn't the problem. This wasn'T the problem at all. I wasn'T a drunk. The 21st day of September of 1946, I had reached what I considered was an end, having never heard the words AA, Alcoholics Anonymous, or anything. I had drank myself into a pitiable condition physically due to malnutrition. My face had broke out in sores all over like boils, the inside of my throat, my nose, my mouth, the outside of my face. I hadn't shaved for days and God knows when I'd seen a bath. I had on this dirty shirt and this dirty pair of pants and I was standing on the street corner bumming just enough to get a bottle of wine to stay alive a few more hours. I hadn't had a drink since about 2 o'clock in the afternoon, and this was around 10 o' clock at night. And I stood there bumming and begging. And a little fellow, and from here on in I want you to remember, this is the part that I know that God wrought a wonder that night. It was late at night, a little fella stopped, he had on a cap who might have been a cab driver or a truck driver, He was going in a hamburger stand, and I asked him for 40 cents for a bottle of wine. He began telling me what a bad gambler he was, how he would steal the silverware out of the house and sell it to bet on horses. And I laughed at him. And I thought, well, either give me the 40 cents or go on. Finally, he said, I wish I could do something about my gambling. And I said, oh, I Wish I Could Do Something About Drinking. He said, why, mister? Do you have a problem with drinking? I said. You think I've got the palsy? I'm sad or shaken so bad. Even my eyelids were shaking. He said, I don't know, mister, but why don't you call up the people that help drunks? Now he didn't know the name Alcoholics Anonymous either. But he read in the paper, in the Curry Journal, a little ad that said if you have a drinking problem, call this number. I used every excuse in the book for not calling. I begged him not to call. He said mister, they just help drrunks. I immediately thought the Salvation Army was going to come down and shake a tambourine, sing hymns, and save my soul. And I didn't want that. I told him so. He said, no, mister, these people just help drunks. And I said, well, I'll call in the morning. He said from the looks of you, you're not going to be here in the morning. And he said, you better call tonight. I said I don't even have a nickel to use the phone. And that was true. He jerked me by the sleeve into this hamburger stand and he called information, asked her if she knew the number of the people that advertised in the paper that helped drunks. She said, you must mean Alcoholics Anonymous. She gave him the number and he called. And that late at night, never before, in my opinion nor since, was anybody at the club that late night. There was two men there that night. He jammed a receiver in my hand and said, You talk to them. They asked me where I lived and I said, I don't know. Just anywhere. And I did by this time. I was living and alleys, truck bodies, anywhere. They came out on the corner. They said, where can we see you? I said, I sit on this doctor's steps here of a doctor's office. That's our hangout. They said we'll be there. Well, I went up there. My little friend accompanied me on up there and sat with me. Wasn't too long, the car pulled up, a big black car pulledup. Ordinarily when a black car pullup, two men got out, you better be on your feet. They weren't going to talk to you about your health. But I sit there. they walked up and they said are you Bill Wallace and I don't know yet why and say no I'm Joe Smith Bill Wallace just went that way but I said yes they sat down there and they started talking to me my little friend walked on I never found out his name where he come from or how he got there for four and a half years I did later find out but as it was they stuck with me they took me across the street to the restaurant and they start feeding me And I've often wondered that night, as they took me there and sat in this booth with me, and they ordered toast with hot milk. God knows what my stomach thought that night. Screaming for anything to drink, and it got milk and black coffee. But it held it. It wouldn't have held a drink of whiskey, I'm sure, but it held its milk. When they told me about this program, I didn't know what they were talking about. I was too dumb, too numb from pain and everything else. Too sick to understand. But one fellow said, Well, if you can't sleep tonight, let me know. I said, I'll try. If I can't, I can walk the floor again. I've done it many a night. One more night's not going to hurt. He said, No, you won't have to do that. You come out. I'll give you some change. You come outside. Come out and call me, and I'll bring my doctor down. This I couldn't understand. Why? In my opinion, that night there wasn't a living soul in the whole world caring whether I was alive or dead. And here was a guy worried whether I slept. This I could not understand. but they brought me over to the club the next day and from this day on I haven't had to find a drink nor a pill for anything at all I've been most fortunate in this program it gave me back everything that I threw away I never lost anything through drinking I threw it all away I saw it go I knew it went and I threw out all of us know when these crises approach which I knew when my home was being broken up that it was gone, but I got it all back. I've got the same wife back. She's here with me today. I've got my home. Incidentally, her mother is with us, you know, at our request, as well. I have a very good job. I work in the field of alcoholism in the courts and the jails in Louisville. Something very, very pleasing to me because I feel that I'm paying back some of it. And I often wonder that night why. Why was I picked that night when you could walk in any three-block direction that night and there was a hundred drunks just as sick as I was? Dying the same way I was dying and why? Why did that little guy come out of the night from somewhere? Why did he pick on me and stop and talk to me when, like I say, he must have been hit a half a dozen times for a bottle? That's the reason I know that there was a wonder at work that night. I didn't ask God for any help that night if I had thought of God, his last name would have been damn, and that's all I knew about it. There wasn't any wife there to say, Bill, why don't you try AA? That else had already happened. There wasn't any boss to say, why don't you go in AA? There wasnít any friends to say try AA. There was anyone but me and that lamppost. And all of a sudden here come a stranger who didnít know anything about it, who didn't have a drinking problem, walked out of the night and brought me this. So it couldnít have been coincidence. Some people might say, oh, it was coincidence. He happened to be there. Four and a half years later I I met my little friend again. He was trying to help another drunk. Rather than have him arrested, he was taking him into the hospital. A friend of mine was there and he was talking to him while they were treating the drunk. And he said, did you hear anything about Alcoholics Anonymous? This dude turned out to be a cab driver. He said, oh yeah, I tried to help a guy about four years ago down in the street corner, but I guess he's dead. My friend said, don't know he's not dead. I know where he is." And they came out home that night, and they stayed all night, we talked. And I guess I got every drunken cab driver in town to my house from there on in. But it was such a pleasure to meet him again. He solved his gambling problem. He's dead now. He died with cancer. But he solved his gambling problem before he died. He got involved in church and then solved his gambling problem and quit. I was most fortunate to be with him many, many times after that. This was a miracle that happened there. So I know that God has wrought many miracles in this room tonight. All of our stories are miracles, I know that. But I can't help but wonder why. Many, many times over and over, what did I ever do that would have caused this drunk to come out of this dark night and asked me to call the people that help drunks. And here I am. It's been a most wonderful experience. Like I say, I've got everything back. Our son grew up to be a full-sized man. He's not bench-legged. And we have everything in God's world that we need. Not everything we want, no. We still want for a lot of things, but we have everything in the God's word we need, My wife, fortunately, is the All-Around Delegate from Kentucky. Very active in the program. very active, as I hope to be always, in the AA program. I love this program so much because it's done so much for us, particularly me. I've got white shirts now, you see. I've Got suits. I've GOT handkerchiefs. I don't have to sell them anymore. I haven't been in a hawk shop since I got off of Skid Row. And it's an amazing thing what this program can do for one. But if you ever wonder why that God picked some of us drunks, just remember God has wrought many things. Thank you so much. Gentlemen, thank you very sincerely for your message. The applause you received proves everybody enjoys your message."