The Survival Code of Facing Reality – Tom M.

I tried to get to know our speaker in the limited time since Friday night that I've had. And, you know, they tell us that we should always seek out the advice of a longer, sober alcoholic when we're about to attempt something new. So, I sought out Ernie the attorney for advice. And I explained to him that I was going to have this privilege and I said, How would you proceed? And he said, well, you know, when I was in college, one of my classmates was Ed McMahon. And he says, you see, you know that man makes an awful lot of money with a one-line introduction. And so, following that advice, here's Tom! Good afternoon, I'm an alcoholic and my name is Tom Moore. Hi. Thank you. I'm from Pasadena, California which puts me in mind thank you I've got a lot of thanks to give away which puts me in mine. I have come a long way. We've come a long way, but I haven't come up as long away as my friend who's going to share with us tonight because he lives 20 miles west of me. I just did one of the toughest things I ever had to do in my life. I stood before a group of my peers and said, I'm an alcoholic. I had a very difficult time getting to the point where I could do that comfortably. I feel anxious, I feel tense, Most people feel tense when they're trying to share with a large group. But I do feel comfortable because I know that there's not a single person in this room who doesn't walk with me or pull with me every inch of the way of my trying to do what I'm trying to doing today. And that's a comfortable feeling. I start out by saying that I'm an alcoholic and I feel that I am in a room full of miracles. There are some non-alcoholics here, but the fact that you're here is a miracle. I have a non-alcoholic wife who's still in Pasadena and that's a miracle everything about today everything that has happened to me on this trip is sort of a special kind of a miracle i have been very touched by everything i've heard from the podium and a lot of it has been said that i was thinking of saying so i don't have to say it but i got a particular kick out of ernie when he was talking about the part of the world that he lived in and operated in because for a long time i lived in baltimore maryland and turn them up i lived in baltimore marylands for a long time is it okay or you mean i'm too short i'll do my best is that any better i uh i lived in baltimore maryland for quite a while maybe i can pull this whole cotton picking thing back because that's better now you don't have to lean forward and during that time at part of my in part of my career I commuted from Baltimore, Maryland to Philadelphia I thought of that when Ernie mentioned it I'd totally forgotten this incident maybe not totally but let's be honest 98% forgotten and at that time I was looking for a big steel company and I lived in Baltimore and I didn't want to live in Philadelphia so I commuded for the better part of a year and on one occasion when i was driving from baltimore to philadelphia which i did about three days a week i imbibed slightly on the way which was my custom and i stopped in kennett square pennsylvania which is the mushroom capital of the united states some of you who live in pennsylvania may remember it and i stopped at kennett square to get reinforced a little bit just because what i had in my bottle was all gone and I made a habit of sipping a little on that 110-mile drive. And I went to the Clinic Square Hotel at the bartender there and I had a couple of drinks with him and he looked at me finally and said, you're through, Mr. Sir. I said, what do you mean? He said, you can't have any more to drink. You've had too much already. Well, I very politely, being a sort of a semi-actor type person, I said well gee, I'm sorry to hear this. You feel that way? And I got in my car and drove on up to Philadelphia. here. And while I was sitting in my room at the Bellevue Stratford in Philadelphia with my bottle beside me taking more drinks, I felt sort of guilty about what had happened between me and that guy, and I knew that although I was acting polite, I spoke rather meanly. So I called the clinic, the Tenet Square Hotel on the phone, and got a hold of the bartender, and I told him what a great guy he was to have 86'ed me. This is how phony I had gotten when I lived in the area that Ernie was talking about. I'd almost forgotten that incident, but when I said that I'm an alcoholic and started talking about it, I wanted to make clear a couple of things. One, I'm lazy. I was born in a part of the world where they give out birth certificates. And on one occasion, I had to have a birth certificate to prove my citizenship. So I got a photostat made of it. To the young people today, a Photostat is a mystery, but to those of us who are old, we know that a photostat is turned white on black. So I got a photostat of my birth certificate to prove my citizenship, and it has a rather interesting display of facts on it, such as the location where you were born, 819 West Franklin Street, Richmond, Virginia. The name was Thomas Leggett Moore Jr. It says boy or girl, and written in is the word boy. Okay? And then it says twins, triplets or other question mark. Nothing's written in there. I was a single. And then the next one was number in order of birth. I was the third one. I had two older sisters. And the fourth box has a little statement in it. Legitimate question mark and it is filled in yes. So I am not what I have so frequently been called. I touched on that very briefly but it is true I said I'm an alcoholic that's one of my problems I have other problems I'm also a duck hunter and I'm sure there's some in the room here thank you I'm also I wear a tie clip here that some of you may know because many of you who are in the military may remember the guy who started it I didn't know the man but I was made an honorary member many years ago it's a very spectacular little tie clip and it has four letters on it I O O B and if you're wondering what that stands for it has nothing to do with the elk it's international order of old bastards i thought there might be one or two in the room the guy the guy who started that was something somewhere down alabama i have uh nothing much to do here today because i said so much of what i feel inside i would like to express has already been said the feelings that ernie spoke of and the way stephanie talked about the 12 steps were telling my story so i'm i'm lucky i can i can just share a little bit i i don't speak in parables i try to speak in first person only because i am the only alcoholic that i know anything about it's a couple of thousand people to this convention there are a couple of thousand different kinds of alcoholics and it took me a long time to recognize that fact I associate myself with Omaha in a rather unusual way. I was asked by my friend Melba where I was from, and I told her. She said, oh, that's not where I thought you were from. I said, have you been here? Are you from Omaha? And I said no, this is the first time I've been to Omaha in the long time. And I remember what that time was. I want you to make a metal picture with me for a minute of a 1952 Chevrolet station wagon brown in color it wasn't a woody it was one of the metal bottle body 1952 92 horsepower chevy station wagon and there was a guy driving that that had a wife beside him and three children in the station wagon and on top of it was a sweet pot covering over suitcases and boxes and a lot of belongings and this was a fellow who was driving from Baltimore, Maryland to the West Coast in a 1952 station wagon and that individual arrived in Omaha checked in at a hotel or motel and went through his usual performance he went downtown to have a few short drinks because it had been a long tough day and his wife stayed in the motel and worried a little bit and the individual got home to the room and he wasn't drunk but he had a few and his wife was still worried because that individual was me and I drove through Omaha in November of 19 in October of 1952 in that 1952 brand new station wagon and this is the first time I've been back since and my story really consists of what happened between then and now and that's how I hope I can share a little bit in the also hopeful hope that somebody will identify with some aspects of it because that's the way this program works. I saw a cute little statement in one of the little bulletins that some of these AA officers sent out. This one, I think, was from San Francisco in the Secretary's newsletter. And it was a simple statement, and since I'm a member of the Hereafter Club, and maybe you don't know what the Hereaster Club is, I should have touched on it before, along with the Duck Hunter and IOB. I'm also a member of the Kirasta Club. Some of you may get there someday, some of you may not. But it runs something like this. My wife came home from a bridge game and mentioned something about one of her friends whose husband was a member of the Hirasta Club, and I said, what the hell is that? It had something to do with the Neptune Society, where they scatter the ashes in the Pacific Ocean. It had nothing at all to do that i said well what is the hereafter club he said well her husband has gotten to the point where like you he will holler to his wife from the den and say brother and then she'll say what do you want he'll say come out here in the kitchen i'm busy and he will walk to the kitchen and by the time he gets there says what do we want and he says i've forgotten what i came in here after i'm exactly at that state today so i forgot to mention this but I thought it makes pretty good sense, and it fits my story beautifully. This is very unintellectual, but it sounds intellectual. Time is nature's way of preventing everything from happening at once. And I'm extremely happy that there is such a thing as time because between that October of 1952 and the present time, a lot happened to me. I wasn't an alcoholic when I came through Omaha in October of 1953. I wasn'T an alcoholic when I went to my first AA meeting. I didn'T become an alcoholic until I quit drinking. Further than that, I'd like to make a statement because it will color everything that I try to say from here on out. When I quit drinking, I gave up the best job I ever had. I quit running the world. With those two things as sort of preface parameters, you know what a screwball I really am. I was very stubborn. I had all the kinds of characteristics that people like me have, and I'm going to try to tell in a nutshell my story. It helps me if I can ease my own problem and also make you feel more comfortable to tell a little story about that. I didn't make it up, but it's one that I find fits the circumstances quite beautifully for me. There was an English teacher, I beg your pardon, a teacher who taught english in a school with 12 year olds or somewhere in that area and she was a very good english teacher and very conscientious but she had a book that she was reading it wasn't this book but it was a book she had a book which she had from the library she wanted to finish reading and it was due the next day and she had to teach this cotton picking class for an hour and she thought that maybe i could use part of that hour or most of it reading the book if i give them an assignment that will keep them busy so she told him he was going to give them an assignment in english composition and she allowed us how it was going to be from their own minds in their own words in their own handwriting and she wanted each of them to write a story and that was the assignment for the day and she wanted to encompass in that story four elements that could be worked into the story however they wish to do so she said i want you to include the elements of religion royalty facts and mystery she talked to herself when she sat down and they all understood her assignment he sat down well that ought to keep a little rascal busy for 45 minutes so she sat back down to read her book and she had hardly gotten a swatted went up when a hand and she hadn't finished the first half page yes johnny what do you want you want to go to the bathroom he said no teacher no and what are you waving your hand for he said i finished my composition she said no you couldn't have did you incorporate the elements i told you about religion and royalty and sex and mystery he said yes teacher well she said in that case go ahead and read it so he stood up and said this is it teacher holy moses cried the princess i am pregnant i wonder who did it It carries a message. I can't do what that smart little Charlie did in class. I cannot possibly. For one thing, my mind is too far gone. For another thing, I don't remember so much. I'm really a survivor. I survived 23 years of consumption of alcohol when I didn't know what I was doing, when I did not know what it was doing to me. And I survived a little over two years of consuming alcohol when i did know what he was doing to me and I've survived 24 years and seven months of sobriety since that time. For those of you who are computer-minded, that's a little over 775 million seconds. I have a lot of friends, some of them, I'm sure, in this room who have survived sobriety for over a billion seconds, and that's 32 years. I hope I get there, but I may not make it. You know, that is amazing to come to think of it when you talk about a billion second. Sometimes, not just in AA, but everywhere. I get sort of concerned because even though I quit running the world, I sometimes worry about how it's running itself. I hear people use words and terms that they don't really understand. And even as recently as a little while ago on the news, I saw something about things that... I know people don't understand the words they use. One of them, for example, is millions and billions and trillions. We've even heard the word trillion mentioned recently. But millions and billion, we mouth the words and we don't really know what they mean. And I heard a fellow one time when I was looking at an astronomy thing on educational TV who put it so nicely for me that I remembered it and I like to bring it out because once in a while I may misuse the word, forgive me. But he said most people don't realize the difference between a million and a billion and a trillion, We talk about the sun being 92 million miles away and the nearest star is something like six and a half trillion miles away. We don't know what we're talking about. He said, let me give you an idea. He said if your lifespan was a million seconds, you'd live 12 days. That's all. Twelve days. If it were a billion seconds, you would live 32 years. And if it were trillion seconds, you would lived 32,000 years. That impressed the heck out of me. And when I say I've been sober 775 million seconds, that's a very small length of time. And for me it has no meaning except for the fact that through the AA program and the help of many, many individuals, I survived. Where did I survive from? I was born and raised in Richmond, Virginia. And I know there are some good rebels in the room here because I've talked to some from Alabama and North Carolina and Kentucky and some who have moved around the country a good bit. I grew up in circumstances sort of like those that Stephanie talked about this morning. There was no alcohol in my family. There was not alcohol in me. There was alcohol in the world in which I live. And when I said that I believed when I came through Omaha in October of 1952, I believed that I believed that I had no problem with alcohol I knew that I drank a little bit too much and between here and Pasadena where we finally got to we went up to Mitchell and we went through the Badlands and I remember we had a particularly bad time at Rapid City because I did overdo it a little but that night and I was vomiting most of the night and couldn't walk the next morning but I mean it was beginning to happen but I wasn't an alcoholic I just had a little problem with drinking and somewhere along the line why in my growing up period, and I don't want to try to expound on it except what I've already said, that there was no alcohol in my background. I was a fairly thinly-weak kid. I had flu in 1918. As some here may remember, the Spanish influenza flu epidemic of 1918. There were 40,000 people that died in Virginia of Spanish influenza. I hadn't, but I wasn't one of them. so my whole family was sick and I ended up with relative of a spine and I had pooping clog and nearly died and I was quite weak coming up so when I ended up the way I was when I grew up I had behind me a background of lots of things that made me feel inferior inadequate scared anxious totally out of touch with all my fears I had all of those characteristics so I know today I don't have to guess about it anymore I know today that I became an alcoholic when that Dr. What's-His-Name picked me up by the feet at 819 West Franklin Street and slapped me on the butt and said, breathe, breathe. That's the moment I became a alcoholic because today I realize that all of my life I have had the characteristics, the personal characteristics that I've heard so many other alcoholics talk about as being part of their makeup. And I never knew about it. I went through the kinds of things that most of us go through. I was very fortunate. I went to a good school in Virginia. I was too young to go to college. I was only 15 when I graduated from school. So I was sent to Lawrenceville School in New Jersey to age for a year, and then I went back to Princeton for four years where I graduated with chemistry. This is just where I came from. And the only reason for mentioning it is that somebody may identify. I didn't identify with a lot of things that I heard at the beginning, and I wish people had detailed their lives more because it would have helped me. But I did finish a fairly good education and I came out during the Depression when a job for $84 a month in a steel mill was a damn good job because there weren't many around and my father had died and the wealth that I grew up with to which I was thoroughly accustomed and to which I paid no attention whatsoever, was all gone because 1929 was the Depression and my father's estate evaporated. In what had been a very comfortable background, I was raised by governesses. How about that? And I had governessers who raised me, but they also raised my two sisters and my brother, and they're not alcoholics, but I used to think that because I was raised by a governess, I had a right to be an alcoholic. And we had a house full of servants and chauffeurs and gardeners and laundry women and upstairs maids and downstairs maids and butlers and the whole world. And it all went. It all went That's not the reason I'm an alcoholic I'm not an alcoholic because of the personality that I had and somewhere in my college I ran across my college days I ran against alcohol when people were celebrating something we were all going to join an evening club so we stood around let's drink to that and I had my first conscious drink at the age of 19 that was the beginning of a very slow for me other people different some people immediately first thing boom the world blows up not me the grip of alcoholism on me developed very slowly if the tentacles went in very very slowly it was inevitable that i end up helpless but the process of getting that way was very slow for me and when i drove through omaha in october of 1952 i had been recently married actually recently 12 years now i've been married 42 years but it seems i've admired 12 years and we'd had one child born in pasadena where i was assigned during the early 40s and then we moved back to baltimore you do that in the steel business almost as bad as you do in the airport you move all over everywhere and i've crisscrossed the country three times but in this case we had two children one born in pasadena one born in baltimore one two born in passing me i'm forgetting even that two born and passing me one ball we had three kids and here we are heading back for the coast and by now i knew that at times i got out of control but i still couldn't put any hat on it i never heard the word alcoholism mentioned when I was involved in the conversation. Nobody ever accused me of anything, and I had never even seen anything about Alcoholics Anonymous except on a weekend at Bonnegat Bay somebody pointed to a guy who was getting ready to go in his twin and said, is that guy over there? I said yes. He's a member of Alcoholics Anonymous. He doesn't look any different to me from anybody else, and I didn't know what AlcoholicsAnonymous was. So I knew nothing about alcoholism or Alcoholics Anonymous, when my life began to implode on me and I got to the point where we all get where something had to be done. I don't know how many people in this room have visited the drunk tax but I imagine there's a fair number. I'm always surprised by things that happen at AA meetings that it happened that it was my good fortune to be present in Long Beach in 1960, at the 25th anniversary of AA's founding. And I sat in the almost front row of the Long Beach Stadium that night, and I looked up and I saw the same thing that I saw earlier today when I was sitting over there and looked up, and saw Bill Wilson's picture. I sat in the front row and Bill Ropen was the speaker. And I enjoyed the whole evening. It gave me a great feeling of identification with what this program was all about. It was a good beginning for me. By that time, I had gotten sober, and I was beginning to understand what the program was All About. But I didn't have any illusions about what was going to happened to me down the road, I was still pretty shaky. And as I said, as alcohol dug its hooks into me slowly, so did AA. I guess it's because I have an Irish temperament or something. I don't know where it came from, but I don' t like change. I know whether good change is a bad thing. I don't like them. I like things to stay the way they were or the way there are. And I didn't like change and the idea of having to change my life was something I was having a good deal of difficulty accepting but I did get to the Long Beach 25th anniversary of the founding of AA and it was a very moving experience and I can identify with that along the way why I developed some friends who were old timers in AA and I had been struggling for so long with this program at the beginning I came to my first AA meeting in November of 1955 and I went to that meeting and a strange thing happened a very strange thing for me and it stands out in my memory vividly I don't remember a lot of things very well because I am a member of the Hereafter Club you know but I I remember this so clearly I went through my first AA meeting after I'd ended up in the drunk tank not the next day three months later I did and I I remembered the drunk bank episode particularly because in later years, the one I was talking about at Long Beach, the fellow who was leading that meeting, a guy named Chuck Key, who comes from our part of the world and is well known in many places he was talking about his own story and he looked around this room which in the Long Beach Municipal Auditorium many people perhaps were at that one he looked Around the room and there must have been 3,000 people in this good big municipal auditorium at midnight, it was a midnight meeting and when he was telling his story He said, just for the hell of it, how many people in this room are graduates of the Lincoln Heights Drunk Tank? And I raised my hand and so did 499 others. There were 500 people in that room who'd been to the Lincoln Heads. Well, the LincolnHeights Drunk Tanks doesn't exist anymore. I mean, it's gone. It ain't there. It stays there, but it's now a goodwill thing or something or other. It's not the old drunk tank. But you sort of have a special badge if you've been to the Lincoln Heights Drunk Tank. And I went through the Lincoln Hike Drunk Tanks, ain't I? I went to the point where something had to be done. My wife was beginning to be concerned over the fact that she would see me drive in to the garage, our house in Pasadena that we'd lived in for 29 years. That's how much of a square I am. Not one person in the million out there has lived in the same house for 29 But I have, and it has a driveway that runs past the kitchen sink window where you're washing dishes and see a car go in and park in back. And my wife would see me come in having got the phone call from me earlier that evening to the effect that I was busy with customers, and I would be home in an hour or so. I'd call her about 6 o'clock and tell her that, and it'd be 9.30 when she'd see me drive in and go in the garage. and she would take the plate out of the oven that she'd kept in there hot for me because it was my dinner and put it on the table and I still didn't come in the house and she'd walk out to see what the hell was the matter. And there I was, down asleep at the wheel which I used to call it sleep. It was passing out. And she wagged her finger at me long before she got to Al-Anon and said, one of these days, Tom, you're not going to make it. And one of those days happened and I ended up in the drunk tank, period. That's the way that goes. I had to do something like that. I went to an AA meeting, and a strange thing happened that I will never forget because of the strange way it all came about. I didn't really want to go to that meeting. You've had people who talked at this one. I think they both talked at the first Cornhuskers Convention. The roundup was here, not in this room but in the other one. And these two people talked, and one of them is named Sybil. And I called up the central office in Los Angeles, and a very friendly voice said, Hello, this is Alcoholics Anonymous. May we help you? And I said, yes, I wonder if you could tell me where there's a meeting sometime this week in Pasadena. This was a Monday morning. I had had a big meeting with my business associates on Friday, and they'd say, Tom, you're going to take two weeks off. If you can't straighten yourself out, you've done. That's the pressure that came to me. I don't know what comes to other people, but that's one of the pressures that was put on me. If you don't straighten yourself out, you're done. And I had talked to a man who was an alcoholic and in the steel business, as I had been, who had gotten sober, and I became curious, andI said, I'm going to try going to AA. And I called up the central office to see if there was an AA meeting in Pasadena, and this little rascal kibble said to me, yes, there's one tonight, which I didn't like. I thought she would say there's one Thursday night there's one tonight and I said well where is it she told me and I went to it I went through the loan because nobody would take me there was nobody to take me the man who told me about AA was too ill to drive out from where he was to Pasadena and I felt that I ought to do something so I went into this AA meeting and I had an experience of a kind of identification that doesn't happen to a person many, many times in a lifetime. I sat there totally uncomfortable. I didn't like the way the people looked. I did not like the way everybody was shook hands with everybody and they did not know me and nobody asked me any questions. They did not come up and pin a medal on me and say good for you Tom you are here. Well now that and I sat in that place and I did know what was going on and people read the steps and they read the traditions and all of a sudden a man got up to talk he was a speaker and I was taken back 25 years in my memory to the time when I was a senior at Lawrenceville in 1930 I remember lying in bed at Lawrencefield when the rules that the house had said you turn the radios off at 10 o'clock well I was an ordinary rascal and rebellious so I put earphones on and left my radio on so nobody could hear me and I would lie down listening to the radio almost every night, and I would hear a voice that came through those earphones that said, good evening everybody, this is Walter O'Keefe speaking to you from New York on the Lucky Strike program. And here I am at my first AA meeting, and the man who gets up says, good evening, everybody, I'm Walter O'Skeefe, an alcoholic. And I couldn't believe it. This started, this was the seed planting for me. it wasn't 100% effective right away but it started me off with a with a jolt and I came back to AA meetings and I stayed dry I like to mention dry because I wasn't sober I stayed dry I went through a lot of phases in my drinking pattern I don't like to intellectualize it because I'm not capable of it and also it confuses me but if I were to intellectualize my drinking, I would break it down into phases such as denial, which most of us have had. I went through the denial phase when it finally dawned on me after the years that my wife had been telling me about the problems I was causing. When it finally dawned on me, I still denied the fact that I was an alcoholic. I had to admit that I had a problem. It is impossible to sit down in the Lincoln Heights drunk tank looking through those bars from the wrong direction and not admit you have a problem. It is Impossible. But I finally admitted, I denied. I went through the denial period for 20, 15 years. I went to, I came to the point of admitting that I had a problem, but I didn't think I was an alcoholic, and I went for my AA meeting. And when I found out what it was all about, I began to comply. I did what they said to do. You do this, you do that. And I went back to meetings, and I went to dozens and dozens and dozens of meetings. And eight months later, I drank it again. I don't know why. I think I understand a little bit about what tricked me into shitting myself, but I don' t know why, and for the next year and a half, that was the most miserable period of my life. As you've heard other people say, and will again, I hope, it may not make you sober but it will sure hell ruin your drinking and I went through that phase and a lot of things happened to me and there were emotional pressures that I couldn't take I don't want to dwell on them too much because they're sad but there were personal pressures I couldn' t take and the only way I knew how to relieve the hurt was the way I'd always relieved the hurt I drank and having taken that drink in the summer of 1956 six, I found that to my total surprise, I couldn't stop. And I was scared and I went through depressions and I thought I'll never make it. Finally, somehow or other, through the good counsel of many, many people, I did make it and during that period when I was first introduced to AA and when I finally surrendered, I mentioned these different phases denial, admission, compliance. I complied for eight months. It didn't mean anything, but I complies. Surrender. I finally surrendered to the fact that I really was an alcoholic and I surrendered when I was away from home on a business trip up to Edwards Air Force Base and I got too drunk to go call on the people I was going to go to see. So I went over to a motel in the nearby town of mojave california from which the desert gets his name or which whatever way it went and i sat in that motel and i turned on the tv then the music didn't interest me and i got there and suddenly i was suffused with a feeling of god this has got to be it you've lost control completely and i started getting honest with myself and for the first time in years i broke down and cried and I threw the bottle of vodka in the trash and that was January the 19th 1958 which is Robert E. Lee's birthday that's just the way it happened to me and that's my drunk alone there were lots of other dumb things that happened God I during one third my wife and I decided well this is during that the first maybe year and a half when I'd been to AA for eight months and I'd stayed dry, and then I started drinking again. And somewhere in that period we decided that we shouldn't have any whiskey in the house. We were going to get rid of all the whiskey inthe house because I wasn't strong enough to take it. And if we ever had guests that came in, we'd walk to the liquor store which was two blocks away and get what we needed, use it up, and I wouldn't be tempted. Just what's all right, just fine. and finally after four or five months of being dry some people call it sober I don't but four or five months of being dry I persuaded my wife that I was strong enough now after five four or five months that we ought to keep something in the house and she said oh I said oh yeah let's do it I was subtle and cunning and baffling and had a idea back there but I didn't let her know it anyway so we agreed we'd put a little bit of Tom Moore bourbon and there is such a thing as some of you may know there's a good bourbon made in Bogstown, Kentucky called Tom Moore Bourbon. They still make it. It's a fairly good-sized distillery. It still goes on. I really tried to put them out of business, but I never did any better than got them. I got them working nice, but I couldn't put them out of it. We kept Tom Moore bourbon and scotch and the little gin in the sideboard. We had an old sideboard that had come from my home in Virginia. Rugged piece of equipment made out of solid wood, not veneer. And she put those three bottles in the bottle compartment on the sideboard and she kept the key. And that was the whole idea. This is going to work just fine. It couldn't have been more than a month or two later that I found myself at 3 o'clock in the morning with a wood chisel. I pulled the R's, and I had my handkerchief around the wood chisel when I was pounding it softly on the top. And I pounded all the wood away from the little metal plunger and pushed the plunger down and got my bourbon out of there. This is the kind of insanity that would run into my mind. I sometimes like to say that the three R's...I'm a very simplistic individual. I believe in simplicity and whenever possible. And the three R's almost killed me. And the 3R's were reservations. I had a reservation, apparently, I didn't know it. Apparently, I had the reservation way in the back of my mind that someday I was going to be able to drink like a person is supposed to drink. I guess it was hidden back then. I had those reservations. And I developed resentments. I resented the people that came there and I didn't. They were making it and I didn't." Reservations, resentments, and the inevitable relapses, they are absolutely inevitable, in my humble opinion, for this alcoholic. I can't speak for anybody else. But for this alcoholic, any reservations whatsoever, I don't mean 99%, I mean you've got to be 100% convinced that you're an And that little 1% will kill you. It almost killed me. So the three R's almost killed me, the resentments, the reservations and resentments and the inevitable relapses. But somehow or other, as I said, I did manage to get sober. It was through many events like the time sitting at Long Beach and hearing Bill talk and hundreds of people, thousands of people sharing at meetings, and it's been that way for me ever since. we hear lots of times little things that help us most of the time we don't even know it and some people develop ways of describing things that I think are beautiful and one of our local citizens up there has an expression he calls he thinks the name of the game in Alcoholics Anonymous when you take your inventory you uncover discover and discard it's one very good and helpful approach uncover these things that are bothering you take off the top lid discover what they are and how deeply they affect you and discard them those are some of the kinds of things that I went through before I heard those words the 12 steps of that kind of a program for me there was a guy who he's gone now In fact, both of my sponsors are gone. I see the sign back there, do you have a sponsor? If not, why not? And I didn't have a supporter when I first came to AA, and I didn' t have any for the first little while, which was a mistake. But that's the way I wanted to do it. I really hadn' t quit running the world at that point. And I went to my meeting in the Pasadena area where I lived one time after I had had my experience up in the desert. but I had surrendered, and I guess the compulsion to drink disappeared entirely because I've never had any compulsion since that moment. I've not been able to kid myself into thinking that it would work next time. But I went up to this fellow out there, andI said, Tom, there's a lot of Toms around, and this was another Tom. This one was in Pasadena. And I said, you know, I've been struggling with this program for a couple of years, but I think I've finally got my arms around it and I believe I'm going to be all right, Tom. Would you let me call you, my sponsor? He said, sure. I've been wondering when you're going to come back and say what you said. He said here's a nickel. In those days it was a nickel today it would have been a dime. He said there's a nickle and if you think you have a good reason for drinking you know my number call me on the phone and if I have a gut enough reason I'll come down and have one with you. That's the way I got one sponsor. I had two unwilling sponsors. The other one was a guy named Cliff, and Cliff was a local fellow who had been very active early in the western part of AA, and I got to know Cliff initially through my business connection. I was in the metal business, as I touched on, and I became familiar with him as a member of AA and little by little got to know him to the point where he became my other unwilling sponsor. And they both died in 1980 and I'm sorry to say that I miss them more than I'll ever be able to put into words not because they took me by the hands and took me to meetings but because they were there when I wanted to talk about something that was real deep and I valued their opinions about whether this was a good idea or whether it wasn't a bad idea for me in the light of their own feelings this kind of thing So, I don't have a sponsor today, but I feel like I have many, many hundreds of sponsors in the area that I live in. During the course of trying to get sober, having finally gone through that phase of denial and admission and compliance and surrender, I think I got to the acceptance phase but that's not the last one as far as I'm concerned the crowning blow of the whole AA program is gratitude so that to me is the whole story of my drunk alarm going through those different phases that I just touched on and somewhere in that period of time when I was hurting so badly I heard a guy talk about the six magic words we've heard it before today and I hope we'll hear it many, many times in the future that the simpler you keep it the better it is and the six magic words for me have been a lifesaver there have been times in my life when I didn't think I could make it and the sixth magic words have flashed across in front of my eyes and the fifth magic word and the first magic words are so simple so direct so concise and so clear and they are these don't drink face reality be grateful for me that's the whole program today I don't have to elaborate anything I don' t have to complicate it I don''t have to make it involved I just have to remember those six magic words don't drinking face reality be grateful if I can do those things everything is going to be alright in the course of being sober mostly sober at the beginning as I said I got dry and then I surrendered but I think it took me probably five years at least before I began to think soberly again the habit of drinking was too deeply rooted in me after 25 years of drinking it wasn't something I could just dispel by saying I'm going to get rid of it boom, boom it took a long long time to get to the point where I could think soberly. And I touch on that primarily because I know people who are hurting today because they've been sober two or three or four or five or eight years, and they're concerned because they aren't making the progress they thought they should. Well, it took some of us a long time for us to get rid of that old alcoholic way of thinking, the sort of fuzzed-up mental processes I used to go through. and those things have become meaningful to me because somehow or other in discussion groups or book study groups or step study groups I hear the details that they already talked about they still come back to the six magic words but the details of the way that I hear talked about confirm the things that other people have given to me and again I get simple For me, the three R's almost killed me and the three A's are what I survive on today. Awareness, appreciation, and acceptance. These are simple things, but they help me. When I say awareness, appreciation and acceptance, I'd like to tell you a little bit about what I mean. Awareness to me is something that I used to have absolutely none of. I had tunnel vision and I wasn't aware of anything that was outside that tunnel I didn't know it I didn' t know that my subconscious was steering me in the direction it was that I was consciously doing one thing and subconsciously doing something very different I thought I was consciously doing what was the right thing but the truth of the matter was I had the blinders on the whole time and I was self-centered I couldn' t get away from me all the time I have forgotten one of the little precepts that AA talks about. We come to AA to get sober, but if we stay long enough, we become more honest with ourselves than with other people. We learn to think less about ourselves and more about others, and we learn to rely on the constant help of a higher power. I've forgotten some of those things. and the awareness of my own inability to have really made the program work solidly would come through to me every now and then when I would hear things outside of AA that used to mean nothing to me and now they were starting to mean something. And this is the toughest part of my sharing with you that I'm going to try to do right now. I was working at a TV program one day and I saw a woman who's not an alcoholic has nothing to do with AA nothing to deal with alcoholism but it's part of my awareness reality she was being interviewed by an interviewer her name was Beverly Sills a marvelous talent, singer wise and she was being interviewed by a man who was quite familiar with her personal life and he asked her, he said Beverly you always seem so happy he said and I know the personal circumstances of your life I know that you have two handicapped children one deaf and one retarded how do you do it? and the reply from her was with the circumstances of my life I can never really be happy but I always try to be cheerful and I would never have had any feeling at all for what that meant had I not been in AA long enough to have taken those blinders off and looked at things around me in a different way it happens that I have two handicapped children my oldest son is deaf and he's retarded and my youngest son is developmentally disabled and here I'm sitting thousands of miles away from Beverly Sills hearing her tell my story nothing to do with alcoholism but a way of life that I would have missed entirely in the old days I've gotten a great deal of support out of knowing that you can be cheerful even though you have tragic circumstances that drag at you all the time as they do me I went through a long period of feeling sorry for myself a very long period I use it as a reason for drinking I know now they were just excuses you know it, I know it people down the road will find it out the reason I drank so much is because I'm an alcoholic it had nothing to do with the fact that my son was born deaf it had Nothing to do With The Fact That The Other Son Was Developmentally Disabled had nothing whatsoever to do with it but at least I can be cheerful about it now and the only way I can be cheerful is because of what this AA life has given me in the way of an attitude my whole attitude is totally different than the way it used to be that's one of the things that came with awareness and another one that happened not too long ago as I said I used to miss so much I don't mean just becoming aware When you go outdoors, you see the trees and the sky and the birds twittering and see things in nature. I don't mean just that. That's a big part of it. But it's more than that. It's more Than Anything I Can Put Into Words better than the way I heard a guy describe it once. It was an article in some kind of a magazine that a fellow gave me and said, Tom, you'd be interested in this. If he'd given it to me 25 years ago, I would have taken a look at the first three sentences and thrown it away. But in this case, I liked it. It was about a man who was describing two people who were squash champions. Squash being a game that's played in the East, not that West, but it could have been tennis or golf or bowling, anything else. But these were squash champion who were having sort of a match to see which of the champions was the champion or not. And they were going to have a big championship match and they were playing this squash thing and there were two people in the audience who were watching them. and the man who wrote the article described it this way he said to his companion he said you know those two guys are just terrific the way they play squash they're almost exactly alike their games the way to handle the racket and the way that played and it was a close contest and the men with him said oh no they're not they're totally different they're both champions they got to the top of the ladder success is when you get what you want happiness is when you want what you get but he said they're both at the top of the ladder so they're successful as squash players but he says they're totally different in their attitudes and the other man said what do you mean they're completely different and he said well Bill over here loves to win and John over here hates to lose they're two champions they've both got to the top one hates loves to Win the other hates to lose one enjoys the fun of victory it's fun when you win and the other one agonizes over defeat even though they both got to be champions the same thing can happen to us in AA the same think can happen to us in AA and I've seen examples of it and every now and then I see an example of it in me all of this kind of thing I wouldn't have paid any attention to in the old days I would have missed it entirely so when I speak of the three A's being so helpful to me the awareness of everything this marvelous facility here the fact that you don't have smog in Omaha all these things I think are tremendous I'm aware of things I didn't used to be at all I was totally blinded out the old tunnel vision I didn' t look for anything except how I was going to save enough money to get the next drink and the appreciation if you appreciate what you have it always becomes more if you belittle what you had it always become less and the acceptance the acceptance of I've got to play the hand the way it was dealt to me I can't change it acceptance these three A's have been so meaningful to me I'm also glad that I was asked to come over and share this roundup I have I have times when everything isn't just roses I have to go to Camarillo which is a state mental institution once a month to see my oldest son he's 40 now he's no longer a boy he's been there for 23 years every time I go there it tears me up inside but I go and I don't come away crying strange that just today I was looking at TV in the room for a few minutes and I saw the cable news network which I never see out west and they were showing a picture of some women who were talking about the ultimate agony the greatest pain that a woman can have to bear is to have a child who's handicapped my wife has two children that are handicapped she's no alcoholic I became the person who used that as my reason for drinking. And I was reminded of that just today, looking at the TV. I mean, it's amazing what's out there if you just keep your eyes open. All of these things I would have missed in the old days. I would've paid no attention to them. None at all. I suppose everybody here has had experiences that are both good and bad with trying to help people. I had some bad ones. I'm a very lousy 12-stepper, I've decided. I sometimes find it difficult to make myself identify with some of the people that I see. I had an experience earlier in my A.A. when a man asked me if I would be his sponsor, and I did. But he was a highly educated man. I had a fair education, but he had a doctorate and all this kind of garbage and he was a professor at Caltech. And I did my best to try to carry the message to him. And I, I did everything I could for his wife and his three marvelous children and et cetera. And he started coming to meetings regularly. He was dry. This is one of the reasons I stress dry so much as confessor with sober. He was dried for five years. dry for five years went to meetings but he never would really go all the way he wouldn't go all out and become a part of he'd gotten to the point where he was shy about standing up and reading anything and after five years of being dry he came by my house one night and said Tom I didn't get the full professorship that I'm entitled to and I had two martinis before I came by to see you and 60 days later I went to his funeral he died of alcoholic convulsions in his own home and I felt guilty about that I don't know why I should have felt guilty but I did and I ran across something that I'm going to read to you because it conveys a message in that regard it is not from an AA publication but it's from a publication about things that relate to us and it's called An Act of Faith an act of faith before I leave I want to mention two things I haven't said much about higher power I touched on it we've learned to rely on the constant help of a higher power I've seen evidences of higher power work on me six months ago I was up at this hospital in Ventura, California Camarillo which is a state hospital and I had taken my son and my wife was with me and we had gone out to lunch and it's difficult. He has to write. He can't speak and sometimes his behavior is hard to control in public but we'd had an hour and a half or two hours with him and I was feeling very low and as I headed back on the road to the hospital I noticed that a car came behind me pretty close. He was beginning to tailgate me and immediately my sensitivity I was always very sensitive my sensitivity was sterile what's the matter with that phone why don't you stay back the right distance instead of coming up and riding my bumper and as I came up to a stop sign I noticed he opened the door on one side and hollered hey your back door is open my son the handicapped one hadn't closed the back door all the way and I hollering thank you very much and then we went to another stop sign and he pulled up alongside me and he leaned over and rolled his number down and he said are you a friend of Bill Wilson and I said you bet your life I am and as he drove away I saw on his bumper sticker easy does it things like that happen as coincidence these kinds of coincidences happen all the time now they happen most unexpectedly I haven't been depressed in a normal way description of the word depression for a long time I try to be cheerful I may not always be happy but I do try to be cheerful like Beverly taught me to be and I've learned from so many people in AA and outside of AA because the world out there is for all of us I just wanted to be sure I mentioned that fact and we have a little saying that floats around my part of the world that was written by a man of the cloth once in which he was trying to get across the point to people who say, I don't understand this and I don' t understand why this had to happen. I don''t understand that. Like the book that many of you may have read called When Bad Things Happen to Good People. That has nothing to do with AA either but if you have bad things that have happened to you and you wonder why, read that little book sometimes. It's quite stimulating. We all have things that happen to us. We know that. and this man in Pasadena had used a phrase that I just love and it goes like this he said we need always to remember that we're in the hands of a higher power that does his work on a scale so vast that we cannot hope to understand his methods or purpose and that fits my way of looking at it today I don't understand anything at all about some of the things that happen to me, near me to other people that I like I don't understand it but it's not for me to understand and I have a certain amount of faith that somehow other things will work out and this little thing I wanted to read to you and it's called an act of faith that applies to what we're talking about a little bit at least I think it does I stand in my garden ready to plant peas this being in the farming country maybe doesn't mean more to you in it, and I thought. I stand in my garden ready to plant peas. I have spaded it, raked it, fertilized it, the calendar says today is the day to plant bees. I look at the pea in my hand, green, hard, wrinkled, dry, no life of any kind shows. Yet if I want to raise a patch of peas, this is what I plant. I dig the trench, lay in the peas, and cover them. My job is over. I can go fishing, watch TV, or sleep, but I cannot do anything to make that pea grow. The sun will shine, the ground will get warm and the rain will fall. I have that faith. I can pull the weeds and chase off the rabbits and I can help out the rain with the garden hose but nothing in the world I can do will make those peas grow, blossom and bear. So it is with the alcoholic. We prepare the ground, plant the seed and pull the weeds, but there is nothing we can do to make it grow. Just as with the peas, the life lies within the alcoholic. We know we won't help any alcoholic if we don't plant the seed, but only God can make it glow. When we start giving instructions to God on how to make the seed grow, we're out of our field. That's his. And when a seed doesn't sprout, that's his too maybe another time another growing season at Wiltsprout and maybe never it's not for us to say which shall grow and which not any more than we can make any of them grow ours is to plant the seed his is to make it grow I like the message that that conveys because it made me feel better on some occasions when I felt what was it I didn't do or what did I do that I shouldn't have done and I do my best And that's about all I can do now. I believe sincerely in so many aspects of the AA program. I'm reasonably happy. I try to be cheerful. And I'm okay, I'm pretty comfortable, except when I have the PIP. and the PIP for me is an acronym that I sort of put together for myself because it conveys to me a certain kind of a message. It comes from the first letters of three words, three character defects that I find cropping up when I got the PIT and those defects are pride, impatience and projection and except for times when I have the PID I feel reasonably good and when the pip comes around I can now look at it and think my God pride you know it's in many of our AA books pride leading to self-justification and always spurred by conscious or unconscious fears is the basic breather of most human difficulties and it happens to me that way all the time pride I've been sitting with three people in a conversational group and one of them will be expounding on something and the other guy will be asking questions back and forth and I'll find myself wanting to get in there make comments right now let him know that I know as much about it as he does nothing but pride pride crops up in so many unusual ways false pride I'm speaking of, of course and the impatience or the intolerance I don't know whether to call the middle eye impatience or intolerance anymore as far as I'm concerned they're just about the same impatience God give me patience right now I've gone through that many times and the last one of projection in spite of the fact that I've been fortunate enough to have been able to stay sober for a while and to live through crises that I never could have taken had I been drinking I would have been long gone I still find that projection is a basic kind of a defect with me when I got ready to come over here, for example. I didn't sleep very well on Thursday night and where we live, I don't have an air conditioner but I had to turn the fan on. I woke up in the morning and my throat was dry and when I took the limousine down to the airport I started sneezing and I immediately projected, my God, I'm going to get over there Friday night with a sore throat and Saturday I won't be able to talk. Projection, projection, projection. It goes on and on. Day in and day out I find myself projecting. If you believe in the AA program and have faith in it, I hope that you have the same good fortune that so many people in AA have had. I'm just one of the many, one of thousands, hundreds of thousands. A man used a good way of describing how he felt about that once, one my local friends is like colorful. He said, you know there was a fellow who went to Niagara Falls and said that he was going a string of cable across the Niagara Falls thing and push a wheelbarrow across it. And he said, and there was a guy that went up to him and he said you know Mr. Thorpe, Mr. Jones, I think I really do. I believe you can do that. And the guy said do you really do? He said yes. He said do have faith that I can do it? He says yes. Well if you have faith, you'll get in the wheelbarrow. I see it that way. I hope and pray that those who are relatively new to AA, if you believe, try to convert it into faith. And you get in that wheelbarow and you'll have the greatest life you ever even thought possible. For that and for all the things that have happened to me, I can only say thank you, thank you and God bless Egypt.