The Traditions as a Laser on a Common Problem – 1935 – Bob D.

And without further ado, can we please give a warm welcome to Bob Darrellman, an alcoholic. And through the grace of a God that I was afraid to believe in, that I have access to maintain in my life through a process outlined in a book entitled Alcoholics Anonymous, the ability to remain sponsorable and a persistence in the primary purpose of trying to forget ourselves and help others I haven't had a drink or any mind or emotion altering drugs since October 31st 1978 and that's my personal best actually I'm glad to be here in this this is feels like Pioneer AA or something, you know. I'm just curious who's here. How many people are in their first 30 days of absolute abstinence? Anybody? Anybody? Really glad you're here. How about first year? Wow. Anybody in their last 30 days kind of fed up with all of us? I'm supposed to talk a little bit about the history. And I can't really talk about the History of Alcoholics Anonymous without talking somewhat about the story of alcoholism that preceded AA. I have a book at home called The Slaying of the Dragon, and it's the account of treatments, failed treatments for alcoholism going back thousands of years. And they, I'll tell you, religion, medicine, psychiatry, families, governments have done a lot of stuff trying to fix us with very, very little success. Prior to 1935, most alcoholics would have to go on to the bitter end, slowly relapsing themselves to death, swearing intermittently they would never do that again until they eventually just couldn't even take their ride anymore and they'd take their own life. And for a guy like me to be born with this sickness that I have into a time, A very, very small little window of time in history where there's something like Alcoholics Anonymous available to me is such an amazing thing. Because most, probably 99.99% of alcoholics throughout history have died of this disease. And here we are. Pretty amazing. Some of the things that were tried to fix us. they burnt us at the stake because they believed we were possessed by demons and I get it, I think my parents at one time thought I must have been possessed by demons, you know that you got back on your feet, you're doing well and you go and burn your freaking life to the ground again, it's like what's wrong with you right, what's long with you And I would secretly have the same thoughts to myself. What's wrong with me? How come I keep doing this? When I swore to myself I'd never do it again. So they'd burn us in stakes. Back in Europe, hundreds of years ago, they'd drill holes in our heads to let the demons out. Not too long ago, and it's still, I've heard rumors that it's done occasionally and they'd give us electroshock therapy. If you ever saw the movie Francis, it's a true account of Francis Farmer, a movie star who had alcoholism before AA, and they ended up giving her a full frontal lobotomy trying to cut the madness out of her brain. I've been over in Russia several times. My first time over there, I met a guy who was startling to me. I was doing a workshop with a translator because very few people over there speak English, and I don't speak Russian. And so during one of the breaks, a guy comes up to me, a Russian guy, and he wants to talk to me but I can't understand Russian. So we had to grab one ofthe two translators, and one ofthetranslators was an Al-Anon and oneofthemwasan AA. So we grabbed theAl-Anontranslator And we brought her up so he could tell me this story. The story he's telling me was that after countless relapses, this was right before the end of the Soviet Union, that the Soviet union had spent a fortune, I mean millions and millions and billions of dollars on alcoholism because the alcoholism was so bad in Russia and is to this day that it made the society virtually dysfunctional. And so one of their last ditch efforts, he's telling me, was that their scientists would implant a chip into the muscle tissue in the middle of your back. And if you drank alcohol, the chip would detect the alcohol in your bloodstream and release a toxin which must have been like some kind of super antabuse. It wouldn't kill you, it wasn't supposed to kill you. I mean, I suppose it could if you were in bad shape, but it was just supposed to make you wish you were dead for a while. You know what I mean? One of those kind of deals. And as he's telling me the story through the Al-Anon translator, he turns around and he lifts his shirt tail up and he shows us this horrible scar in the middle of his back and he says that after a year of having the chip in there and no relief, no ease and comfort a year have accelerated restless, irritable and discontent he begged his best friend to take a kitchen knife and cut the chip out of him Now, the Al-Anon translator was horrified by that story. Oh my God, how could anybody do that? I, on the other hand, was horrifyed that he waited a year. Right? Because I know what it's like to just not drink because of a disease called alcoholism that drives guys like me so insane that I forget that I was sobbing as they were checking me into detox swearing to myself and meaning it that I'll never touch that stuff again I forget that and it's funny if you have the mind of a chronic alcoholic you will forget what you should remember and you will remember what you shouldn't forget you'll remember what that second grade teacher did to you but you'll forget that alcoholism is killing you and so they did stuff like that and nothing really worked much. There was the Washingtonians, which I've kind of become a student of them. I got a big book on them that's kind of a rare book. You don't see many. There's only a few copies in existence about the Washingtonian. And they were very much like us in some ways. And there were founded in the mid-1840s by a bunch of drunkards who couldn't stay sober, who had done the pledges, who had sworn to themselves and their families. They'd been in multiple sanitariums, they'd been sobered up in jails and they got together in a bar in Baltimore and they were having this discussion about we've done everything. I just can't seem to quit. Here we are drinking again. What's wrong with us? And how they started discussing all the people that tried to help them And they realized, as they were talking amongst themselves, that these well-intentioned, kind, altruistic people that were trying to help them really didn't understand them. Not really. And yet, they understood each other. And they came up with a novel idea that these people can't help us to stay sober, But maybe we could help each other because of the commonality. We have this bond in our failure. We're bonded by our own demises and our own failures, and we understand each other. And so they formed this organization. They named it after the first president of the United States, George Washington. They called themselves the Washingtonians. And in just five years, five years they grew to a couple hundred thousand members. Unbelievable. When Alcoholics Anonymous was five years old it didn't even have a thousand members and this was in the 1800s before they had telephones, before they hade mass transit, before they hade all the things that are available to us in the 1930s and 40s. and then because they had no structure within six or seven years they failed to exist. Within six or seven years all the members of the Washingtonians that for the first time in their disastrous drinking careers and their disastrous failures at staying sober, they had hope and all of a sudden it's gone and what had happened well they they had no singleness of purpose they had no focus they started helping a lot of people with a lotof great causes like abolition of slavery if you're a spiritually minded person trying to change your life that would seem like a legitimate thing to back they started backing the temperance movement all kinds of things and their focus that had been like Alcoholics Anonymous focus, like a laser on a common problem. They started trying to fix opium addicts, which was laudanum, all these political positions they were taking, and the focus of their recovery was spread over such a large area that it lost its power. And the fellowship started to dissolve a lot of it Through bickering, a lot of it through people. There was a lot of self-promotion in their ranks. You know, people like just trying to look at me, putting themselves in the spotlight. And they dissolved. They dissolved away. And in the 1940s, when Alcoholics Anonymous was in trouble, Bill Wilson learned from the experience of the Washingtonians. And that's another story about how he took that and through meditation and a desire in his love for alcoholics and Alcoholics Anonymous, he put together the original 12 traditions, which is today known as the long form. But so nothing really is – there's no real traction. Once the Washingtonians dissolved in the mid-1800s, there was nothing really for us. You know, the temperance movement, you know, I have some posters from the temperence movement of some pretty funny stuff. I mean, they were, they had a very self-righteous, they have an approach that turns most alcoholics off. You know what I'm saying? And not much traction, very few people. I got, I Have some sheets of the Washington, from the Temperance Movement pledges that people would sign. And if you ever get a chance to go to Stepping Stones, upstate New York, and you look at Lois' Bible, you'll see all the pledges that he signed and dated where he swore on the Bible he'd never drink again. And then there's another one. And then here's another. You know, boy, I love that because I get that. That's me. And so there's not much going on. And then in 19, December 11th, 1934, this washed-up stockbroker who hadn't worked in quite some time, he'd been such a big shot on Wall Street and he was such a failure. And his poor wife, who had been a debutante, whose family was very well-known and very successful, she was working in a department store in New York supporting him. And again, one more time, he went into Towns Hospital in Newark City where he got detoxed again. and he got out of there with an after having an experience that I don't know that he understood it I don'T know that the doctor there understood it but something had happened to him there was a guy who sort of 12 stepped him that he ended up referring to as his sponsor until his dying day even though the guy never stayed sober himself for any length of time I think he had almost seven years living in Texas with Circe. Circe used to tell us the story of that. But this guy, Ebi, came and called on him. He was living on Clinton Street in Brooklyn and Ebi came and called on him and he was in pretty bad shape. But he was excited when Ebi called him and said, I'm coming over because he was a guy who used to get drunk together all the time. He was excited. as you know the loneliness of late stage alcoholism and then the idea of an old drinking companion showing up exciting stuff and he ebby showed up but he was sober and like just looked bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and and bill said what what's what's with you he says i'm not drinking i've got religion and bill said something i thought was funny he said yeah the guy he said a year ago he was insane from alcoholism now he's insane from religion or something like that he starstruck uh he said but my gin will outline his pre will outlive his preaching and uh and he brought abby in and abby started telling him about an experience he had with this oxford group which was a first century Christian organization that was trying to fix a lot of things, not just alcoholism, but a lot of stuff. After that, not too long after that, Bill went into the hospital December 11th for the last time. And in the meantime, between the time that Ebby came to Clinton Street and Bill eventually went into Towns Hospital. Bill got drunk one night and was out looking for Ebi and he went down to the mission which, the Calvary Mission, which Oxford group was kind of tied in a little bit there and went into one of their meetings and very drunk and had to share ever been in an AA meeting and a drunk guy comes in has to share, just needs to share you know, and they eventually ask him to leave, you know and he ended up in Towns hospital and uh and ebby came and called on him with a guy named roland and they brought him a book it was the first thing that bill ever read sober and he read it in town's hospital was called the varieties of religious experience which was a series of lectures given by william james in scotland and about about the diversity of spiritual experiences and it's really an amazing book what to me what's amazing is i've read that book twice in my sobriety i can't it's hard for me to believe that wilson or anyone could have read that in detox and understood it it's a very if you ever read it it'S A VERY HARD READING the second time with a double digit sobriete i started to get something from it uh and he read that books and ebby and roland visited him and ebbe He took him through a rudimentary thing of the steps. It wasn't as the steps exist today. It was as they existed in the Oxford group. And Bill had a spiritual experience in Towns Hospital. And he talks about it and he describes it as a wind from a high mountain blowing through and the light got brighter in the room and all that kind of stuff. And that's attributed to Bill's spiritual experience. I personally don't think that was it. I think his real spiritual experience came a little bit later. And he says in the book, he said, Later, I was laying in my hospital bed and a thought came to me. Now, picture yourself in detox. Your life, you're worthless. You've failed at everything you've ever done. Everywhere you look, you see problems. You got problems with your wife. You got money problems. You got problem with the government. You got programs everywhere you look. And he says, and I was laying in my hospital bed and the thought came to me that maybe there might be thousands of alcoholics out there, maybe millions, that I could help. Now, how many of you had that thought come to you when you were in detox? I mean, no, truly. I mean where in the midst of all your problems, how many have you sat there and go, I can't wait to get out of here because I want to help some people. I mean it's sort of, it's a contrarian idea for a guy like me who's self-obsessed, self-centered, self-concerned and extremely problematic. and yet the thought came to Bill and thoughts come to alcoholics but it was a thought that seemed to stick and have some traction because from December 15th 1934 Bill Wilson exited Towns Hospital for the last time and from December 5th December 15, 1934 to what was often believed was May 10th, 1935 not quite, five days short of five months Bill Wilson worked with 96 alcoholics and none of them stayed sober one of them committed suicide in their house on Clinton Street he let him stay there and the guy committed suicide another one stole, Bill had one nice suit for job interviews is the guy stole his suit. Another guy stole their coffee pot, and Bill never gave up. And he finally, after almost five months of this, about four months of these, in despair, he kept looking at his wife come home from working in the department store, and she'd be exhausted. And how much she had given him, and how much he had done for him. And he went to her and he said, Lois, I think I was wrong. I had this experience in the hospital and I was convicted that I could help people but nobody's staying sober and I need to go get a job and stop this AA. We didn't call it AA, stop this helping drunk thing and Lois said something that changed the world and kept Bill on track. She said, but Bill, you're sober and he had been sober as a result of those actions and reasonably happy being sober and right after that he went back and talked to Dr. Silkworth because he had an opportunity to go back to Akron, Ohio and represent some people and had a chance of rising to the top again and becoming a man of significance and money etc and I can imagine that Bill was tired of having his wife support him I imagine that Bill being at one time a big shot was tired of scraping by and he has this chance to go to Akron and he goes and the whole deal falls apart it was a proxy fight they lost the people he was representing they lost their position and here he is it's all over, the smoke's cleared and he has not even enough money to pay for his hotel bill and he's pacing the lobby of the Mayflower Hotel and that part that Marnie read at the beginning of the meeting, I've done I've chaired meetings in the lobby on three occasions of the lobby of the Bayflower Hotel and I was asked twice two of those three times to read that part that Marnie read at the beginning of the book, I couldn't read it. Because I knew where I was and I'd start tearing up. Am I having a heart attack? And it's amazing and Wilson is a failure again. Again, a failure. And he's pacing the lobby and he doesn't know what to do and there's a cocktail lounge in there And now it's something different, but you could see where it was. And he hears the noise. The noise of alcoholics having fun. And against the backdrop of his own failure and loneliness, it must have been very seductive. hearing the laughter roll out of that cocktail lounge across that hotel lobby. And he started to get afraid because he had started having thoughts like, well, maybe I can just go in there and strike up a conversation with someone. I could have ginger ale. Or then the thought came, oh, I could maybe just have one drink. And the minute he thought that, he panicked. He thought, oh, I'm in trouble. And he went to the, there's, there are ghosts in the room. He went to The, there was a payphone in the lobby of the hotel. And he, he went into that hotel, he wanted to go into that payphone and there was a church directory but years ago there used to be church directories just as there were bibles in all hotel rooms there was also church directorlies in most hotels and he looked at the church directory started calling with a little bit of money he had left not much he started calling people talking to ministers he got rejected rejected and people didn't have time for him and they didn't answer. And he finally got to the 10th, I believe it was the 10TH call, and he got this Reverend Tungst, and Tungsta responded differently. Tungste said, well, you know, there's someone in our congregation who's actually been having problems with a friend of theirs that's a bad drunk. And I'll hook you up. and he, through some actions that they took, he had hooked up Bill Wilson with Henrietta's cyberling. Which, when he discovered who it was, it must have been difficult for him because the cyberlings were tire magnets and he just lost a deal with the tire thing and it must've been a little embarrassing to him to have to talk to Henrietta cyberling Henrietta said I'll call you right back I got this doctor he just admitted in an Oxford group meeting that he's a secret drinker she called him back and she said his wife said he'll see you but he can't see you today because he's taken a nap under the dining room table you gotta like a guy like that See, I'm a napper. I take naps sometimes. You know, you can't wake me up. I'm an napper and Bob was so out of it he was taken he was passed out underneath the dining room table he screwed up Mother's Day as he screwed up a lot of things and the next day his son Smitty drove him and Ann and his sister his step adopted sister or step I don't know his sister Sue to the Cyberling gatehouse to meet this Bill Wilson and Smitty and I were good friends Bob's son and he spent he stayed with me for a week in my house and he sat and there's a whole bunch of us in the living room packed in there and he told us the story about how his dad did not want to go and have this guy talk to him about his drinking but he was guilty because he screwed up Mother's Day so he was going reluctantly And he's ranting in the car to his wife, and please don't make me stay in there any more than 15 minutes. I can't take it. I can' t take people lecturing me on my drinking more than 15 minutes, that's it. And they agreed to that. And he went into the room alone with Bill Wilson, and he didn't come out for hours. We asked his son, how come you let your dad stay in there for all those hours when you'd agreed to get him out of there in 15 minutes and smitty said we could we were sitting out there and we could hear my dad laugh and he hadn't laughed in years that kind of laughter when you're starting to identify that some of us experience that kind of laughter for the first time it's the best and most humble laughter in the world it's the self-effacing laughter where you start laughing at yourself through another person's experience and they left him in there and he came out and he was excited where he went in depressed he came up lit up and he had his arm around bill wilson and and he says to uh to ann this guy knows what he's talking about and he invited bill to come to ardmore street and stay for a while and Since Bill didn't have enough to pay his hotel bill, I'm sure Bill thought, well, that's, sure, I'd love to go there. He went and stayed at the house on Ardmore Street for a while. And they started talking about spiritual stuff. And Dr. Bob loved, there was all these aspects of AA that Bob loved. He loved the concept of prayer and meditation, confession of shortcomings, going to help people but he dug his heels in when it came to amends. He didn't want to do that and he said something along the lines of you know we should let bygones be bygodes I've already destroyed my or really hurt my reputation as a surgeon and a proctologist in this community by my drunkenness let's just leave that alone I'll do everything else except the amends and some of you knows the rest of the story this is quite newcomer thinking there was a medical convention in Atlantic City who Bob had been drunk at the year before and he wanted to go back to show them that he was sober right now in today's Alcoholics Anonymous any sponsor would have said what are you out of your mind right Bill Wilson didn't have any this was his first guy that ever stayed sober he didn't know what to do So Bob went back to Atlantic City and he got so drunk and he just stayed out of it for days, drinking around the clock. Bob, Dr. Bob drank like I drank, drank for oblivion and just, you know, I was that drinker. I could come to and many times, many times I'd come to and I'd look out the window and Ied look at the clock and it's six o'clock and I don't know if it's 6 o'clock in the morning or 6 o´clock at night because I've just spun out because I'd been out of it for so long and he's coming back to Akron and his train station was Cuyahoga Falls and they get to the CuyAHoga Falls station and Dr. Bob is almost comatose he's out of him so the conductor and someone else had to literally lift him and carry him off the train and they didn't know what to do So they laid him on the platform at Cuyahoga Falls and the station master called up, knew him, called up his office and his office secretary, office manager came down and started to try to take care of him. They couldn't get him awake and eventually got him back to Ardmore Street where they put him to bed. And he came to on what for years was believed to be June 10th, 1935. Now, most of the historians are believing it was probably June 17th, 1935, because just not too long ago they found the records of when the medical convention was in Atlantic City. So he couldn't have been June 10th. So they're estimating it might have been Jun 17th. But regardless of whatever day it was, he came to early in the morning, sick, shaken, Bob would come to like I'd come to. Just feel like I want to jump out of my skin. My nerves are shot. I get it. And he says, what day is it? And they tell him and he goes, oh no, no, no. I have to perform a surgery this morning. And I can't postpone it. It's already been postponed. I have to do this surgery. And he's shook like this. And Bill didn't know what to do. He's hellbent. He has to go to the hospital. So Bill gave him a sedative and some beer and sent him into the surgery. Imagine being that patient just laying there watching your surgeon vibrate and smell like beer. You know, it's just a big boost of confidence in your doctor. And we don't know what happened to that guy. The surgery was evidently a minor colon cancer surgery. It was over quickly, still in the morning of that day. And Bob disappeared. You know, nobody knows. It's odd that Bill, a friend of mine, Bill Pittman, who was an archivist, he worked with Frank Mauser and Mauser, and several other historians has searched the St. Thomas Hospital and the Akron City Hospital records trying to find more information about that patient. Because all it says in AA literature is he lived. And they couldn't find anything. We don't know anything more than he lived, but did he whistle when he walked or what? Because Dr. Bob was a proctologist. We don'T know what happened. And so Bob disappears. And his son said that everybody was scared. wilson was afraid that he was out drinking wilson kind of thought he was out drinking because he gave him some beer before he went into the thing and you know and wilson knows about this phenomenon of craving and maybe he disappeared maybe he's out on a drunk and and everybody was afraid and according to smitty uh he came home it was probably close to midnight late that evening and he hadn't been drinking and not only hadn't he been drinking he was different and what they discovered that he spent all that late morning, all that afternoon and early evening out seeking everyone who he was afraid to face without any self concern and he pushed finally, finally one man was willing to go to any lengths and push his obsessive self-concern aside for a spiritual principle of making the restitution and making things right and consequently dr bob never took another drink the rest of his natural life he lived 15 more years roughly and in those 15 years there's estimates that that he personally helped 5 000 alcoholics and he not only helped them get sober and stay sober he embedded in them an ethic that they must go and help other alcoholics who would help other alcoholics. And I would venture to say that in a sense, we are all here because of one man's eighth step. One man finally being able to set his fear aside of facing those people and paying back the money and all the self-centered fear to serve a purpose greater than all of that self-serving stuff. and that was the beginning of Alcoholics Anonymous we don't celebrate the day that Bill Wilson got sober except at Stateline we have an event in Las Vegas it's on Bill Wilson's sobriety birthday I think as far as I know it might be the only AA celebration or event in the world that celebrates the day Bill got sober but AlcoholicsAnonymous celebrates our Founders Day is based on when bob got sober when the first transmission of the message took and stuck and you know they had a tough time uh in early sobriety there was you know they they finally got they had a couple guys drink again then he finally got bill dodson and bill stayed sober and they started a little group they actually they were meeting at t henry's house and a couple years ago i was with my sponsor clancy and a whole bunch of sponsees we were back at the uh founders day and for the first time in 80 some years the people who owned that t henry's house today opened their house and let us come in there and have an aa meeting and we went up into the room where people got surrendered the oxford group was big on surrendering you and they didn't really care much if you were ready for that or not they would just take you upstairs they make you get down on your knees and you know they do that stuff and there's i think it's a dr bob in the good old timers there's accounts of of watching people come down those stairs like just like like petrified just like they don't know what just happened right um and we went up into that room in t henry's house and to every single one of us as we walked in that room the hair stood up on the back of our necks and on our arms there was something in that room maybe it was a lingering of the spirit of Dr. Bob's first surrender maybe it Was all the people that had alcoholism that were prayed over I don't know but there was Something Amazing in that place they started the first group they didn't call it Alcoholics Anonymous because it was just part of the Oxford group They had a lot of difficulties in the Oxford group. The Oxford group was started by a guy named Frank Buckman, and Frank's vision of spirituality was really catered to the rich kind of. Him and Wilson had had some arguments. He wanted Bill Wilson to go down to Wall Street and testify and minister to the heads of industry to bring them into the Oxford group you know, to swell the coffers I suppose of the Oxford Wilson didn't want to do it Wilson wanted to work with the dregs of the earth he wanted to look for guys like me and they had a little bit of a falling out over that and there was also, there was some controversy about some newly sober people who were Catholics and there Was a bishop in Cleveland that was telling them they can't go to the Oxford group because the Catholic Church in those days was very, very territorial. And so they started, they broke away from T. Henry's house and they started the first meeting at a place called King's School. I've been to that meeting many times. They have Bill Dotson's Bible is there because you got to remember in the early days of Alcoholics Anonymous they didn't have a big book they didn'y have any literature so they used whatever spiritual literature they could grab onto and that was I have a whole bunch of books that were used by the Oxford group back in the day and then they eventually took the name Alcoholics Anonymous and AlcoholicsAnonymous had a lot of growing pains in its early years and the growing pains were from growth more than anything else the struggling years when they couldn't get much traction and membership grew very slowly they seemed to be solid in who was there and then a couple things happened one is there was a baseball player in Cleveland who was interviewed by the Cleveland Plain Dealer and that was a local newspaper paper in Cleveland and they did a great article and they broke his anonymity there was no traditions and they said his life was changed as a result of Alcoholics Anonymous and the Cleveland group of Alcoholic Anonymous got inundated by hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people and it was unbelievable experience for the Cleveland group but they grew so fast that they were desperate trying to get people solid and they were outgrowing themselves literally and then a couple years later there was a journalist who had a reputation for no nonsense, a reputation for exposing fraud and his name was Jack Alexander and Jack went in to Alcoholics Anonymous and tried to find out how phony we were and to his amazement And I suppose he discovered that we were exactly what we said we were. There was nobody making money here. There was no money promoting themselves. There was somebody trying to help people so they'd get the spotlight. There was Nobody's helping people to make money. That we really and truly were an altruistic movement, which means that there's no self gain, that the service is its own reward. That we don't have to get prestige, money, property. The three things that Wilson would incorporate into the 12 traditions later. And Jack Alexander just raved about it. Matter of fact, he fell in love with Alcoholics Anonymous. He was on one of the early boards. He loved AA. And his article in the Saturday Evening Post brought thousands and thousands and thousands of requests for help from all over the country. A woman that I was really good friends with was a woman named Sybil Corwin. Sybil was the second woman to ever get sober in the world, six months behind the gal, the first gal that got sober on the East Coast who, because Marty Mann didn't stay sober. Marty Mann was the first, but she didn't say. and Sybil was the second woman to ever get sober and stay sober she tells this story here she is, she shows up the first time at the Los Angeles group of Alcoholics Anonymous and they turned her away they sent her down the hall where the wives were gathered because they didn't have any concept that there might be women alcoholics They didn't understand that. How could a woman be an alcoholic? They sent her down the hall. She came back later to the next meeting, and she's crying and begging them. She says, I'm dying of alcoholism. I can't stop drinking. And they let her in, and they gave her a stack of letters from women that they didn't know what to do with. And day one, they sent her out to 12-step all these women. Imagine that. You're still shaking, and all of a sudden you've got 120 women you've got to call on. I mean, just like, that's crazy. And Sybil never took another drink the rest of her life. I was very good friends with her and her daughter, and I ended up with all her big books, all that stuff. Amazing member of Alcoholics Anonymous. If you ever get a chance, she gives talks on the traditions that were unbelievable because she lived through the turmoil years that made the traditions necessary, they made them necessary and so Alcoholics Anonymous is growing by leaps and bounds and they're starting to be bickering there's somebody down in Florida charging money for membership there was a group the executive committee of AlcoholicsAnonymous in the greatest Los Angeles area met one day and I have a copy of a letter they sent to a woman named Irma Livoni. They revoked her membership and Irma died on the streets of Los Angeles and they revoked her membership because she was flirtatious Ladies if they were doing that today some of you would be dead Some of the strongest members of women members of Alcoholics Anonymous that I know today were that way when they first got sober and then you start thinking outside the box of yourself and so AlcoholicsAnonymous was having a lot of trouble there were bickering there's still to this day in some of the old timers in Cleveland an animacy towards Bill Wilson's version I was back 30 years ago, I was in Cleveland and I going around with seeing some of the historical stuff with a guy who kept referring to Wilson as if he was the Antichrist. You know that the real sobriety, the real was Akron, you know, in Cleveland. And there were people in New York that thought that people in Ohio were too religious and there was bickering never between Bob and Bill, but between their followers. And what Bill Wilson saw was people are getting resentments and they're drinking again. Groups were dissolving. Alcoholics Anonymous was dying. And it had, it was only in existence not even less than 10 years. It was running the exact same short spurt that the Washingtonians had had before where they bickered their way and divided their way away from themselves and dissolved. And Wilson had started reading about the Washingtonians, and he became afraid. Everyone I've ever talked to that knew Bill Wilson always said that he had such a love for alcoholics and such a visionary that he could see. He was always concerned with alcoholics that aren't even born yet. that that's where his heart and soul was. And so Wilson, as a result of studying the Washingtonians and reading all the letters from the people with problems in the groups that are dissolving around the country, he put together the 12 traditions. They were originally called the tenets to ensure AA's future, which now they're called the long form. Most members of AA don't even know about the long term because all you ever see is the short form. And how the short-form came about is after several years of Bill Wilson trying to get groups to adopt his version, the only version, of the 12 traditions, the long-form, he kept failing. He couldn't even get groups to read them at the meetings. And if you've ever been in a meeting where they read the 12 traditions in the long form they're freaking long i mean oh my god they're long i just used to do it my old home group you just watch the the newcomer's eyes glaze over and just with this look like make it stop let me let's get back to the important stuff that has to do with me you know self-centered in the extreme and they resisted it and uh there was a guy, Earl Treat out of Chicago a guy that Bob had worked with and he wrote an abbreviated version of the 12 traditions which now is the 12 Traditions you'll see on the walls the short form and through great reluctance Wilson eventually agreed to back the short form and they introduced them in a series of grapevine articles to this new magazine that was just being put out called the grapevine and they were introduced to the fellowship and they Were Eventually Ratified in 1950 in Cleveland at the first conference I could talk for an hour about what we lost when we walked away from the long form but we had something something that I think I travel around a lot, and I'll tell you something. Over the last 10 years, I see evidence that in some parts of the country, there's a disdain for the traditions that you're seeing being recreated the problems that occurred in Alcoholics Anonymous in the early 40s. The disunity. The selfishness and self-centeredness where people want to put their own property, money or prestige ahead of the common welfare here, ahead of the good. And I get it. I understand. If you're like me and you get sober and you're obsessively self-concerned and need a lot of attention, a lot of prestige and you never have enough property or money and you're just clamoring for more kind of thing going on. It's easy to have that override the very principles of Alcoholics Anonymous and if it does I suspect the same thing could happen to us that happened to the Washingtonians. Some of you are sitting here thinking who cares? I'm sober I got mine well you may have grandchildren who are going to stand on a bridge as I did in 1978 and be in such despair and hopelessness they're going to try to take their own life and there may not be alcoholics anonymous as we've known it when they come off that bridge as I found in 1978 and we could go back to the years the thousands and thousands of years on the planet where there was no help for us where Alcoholics Anonymous could become a professional organization where you pay for membership and you don't have a sponsor anymore because that's been ruled out because they don't know how to do it they don' t have credentials that almost happened a couple of years ago So there was a court case in Santa Clarita, California, where a guy and a girl met at this AA club. Not an old story. Not a new story, rather. And they got in a relationship, and they both had sponsors. And the guy got drunk, and he killed the girl. and it came out that he had been in prison for abuse of women and the family sued Alcoholics Anonymous they sued the meeting hall and they sued each of the sponsors and when that case was going on I tell you, I was really afraid what I was afraid of is that a judge could make a ruling that no one has a right to sponsor people unless you have some kind of certification and that would have destroyed us and it was this close so I think we are here because of the grace of God but the grace of God is sustained as it is for me personally by the personal application of the actions in the 12 steps and I think it is sustained in Alcoholics Anonymous by our willingness to put these principles before ourselves. Before ourselves. So you know, we've been flat. If you track the history of how many people are in AA over the last 40, 50 years. You'll see a trend for years. It was like it was just up, up, every year we were increasing our membership exponentially. And then about close to 10 years ago, I suppose, I'm not sure exactly, it started to flatten out and now it's gone down against the population that's increasing rapidly. it should be accelerating upward I think it was in the early 2000's we had estimated 2 million members now it's less than 1.7 million according to a friend of mine from GSO so there's something wrong here and I think the answer is in the 12 traditions and we might get a chance to talk about that a little bit this weekend. Maybe not. We've got a lot of topics here. The next one I'm excited to talk about, the main problem of the alcoholic centers in his mind. Oh yeah. Oh yeah, and I'm excited to talk about that and i've uh if you're new here uh or even maybe you're not so new maybe you're sober somewhere between five and ten years and you're starting just starting because i think it takes some of us 10 years of service before we fall in love with alcoholics and you will eventually fall in love with anything you serve. It's inevitable sometimes quickly sometimes slowly but it's inevitable and you will stay in love with anything you serve so maybe some of you are sitting here and you're sober 5 or 10 years or maybe longer but you've only really served for a few years and you are starting to fall in Love with Alcoholics Anonymous in the way that we do because you are sponsoring people and they become dear to you because these are men and women that sometimes you feel closer to than your own family you know more about them than you know about your brothers and sisters you struggle with them as they got their kids back you struggled with them as they were so afraid to deal with their legal stuff you struggled towards the light with them and you fall in love with them and as I started to fall in love with Alcoholics Anonymous things like it's history became important to me it never did before for over 10 years it didn't seem like, that doesn't have anything to do with me me, me, and the same with traditions until you fall in Love with Alcoholic Anonymous when you fall In Love with AA you want to know everything about it you can And when you fall in love with Alcoholics Anonymous, you'll do anything. You'll push yourself aside. You'll sacrifice. You'll do whatever is necessary to keep these things going because you realize what we have here is something that may not be able to be duplicated again. I'll tell you a little story. It's not real well known. I got a piece of it from Gail LaCroix and another piece of it from another person that's also a historian. When the 12 Traditions were first published in The Grapevine, there was another magazine called The Graepfine. And it was the in-house newsletter for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. and one of the FBI agents saw one of our grapevines and was just kind of pissed an alcoholic synonymous was still stigmatized a lot this bunch of degenerate have taken the name of the magazine of the most prestigious law enforcement agency in the world this is an outrage they put a copy of it on J. Edgar Hoover's desk well Hoover was quirky but he was bright and he looked at it and he thought my god this is the most if you took away Alcoholics Anonymous and just looked at the principles this is the most amazing set of principles for social engineering and unity that he'd ever seen and he turned him over to a guy that was not, they had the same last name but they weren't related Herbert Hoover who was involved with the putting together of the United Nations and he presented, he took the words Alcoholics Anonymous out of it and presented them as principles to the committee that was putting together the bylaws for the United Nations and they loved them and they were going to ratify them as part of the fabric of the United Nation until some guy demanded to know where these principles came from and they found out they came from AlcoholicsAnonymous and the stigma stigmatism was so heavy they threw them out we were this close what would the world be like if our common welfare came first what if we took all these self-interest out of it I think I think we lost something there as I think we've lost something when we walked away from the long form thanks for listening we'll take a what a 15 minute break 10 minutes 15 minutes I don't know how to fix it. We'll try to figure it out, Bob. Thank you. Can I wrap this up in here? Can I rap this?