Читать книгу Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age - Anonymous - Страница 7

DURING the first three days of July, 1955, Alcoholics Anonymous held a Convention in St. Louis, commemorating the twentieth anniversary of its founding. There our fellowship declared itself come to the age of full responsibility, and there it received from its founders and old-timers permanent keeping of its three great legacies of Recovery, Unity, and Service.

I will always remember those three days as among the greatest experiences of my life.

At four o’clock in the afternoon of the final day about 5,000 A.A. members and their families and friends were seated in the Kiel Auditorium at St. Louis. All of the United States and Canadian Provinces were represented. Some had traveled from far lands to be there. On the auditorium stage were the General Service Conference of Alcoholics Anonymous, including some seventy-five delegates from the United States and Canada, Trustees of A.A.’s General Service Board, directors and secretarial staffs of our world services at New York, my wife Lois, my mother, and I.

The General Service Conference of Alcoholics Anonymous was about to take over the custody of A.A.’s Twelve Traditions and the guardianship of its world services. It was to be named as the permanent successor to the founders of A.A. Speaking for co-founder Dr. Bob and for A.A.’s old-timers everywhere, I made the delivery of the Three Legacies of Alcoholics Anonymous to our whole society and its representative Conference. From that time A.A. went on its own, to serve God’s purpose for so long as it was destined, under His providence, to endure.

Many events in the days preceding had led up to this moment. The total effect was that 5,000 people got a vision of A.A. such as they had never known before. They were exposed to the main outlines of A.A. history. With some of us oldsters they relived the exciting experiences that led to the creation of the Twelve Steps of recovery and the book Alcoholics Anonymous. They heard how the A.A. Traditions were beaten out on the anvils of group experience. They got the story of how A.A. had established beachheads in seventy foreign lands. And when they saw A.A.’s affairs delivered entirely into their own hands, they experienced a new realization of each individual’s responsibility for the whole.

At the Convention it was widely appreciated for the first time that nobody had invented Alcoholics Anonymous, that many streams of influence and many people, some of them nonalcoholics, had helped, by the grace of God, to achieve A.A.’s purpose.

Several of our nonalcoholic friends of medicine, of religion, and of A.A.’s Board of Trustees had come all the hot and dusty way to St. Louis to share that happy occasion and to tell us about their own experience of participation in the growth of A.A. There were men like clergyman Sam Shoemaker, whose early teachings did so much to inspire Dr. Bob and me. There was the beloved Father Dowling¹ whose personal inspiration and whose recommendation of A.A. to the world did so much to make our society what it is. And there was Dr. Harry Tiebout,² our first friend of psychiatry, who very early began to use A.A. concepts in his own practice, and whose good humor, humility, penetrating insight, and courage have meant so much to all of us.

It was Dr. Tiebout, helped by Dr. Kirby Collier of Rochester and Dwight Anderson of New York, who persuaded the Medical Society of the State of New York in 1944 and later the American Psychiatric Association in 1949 to let me, a layman, read papers about A.A. at their annual gatherings, thus hastening the acceptance of the then little-known A.A. by physicians all over the globe.

The value of Dr. Tiebout’s contribution, then and since, is beyond calculation. When we first met Harry, he was serving as Chief Psychiatrist at one of America’s finest sanitariums. His professional skill was widely recognized by patients and colleagues alike. At that time the modern art of psychiatry was just passing out of its youth and had begun to claim world-wide attention as one of the great advances of our times. The process of exploring the mysteries and motives of the unconscious mind of man was already in full swing.

Naturally, the explorers, representing the several schools of psychiatry, were in considerable disagreement respecting the real meaning of the new discoveries. While the followers of Carl Jung saw value, meaning, and reality in religious faith, the great majority of psychiatrists in that day did not. They mostly held to Sigmund Freud’s view that religion was a comforting fantasy of man’s immaturity; that when he grew up in the light of modern knowledge, he would no longer need such support.

This was the background against which, in 1939, Dr. Harry had seen two spectacular A.A. recoveries among his own patients. These patients, Marty and Grennie, had been the toughest kind of customers, both as alcoholics and as neurotics. When after a brief exposure to A.A. they abruptly stopped drinking (for good, by the way) and at once began to show an astonishing change in outlook and attitude, Harry was electrified. He was also agreeably astonished when he discovered that as a psychiatrist he could now really reach them, despite the fact that only a few weeks previously they had presented stone walls of obstinate resistance to his every approach. To Harry, these were facts, brand-new facts. Scientist and man of courage that he is, Harry faced them squarely. And not always in the privacy of his office, either. As soon as he became fully convinced, he held up A.A. for his profession and for the public to see. (Note the index of his medical papers.)³ At very considerable risk to his professional standing Harry Tiebout ever since has continued to endorse A.A. and its work to the psychiatric profession.

Dr. Tiebout was paired on the Convention’s medical panel with Dr. W. W. Bauer of the American Medical Association, who held out the hand of friendship to A.A. and recommended us warmly.

These good medical friends were not in the least surprised at the testimony of Dr. Earle M., the A.A. member of the panel. A notable in medical circles from coast to coast, Dr. Earle flatly stated that despite his medical knowledge, which included psychiatry, he had nevertheless been obliged humbly to learn his A.A. from a butcher. Thus he confirmed all that Dr. Harry had told us about the necessity of reducing the alcoholic’s ballooning ego, before entering A.A. and afterward.

The inspiring talks of these doctors reminded us of all the help that A.A.’s friends in medicine had given us over the years. Many A.A.’s at the Convention had been at the San Francisco Opera House on the evening in 1951 when Alcoholics Anonymous received the Lasker Award—the gift of Albert and Mary Lasker—from the 12,000 physicians of the American Public Health Association.⁴

The addresses which the Rev. Samuel Shoemaker,⁵ Father Edward Dowling, Dr. Harry Tiebout, and Dr. W. W. Bauer made before the Convention can be read beginning in chapter 4 of this book. Along with them we publish the talk of another friend, Bernard B. Smith, the New York lawyer who has served us so faithfully and brilliantly in recent years as Chairman of A.A.’s Board of Trustees. He will be remembered forever as the nonalcoholic whose singular skill and ability to reconcile different viewpoints were deciding factors in the formation of the General Service Conference upon which A.A.’s future so heavily depends. Like the other speakers, Bernard Smith tells not only what A.A. means to alcoholics and to the world at large but also what A.A. principles as practiced in his own life have meant to him.

Several other of our old-time friends made inspiring contributions to the gathering. Their talks, indeed all of the St. Louis meetings, were recorded on tapes in full and thus are available. [These tapes are no longer available.] We regret that the limited compass of this volume does not permit the inclusion of all of them here.

On the very first day of the Convention, for example, one of A.A.’s oldest and most valued friends, Mr. Leonard V. Harrison, chaired a session called “A.A. and Industry.” Leonard, who is still a Trustee, has endeared himself to us over a period of more than ten years’ service on our Board. He preceded Bernard Smith as our Board Chairman, and he saw A.A. through its frightfully wobbly time of adolescence, a time when nobody could say whether our society would hang together or blow up entirely. What his wise counsel and steady hand meant to us of A.A. in that stormy period is quite beyond telling.

Mr. Harrison then introduced a newer friend, Henry A. Mielcarek, who is engaged by Allis-Chalmers to look after the alcoholic problem in that great company. Ably seconded by Dave, an A.A. member holding a similar position at Du Pont, Mr. Mielcarek opened the eyes of the audience to the possibilities of the application of A A. and its principles in industry. Our vision of A A. in industry was taken a step farther by the final speaker, Dr. John L. Norris⁶of the Eastman Kodak Company. He had come to the Convention in a double role. One of the pioneers in the introduction of A.A. into industry, he was also a long-time Trustee on A.A.’s General Service Board, a most selfless and devoted worker. Again those of us who sat in the audience asked ourselves: What would we have ever done without friends like these?

During the second day of the Convention there was a meeting on “A.A. in Institutions.” The speakers took us on a journey into what were once the two darkest pits in which the alcoholic could suffer, the prison and the mental hospital. We were told how a new hope and a new light had entered these places of one-time darkness. Most of us were astounded when we learned the extent of the A.A. penetration, with groups today in 265 hospitals and 335 prisons⁷throughout the world. Formerly only about 20 per cent of the alcoholic parolees from institutions and prisons ever made the grade. But since the advent of A.A., 80 per cent of these parolees have found permanent freedom.

Two A.A.’s sparked this panel, and here again our faithful nonalcoholic friends were represented. There was Dr. O. Arnold Kilpat-rick, psychiatrist in charge of a New York State mental institution, who told us of the wonderful progress of A.A. in his hospital. He was followed by Mr. Austin MacCormick, one-time Commissioner of Correction in New York City and now Professor of Criminology at the University of California. Here was an old-time friend indeed, a kind and devoted fellow worker who had served a considerable hitch as a Trustee in the days of A.A.’s Alcoholic Foundation. When he moved west, it was California’s gain and a corresponding loss to A.A.’s Headquarters. And now here he was again, telling how he had kept in touch with prison authorities throughout America. As Dr. Kilpatrick had confirmed A.A.’s progress in mental institutions, so Austin MacCormick, with an authority born of experience, reported the steadily increasing influence of A.A. groups in prisons. Again our vision was extended and our spirits were kindled.

During the Convention many just plain A.A. meetings were held. At those meetings, and in the corridors, coffee shops, and hotel rooms, we were continually and gratefully thoughtful of our friends and of all that Providence had appointed them to do for us. Our thoughts often went out to those who were not there: those who had passed on, those who were ill, and those who just couldn’t make it. Among the latter we sorely missed Trustees Jack Alexander, Frank Amos, Dr. Leonard Strong, Jr., and Frank Gulden.

Most of all, of course, we talked about co-founder Dr. Bob and his wife, Anne. A handful of us could recall those first days in 1935 at Akron where the spark that was to become the first A.A. group was struck. Some of us could retell tales that had been told in Dr. Bob’s living room in their house on Ardmore Avenue. And we could remember Anne as she sat in the corner by the fireplace, reading from the Bible the warning of James, that “faith without works is dead.” Indeed, we had with us at the Convention young Bob and sister Sue, who had seen the beginnings of A.A.’s first group. Sue’s husband, Ernie, A.A. number four, was there, too. And old Bill D., A.A. number three, was represented by his widow, Henrietta.

We were all overjoyed to see Ethel, the longest-sober lady of the Akron-Cleveland region, whose moving story can now be read in the second edition of the A.A. book. She reminded us of all the early Akron veterans—a dozen and a half of them—whose stories were the backbone of the first edition of the book Alcoholics Anonymous and who, together with Dr. Bob, had created the first A.A. group in the world.

As the stories unfolded we saw Dr. Bob entering the doors of St. Thomas Hospital, the first religious hospital to receive prospective members of A.A. for treatment on a regular basis. Here there developed that great partnership between Dr. Bob and the incomparable Sister Ignatia⁸of the Sisters of Charity of St. Augustine. Her name brings to mind the classic story about the first drunk she and Dr. Bob treated. Sister Ignatia’s night supervisor wasn’t very keen about alcoholics, especially the d.t. variety, and Dr. Bob had arrived with a request for a private room for his first customer. Sister Ignatia said to him, “Doctor, we do not have any beds, much less private rooms, but I will do what I can.” And then into the hospital’s flower room she slyly bootlegged A.A.’s first jittering candidate for admission. From this uncertain start of hospitalization in our pioneering time, we watched the growing procession of alcoholic sufferers as they passed through the doors of St. Thomas and out into the world again, most of them never to return to the hospital except as visitors. From 1939 to the time Dr. Bob took his leave of us in 1950, over 5,000 had thus been treated. And so the ministry of Dr. Bob, his wife Anne, Sister Ignatia, and Akron’s early timers set an example for the practice of A.A.’s Twelve Steps that will remain for all time.

This great tradition lives on in the person of Sister Ignatia. She continues her labor of love today at Cleveland’s St. Vincent Charity Hospital, where grateful A.A.’s of that area have contributed labor and money to reconstruct an old wing of the place which has been christened “Rosary Hall” and set aside for the special use of the Sister and her co-workers. Already 5,000 cases have been treated.⁹

Many an A.A. member today believes that among the best gateways to sobriety are the alcoholic wards of the religious hospitals that cooperate with us. Surely those who have passed through St. Thomas at Akron and St. Vincent’s Charity at Cleveland will heartily agree with this. It is our hope that in due time religious hospitals of all denominations will follow the example of these great originals. What Sister Ignatia and her associates at St. Thomas have already done is a very brave beginning. But the future may honor them even more for the great works that their example set in motion.

In 1949, ten years after the start of Dr. Bob’s and Sister Ignatia’s pioneering, the importance of this work was deeply realized by A.A.’s throughout Ohio. A committee was formed to place a plaque in the alcoholic ward at St. Thomas Hospital, a memorial which would clearly show what so many of us really thought and felt. I was asked to write the inscription and preside at the dedication. Though Anne had recently passed away, Dr. Bob could still be with us. Characteristically, Sister Ignatia would not let her name appear on the inscription. It was on Saturday afternoon, April 8, 1949, that we unveiled and presented the memorial plaque to the hospital. Its inscription read as follows:

IN GRATITUDE

THE FRIENDS OF DR. BOB AND ANNE S.

AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATE THIS MEMORIAL

TO THE SISTERS AND STAFF OF

ST. THOMAS HOSPITAL.

AT AKRON, BIRTHPLACE OF ALCOHOLICS

ANONYMOUS, ST. THOMAS HOSPITAL BECAME

THE FIRST RELIGIOUS INSTITUTION EVER

TO OPEN ITS DOOR TO OUR SOCIETY.

MAY THE LOVING DEVOTION OF THOSE WHO

LABORED HERE IN OUR PIONEERING TIME

BE A BRIGHT AND WONDROUS EXAMPLE

OF GOD’S GRACE EVERLASTINGLY SET

BEFORE US ALL.

Everyone remembers Dr. Bob’s famous final admonition to Alcoholics Anonymous: “Let’s not louse this thing up; let’s keep it simple.” And I recall my own tribute in the A.A. Grapevine to his great simplicity and strength…

Serenely remarking to his attendant, “I think this is it,” Dr. Bob passed out of our sight and hearing November sixteenth, 1950 at noonday. So ended the consuming malady in the course of which he had shown us how high faith can rise over grievous distress. As he had lived, so he died, supremely aware that in his Father’s house are many mansions.

Among all those he knew, memory was at floodtide. But who could really say what was thought and felt by the five thousand sick ones to whom he personally ministered and freely gave a physician’s care? Who could possibly record the reflections of his townsmen who had seen him sink almost into oblivion, then rise to anonymous world renown? Who could express the gratitude of those tens of thousands of A.A. families who had so often heard of him but had never seen him face to face? And what were the emotions of those nearest him as they thankfully pondered the mystery of his regeneration fifteen years before and all its vast consequence since? Only the smallest fraction of this great blessing could be comprehended. We could only say, “What indeed hath God wrought?”

Never would Dr. Bob have us think him a saint or a superman. Nor would he have us praise him or grieve his passing. We can almost hear him saying to us, “Seems to me you folks are making heavy going. I’m not to be taken so seriously as all that. I was only a first link in that chain of Providential circumstances which is called A.A. By grace and good fortune my link did not break, though my faults and failures often might have brought on that unhappy result. I was just another alcoholic trying to get along, under the grace of God. Forget me, but go you and do likewise. Add your own link to our chain. With God’s help, forge that chain well and truly.” It was in this manner, if not in these exact words, that Dr. Bob actually did estimate himself and counsel us.

Meeting a few months after Dr. Bob’s death, the first General Service Conference of Alcoholics Anonymous voted in 1951 to present each of Dr. Bob’s heirs, young Bob and Sue, with a scroll which struck a final note. It read as follows:

DR. BOB

IN MEMORIAM

Alcoholics Anonymous herein records its timeless gratitude for the life and works of Dr. Robert Holbrook S., a Co-Founder.

Known in affection as “Dr. Bob” he recovered from alcoholism on June 10, 1935; in that year he helped form the first Alcoholics Anonymous Group; this beacon he and his good wife Anne so well tended that its light at length traversed the world. By the day of his departure from us, November 16, 1950, he had spiritually and medically helped countless fellow sufferers.

Dr. Bob’s was the humility that declines all honors, the integrity that brooks no compromise; his was a devotion to man and God which in bright example will shine always.

The World Fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous presents this testament of gratitude to the heirs of Dr. Bob and Anne S.

Thinking of the early years in Akron reminded us also of the pioneering days in the East; of the struggle to start A.A.’s Group Number Two at New York in the fall of 1935. Earlier in the year, before meeting Dr. Bob, I had worked with many alcoholics, but there had been no success in New York until my return home in September. I told the Convention how the idea began to catch on: of the first meetings in the parlor at 182 Clinton Street, Brooklyn; of the forays to New York’s Calvary Mission and Towns Hospital in the feverish search for more prospects; of the sprinkling of those who sobered up and of the many who dismally flopped. My wife Lois recalled how for three years our Clinton Street home had been filled from cellar to garret with alcoholics of every description and how to our dismay they skidded back into drink, seeming failures all. (Some of them did sober up later on, perhaps in spite of us!)

Out in Akron, in the houses of Dr. Bob and Wally, the home-sobering treatment fared better. In fact, Wally and his wife probably made an all-time high record for home treatment and rehabilitation of A.A.’s newcomers. Their percentage of success was great and their example was widely followed for a time in the homes of other Akron-ites. As Lois once said, it was a wonderful laboratory in which we experimented and learned—the hard way.

I reminded Jerseyites at the Convention of early meetings in Upper Montclair and South Orange and in Monsey, New York, when Lois and I moved over there about the time the A.A. book came off the press in the spring of 1939, after the foreclosure of the Brooklyn home of her parents where we had been living. The weather was warm, and we lived in a summer camp on a quiet lake in western New Jersey, the gracious loan of a good A.A. friend and his mother. Another friend let us use his car. I recalled how the summer had been spent trying to repair the bankrupt affairs of the A.A. book, which money-wise had failed so dismally after its publication. We had a hard time keeping the sheriff out of our little cubicle of an office at 17 William Street, Newark, where most of the volume had been written.

We attended New Jersey’s first A.A. meeting, held in the summer of 1939, at the Upper Montclair house of Henry P., my partner in the now shaky book enterprise. There we met Bob and Mag V., our great friends-to-be. When at Thanksgiving snow fell on our summer camp, they invited us to spend the winter with them at their house in Monsey, New York.

That winter with Mag and Bob was both rough and exciting. Nobody had any money. Their house was a one-time mansion gone ramshackle. The furnace and the water pump quit by turns. An earlier member of Mag’s family had built an addition of two huge rooms, one downstairs and one upstairs, which boasted no heat at all. The upper room was so cold they called it “Siberia.” We fixed this with a second-hand coal stove which cost $3.75. It continually threatened to fall apart, and why we never burned the house down I’ll never understand. But it was a very happy time; besides sharing all they had with us, Bob and Mag were expansively cheerful.

The big excitement came with the start of the first mental hospital group. Bob had been talking to Dr. Russell E. Blaisdell, head of New York’s Rockland State Hospital, a mental institution, which stood nearby. Dr. Blaisdell had accepted the A.A. idea on sight for his alcoholic inmates. He gave us the run of their ward and soon let us start a meeting within the walls. The results were so good that a few months later he actually let busloads of committed alcoholics go to the A.A. meetings which by then had been established in South Orange, New Jersey, and in New York City. For an asylum superintendent this was certainly going way out on the limb. But the alcoholics did not let him down. At the same time the A.A. meeting was established on a regular basis in Rockland itself. The grimmest imaginable cases began to get well and stay that way when released. Thus began A.A.’s first working relation with a mental hospital, since duplicated more than 200 times. Dr. Blaisdell had written a bright page in the annals of alcoholism.

In this connection it should be noted that three or four alcoholics previously had been released into A.A. from Jersey’s Greystone and Overbrook asylums, where friendly physicians had recommended us. But Dr. Blaisdell’s Rockland State Hospital was the first to enter into full scale co-operation with A.A.

Lois and I finally recrossed the Hudson River to stay in New York City. Small A.A. gatherings were being held at that time in newcomer Bert’s tailor shop. Later this meeting moved to a small room in Steinway Hall and thence into permanent quarters when A.A.’s first clubhouse, “The Old Twenty-Fourth,” was opened. Lois and I went there to live.

As we looked back over those early scenes in New York, we saw often in the midst of them the benign little doctor who loved drunks, William Duncan Silkworth, then Physician-in-Chief of the Charles B. Towns Hospital in New York, a man who was very much a founder of A.A. From him we learned the nature of our illness. He supplied us with the tools with which to puncture the toughest alcoholic ego, those shattering phrases by which he described our illness: the obsession of the mind that compels us to drink and the allergy of the body that condemns us to go mad or die. These were indispensable passwords. Dr. Silkworth taught us how to till the black soil of hopelessness out of which every single spiritual awakening in our fellowship has since flowered. In December, 1934, this man of science had humbly sat by my bed following my own sudden and overwhelming spiritual experience, reassuring me. “No, Bill,” he had said, “you are not hallucinating. Whatever you have got, you had better hang on to; it is so much better than what you had only an hour ago.” These were great words for the A.A. to come. Who else could have said them?

When I wanted to go to work with alcoholics, Dr. Silkworth led me to them right there in his hospital, and at great risk to his professional reputation.

After six months of failure on my part to dry up any drunks, he again reminded me of Professor William James’ observation that truly transforming spiritual experiences are nearly always founded on calamity and collapse. “Stop preaching at them,” Dr. Silkworth had said, “and give them the hard medical facts first. This may soften them up at depth so that they will be willing to do anything to get well. Then they may accept those spiritual ideas of yours, and even a higher Power.”

Four years later, Dr. Silkworth had helped to convert Mr. Charles B. Towns, the hospital’s owner, into a great A.A. enthusiast and had encouraged him to loan $2,500 to start preparation of the book Alcoholics Anonymous, a sum, by the way, which was later increased to over $4,000. Then, as our only medical friend at the time, the good doctor boldly wrote the introduction to our book, where it remains to this day and where we intend to keep it always.

Perhaps no physician will ever give so much devoted attention to so many alcoholics as did Dr. Silkworth. It is estimated that in his lifetime he saw an amazing 40,000 of them. In the years before his death in 1951, in close co-operation with A.A. and our red-headed powerhouse nurse, Teddy, he had ministered to nearly 10,000 alcoholics at New York’s Knickerbocker Hospital alone. None of those he treated will ever forget the experience, and the majority of them are sober today. Silky and Teddy were much inspired by Dr. Bob and Sister Ignatia at Akron and will always be regarded as their Eastern counterparts in our pioneering time. These four set the shining example and laid the basis for the wonderful partnership with medicine which we enjoy today.

We could not take leave of New York without paying grateful tribute to those who made today’s world services possible: the very early pioneers of the Alcoholic Foundation, forerunner of A.A.’s present General Service Board.

First in order of appearance was Dr. Leonard V. Strong, Jr., my brother-in-law. When Lois and I were alone and deserted, he, together with my mother, saw us through the worst of my drinking. It was Dr. Strong who introduced me to Mr. Willard Richardson, one of the finest servants of God and man that I shall ever know. This introduction led directly to the formation of the Alcoholic Foundation. Dick Richardson’s steady faith, wisdom, and spiritual quality were our main anchors to windward during the squalls that fell on A.A. and its embryo service center in the first years, and he carried his conviction and enthusiasm to still others who labored for us so well. With selfless care and devotion, Dr. Strong served as secretary to our Board of Trustees from its beginning in 1938 until his own retirement in 1955.

Dick Richardson was an old friend and confidant of the John D. Rockefellers, Senior and Junior. The result was that Mr. Rockefeller, Jr., became deeply interested in A.A. He saw that we had the small sum necessary to launch our service project, yet not enough to professionalize it, and he gave a dinner in 1940 to many of his friends so they might meet some of us and see A.A. for themselves. This dinner, at which Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick and the neurologist Dr. Foster Kennedy talked, was a significant public recommendation of our fellowship at a time when we were few and unknown. Sponsoring such a dinner could have brought Mr. Rockefeller under much ridicule. He did it nevertheless, giving a very little of his fortune and much of himself.

Mr. Richardson brought still other friends to our aid. There was Mr. Albert Scott, head of an engineering firm and Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Riverside Church in New York, who presided over the famous meeting in late 1937 in Mr. Rockefeller’s office which was the first gathering of some of us alcoholics with our new friends. Here Mr. Scott asked the searching and historic question: “Won’t money spoil this thing?” Dr. Bob, Dr. Silkworth, and I attended that meeting, and there were present also two more friends of Mr. Richardson’s who were destined to exert great influence on our affairs.

Early in the spring of 1938 our new friends helped us to organize the Alcoholic Foundation, and Mr. A. LeRoy Chipman tirelessly served for many years as its treasurer. In 1940 it seemed desirable for the Foundation to take over Works Publishing, Inc., the little company we had formed to handle the book, and two years later Mr. Chipman did most of the work in raising the $8,000 which was needed to pay off the shareholders and Mr. Charles B. Towns in full, thus making the Foundation the sole owner of the A.A. book and putting it in trust for our society for all time. Recently Mr. Chipman had to retire from the Board of Trustees because of illness and to his deep disappointment was unable to come to St. Louis. Nor could Dick Richardson be with us, for he had died some years before.

Present at that early 1940 meeting was yet another of Mr. Richardson’s friends, Frank Amos, a newspaper and advertising executive and a Trustee of A.A., only lately retired. In 1938 Frank went out to Akron to meet Dr. Bob and to make a careful survey of what had transpired there. It was his glowing report of Dr. Bob and Akron’s Group Number One that had caught Mr. Rockefeller’s interest and had further encouraged the formation of the Foundation. This Foundation was to become the focal point of A.A.’s world services, which have been responsible for much of the unity and growth of our whole fellowship. Frank Amos was accessible at his office or home in New York at almost any time of day or night, and his counsel and faith were of immense help to us.

As we New Yorkers continued to reminisce the small hours away at St. Louis, we thought of Ruth Hock,¹⁰ the devoted nonalcoholic girl who had taken reams of dictation and had done months of typing and retyping when the book Alcoholics Anonymous was in preparation. She often went without pay, taking the then seemingly worthless stock of Works Publishing instead. I recall with deep gratitude how often her wise advice and her good humor and patience helped to settle the endless squabbles about the book’s content. Many an old-timer at St. Louis also remembered with gratitude those warm letters Ruth had written to him when he was a loner struggling to stay sober out there in the grass roots.

Ruth was our first National Secretary, and when she left in early 1942 Bobbie B. took her place. Bobbie for several years faced almost single-handed the huge aftermath of group problems that followed in the wake of Jack Alexander’s feature article on A.A. in the Saturday Evening Post. Writing thousands of letters to struggling individuals and wobbly new groups, she made all the difference during that time when it seemed very uncertain that A.A. could hang together at all.

While I was still reminiscing about old times in New York, the names of more of my alcoholic friends loomed up. I remembered Henry P., my partner in Works Publishing and the book enterprise. Among all the prospects Dr. Silkworth had pointed out to me at Towns Hospital, Henry in 1935 was the first one to sober up. He had been a big-time executive and salesman, and he turned his really prodigious enthusiasm into the formation of the New York group. Many a Jerseyite can remember his impact over there, too. When in 1938 the Foundation found it could not raise money to publish the A.A. book, it was largely Henry’s insistence that caused us to set up Works Publishing, Inc., and while we were working on the book his endless hounding of the subscribers to Works Publishing kept enough money trickling in (barely enough!) to finish the job.

About that time there appeared on the New York scene another character, Fitz M., one of the most lovable people that A.A. will ever know. Fitz was a minister’s son and deeply religious, an aspect of his nature which is revealed in his story entitled “Our Southern Friend” in the Big Book. Fitz fell at once into hot argument with Henry about the religious content of the coming volume. A newcomer named Jimmy B., who like Henry was an ex-salesman and former atheist, also got into the hassles. Fitz wanted a powerfully religious document; Henry and Jimmy would have none of it. They wanted a psychological book which would lure the reader in; when he finally arrived among us, there would then be enough time to tip him off about the spiritual character of our society. As we worked feverishly on this project Fitz made trip after trip to New York from his Maryland home to insist on raising the spiritual pitch of the A.A. book. Out of this debate came the spiritual form and substance of the document, notably the expression, “God as we understood Him” which proved to be a ten-strike. As umpire of these disputes, I was obliged to go pretty much down the middle, writing in spiritual rather than religious or entirely psychological terms.

Fitz and Jimmy were equally ardent to carry the A.A. message. Jimmy started the Philadelphia group in 1940, while Fitz took the good news to Washington. The first meeting in Philadelphia was held in the home of George S. George was one of A.A.’s first loners. He had sobered up after reading the article “Alcoholics and God” written in 1939 by Morris Markey and published in the September issue of Liberty magazine by its then editor Fulton Oursler, who was to do much more for us later on. George’s case was a very severe one, even for those days of “last gaspers.” When the issue of Liberty first arrived, George was in bed drinking whiskey for his depression and taking laudanum for his colitis. The Markey piece hit George so hard that he went ex-grog and ex-laudanum instantly. He wrote to New York, and we gave his name to salesman Jimmy, who traveled that territory, and that’s how A.A. started in the City of Brotherly Love.

Philadelphia A.A. soon attracted the attention of three noted Philadelphia physicians, Drs. A. Wiese Hammer, C. Dudley Saul, and John F. Stouffer, the latter of the Philadelphia General Hospital. The outcome of this interest was the best of hospital care for alcoholics and the opening of a clinic. And it was Dr. Hammer’s friendship with Mr. Curtis Bok, owner of the Saturday Evening Post, that led to the publication in 1941 of Jack Alexander’s article. These friends could hardly have done more for us.

Fitz, living near Washington, D.C., had no such breaks. Near-failure dogged his efforts for years. But he finally planted seed there that bore fruit and before his death in 1943 he saw that seed flower. His sister Agnes rejoiced with him. She had loaned him and me $1,000 from her modest resources when, after the A.A. book fiasco in 1939, the future had looked the darkest. To her I send our everlasting thanks.

The year 1939 saw the arrival among us of still another unforgettable character, a woman alcoholic known to so many of us as Marty. At Blythewood Sanitarium in Greenwich, Connecticut, she had been a patient of Dr. Harry Tiebout’s, and he had handed her a prepublication manuscript copy of the A.A. book. The first reading made her rebellious, but the second convinced her. Presently she came to a meeting held in our living room at 182 Clinton Street, and from there she returned to Blythewood carrying this classic message to a fellow patient in the sanitarium: “Grennie, we aren’t alone any more.”

Marty pioneered a group in Greenwich so early in 1939 that some folks now think this one should carry the rating of A.A.’s Group Number Three. Backed by Dr. Harry and Mrs. Wylie, owner of Blythewood, the first meetings were held on the sanitarium’s grounds. Marty was one of the first women to try A.A., and she became in later years among the most active workers we have, as well as a pioneer in the field of education and rehabilitation for alcoholics. Today she holds the longest sobriety record in A.A. for her sex. There had been another earlier woman pioneer, Florence R., who had come among us in 1937. Her story was printed in the first edition of Alcoholics Anonymous. With great valor she had tried to help Fitz at Washington, but she became involved in the early wave of failure there and died of alcoholism.

Old-time midwesterners at the Convention could remember that while all this was going on in Akron and New York, certain candles were being lighted in Cleveland which presently sent up a flame that could be seen country-wide. A few older Clevelanders remembered how some of them had gone to the Akron meetings, then held in the home of Oxford Groupers T. Henry and Clarace Williams. There they had met Dr. Bob and Anne and had looked with wonder upon alcoholics who had stayed sober one and two and three years. They had met and listened to Henrietta Seiberling, the nonalcoholic who had brought Dr. Bob and me together in her house three years previously—one who had understood deeply and cared enough and who was already seen as one of the strongest links in the chain of events that Providence was unfolding. On other evenings, Clevelanders had gone to Dr. Bob’s Akron home, sitting with him and Anne over cups of coffee at their kitchen table. Eagerly they had absorbed knowledge of their problem and its solution and had breathed deeply of the remarkable spiritual atmosphere of the place. They became friends with old Bill D., A.A. number three. At other times Dr. Bob had taken them to St. Thomas Hospital, where they met Sister Ignatia, saw her at work, and in their turn talked to the newcomers on the beds. Returning to Cleveland, they began to dig up their own prospects and got to know for the first time the pains, the joys, and the benefits of A.A.’s Twelve Steps.

Clarence S. and his wife Dorothy were among the earliest contingent to come from Cleveland to the Akron meeting. By the early summer of 1939 a group had commenced to form around them in Cleveland where, by fall, they could count a score or more of promising recoveries.

At this point the Cleveland Plain Dealer ran a series of pieces that ushered in a new period for Alcoholics Anonymous, the era of mass production of sobriety.

Elrick B. Davis, a feature writer of deep understanding, was the author of a series of articles that were printed in the middle of the Plain Dealer’s editorial page, and these were accompanied every two or three days by red-hot blasts from the editors themselves. In effect the Plain Dealer was saying, “Alcoholics Anonymous is good, and it works. Come and get it.”

The newspaper’s switchboard was deluged. Day and night, the calls were relayed to Clarence and Dorothy and from them to members of their little group. Earlier in the year, through the good offices of Nurse Edna McD. and the Rev. Kitterer, Administrator of Deaconess Hospital, an A.A. entry was made into this institution. But this one hospital could not begin to cope with the situation that now confronted Cleveland. For weeks and weeks A.A.’s ran about in desperate haste to make Twelfth Step calls on the swelling list of prospects. Great numbers of these had to be tossed into other Cleveland hospitals such as Post Shaker, East Cleveland Clinic, and several more. How the bills were paid nobody ever quite knew.

Sparked by Clarence and Dorothy, clergymen and doctors began to give great help. Father Nagle and Sister Victorine at St. Vincent’s Charity Hospital were meeting the new tide with love and understanding, as was Sister Merced at St. John’s. Dr. Dilworth Lupton, the noted Protestant clergyman, preached and wrote warmly about us. This fine gentleman had once tried to sober up Clarence, and when he saw A.A. do the job he was astonished. He published a pamphlet, widely used in Cleveland, entitled “Mr. X and Alcoholics Anonymous.” “Mr. X” of course was Clarence.

It was soon evident that a scheme of personal sponsorship would have to be devised for the new people. Each prospect was assigned an older A.A., who visited him at his home or in the hospital, instructed him on A.A. principles, and conducted him to his first meeting. But in the face of many hundreds of pleas for help, the supply of elders could not possibly match the demand. Brand-new A.A.’s, sober only a month or even a week, had to sponsor alcoholics still drying up in the hospitals.

Homes were thrown open for meetings. The first Cleveland meeting started in June, 1939, at the home of Abby G. and his wife Grace. It was composed of Abby and about a dozen others who had been making the journey to Akron to meet at the Williams home. But Abby’s group presently ran out of space. So one segment began to meet in the home of Cleveland’s financier, Mr. T. E. Borton, at his generous invitation. Another part of the group found quarters in a hall in the Lakewood section of Cleveland and became known as the Orchard Grove Group. And still a third offshoot of Abby’s meeting went under the name of the Lee Road Group.

These multiplying and bulging meetings continued to run short of home space, and they fanned out into small halls and church basements. Luckily the A.A. book had come off the press six months before, and some pamphlets were also available. These were the guides and time-savers that probably kept the hectic situation from confusion and anarchy.

We old-timers in New York and Akron had regarded this fantastic phenomenon with deep misgivings. Had it not taken us four whole years, littered with countless failures, to produce even a hundred good recoveries? Yet there in Cleveland we saw about twenty members, not very experienced themselves, suddenly confronted by hundreds of newcomers as a result of the Plain Dealer articles. How could they possibly manage? We did not know.

But a year later we did know; for by then Cleveland had about thirty groups and several hundred members. Growing pains and group problems had been terrifying, but no amount of squabbling could dampen the mass demand for sobriety. Yes, Cleveland’s results were of the best. Their results were in fact so good, and A.A.’s membership elsewhere was so small, that many a Clevelander really thought A.A. had started there in the first place.

The Cleveland pioneers had proved three essential things: the value of personal sponsorship; the worth of the A.A. book in indoctrinating newcomers, and finally the tremendous fact that A.A., when the word really got around, could now soundly grow to great size.

Many of the essentials of A.A. as we now understand them were to be found already in the pioneering groups in Akron, New York, and Cleveland as early as 1939. But there remained much more to be done and lots of questions to be answered. Would many A.A.’s, for example, moving out of the old original groups, be successful in new towns and cities? In those days the first few of our early A.A. travelers, the forerunners of thousands, were on the move.

We had watched one named Earl T. as, soundly indoctrinated by Dr. Bob and the Akronites, he returned home to Chicago in 1937. With much concern we had followed his constant but fruitless efforts to start a group there, a struggle that lasted two whole years, despite the help of Dick R., his first “convert,” and Ken A., who had migrated from the Akron group in 1938. Then in mid-1939 two Chicago doctors came upon the scene. Earl’s friend, Dr. Dan Craske, handed him two floundering patients. One of them, Sadie, began to stay dry.

A little while later a Dr. Brown of Evanston exposed several patients to Earl. Among them were Sylvia, Luke, and Sam and his wife Tee, all of whom have remained sober to this day. Sylvia, however, got off to a slow start. In desperation she visited Akron and Cleveland, the founding centers in Ohio. Here she was exposed to Henrietta and Dr. Bob, and was worked over by Clarence and Dorothy, the Cleveland elders. Still she drank on. She returned to her home in Chicago, where for reasons best known to herself and God, she suddenly got sober and stayed that way.

Chicago now had the solid nucleus from which its coming great growth could issue. Continually encouraged by Dr. Brown, vastly helped by Sylvia’s nonalcoholic personal secretary, Grace Cultice, and cheered on by Earl’s wife Katie, the Chicagoans started to search for still more prospects. Meetings soon began, both in Earl’s home and in Sylvia’s.

As A.A. in Chicago slowly grew and prospered, Grace was continually at the business end of Sylvia’s phone, and she became the group’s first secretary. When the Saturday Evening Post article appeared in 1941, the traffic became very heavy. Sylvia’s place became a sort of Chicago Grand Central, and things were just about as rugged with Earl and Katie. Something had to be done. So they rented a one-room office in the Loop, and secretary Grace was installed there to direct the stream of applicants for Twelfth Step attention, hospitalization, or other help. This was A.A.’s first organized local service center, the forerunner of the many Intergroup Associations we maintain in large cities nowadays. Many an A.A. group within a several-hundred-mile radius of Chicago can trace its origin to the work of that center—notable early ones being Green Bay, Wisconsin, and Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Meanwhile, Katie realized that many A.A. families needed the program as much as their alcoholics did, and she vigorously carried on the precedent already set by Anne and Lois who—in their homes, in their A.A. travels with Dr. Bob and myself, and even upstairs in New York’s Old Twenty-Fourth Street Club—had urged A.A.’s Twelve Steps upon nonalcoholic wives and husbands as a way of restoring family life to normal.

No one knows exactly when the first Family Group as such started. One of the largest, most vigorous, and best accepted of the early family centers developed in Toronto, Canada. There they wrought so well that many A.A. groups in the area customarily invite Family Group speakers to their meetings. By 1950, the Toronto Family Group had created such a wide and deep impression that their speakers were featured at the Cleveland International A.A. Convention of that year. And what was true of Toronto was equally true of Long Beach, California, and Richmond, Virginia. Indeed, some of these latter Family Groups may quite possibly have antedated Toronto somewhat. In any case it is sure that Anne, Lois, and Katie long ago planted the ideas which have since flowered into hundreds of Al-Anon Family Groups, one of the most encouraging developments in the whole A.A. picture in recent years.

Another early A.A. traveler was Archie T. He had been tenderly nursed back to sobriety in the home of Dr. Bob and Anne at Akron. Still sick, frail, and frightened, he returned to his native city, Detroit, the scene of his downfall, where his personal reputation and financial credit still stood at zero. We saw Archie make amends everywhere he could. We saw him delivering dry cleaning out of a broken-down jalopy to the back doors of his one-time fashionable friends in Grosse Pointe. We saw him, helped by a dedicated nonalcoholic, Sarah Klein, start a group that met in her basement. Archie and Sarah next straightened out a man named Mike, a manufacturer, and a socialite lady named Anne K. These were the ones from whom stemmed Detroit’s huge membership of later years.

Then there was Larry J., a newspaperman who had barely escaped death by d.t.’s and exhaustion. Despite a lung ailment that required him to spend much time in an oxygen tent, he courageously set out from Cleveland to Houston, Texas, and on the train he experienced a spiritual awakening that made him feel, as he said, “all in one piece again.” On his arrival in Houston, Larry wrote a series of pieces for the Houston Press that attracted the attention of the townsmen and their Bishop Quinn, and thus finally, after heartbreaking setbacks, the first group in Texas emerged. Larry’s first good prospects were salesman Ed, who was to carry the message to Austin; Army Sergeant Roy, who made the start at Tampa, Florida, and who later helped greatly in Los Angeles; and one Esther, who presently moved to Dallas, where, with characteristic enthusiasm and energy, she founded A.A. in that town and became dean of all the alky ladies in the astonishing state of Texas.

Meanwhile Cleveland A.A. had sobered up Rollie H., a famous athlete. Newspaper stories about this event were sensational and they brought in many new prospects. Nevertheless this development was one of the first to arouse deep concern about our personal anonymity at the top public level.

Still another famous early itinerant was Irwin M., a Cleveland A.A. who had become a champion salesman of Venetian blinds to department stores in the deep South. He used to range a territory bounded by Atlanta and Jacksonville on one side and Indianapolis, Birmingham, and New Orleans on the other. Irwin weighed 250 pounds and was full of energy and gusto. The prospect of Irwin, as a missionary, scared us rather badly. At the New York Headquarters we had on file a long list of topers in many a Southern city and town, people who had not been personally visited. Irwin had long since broken all the rules of caution and discreet approach to newcomers, so it was with reluctance that we gave him the list. Then we waited—but not for long. Irwin ran them down, every single one, with his home-crashing tornado technique. Day and night, besides, he wrote letters to his prospects and got them to writing each other.

Stunned but happy Southerners began to send their thanks to Headquarters. As Irwin himself reported, many a first family of the South had been an easy pushover. He had cracked the territory wide open and had started or stimulated many an original group.

Still thinking of the South, we remembered the Richmond A.A.’s who believed in getting away from wives and drinking only beer, but who became more orthodox through the ministrations of the Virginia squire, Jack W., and certain A.A. travelers. We thought, too, of the Jersey boiler inspector, the tireless Dave R., who had descended upon Charlotte, North Carolina; and of Fred K., another Jersey man, who set the A.A. ferment going in Miami; and of super-promoter Bruce H., who, working in Jacksonville and its environs, was the first to use radio to carry the message.

Shortly after the beginning of A.A. in Atlanta, that shaky group was sparked by the appearance of Sam, a high-powered Yankee preacher, temporarily minus frock and salary. Sam spoke with great effect from both pulpit and A.A. platform. He created a sort of “Chautauqua” brand of A.A. which was mildly deprecated by some members but cheered on by others. Sam has since passed away, but his work is remembered gratefully.

Many more of these early people and early stories came flooding back to mind as we in St. Louis continued to review the history of A.A.’s growth. We remembered the excitement of the formation of the first A.A. group solely by mail in Little Rock, Arkansas; the first Canadian group in Toronto and soon after those in Windsor and Vancouver, B.C.; the first beginning in Australia and Hawaii, creating a pattern later followed in some seventy foreign lands and U.S. possessions; the affecting tale of the little Norwegian from Greenwich, Connecticut, who had sold all he had to go to Oslo to help his brother and thus started the group there; the Alaskan group that had taken shape because a prospector out in the wilds found an A.A. book in an old oil drum; the Utah alkies who dried up in A.A. and struck uranium in the process; the spread of A.A. to South Africa, Mexico, Puerto Rico, South America, England, Scotland, Ireland, France, and Holland, and then to Japan and even Greenland and Iceland; the story of Captain Jack in a Standard Oil tanker, spreading A.A. as he sailed. In such happy reminiscences we at St. Louis reviewed A.A.’s crossing of the barriers of distance, race, creed, and tongue and saw our fellowship reaching to the four corners of the earth.

These tales brought Lois and me wonderful recollections of our six weeks’ journey abroad in 1950.

We could remember the heated arguments between the Swedes of Stockholm and the Swedes of Göteborg over whether A.A. should be based on Stockholm’s “Seven Steps” or America’s “Twelve.” We recalled meeting the founder of the wonderful group in Helsinki, Finland. We could still see the Danes at Copenhagen as their “Ring i Ring” wondered whether A.A. or antabuse was their answer. We remembered Henk Krauweel, in whose home we were guests while in Holland. Henk, a social worker and nonalcoholic, was engaged by the city of Amsterdam to see what he could do for the drunks there. He had been able to do very little until one day he ran across A.A.’s Twelve Steps. Translating them into Dutch, he handed them to some of his charges. To his astonishment, several tough cases went dry. And by the time we arrived he could show us plenty more. A.A. was solid in the Netherlands and well on its way. Our great friend Henk Krauweel has since become one of Europe’s leading authorities on the total alcohol problem.

In Paris we found several scattered American A.A.’s who acted mostly as a reception committee for A.A. travelers, some dry and some in deep trouble. The Frenchmen at Paris were still pretty shy about A.A. and they were possessed of the wonderful rationalization that wine was not liquor at all and was therefore quite harmless!

In London and Liverpool we met many very anonymous Englishmen. In those days their meetings had a definite parliamentary atmosphere, including a gavel which was struck at appropriate moments. Of course the Irish A.A. was everything we expected and more. The South-of-Ireland A.A.’s at Dublin were on a most genial basis with the North Irelanders at Belfast, despite an occasional burst of rock throwing among their compatriots in the streets. We watched as the seeds of A.A. pushed up their sprouts in Scotland, and when we encountered Scottish hospitality we knew for sure that the Scotsman A.A. is neither penurious nor dour.

To Lois and me this overseas experience was like turning the clock back to early times at home. Depending on their stage of progress, the foreign groups of that day were either flying blind, were hopefully pioneering, or had reached the fearsome and sometimes quarrelsome state of adolescence. They were re-enacting all of our American experiences of fifteen, ten, and five years before. We returned home with the sure conviction that nothing could stop their progress, that they could surmount all barriers of social caste or language. In the seven years since our 1950 visit, the A.A. achievement overseas has far exceeded our highest hopes.

I have saved our Norwegian impression for the final part of this foreign account, because the story of the beginning there is a classic. It all started in Greenwich, Connecticut, in a coffee shop owned by a quiet little Norwegian and his devoted wife. The Greenwich group had lifted him to sobriety and his shop had become a popular rendezvous for them.

The little Norwegian had not written and had not heard from home in the twenty years he had been a virtual derelict. But now, feeling sure of himself, he sent a letter bringing the folks back there up to date and telling them all about himself and his escape from alcoholic oblivion via A.A.

He soon received an excited and pleading letter, telling him of the awful plight of his brother, a typesetter on an Oslo newspaper. The brother, his relatives said, was not long for his job and maybe not long for this world. What could be done?

The little Norwegian in Greenwich took counsel with his wife. They sold their coffee shop, all they had in the world, and bought a round-trip to Oslo, with only a little to spare. A few days later they saw their homeland. From the airfield they hurried down the east bank of Oslo fjord to the stricken brother’s house. It was just as they had been told; the brother was close to the jumping-off place.

But Brother was obstinate. The man from Greenwich told his A.A. story and retold it. He translated the Twelve Steps of A.A. and a small pamphlet he had brought along. But it was no use; Brother would have none of it. Said the travelers, “Have we come all the way to Oslo just for this? Our money will soon run out and we shall have to go back.” Brother said nothing.

So the Norwegian from Greenwich began to canvass the clergymen and some of the doctors in Oslo. They were polite but not interested. Much cast-down, the A.A. and his wife made their plans to return to America.

Then the impossible happened. Brother suddenly called out and said, “Tell me more about those anonymous alcoholics in America. Explain again their Twelve Steps to me.” He sobered up almost at once and was able to watch his brother’s plane take to the air for New York. He had got the message all right, but he was alone now. What could he do?

The instant he got back to work he started modest ads in his own newspaper, one every day for a month. Nothing happened until the very last day. Then the wife of one of Oslo’s sidewalk florists wrote him a letter asking help for her husband. When the florist heard the story and studied the Twelve Steps he too dried up. The two-man group continued the newspaper notices that A.A. had come to town. Soon they had a third sober member. Among others who followed was a patient of Dr. Gordon Johnson’s, Oslo’s leading psychiatrist. Dr. Johnson, a deeply religious man, at once saw the implications of A.A.’s Twelve Steps and immediately threw the whole weight of his reputation behind the uncertain little group.

Three years later Lois and I looked through the customs gate at Oslo Airport upon a large welcoming delegation. Very few words of English could they speak, but they didn’t have to. We could see and feel what they had. On the way to the hotel we learned that Norway already had hundreds of A.A.’s now spread into many groups. It was unbelievable, yet there they were.

What happened to the little Norwegian from Greenwich? He came home and somehow started another coffee shop. Four years later he suffered a heart attack and died. But not before he had seen A.A. grow great in Norway.

One more word about Norway. Quite unknown to the rest of that country, a group had sprung up in Bergen at about the same time that Oslo got underway. Hans H., a Scandinavian-American, had returned to his home town with an A.A. book. Having perfect command of English, he could translate it into Norwegian as he read aloud to a tiny band of alcoholics that he had somehow gathered about him. With the benefit of this auspicious beginning several laid hold of sobriety and thereafter spread the message in this city to such good effect that Bergen today can point to sixteen A.A. groups as the remarkable result.

At many another Convention meeting the panorama of A.A. in action today was unfolded. A.A. clubs, now numbered by the hundreds, had their problems aired and their assets and liabilities weighed. There was a lively swapping of experience on how best we could give brother and sister sufferers in mental hospitals and prisons a still better break while they were in these places and when they left them. Great numbers of these folks were already making good and had become our fast friends and co-workers on the outside, and we realized how foolish had been our early fears of the alcoholic bearing a double stigma. In still another seminar secretaries and committeemen of scores of local central services, the so-called Intergroup Associations, exposed their many problems for each other’s inspection and advice, always seeking to remedy the functional weaknesses of the many newer service bodies just trying to get under way.

In another meeting the whole subject of money in A.A. got a most healthy kicking around. A.A.’s principle of “no compulsory fees or dues” can be construed and rationalized into “no voluntary group or individual responsibility at all,” and this fallacy was exploded with a bang. There was complete unanimity that through voluntary contributions the legitimate bills of groups, areas, and A.A. as a whole must be paid or we could not properly carry our message. It was agreed that no A.A. treasury ought to get overstuffed or rich. Nevertheless, it was emphasized that the notion of keeping A.A. “simple” and “spiritual” by eliminating vital services that happened to cost a little time, trouble, and money was risky and absurd. It was the opinion of the meeting that oversimplification, which might lead us to muff our Twelfth Step work, area-wide and world-wide, could not be called either really simple or really spiritual.

Then there was a very moving get-together of lone A.A. members who had come in from the far reaches and isolated outposts to share the unusual view of our fellowship that St. Louis afforded. To no others could the Convention mean so much. They got a fresh sense of belonging, and they realized that their isolation was never so complete as they had sometimes felt it to be. They knew, as few did, how greatly A.A.’s literature and world services could help, for their sobriety had depended heavily upon the Big Book and upon those constant letters that came to them from Headquarters and fellow loners. They had developed all sorts of gimmicks and disciplines to bulwark themselves and to perfect their conscious contact with God, who, they had joyfully discovered, could just as well be felt and heard whether one dwelt in a ship crossing the equator or next door to the polar icecap.

Typical of the loner stories was that of the Australian sheepman who lived 2,000 miles from the nearest town where yearly he sold his wool. In order to be paid the best prices he had to go to town during a certain month. But when he heard that a big regional A.A. meeting was to be held at a later date when wool prices would have fallen, he had gladly taken a heavy money loss in order to make his journey then. That’s how much an A.A. meeting could mean to him. This was something that every loner at St. Louis could well understand.

At another interesting gathering the founders of many groups assembled to swap information on how best to get going in a new locality. Since more than 7,000¹¹ A.A. groups with a total membership of over 200,000 had already been spawned over the years and new ones were taking shape somewhere in the world almost every day, there were plenty of experiences to share.

In still another section of the Convention there was much to be learned about A.A.’s Grapevine, our magazine of more than 40,000¹²monthly circulation and our biggest and best means of communicating current A.A. thought and experience in staying sober, in hanging together, and in serving. Among members of the Grapevine’s staff on hand were editor Don, three editorial assistants, a photographer, and a number of artists and magazine experts. By talks and exhibits they showed how the Grapevine’s well-illustrated pages could be a lively and convincing means of introducing A.A. to the new or potential member, and how its articles could provide solid material for closed meetings and discussion. The Grapevine was seen as the monthly mirror of A.A. in action, always the same principle yet ever growing and ever finding better ways of doing and thinking on new fronts of our exciting adventure in living and working together.

Then there was a session called “Presenting the Headquarters Staff.” The staff was headed by manager Hank G., and it included fellow workers with talents in finance, public relations, and the like, and five capable A.A. women staff members. There was an extensive set of exhibits showing the wide range of activities of our top services. To the onlookers the World Headquarters of Alcoholics Anonymous was no longer the source of dry statistics about tons of literature, thousands of calls for help and letters in reply, and hundreds of problems of groups and of public information, or just the source of pleas for voluntary contributions. Here were the flesh-and-blood folks who were actually doing these things, and a well-trained, eager, and dedicated group they were, just like the Grapevine gang.

Countless A.A.’s at the Convention got to know our Trustees, those faithful alcoholic and nonalcoholic friends who had served us so long. Many a grass-rooter talked with Archie Roosevelt and learned that this exuberant and genial man had recently joined the Board and had taken on the sometimes thankless and always time-consuming job of being its treasurer. Grass-rooters and city people alike began to say, “Well, if our new nonalcoholic friend Archie can spend years looking after A.A.’s general finances, then we guess that we can certainly spare the minute it takes twice yearly to reach into our pockets for those two dollars that Archie needs to balance A.A.’s budget.”

Right up front among the biggest eye-openers of the Convention were Al-Anon Family Group meetings, which bore the titles: “Meet the Staff,” “The Children of Alcoholics,” “Adjustment Between Husbands and Wives,” and “The Twelve Steps.” In St. Louis many a skeptical A.A. had his first look at this movement within a movement and learned with astonishment that the Family Groups had jumped from 70 to 700 in only three years and that right now a brand-new one was popping up in the world about every day. Lois and speakers from many areas told us that the Family Groups had a world clearinghouse much like A.A.’s Headquarters and that already there was literature, the beginning of a magazine, and even a new book.

Many A.A.’s had wondered what these Family Groups were all about. Were they gossip clubs, commiseration societies? Were they coffee and cake auxiliaries? Did they divert A.A. from its single purpose of sobriety? The Family Group meetings provided the answers: These new groups were not also-rans to A.A., nor were they gossip factories. The families of alcoholics—wives, husbands, mothers, fathers, and children—were pointing A.A.’s principles right straight at themselves and at nobody else.

The Family Group speakers asked and answered plenty of questions like these: “Weren’t we just as powerless over alcohol as the alcoholics themselves? Sure we were.” “And when we found that out, weren’t we often filled with just as much bitterness and self-pity as the alcoholic ever had been? Yes, that was sometimes a fact.” “After the first tremendous relief and happiness which resulted when A.A. came along, hadn’t we often slipped back into secret and deep hurt that A.A. had done the job and we hadn’t? For many of us, that was certainly so.” “Not realizing that alcoholism is an illness, hadn’t we taken sides with the kids against the drinking member? Yes, we had often done that, to their damage. No wonder, then, that when sobriety came, the emotional benders in our homes often went right on and sometimes got worse.”

As the A.A.’s listened, the Family Group speakers continued: “Could we find an answer for all of this? At first, no. The A.A. meetings sometimes helped us, but not enough. We got a better understanding of the alcoholic problem but not enough of our own condition. We thought A.A.’s Twelve Steps were wonderful for alcoholics, but didn’t think we had to take them too seriously. After all, we had been doing our best. There was nothing much wrong with us. So we reasoned, and so we complained when things continued to go badly at home. Or often, if things went well, we turned complacent or maybe rather jealous of all the time our partners thought they had to spend on A.A.

“But when the Family Groups were formed, these notions and attitudes began to change, and the change was mainly in us. The transformation really set in when we began to practice A.A.’s Twelve Steps in daily living, in all our affairs, and in the company of those who were able to understand our problems as no alcoholic partner could.

“In the Family Groups we see men and women, even those with active alcoholics on their hands, shake off their miseries and begin to live serenely, without blame or recrimination. We have seen many a partner, whose mate was sober in A.A. but still hard to live with, completely alter his or her thinking. Finally we have seen badly bent children straighten around and begin to respect and love their parents once more. We have seen many kinds of pride and fear and domination and nagging and maddening possessiveness just melted away by the Twelve Steps as we practice them in the home. Like our A.A. partners, we Family Groupers are now getting the tremendous dividend which comes from the practice of Step Twelve, ‘carrying the message.’ And the message of our Family Group is this: ‘You can have more than alcoholic sobriety in your own family; you can have emotional sobriety, too. Even if the rest of the family about you hasn’t yet found stability, you can still have yours. And your own emotional sobriety often can hasten the happy day of change for them.’ ”

Many an A.A. member who saw the Family Groups in action in St. Louis said afterwards, “This is one of the best things that has happened since A.A. began.”

When they saw the Convention’s pressroom, many visitors realized for the first time that good communications, within and without, were the actual arteries in which A.A.’s life-giving blood circulates among us and thence out to brother and sister sufferers everywhere. Something more than slow word-of-mouth message-carrying obviously has been required. Certainly not much Twelfth Step work ever could have been done until the sick ones and their families had been reached and persuaded that A.A. might offer hope for them. This kind of communication often required the good will of clergymen, doctors, employers, and friends—indeed, the good will of the public at large. For years A.A.’s Headquarters had used every possible means of enlisting such good will, and in addition to our own efforts our friends of the press—newspapers, magazines, and later radio and television—had told our story faithfully and often and had reported eventful A.A. occasions whenever they occurred. Thus they had drawn thousands of alcoholics into our membership and were still doing so.

They had not done this, of course, without help from us. Years ago we found that accurate and effective publicity about A.A. simply does not manufacture itself. Our over-all public relations couldn’t be left entirely to chance encounters between reporters and A.A. members, who might or might not be well informed about our fellowship as a whole. This kind of unorganized “simplicity” often garbled the true story of A.A. and kept people away from us. A badly slanted press could prolong preventable suffering and even result in unnecessary deaths.

When in 1941 the Saturday Evening Post assigned Jack Alexander to scout A.A. for a feature story, we had already learned our lesson. Therefore nothing was left to chance. Had Jack been able to get to St. Louis for the Convention he himself could have told how skeptical he had been of this assignment. He had just finished doing a piece on the Jersey rackets, and he didn’t believe anybody on a stack of Bibles a mile high.

After Jack checked in with us at Headquarters, we took him in tow for nearly a whole month. In order to write his powerful article, he had to have our fullest attention and carefully organized help. We gave him our records, opened the books, introduced him to nonalcoholic Trustees, fixed up interviews with A.A.’s of every description, and finally showed him the A.A. sights from New York and Philadelphia all the way to Chicago, via Akron and Cleveland. Although he was not an alcoholic, Jack soon became a true A.A. convert in spirit. When at last he sat down at his typewriter, his heart was in it. He was no longer on the outside of A.A. looking in; he was really inside looking out. As soon as the article appeared, 6,000 frantic inquiries hit our New York post office. Jack’s piece made Alcoholics Anonymous a national institution, and it also made him one of our greatest friends and, finally, one of our Trustees.

The kind of help we gave Jack Alexander—our organized service of public information—is the vital ingredient in our public relations that most A.A.’s have never seen. But in the St. Louis pressroom the visitors did see one aspect of it, working this time for the Convention itself. There sat A.A.’s Ralph, handling our contacts with the press. He was surrounded by phones, typewriters, piles of releases, clip-sheets, telegrams in and out—all the gadgets of his trade. Now what was he doing and why? Could this be a ballyhooed promotion stunt, something quite contrary to A.A. Traditions?

Not a bit of it. Ralph was handling this job simply to help our friends of press, radio, and television. The whole world wanted to know about our twentieth anniversary. Newspapers and magazines wanted interviews and press releases. Radio and television broadcasters wanted to arrange for interviews. People wanted us to explain what we meant when we said that A.A. had “come of age.”

Our friends in A.A. and millions outside wanted to read and hear and see, and it was certainly up to us to help. It was not always a question of our communicating with them: lots of them wanted to communicate with us, especially alcoholics and families who were still suffering. The city fathers of St. Louis sent their warmest congratulations, and this reminded us of their generosity in giving the use of the Kiel Auditorium free of charge. We were further reminded of the wonderful cordiality of the local groups in town, the hospitable clubs and the many parties.

Telegrams came to us in the Kiel Auditorium from A.A. people and groups everywhere. One of the brightest highlights of the Convention appeared in this message:

Dateline: The White House; Sender: The President of the United States

Please convey to all who participate in your Twentieth Anniversary gathering my good wishes for a successful meeting. Your society’s record of growth and service is an inspiration to those who, through research, perseverance and faith, move forward to the solution of many serious personal and public health problems.

Dwight D. Eisenhower.

When this telegram was read to the Convention, we experienced great elation mixed with deep humility. A.A. had indeed come of age. In the eyes of the world we had now become full and responsible citizens once more.

The last day of the Convention moved from morning crescendo to afternoon climax. At 11:30 a.m. we began the meeting “God as We Understand Him.” Deep silence fell as Dr. Jim S., the A.A. speaker, told of his life experience and the serious drinking that led to the crisis which had brought about his spiritual awakening. He re-enacted for us his struggle to start the very first group among Negroes, his own people. Aided by a tireless and eager wife, he had turned his home into a combined hospital and A.A. meeting place, free to all. As he told how early failure had finally been transformed under God’s grace into amazing success, we who listened realized that A.A. not only could cross seas and mountains and boundaries of language and nation but could surmount obstacles of race and creed as well.

A great cheer of welcome greeted Father Ed Dowling as, indifferent to his grievous lameness, he made his way to the lectern. Father Dowling of the Jesuit order in St. Louis is intimately known to A.A.’s for a thousand miles and more around. Many in the Convention audience remembered with gratitude his ministry to their spiritual needs. St. Louis old-timers recalled how he helped start their group; it had turned out to be largely Protestant, but this fazed him not a bit. Some of us could remember his first piece about us in The Queen’s Work, the sodality’s magazine. He had been the first to note how closely in principle A.A.’s Twelve Steps paralleled a part of the Exercises of St. Ignatius, a basic spiritual discipline of the Jesuit order. He had boldly written in effect to all alcoholics and especially to those of his own faith: “Folks, A.A. is good. Come and get it.” And this they certainly had done. His first written words were the beginning of a wonderfully benign influence in favor of our fellowship, the total of which no one will ever be able to compute.

Father Ed’s talk to us at the Convention that Sunday morning flashed with humor and deep insight. As he spoke, the memory of his first appearance in my own life came back to me as fresh as though it were yesterday: One wintry night in 1940 in A.A.’s Old Twenty-Fourth Street Club in New York I had gone to bed at about ten o’clock with a severe dose of self-pity and my imaginary ulcer. Lois was out somewhere. Hail and sleet beat on the tin roof over my head; it was a wild night. The Club was deserted except for old Tom, the retired fireman, that diamond in the rough lately salvaged from Rockland asylum. The front doorbell clanged, and a moment later Tom pushed open my bedroom door. “Some bum,” said he, “from St. Louis is down there and wants to see you.” “Oh, Lord!” I said. “Not another one! And at this time of night. Oh, well, bring him up.”

I heard labored steps on the stairs. Then, balanced precariously on his cane, he came into the room, carrying a battered black hat that was shapeless as a cabbage leaf and plastered with sleet. He lowered himself into my solitary chair, and when he opened his overcoat I saw his clerical collar. He brushed back a shock of white hair and looked at me through the most remarkable pair of eyes I have ever seen. We talked about a lot of things, and my spirits kept on rising, and presently I began to realize that this man radiated a grace that filled the room with a sense of presence. I felt this with great intensity; it was a moving and mysterious experience. In years since I have seen much of this great friend, and whether I was in joy or in pain he always brought to me the same sense of grace and the presence of God. My case is no exception. Many who meet Father Ed experience this touch of the eternal. It is no wonder that he was able to fill all of us there in the Kiel Auditorium with his inimitable spirit on that wonderful Sunday morning.

There came next to the lectern a figure that not many A.A.’s had seen before, the Episcopal clergyman Sam Shoemaker. It was from him that Dr. Bob and I in the beginning had absorbed most of the principles that were afterward embodied in the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, steps that express the heart of A.A.’s way of life. Dr. Silkworth gave us the needed knowledge of our illness, but Sam Shoemaker had given us the concrete knowledge of what we could do about it. One showed us the mysteries of the lock that held us in prison; the other passed on the spiritual keys by which we were liberated.

Dr. Sam looked scarcely a day older than he had almost twenty-one years earlier when I first met him and his dynamic group at Calvary’s parish house in New York. As he began to speak, his impact fell upon us there in the Kiel Auditorium just as it had upon Lois and me years before. As always, he called a spade a spade, and his blazing eagerness, earnestness, and crystal clarity drove home his message point by point. With all his vigor and power of speech, Sam nevertheless kept himself right down to our size. Here was a man quite as willing to talk about his sins as about anybody else’s. He made himself a witness of God’s power and love just as any A.A. might have done.

Sam’s appearance before us was further evidence that many a channel had been used by Providence to create Alcoholics Anonymous. And none had been more vitally needed than the one opened through Sam Shoemaker and his Oxford Group associates of a generation before. The basic principles which the Oxford Groupers had taught were ancient and universal ones, the common property of mankind. Certain of the former O.G. attitudes and applications had proved un-suited to A.A.’s purpose, and Sam’s own conviction about these lesser aspects of the Oxford Groups had later changed and become more like our A.A. views of today. But the important thing is this: the early A.A. got its ideas of self-examination, acknowledgment of character defects, restitution for harm done, and working with others straight from the Oxford Groups and directly from Sam Shoemaker, their former leader in America, and from nowhere else. He will always be found in our annals as the one whose inspired example and teaching did most to show us how to create the spiritual climate in which we alcoholics may survive and then proceed to grow. A.A. owes a debt of timeless gratitude for all that God sent us through Sam and his friends in the days of A.A.’s infancy.

As we approached our last session, a number of great questions still remained in the collective mind of the Convention. What would happen when A.A.’s originators and old-timers had gone? Would A.A. continue to grow and prosper? Could we go on functioning as a whole, no matter what perils the future brought? Had A.A. really come to the age of full responsibility? Could members and groups world-wide now safely assume complete control and guidance of A.A.’s principal affairs? Would A.A. now be able to take over from the old-timers, from Dr. Bob and from Bill? If so, by what agency, and just how?

For a long time these questions had been asked anxiously, and for over five years solutions for these problems had been eagerly sought, especially by old A.A. hands, people like myself who must soon relinquish their twenty years’ guardianship of A.A. and turn over their trust to the vast family now fully reared. The time had come for the answers.

High in the great hall of the Kiel Auditorium there hung a banner on which everyone could see the new symbol for Alcoholics Anonymous, the triangle within the circle. On the stage far beneath the banner, at four o’clock on Sunday, our society was to be declared come of age. Its elected Service Conference, taking over the guardianship of our Traditions and the custody of our World Services, would then become the successor to the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous. The thousands of us were united in one spirit and in a great expectation as we sat waiting for the opening of this last meeting. What we thought and felt is hard to tell, hard especially for one person. It would help if someone could speak for all of us, and perhaps in a way this is possible.…

Each day at the Convention I had spoken with many A.A.’s, folks of every description and persuasion: plainsmen and mountain people, city dwellers and townsmen, workmen and businessmen, schoolteachers and professors, clergymen and doctors, ad men and journalists, artists and builders, clerks and bankers, socialites and skid-rowers, career girls and housewives, people from other lands speaking in strange accents and tongues, Catholics and Protestants and Jews and men and women of no religion.

Of many of these people I asked the same questions: “What do you think of this Convention?” and “What do you think of A.A.’s future?” Each of course reacted according to his or her own viewpoint, but I was astonished when I sensed the unanimity of feeling and opinion that ran through all. I felt and still feel this so strongly that I believe it may be permissible here to introduce a spokesman for the whole Convention itself, a sort of composite character who nevertheless may truly portray what practically everybody at St. Louis really saw, really heard, and really felt. Let’s call our anonymous spokesman Mr. Grassroots. He hails from Centerville, U.S.A., and this is what he has to say:

“I went to the Kiel,” says Mr. Grassroots, “ahead of time for that last meeting. While I was waiting I thought of all that had happened to me in three days. I come from the small town of Centerville. I was born and raised there, did my drinking and got into my trouble there, and was about ready to throw in the sponge when A.A. came to town. Several years back a traveling chap tossed us the idea, and since then about a dozen of us alkies in Centerville have grabbed the life-line.

“The groups in my state are pretty small and scattered, and so we do not see much of each other. We’ve never had a state get-together. Our Centerville group has been just about all of A.A. for me. Good A.A., too. Of course we’ve had the Big Book and some pamphlets and the Grapevine, and now and then a traveler told us something about A.A. in other places. It was fine to know that other people like us were getting their chance, too. But our main interest was in each other and in the Centerville drunks that had not yet sobered up. The rest of A.A. seemed a long way off. There did not seem to be much that we could do about it anyhow, even if we wanted to. This was how it was with me before St. Louis.

“This Convention has been a terrific experience. I ran into hundreds of A.A.’s and their families charging around in the hotels. Then I saw thousands in the big Auditorium. I am sort of shy, but I got over that. I got mixed in with people who were having the time of their lives, people who came from five hundred, a thousand, maybe five thousand miles away—from places I’d only read about in the papers. Pretty soon I was telling them about A.A. in Centerville, rattling on as happy as anybody.

“These people were not strangers to me at all; it seems as if I had known and trusted and loved them all my life. I had felt that way about my A.A. group at home, but now I felt the same way about every A.A. and all of A.A. I can’t tell you what this meant. To me it was big. This was real brotherhood. These were my people, my kin and my kind. I belonged to them and they belonged to me. Every barrier, every thought of race, creed, or nationality dropped out of my mind. This tremendous thing happened to me in only a few hours.

“I took in every meeting I could. I heard those doctors tell how much their profession was for us. I went to an Al-Anon meeting and realized for the first time that A.A. is for the whole family, too. The sessions on prisons and mental institutions convinced me that as a drinker I had been a piker and that almost no alcoholic disaster was too tough for A.A. to help. At other meetings I saw that A.A. had been facing and solving a lot of problems I never knew we had; problems in the big cities and all over the world. I saw that we still had plenty wrong with us as a fellowship, but I was sure that our present troubles would iron out as well as the others had.

“On Friday night I heard how A.A. started—how many people, nonalcoholic friends as well as ourselves, had been required to do the job—at how many points we could have run off the road for a complete smashup, yet how we had never yet over skidded a curve or failed to take the right turn. The hand of a higher Power had been on the wheel all the time.

“On Saturday night I felt like getting worried all over again as Bill told us how he and Dr. Bob had wondered all the way from 1939 to 1945 if A.A. was going to hang together after all, what with the troubles of members, groups, and new beginnings in foreign countries. I got a jolt when I heard that the A.A. book and the New York Headquarters had once been the source of the most hair-raising squabbles of all. Maybe this kind of thing could get going again someday. But I calmed down when it was made clear that all this old-time grief and uproar had actually been very good for us and that without this experience A.A.’s Twelve Traditions could never have been written. And I felt still better when I heard that by 1950 most of those woes were things of the past and that the Twelve Traditions had been adopted unanimously at the International Convention in Cleveland in 1950 when Dr. Bob made his final appearance and spoke so confidently of his faith in A.A.’s future.

“On Sunday morning—the last day of the Convention—I found those Twelve Traditions still on my mind. Each of them I saw is an exercise in humility that can guard us in everyday A.A. affairs and protect us from ourselves. If A.A. were really guided by the Twelve Traditions, we could not possibly be split apart by politics, religion, money, or by any old-timers who might take a notion to be big shots. With none of us throwing our weight around in public, nobody could possibly exploit A.A. for personal advantage, that is sure. For the first time I saw A.A.’s anonymity for what it really is. It isn’t just something to save us from alcoholic shame and stigma; its deeper purpose is actually to keep those fool egos of ours from running hog wild after money and public fame at A.A.’s expense. It really means personal and group sacrifice for the benefit of all A.A. Right then I resolved to learn our Twelve Traditions by heart, just as I had learned the Twelve Steps. If every A.A. did the same thing and really soaked up these principles we drunks could hang together forever.

“I watched as the big hall of the Kiel Auditorium filled up. Thousands of my new-found friends were pouring in for the final windup. I caught sight of Father Ed as he eased himself into a seat across the aisle. He was a wonderful reminder of our morning session on the spiritual part of the program. In that session something happened to me I’ll never forget.

“I had always carried a certain amount of prejudice against churches and clergymen and their concepts of God. Like many A.A.’s, my ideas about God were still mighty vague.

“But as these two spoke, it had loomed up on me that most of A.A’s spiritual principles had come to us through clergymen. Without clergymen, A.A. could never have started in the first place. While I had been nursing my grudges against religion, Father Ed and Dr. Sam had been going all out for us. This was a brand-new revelation. Suddenly I realized that it was high time I began to love them, even as they had loved me and the rest of my kind.

“When I knew that I could now do this, I commenced to feel warm clear through. The conviction spread in me that love is a mighty personal thing. Then came the feeling that maybe my Creator really did know me and love me. So I could now begin to love Him, too. This was one of the best things that happened to me at St. Louis, and there must have been a lot of others there who had the same experience.

“Our last meeting finally began, and it opened with a silence that was charged with confident hope and faith. We knew that ours was a fellowship of the Spirit and that the grace of God was there.”

Although these are only words put into the mouth of our created character Mr. Grassroots, they do represent much of the spirit and the truth that lived in the heart of many an A.A. as the St. Louis Convention moved toward its culmination.

From the Kiel stage I looked out upon the sea of faces gathered there, and I was powerfully stirred by the wonder of all that had happened in the incredible twenty years now coming to a climax. Had this meeting place been a hundred times larger, it still could not have held all of A.A.’s members and their families and friends.

Who could render an account of all the miseries that had once been ours, and who could estimate the release and joy that these last years had brought to us? Who could possibly tell the vast consequences of what God’s work through A.A. had already set in motion? And who could penetrate the deeper mystery of our wholesale deliverance from slavery, a bondage to a most hopeless and fatal obsession which for centuries had possessed the minds and bodies of men and women like ourselves?

It may be possible to find explanations of spiritual experiences such as ours, but I have often tried to explain my own and have succeeded only in giving the story of it. I know the feeling it gave me and the results it has brought, but I realize I will never fully understand its deeper why and how.

We A.A.’s had tried out a radical and old-time formula, one rather out of fashion nowadays, and it had worked. “We admitted that we were powerless—that our lives had become unmanageable” and “we made a decision to turn our wills and our lives over to God as we understood Him.” Every one of us who could make and fairly well maintain this humbling admission and sweeping decision had found relief from obsession and had begun to grow into a totally and wonderfully different mental, physical, and spiritual existence.

The thought of Dr. Foster Kennedy crossed my mind. Years ago this noted physician had asked if one of A.A.’s early friends of psychiatry would come to the New York Academy of Medicine to explain A.A. to its neurological section. Since several doctors publicly had endorsed us, some in the Saturday Evening Post article of 1941, I thought there would be no difficulty about this. But every one of these medical friends of ours rejected the unusual opportunity.

In substance, this was what they said: “In A.A. we see an unusual number of social and psychological forces working together on the alcoholic problem. Yet fully allowing for this new advantage, we still cannot explain the speed of the results. A.A. does in weeks or months what should take years. Not only does drinking stop abruptly but great changes in the alcoholic’s motivation follow in a few weeks or months. There is something at work in A.A. which we do not understand. We call this ‘the X factor.’ You people call it God. You can’t explain God and neither can we—especially at the New York Academy of Medicine.”

Such is the paradox of A.A. regeneration: strength arising out of complete defeat and weakness, the loss of one’s old life as a condition for finding a new one. But we of A.A. do not have to understand this paradox; we have only to be grateful for it.

My mother was there on the auditorium stage, she who had brought me into life fifty-nine years before and who had waited a long anxious time for a happy fulfillment to my failure-ridden years. Beside her was my wife Lois, the one who held steadfast when hope had gone, who had attended my second birth, and who in full partnership had shared with me the pains and joys of our exciting life for the past twenty years.

And there sat my sponsor Ebby, who had first brought the word that lifted me out of the alcoholic pit.¹³With the whole convention I rejoiced that he could be with us. And I thought of many nonalcoholic friends of the very early days. Without them there could have been no A.A. at all. They had set us wonderful examples of unselfish devotion. They were the prototypes of thousands of men and women of good will who have since helped make our society what it is.

One after another I looked at my friends and fellow workers in A.A.’s Headquarters—trustees, directors, staff members—whose dedicated labor had been given for years to perfect the structure that would now be given into the final keeping of our fellowship itself.

Among the crowd in the great Kiel hall I could see many an old-timer. This had been indeed a reunion of the veterans. They had carried the very first torches, and I could feel the deep kinship that will always be something very special among us. I remembered, too, how their ranks had already thinned, and I reflected that in a little more time all of us who had been pioneers of A.A. would belong to its past. Suddenly I was seized with a desire to turn the clock back. I felt a nostalgia for the old days blending strangely with my gratitude for the great day in which I was now living.

Bernard Smith,¹⁴our chairman, presently summoned me to speak. I recounted and relived the seventeen-year story of the building of A.A.’s World Service structure. This talk together with a full account of our subsequent proceedings on this historic day may be read farther on in this book.

The full attendance of thousands of A.A.’s at St. Louis, representing an accurate cross section of A.A. opinion, now sat in convention before us. On the auditorium stage was the Service Conference of Alcoholics Anonymous, about a hundred men and women who were the named and chosen representatives of the whole fellowship. The Conference, having completed the fifth year of its experimental period with a record of high success, was no longer an experiment. It was the instrument destined to become the heart of A.A.’s Third Legacy of Service and the whole of A.A.’s conscience, world-wide.

In the simple ceremony that followed, I offered a resolution to the effect that our society should now take its affairs into its own hands and that its Conference ought to become the permanent successor to the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Amid a roar of acclamation from the floor, the Convention carried that resolution. There was silence, and then we heard chairman Smith offer the resolution to the Conference for its confirmation. A simple show of hands expressed the consent of the Conference and marked the exact moment when A.A. came of age. It was four o’clock.

An address was then given by Bernard Smith. It had been his skill and devotion that had tipped the scales of opinion among A.A.’s Trustees—nearly all of whom had had grave doubts—in favor of proposing the Conference in the first place. And so we knew that this was as wonderful a day in Bern Smith’s life as it was in ours.

And now the history-making hours had almost run their course. It remained only for Lois and me to say brief words of farewell.

The Convention listened affectionately as Lois highlighted some of her memories of other days and gave thanks for the blessings that the years had brought to us and to her. To all present she was a symbol of what every family under the lash of Barleycorn had suffered, and she was also a symbol of what every united A.A. family has since found and has become. Lois made us all feel good clear through.

Standing before the Convention for the last time, I felt as all parents do when sons and daughters must begin to make their own decisions and live their own lives. No more would I act for, decide for, or protect Alcoholics Anonymous. I saw that well-meaning parents who cling to their authority and overstay their time can do much damage. We old-timers must never do this to the A.A. family. When in the future they might ask us, we would gladly help them in the pinches. But that would be all. This new relationship was indeed the central meaning of what had just taken place.

Like most parents at such an anxious time, I could not resist a few admonitions, which can be read in Part III of this book.

As I spoke I again felt the tug of that desire to set back the clock, and for a moment I dreaded the coming change as much as anyone. But this mood quickly passed, and I knew that all worrying concern as a parent was now at an end. The conscience of Alcoholics Anonymous as moved by the guidance of God could be depended upon to insure A.A.’s future. Clearly my job henceforth was to let go and let God. Alcoholics Anonymous was at last safe—even from me.

1 Father Dowling died in 1960.

2 Dr. Tiebout died in 1966.

3 See Appendix E:b for Dr. Tiebout’s papers.

4 See Appendix D, Lasker Award citation.

5 Rev. Sam Shoemaker died in 1963.

6 “Dr. Jack” Norris died in 1989.

7 These figures as of 1957. In 2009 there are over 1,500 groups in correctional facilities and more than 1,000 in treatment facilities in the U.S. and Canada.

8 Sister Ignatia died in 1966.

9 As of 1957.

10 Ruth Hock Crecelius died in 1986.

11 As of 2009, there are more than 116,800 groups worldwide and an estimated total of over two million members.

12 Circulation in 2009 is approximately 94,000.

13 Ebby died in 1966.

14 Bernard Smith died in 1970.