Sober Sunrise – Mel B. – Las Vegas, NV – 2005
AA speaker Mel B. shares 55 years of sobriety, his early struggles, and his deep knowledge of AA history—including his personal connections with Bill W., Dr. Bob, and the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Mel B. from Nebraska got sober in 1950 at age 24 after years of destitution, jail time, a stint in a state hospital, and finally finding AA. In this AA speaker tape, he traces his own unlikely journey from a frightened, alcoholic kid to a man with over 55 years of sobriety—and along the way, he shares what he learned through personal meetings with Bill W., Dr. Bob’s family, and other early AA pioneers, weaving together his recovery story with forgotten pieces of AA history.
Mel B. shares 55+ years of continuous sobriety beginning in 1950, detailing his descent into alcoholism during childhood depression, military service, and homelessness before finding AA in Santa Paula, California. This AA speaker tape covers how working the program transformed his character—from someone prone to anger and resentment into a man able to live with integrity at work and in relationships. Mel also draws from personal interviews and meetings with AA founders and early members, including Bill W., Dr. Bob’s family, and AA number three, offering rare historical perspective on how AA began in Akron, Ohio in 1935.
Episode Summary
Mel B. opens with a lifetime of sobriety that began on April 15, 1950—a date he’s now carried for 75 years. At 24, broken by repeated failures, he spent seven weeks in a Nebraska state hospital before committing fully to AA. What makes this talk unusual is that Mel doesn’t just tell his own recovery story; he weaves it together with firsthand accounts of AA history he learned by meeting and interviewing the people who built the fellowship.
His childhood in Depression-era Nebraska set the stage. At 12, gripped by a terror of dying, he fell into deep depression and discovered that alcohol lifted the fog—a moment that would shape the next two decades. His father was a volatile man, his mother absent, and his older sister eventually took her own life at 45. Young Mel felt responsible for all of it. He dropped out of school, joined the Navy, worked oil fields and railroads, and spent time in jails in Idaho and New Jersey. He was always running, always drinking. By his early twenties, bartenders were taking his glasses away before he threw them, and he’d become someone strangers feared.
The turning point came through humility and hospitalization. A neighbor drove him to the state hospital in Norfolk, Nebraska—a place he’d heard whispered about as a threat his whole childhood. Seven weeks there, and he got back to AA meetings. He never left.
What distinguishes this talk is Mel’s detailed exploration of AA history woven throughout his recovery. In 1950, newly sober in Pontiac, Michigan, he worked in a machine shop with relatives who didn’t understand the program but showed him kindness anyway. He witnessed the program working in his own behavior—moments when he felt rage rising on a factory floor but, through the principles he was learning, could set down the wrench and let it pass. Years later, working in Jackson, he watched resentment dissolve when he stopped participating in office gossip. The fear of being talked about lifted when he quit doing it himself.
Mel’s real passion emerged in his research. Bill W. came through Detroit in 1951 promoting the Third Legacy (service and the general service conference). Mel went, but didn’t meet him then. By 1956, he’d written to Bill and received a lengthy letter that “just astounded” him. In 1958, he traveled to Akron for Founders Day and photographed Bill at Dr. Bob’s grave—pictures that would later appear in AA literature. He spent a day with Bill D. (AA number three), who shared stories from those early days. In 1963, when Mel moved to New York, he got to know Bill W. personally and served on the Grapevine editorial board.
Mel recounts the near-miraculous meeting of Bill W. and Dr. Bob in 1935. Bill, six months sober but facing a weekend alone in Akron after a failed business deal, called someone from the Oxford Group. That call led to Dr. Bob’s wife, who three weeks earlier had finally gotten her husband to admit he was alcoholic. Bill and Bob talked for five hours instead of 15 minutes. When Bob relapsed days later, Bill almost left—but Bob’s wife convinced him to stay. Three days later, after performing surgery, Bob committed to the program and never drank again.
Later, Mel worked on the manuscript for “Pass It On,” Bill’s biography, spending weekends at Stepping Stones interviewing Lois (Bill’s wife). He met her at 89—a gracious, vital woman who chose Bill despite his flaws, just as Dr. Bob’s wife Anne had stood by her man.
Throughout, Mel emphasizes that the program works on small, invisible scales. The wrench not picked up. The gossip session mentally abandoned. The resentment that dissolves when you change your own behavior. He shows how AA’s principles operate in everyday moments—how the fellowship protected him and others by giving them something stronger than their impulses.
The talk ends with a song Mel wrote called “Once There Were Founders,” a tribute to Bill and Bob. It’s a reminder that what Bill and Bob did, they did to save themselves; that we all benefit from their desperation and honesty.
Notable Quotes
I got a lot of mileage and self-pity out of blaming everything on my parents’ divorce.
The moment I discovered alcohol, I knew why people drank, and I didn’t realize I was setting in motion something that would almost destroy me, because I thought it was saving me. This is the fallacy of alcoholism—we think it’s really our medicine.
After a few drinks, everything changes. With good intentions, you can have the best of intentions, and then after a few drinks, everything changes. That’s what happens to alcoholics.
I think there are times when we’re without defense against anger, just like there are times when we’re without defense against the first drink.
He was just considerate of everybody—he wouldn’t walk across somebody’s lawn to take a shortcut. Bill Wilson was one of the most considerate people you could ever meet.
The irony is that 55 years later, I had these relatives who had businesses, and younger members of the family took over those businesses and drank them up. But I was on the right track because I had AA, and they didn’t have what I found.
Early Sobriety
Hitting Bottom
Step 1 – Powerlessness
Sponsorship
Topics Covered in This Transcript
- Founders & AA History
- Early Sobriety
- Hitting Bottom
- Step 1 – Powerlessness
- Sponsorship
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Full AA Speaker Transcript
This transcript was auto-generated and may contain minor errors. For the best experience, listen to the audio above.
welcome to sober Sunrise a podcast bringing you AA speaker meetings with stories of experience strength and Hope from around the world we bring you several new speakers weekly so be sure to subscribe whether you join us in the morning or at night there’s nothing better than a sober Sunrise we hope that you enjoy today’s speaker I’m Mel Barger an alcoholic I want to thank you will that was a better introduction than I deserve the uh really nice to come out here and this nice weather we’re having and we left Detroit a couple days ago it was so cold it would freeze the ears off a brass monkey and uh just nice to be out here and and have this time this is an amazing conference uh and just feel complimented to have been invited here well my plan I think is to tell my own story and uh then talk a little bit about some AA history and about Bill and Dr Bob if that’s permissible I really like this Podium here and the fact that it covers me up just in case I forgot to zip up my age I sometimes forget to zip tip down I I asked somebody what they what I could do about that and they said well it depends but anyway my story it’s a I’m uh my sobriety date is April 15th 1950 and uh I was 24 years old and of course somehow I got to be 80 now I was born out in Nebraska at a very early age in uh 1925 in September I turned 80 and also in September uh had my our 45th wedding anniversary and this is my trophy wife here would would you mind standing up and that this is Lori and uh we we have four adult children and eight grandchildren and then also right next to is Tina who is a member of my home group The Rab Road group that meets west of Toledo Tina why don’t you stand up oh yeah um well um part of my story can be summed up by a little limr uh which uh I’ll just I kind of composed this to sum it up a fearful young man from Nebraska drank a mount that would surely aast you he’d take any old slop and drink till he’ drop and finally fell on his ASA but um Nebraska has a lot to do with my story that’s where I grew up and where I finally got sober in a town in northeast Nebraska and I used to feel very sorry for myself about growing up in Nebraska in fact I was critical of Nebraska I would say that if they ever want to give the world an enema Nebraska would be a good place to stick the hose but that that was very unkind and I uh I I regret that now I retract it because I’m quite proud of it now and I go back there and they’re very nice to me but that’s where I finally did get sober but that’s also where I started to drink I grew up there in the 1930s in the Great American depression and my parents divorced in the middle of the 1930s a very bitter thing there’s a lot of bitterness and unhappiness in my family and uh I regret that today but it was just one of those things and I got a lot of mileage and self-pity out of blaming everything on my parents’ divorce and so on I think one of the worst things that happened was when I was about 12 years old I fell into a terrible depression a terrible fear of dying and oh I you just can’t imagine how bad it was and everything plunged my schoolwork and I never had gotten along well with other kids anyhow with the family and so this just made things worse and then maybe about a year or two later I discovered alcohol for the first time I got into some of my my dad’s wine and uh I found something in that wine that I’d never had before a feeling of being lifted up uh Joy or Delight I don’t know what you would describe it but I know that if you had any substance that gave you that feeling it’s pretty hard not to go back to it again uh the the moment I that took effect I knew why people drank and I didn’t realize I was setting in something in motion that would almost destroy me because I thought it was saving me this is the fallacy of alcoholism we think it’s really our medicine it’s it’s a the the solution to all our problems and of course it’s the cause of many many more uh I never got along well with my uh family my mother and my dad uh my father I think he was a something of a rageaholic I think he was depressed too but he dealt with it that way and I had an older sister who did very well in school but later on she developed serious problems and she took her life when she was 45 years old so you see there were a lot of family problems I dropped out of school uh in the second year in high school with only about a Year’s credit and then uh after well let me go on a little bit about the drinking after that first experience with alcohol I didn’t become a daily Drinker or anything like that you know at age 13 or 14 but I went out fishing with an uncle and drank all his beer and then on New Year’s Eve in 1941 just after World War two had started I was working in an allight Filling Station out in western Nebraska a truck driver and his girlfriend came in with a bottle and I started drinking with them and about midnight the truck driver had knocked me into a snowdrift I was always hitting people on the fist with my nose and um but what happened I was very shy person uh with with without anything to drink but with just a few drinks I had a complete change of personality and today I I see that as one of the signs of alcoholism if you see a person who is very shy and withdrawn and fearful and suddenly with two drinks he becomes a different person well I think there’s an there’s an alcoholic that’s one of the signs I went to Denver and lived there for a while worked in an Army hospital and I could drink in their PX even though I was only 16 years old and uh after I left that job and I go out there and drink again a few times so you see I was making special efforts to find uh ways to drink then I went out to California to and I caught a ride with a guy out of Salt Lake City and he had a bottle in his glove compartment and he gave me a couple of swigs from his bottle and then when I wanted another one he turned to me and he said kid you’re one of those people who can’t drink now he knew this after seeing me take just two jolts from his bottle of course I think he was an alcoholic too and he was probably trying to protect his Supply he didn’t want to share it with me and I remember he was almost passed out by the time we got to Reno see that was Lois and uh people came to her for help she was always ready to help now this was the woman you know that helped bill in the 30s when he was uh bringing people to their home and everything else and did all the cooking earned the living and everything else really probably if it hadn’t been for Lois and also an we wouldn’t have had these two Founders the I worked up a PowerPoint program with some some illustrations and I finish it by pointing to the four people most responsible for the origin and growth of AA includes an Smith Dr Bob Lois and Bill these people took all of those people really to to get this thing going so then uh while working on this uh just you just discover lots of little pieces of information I found that when Lois and Bill became engaged there had been a young fellow now this was in Manchester Vermont and the the reason they met is Lois’s family always summered in Manchester and they were called Summer people around there see Manchester had two classes of people there were the Native people who lived there all the time and then there were the summer people and I suppose the summer people look down on the people who Liv there all the time something like that and uh there had been a young fellow from Ontario that wanted Lois to marry him and his name was Norman and his family was one of the wealthiest families in Ontario in fact Norman eventually became a member of parliament up in Ontario very distinguished man well I went up to see Lois this one day and a young alanon woman from Manchester was with me her name was Melanie and she was very much interested in AA history and somehow we got to talking about Norman and Norman had asked Lois to marry him the very day she and Bill got engaged and uh but they still exchanged Christmas cards they still on a friendly basis and Norman was now in his ‘ 90s still living and so Melanie says you know do you ever stop to think what your life would have been like if you had married Norman especially when things got real bad now things got very bad for Lois you know after they they became destitute in the in the 30s and Bill’s drinking bill was not a very good husband uh there were a lot of he had a lot of shortcomings as a husband and U Anyway said you ever stop to think what it been like with the road not taken if you had married Norman and Lois says never it was always Bill Wilson you know bad as Bill got at times he was always the great man in her life and that’s just a wonderful thing about I think probably was the same way with Anne Smith too uh with all of Dr Bob’s deficiencies why she was he was still her man and she stood by her man and all that kind of thing so these two two guys akan and New York and all of that it it’s just a wonderful story there’s many facets of it now I’ve written the five books since I worked on Passad on and they messed up that story I’ve uh written some books for hazeldon and one of the first one was called new wine and it uh it’s about the spiritual roots of AA and there’s a lot of stuff in there that they took out of some of the stuff I wrote for pass it on which I think should have been included especially some of the akine stuff and so that book uh was published by hazeldon and was done fairly well and then u i I did a meditation book called walk in dry places and you know my wife and I still use that for our daily meditation and every now and then she’ll say God I’d like to meet that guy he’s he’s really got it together and uh then I did another book about eie uh the the man who sponsored Bill W now you know eie had a lot of trouble he stayed sober two and a half years and then he got drunk in 1937 and had a lot of trouble the rest of his life but one part of the story is that bill was always loyal to him never lost his gratitude to eie for what eie had done and then also that we should feel the same way that for the time he did stay sober the 2 and 1/2 years Ebie did some things that were very important for the future of AA these these things are important to remember eie did have about eight good years down in Texas they they spirited him down there in 19 53 and he stayed there until 61 and the Texas members treated him very well he they kind of lionized him you know as one of the founders of AA so he had a lot of sobriety down there but then he started drinking again and and got back up into New York and the last two years of his life eie was in a being cared for in a home about 25 miles north of Albany which is his hometown and I met the woman who took care of him the last two years of his wife wonderful woman her name was Margaret mcpike she was AA member and also a an a practical nurse and she and her husband ran this little Care Home up there and that’s where they took care of eie the last two years of his life and Bill had arranged all of that he always took care of EBY always even raised a fund for him to take care of him in the last couple years of his life so we can feel pretty good about that uh then I did one more book it was called my search for Bill W and this is also published by hazeldon I’m really pushing my books here ain’t I the but talking about the traits that I think Bill had that enabled him to become the person he was the founder of AA and he was a peacemaker he was an entrepreneur a good communicator a fixer a guy who liked to fix things I think I think I found seven Bill Wilson’s there now this book never had a big sale it’s still there but um uh one night my son called our oldest son from Dallas he called and he wanted to know if the phone was ringing off the hook and what had happened a a session of The Sopranos one of the thugs had gone into rehab and they had him reading my book my my search for Bill W but Mel B right on the cover and I got five or six calls about that just right away people in Toledo and everything else so I went to my group and I told them I says you folks better start treating me a little better because I’m now tight with the mob so anyway I could go on and on all day along about some of these things uh in 1958 when I when we had that service for Bill W at Dr Bob’s gravesite the one that has ballooned into thousands of attendant attendees every year I took some nice pictures of Bill and just happened to have a riflex camera with me in the car and he gave me per permission to do this and several of them have now been used in books that have been published about Bill and I put one on the internet if you wanted a copy of it just go into Google and put quotes around hindfoot h i n DS fo o o t and you can pull up that picture and print it out if you want to uh and I plan to put anything else that I can on the internet so everybody can uh can share it uh incidentally I’m very grateful to Al Gore for having invented the Internet uh because things that things that you never could do before thanks to the internet you can now do them I mentioned that I’d written some articles for the Grapevine 55 that have been published but about 10 or 15 they they wouldn’t accept them so I put them on the internet now and anybody can have them and there are a lot of things you can do that way and if some editor doesn’t think your works okay maybe somebody out there in the Boondock wants to read it thank God for the internet another great thing that has been done is uh the grape vine has digitized all of the Articles it ever published something like 12,000 articles are now available over the internet I think it costs $10 a year it’s called The Grape Vine digital archive and you can pull up articles on any subject it’s just wonderful I find that uh if I want a subject and to go to a meeting and talk about it sometimes I pull it up on the internet print it out make 20 copies and take it to the meeting and pass it out just these are wonderful things that you never could do in the old days so this technology is really doing us some good uh I have U just about finished what I want say here and I have a little practice of God this is almost embarrassing I’m really kind of imposing on you but when I was in the sixth grade back in Nebraska I went to school there with a fellow who became a famous television personality and he used to laugh at me all the time and uh he he would come here to the Riviera and get $550,000 well I come here and I get a free lunch and uh anyway when I was in the sixth grade I I thought I could sing and what and the teacher assured me that I couldn’t sing but I wanted her to give me a try and I got up in front of the class and not a damn thing came out and everybody laughed at me and I was 38 years old before I could finally sing a song in public and that came about by the way through AA and so I kept on I’m still s uh taking singing lessons today at age 80 and uh I sang a few years ago for an older couple that got married out in Palm Springs at an aviation convention a guy came up later and he said God I always wished I could sing now I wish you could and but anyway I I have this song that I wrote using a tune that was developed up in Canada and it’s called once there were Founders and it’s a tribute to Bill and Bob and that’s the way I’d like to close my talk once there were Founders two men we esteem they had a vision a sort of a dream and though they had struggles they had never complain I wish they were with us again once there was darkness no answer was known each of us faced a grim future alone then came their vision and New Life appeared our Founders were with us back then can you imagine their place in the universe higher than princes or Kings they open the gates to a new way of life and all of the Wonder it brings once there were Founders we honor them still a doctor named Bob and a broker named Bill dim was the path when their Journey begun I feel there now with us again and over the long years their stories were told and lost souls began to return to the fold all that they told us turned out to be true I wish they were with us again can you imagine their place in the universe higher than princes or Kings they open the gates to a new way of life and all of the Wonder it brings once there were Founders both gentle and kind they gave us this program it’s yours and its mine when we came broken they helped us to men I wish they were with us again so remember the gift from the founders we love with help from our friends and the power above each day we have is a journey begun I feel there now with us again yes I feel there now with us again now this was early in 1942 then I lived in the valo California area for about a year and did quite a bit of drinking there the um now that’s where I heard the term wio uh that’s right next to Napa the Napa Valley where all the wine is produced and wine was so cheap there there were little neighborhood stores with barrels in the back you could go in and fill a fruit Jar full of wine for 15 or 20 cents person anybody who could mooch 50 cents on the street could stay drunk all day but I didn’t want to be a wio and uh CU there’d be one or two goofy guys and say he’s a wio uh but I wound up drinking a lot of wine it was only after I got an AA that I discovered that a wio is no different than a beero or a whiskey o we we we drink it for the alcohol that’s all no matter that’s what we’re looking for and um anyway uh if you see a bunch of guys who are sitting around drinking wine they’re not partial to wine if you bring in a bottle of chivis Regal they’ll drink that too you then I got back to Nebraska somehow and after a few months I joined the Navy in May of 1943 and I I don’t know if it’s a coincidence or not but the war started turning in our favor just that month that I signed up but it wasn’t due to any expertise or action on my part and in fact I I have to admit that if everybody in the armed C Services had operated at my level of competence Hitler would have wound up in the White House H but anyway I thought that the thing you were supposed to do in the Navy was drink and of course there were a lot of people in the Navy who didn’t drink but that was my impression so I did a lot of drinking in San Diego and places like that and when I went home on leave I look back on that uh those were considered joyous times there and now I look back back on it as being very very sick and uh some bad things happened in the Navy but none of it got on the record but there was one event that stood out I was on an amphibious type of ship they called it an LST it had bow doors would go right up on the beach and disgorge vehicles tanks and so on and we were out in the Western Pacific on these island hopping campaigns it was the closing year of World War II by that time and we didn’t drink on the ship we couldn’t drink on the ship but They Carried beer and when we went somewhere we could have a liberty party ashore they would give you let you go ashore and give you three cans of beer and we were anchored in the Philippines all loaded up with troops and supplies off the island of Samar and they let some of us go ashore to a recreation area on the beach and as I got out of the boat we used our Landing boats for Liberty boats a Filipino came up and his shirt was stuffed with bottles which he said was potato whiskey it was in beer beer bottles and I had no idea of buying any of that it was $5 a bottle it was not because it was $5 but I was afraid of the stuff we had been warned you know that some of the stuff you might drink could be pretty bad so I had my three cans of beer and another guy gave me his three cans of beer and then another guy sold me his three cans and suddenly there’s no beer left on that beach what did I do I looked up the potato whiskey man and I bought one bottle and I remember buying a second bottle and then the next thing I knew it was uh 4:00 in the morning 0400 Navy time and I was in the boat on the bottom of the boat they had hoisted it on the davits and just left me there and God what an awful thing it was somebody had come up and thrown up on me and uh or done something like that that’s what was always happening you know there was always somebody coming in and urinating on my bed when I drank uh excuse me so anyway I didn’t get anything out of that experience until after I got an AA a few days later we were uh we were on the invasion of okanawa which was April 1st 1945 and I got a sh a picture from the Navy of my ship at in that day and I think I was still sick several days later but it didn’t occur to me to look back at that experience and realize that I had when I was perfectly sober perfectly dry I could turn down something that appeared to be dangerous but after nine cans of beer I threw all caution to the winds and that’s what happens to alcoholics with with your good intentions you can have the best of intentions and then after a few drinks Everything Changes there’s a movement now I’ve picked up something on the Internet they call it harm reduction they try to teach alcoholics to reduce the amount of harm that might be caused during a drunk and maybe not to quit all together but to behave more responsibly and sensibly you know we’ve tried all that you know we you you ever try to get an alcoholic to give you his keys his car keys you know they don’t do that the harm reduction would be of course to give your car keys not D drive and do things like that but it just doesn’t happen that way uh once an alcoholic has a few drinks all bets are off well I went back to uh got discharged from the Navy in late 1946 Had a Good Conduct Medal one one enlistment with a no nothing on my record but that was I wasn’t entitled to that because I’d done a lot of things that were pretty bad even stolen government property and sold it and stuff like that none of that got on the record so I had this Good Conduct Medal honorable discharge and all that went back to Nebraska and you know I stayed continuously drunk until the money I had saved up was gone and by 1947 uh I started getting shut off in bars now and then I’d go down to Omaha and go in a nice bar and maybe have a couple drinks and then the bartender would come over and take the glasses away so I wouldn’t throw them at him and tell me to to take a hike so you know something must have happened I these bartenders must have Radars so they know who bad actor is going to be well I wasn’t always that bad I said some bad things but I never got really physically abusive uh Thro threw anything around or anything like that and then uh I wound up out in Idaho where my dad lives and never got along well with my dad which I regret today uh that not even after I got sober it never was all that comfortable but I stayed there for a while and my drinking started to cause problems and finally I left briefly and wound up up on the Idaho Oregon border destitute and ashamed to go back to where my dad lived so I went out and I went to work on a railroad Gandy gang now these were guys who worked up and down the Union Pacific Railroad they lived in railroad cars and they worked on the tracks and God that was an experience there uh the food wasn’t bad the the railroad cars uh the accommodations here at the Riviera much better I can tell you that and uh but these guys what scared me was the lives these guys had led some of them had worked up and down that railroad for 15 or 20 years and only had the clothes on their backs and they’d been in every jail on the line they talk about well you don’t want to get picked up in pocatella the cops are terrible there or Salt Lake City is a lousy place to get arrested in it was that sort of thing well I didn’t want to be like those guys but you know I got a paycheck and went into town and uh started shooting a game of pool with a guy and and he handed me a beer and my God the next morning I wake up in jail and I don’t even know it’s a little town of Weezer Idaho and wake up in this jail at 1:30 and and didn’t even know how I got there I mean about 6:30 or 7:30 what had happened I found out is at 1:30 in the morning they had found me passed out on the sidewalk well it’s not too cold there but you can see how I could have fallen asleep in some place of freezing temperatures and frozen to death this what happens to alcoholics too and uh there again somebody had thrown up on me in that jail and so I had to wash my shirt out and go into Police Court with a wet shirt and everything but the judge kind of took pity on me uh he found a they found a card in my wallet said I’d been the Navy and he thought I’d been HT or something well I got out of that and then I went back and stayed with my dad for a while and then I go over to Boise and get drunk over there and take a cab 30 miles without a scent to pay the cab driver can you imagine well I don’t know what I had in mind but anyway I got a 10day jail sentence out of that well uh shortly after that I had another argument with my dad and left and hitchhiked all the way down to Ventura California where my sister and brother-in-law lived and I spent that summer there I got a job working in the oil fields which I’m completely not fitted for uh whenever I see a picture of guys working on an oil Derek I just shot you know thinking think what that work was like and also with a hangover but anyway my drinking got so bad that summer that in October I is October of 1948 I get in touch with AA for the first time and I went to my first AA meeting in Santa Paula California little town about 9 or 10 miles from Ventura now I fell in love with the people I met an AA there uh two of the first three AA members I met were from akan which of course we consider the birthplace of AA one of them was one of the first 2,000 members of AA and the other one his son-in-law was one of the first 200 members I didn’t know it but that was the first step on my becoming an amateur historian in AA and they talked about some of the people Dr Bob’s wife was still living they mentioned Bill doson who was AA number three an anonymous number three you read his story in the big book and one of them called him the guinea pig but two years later about about four years later I would meet Bill and there was something would come up about that but anyway I stayed sober five months and then somehow joined the army and I spent seven months in the Army and got kicked out with an undesirable discharge now that was a very bad period in my life that what happened in that s months would be almost a story in itself uh wound up going to Europe but not seeing it except from a railroad car or from the guard house or the hospital window or something like that my wife and I went to Europe about four years ago and um had a really quite a nice time and I found out what it looked like it uh the uh but anyway I I got back to New Brunswick New Jersey got kicked out of the got this undesirable discharge and and woke up the next morning on a lawn on the edge of town and my money was gone my belt and my tie my railroad ticket and even my undesirable discharge there’s somebody in New Brunswick who has an undesirable discharge he didn’t earn now about 17 years later I uh a retired Navy man helped me get that discharge upgraded through a board in Washington so it’s a a a general discharge now they got that changed they’ve become a little more tolerant of alcoholism and the military services I don’t think they throw people out with that kind of a stigma attached to them but that’s what happened to me and maybe it was my comeuppance for getting that Good Conduct Medal and everything when I was in the Navy the one I didn’t deserve then I get this undesirable discharge which I did deserve and I went back to Nebraska and lived with my stepmother or my mother and my stepdad uh for the winter of 1949 and 1950 and I still look back with some regret about imposing on them there I was 24 years old and I worked a few times but mostly I was just a kind of a leech and what I was though was also in deep depression and fear probably almost suicidal and everything but in the back of my mind I knew that AA worked and finally in April a neighbor lady took me out to the state hospital which was on a hill overlooking my hometown and uh I remember when I was growing up there people would always talk about out on the hill you know boy you act like that boy they’ll take you out on the hill and this was a state hospital in Nebraska Norfork and you know I’ve always lived in places that for some reason people made fun of they made fun of Norfork because of the state hospital and then later when I lived 19 years in Jackson Michigan where was the world’s largest prison W prison they made fun of Jackson because the prison now I’ve lived in Toledo we’ve lived in Toledo 33 years and people make fun of Toledo and I don’t know why uh they had a contest up in Min Minneapolis and the first prize was a week in Toledo and the second prize was two weeks in Toledo and you know John Denver had his song about Toledo so on but where was I well I got out to that state hospital and I spent seven weeks there and I got back into AA then and and I’ve been in AA ever since been sober ever since never taking another drink and never stopped going to meetings and that was the start of it but I had to be in this state hospital and very humiliating place to be in but it was a good thing uh the one of the AA members who used all was also a minister up in Detroit he would say some of the worst things that happened to me have been the best things and he used his alcoholism as an example it was one of the worst things but it became one of the best things because of what he found in AA and so I have to say that about this state hospital and things like that sometimes they appear to be bad breaks but if they Le lead to something good well they weren’t so bad maybe that was our higher poers way of getting our attention and getting us on the right track certainly it worked that way for me and um few months after I got out of the state hospital I uh was active in AA then going to meetings regularly and I moved out to Pontiac Michigan where I had relatives and they owned a little machine shop and I lived with them for 6 months and worked in in their shop and uh these relatives were very kind to me uh they didn’t think much of AA though they were quite religious people in some sense and they just thought that you know people that drank they were just bad drinking was bad and so on and U my cousin their daughter had married into a quite affluent family so they were all pretty well off and so it was very nice to be with these people they would invite me to dinner in their homes and everything and so just here I was a dtit destitute guy just getting started in AA and and had these nice things happening to me but you know the the irony of this is that now 55 years later the the one family had a very nice family restaurant uh between Pontiac and Detroit a very profitable one and then the machine shop also was uh very successful successful but younger members of the families took those businesses over and drank them up the both businesses are gone today and it was all because of of these younger members of the family and I remember that they looked upon me as a kind of a lost sheep you know the The Prodigal Son kind of that you’re taken back but without knowing it I was on the right track because I had AA and some of these other people came along and developed drinking problems and they didn’t have AA they didn’t have what we found and it didn’t work so so well uh I when I was uh the 55th anniversary of going out to Michigan I called up my cousin’s husband uh and wanted him to have lunch with me up in Bloomfield Hills and I just wanted to tell him again that I was grateful that they had given me this job when I came out there but he had lost a lot of money money over selling the Machine Shop to his former son-in-law and he said the son-in-law had even taken $100,000 out of the business and come out here to Las Vegas to invest it and of course that was gone and stuff like that so I have have a lot to be grateful for and uh anybody who helps us along the way sometimes even people who try to hurt us maybe we should be grateful to to him because of what lessons we learned in the process so right from that start then things started to improve I started to work regularly I went down to Detroit and worked in a engine plant there for a little over a year and then in 1952 I got a job in Jackson Michigan with a very fine company it just came about through some miraculous uh you know almost like coincidences but that’s where I lived from 1952 until 1972 except for one year when I went down to New York on what appeared to be a great job opportunity didn’t work out all that well but anyway from 1952 until 72 lived there in Michigan you know Michigan is in the shape of a a mitten and this part of it we call the thumb and Jackson is here and I like to think of Michigan as being God’s hands and I was in the palm of his hand when I live lived in this town because had fine AA and that’s where I met my trophy wife in 1959 I had become an amateur actor and that was one another things that AA allowed me to do and I had to part in the The Great sebastians and there’s one scene where Sebastian runs across the stage in his underwear and she was doing the artwork for the show and I know that when she saw me in my underwear she said I had to have that man anyway uh uh I’d like to talk a little bit about AA history well a couple of the things that did happen to me though as as a result of the program one of them uh I was working in this engine plant in Detroit and I’d always had trouble working with people getting along with other people but with the AA program I was trying to follow the principles you know when you’re working with people trying to be considerate of the other person and so on trying to do your part but there was one guy that was making himself very obnoxious and we had a part a job the working on these engines it was kind of an assembly line where you push the engines Along on rollers we were putting special Parts on these engines and he kept telling me not to put my hand behind the engine when I pushed it to the next station well sometimes s I’d forget and one day I I started to push the engine and I forgot about that and I just happened to look around and he was pushing the other one and he had a look of rage on his face and just like that and the two came together and I just managed to pull my hand out in time well that would have broken every bone in in my hand now there was a wrench laying right there and just for a moment an electric current went through me and I felt like picking up that wrench and working him over just just just a moment you know and then suddenly I had no feeling at all I just went on about my business and uh I suppose maybe in two or three weeks he was bumped to another job that’s the way it kind of worked in that factory well that was in 1951 or 52 and you know if if IID picked up that wrench I would still know everything about that guy and I mean it just would have changed everything completely but thanks to the program and the fact that I was trying to follow these principles I think something was protecting me and protecting him too of course so this this is the way it works there are times when we’re out of control we uh emotionally and everything else the big book even says there are times when we’re up without defense against the first drink and it’s a good thing to remember that at all times well I think there are times we without defense against anger and that kind of thing too so that was one case where I just felt the program working and then when I got a better job working up in Jackson I was working with a bunch of young fellows who are better educated than I I was really only a high school dropout I had gone to college a little bit after the war but it uh I didn’t feel like I I was a high school graduate uh even and I was working with these fellas they were all college graduates and everything and and their coffee breaks turned out to be gossip sessions well I enjoyed being included in these sessions but then I didn’t enjoy them too because I’d feel guilty later on the day we would have talked about somebody and I’d see the person later on in the building and and I feel kind of guilty well it’s the AA program that works when you do something wrong why you know you you don’t feel right about it so I started mentally withdrawing from these gossip sessions and you know a funny thing now with with those sessions you were always afraid to leave first or then they sto gossiping about you but the moment I quit mentally engaging in that cooperating with it I stopped fearing being gossiped about so I think if you you’re afraid of people talking about you you better look at your own thoughts and behavior maybe you’re projecting something that you’re doing because when you quit doing it well you lose the fear of it that was another thing where I saw the AA program working and also as time went on they had a company magazine and in 1955 now I’d always wanted to do some writing now here I am a high school dropout and everything and didn’t even do well in English classes didn’t learn all the rules and yet here I feel I should write well I I started writing articles for the company magazine it was a pretty good magazine that went out to 40,000 people and they spent quite a money a lot of money printing it mostly articles about customers and that kind of thing well before long I’m editor of the magazine and then I get an article published that year in the AA Grapevine and uh that was the first of 55 that have been published over the years and then that did something for me so kind of through the back door I I became an industrial or business writer and I’ve been that ever since and I’ve had five books published by hazeldon which I’ll mention later and I want to tell you that all of those books would be bests sellers except that millions of people chosen not to buy them well anyway there was this interest in AA history that kept on in 1951 for example Bill Wilson came out to Detroit and he was barnstorming the whole country to promote what he called the third Legacy this was the general service conference Dr Bob had died the previous November and Bill was always talking about what’s what’s going to happen to AA after the Undertaker gets us Founders see he was always putting it in that kind of a language and so the idea of the general service conference or the third Legacy as he called it uh the first two legacies were recovery and unity and the third one was service and that was the general service conference and so he was promoting that I went down to Detroit on a very cold night to hear him and but I never met bill but then in 56 I did and I wrote to him and got a very long letter that just astounded me and got to know him and 1958 went to Founders Day in akan and took some pictures of him at Dr Bob’s grave site uh a service they started having there there were only about three dozen people well you know I came back 20 years later and there were thousands of people at at at in this Cemetery covering the whole cemetery and uh quite a thing but I went down to akan in 1952 in November and spent a day with Bill datson just to find out more about how AA had got we consider akan the birthplace of AA and I I’ve been there many times was there this past Sunday they had a gratitude Sunday for oldtimers and this was in the house right next to Dr Bob’s house which by the way is now an AA Shrine they’ve even got a monument in the front front yard denoting that this is where AA was started very thing that Dr Bob didn’t want for himself why they have they bought his house and then they bought the house next door for the archives and um so every November they have a gratitude Sunday for oldtimers but every time I go over there I get a strong feeling about how Bill and Bob met there in 1935 and what has taken place since and how we have benefited from it and it was all just the things they did they just did to help themselves because they were desperate people looking for answers but then we have all benefited from it uh Bill somebody asked me the other day now see I heard Bill talk several times and then in 1963 I made a job change went down to New York and I worked for a brief time for the Wall Street Journal and it didn’t really work out in the long run but I was we were down there for about a year living in New Jersey and and uh got to know Bill a lot better I was on the a grapevine editorial board by that time and he would come to the meetings we’d have every month somebody asked me what what was there about Bill that I would remember more than anything and I think it’s that he was a very considerate man one of the most consider considerate people that you could ever met meet there was just something about him uh if if he had ever hurt anybody unintentionally he would just feel terrible about it he was that sort of a person uh Lois even said that Lois his wife even said that he wouldn’t walk across somebody’s lawn you know to take a shortcut or anything like that he he was just considerate of everybody he was a tall man about 6′ three and he talked with a kind of a twang a new you know like some of those new englanders do he had grown up in a little town in Vermont East Dorset which is about 7 miles north of Manchester which is a a resort Town Manchester Vermont still is today you go there and they have very fine uh bread and breakfast and things like it’s a beautiful place in the Green Mountains in Vermont and he had taken a lot of shocks growing up his parents were divorced when he was nine I identified with him on that and his mother was a very abusive person uh but uh she went off to after her parents were divorced her father his father went off to British Columbia he was a quarry man who ran quaries and that kind of thing and then his mother went off to be an osteopathic physician leaving bill and his sister with his her her parents well from one standpoint he his his grandfather was quite well off and so he had everything he needed when he was growing up but they had that sense of Abandonment that their parents had abandoned them and this is an awful thing if if you feel that your parents didn’t really want you I know when my sister took her life she was 45 years old she had a three-year-old daughter and I thought well she’ll never be affected by that and you know a few years ago she wrote to me she’s now 40 years old and has a doctorate and everything else but she felt that her mother had abandoned her when she learned that her mother had taken her life that kind of thing so boy we can really be affected by these things can’t we well anyway Bill became a stock broker in New York and he had a terrible drinking problem and this is all covered in Bill’s story in the big book and uh he he got in touch uh in in 1934 at what turned out to be his last Trum one of his old friends called on him and the fellow’s name was eie eie Thatcher and told Bill about something he had learned from a group called the Oxford Group and Bill found those principles he talks about it in his story had a spiritual experience which I believe Today Was A Touch of Grace a form of Illumination we might call it and then for 5 months he kept sober himself and tried to pass it on to other people now that was that’s what another significant thing about Bill Wilson is having found something good he tried to share it with other people rather than just thinking about himself and uh he went out to akan on a what they call a proxy fight trying to take over a little Machine Tool Company the thing fell apart and it was through that that he called somebody in the Oxford Group and got in touch with Dr Bob and you know we’ve we’ve read about that story many times well Dr Bob was also a vermonter he was about 15 years older than Bill and he was a physician in akan he had gone to medical school now his story you it’s called Dr Bob’s nightmare in the big book he had to change medical schools simply because of his drinking problem he started at the University of Michigan and then wound up with at the Rush Medical College in in Chicago and then got his intern ship in akan at City hospital and after he opened his office he started drinking when he was doing his internship he he hardly ever left the hospital but then he started drinking and uh it was a very sad story what happened to him he was just about out of business completely by the time bill called in 1935 but there’s an interesting thing the Oxford Group had somehow come come to akan in 1933 and uh this was because a member of the Firestone family had been helped by an Oxford grouper and Harvey Firestone the great Tire Pioneer he sponsored this rally and this 1933 rally Dr Bob’s wife attended so did some of the other people who had helped the early AAS and so they started an Oxford Group in akan and Dr Bob started attending these meetings and he tells about it in his personal story about falling in with this group of people he had some kind of a spiritual program that didn’t interest him much but he admired the people because they seemed confident and at ease and all of that and he was uptight all the time so he went to their meetings for two and a half years now listen to all these principles that the kind same kind of principles we have in AA but he got tied every night nonetheless he said well then about 3 weeks before Bill wil called the uh a woman named Henrietta cyberline who was a member of the Oxford Group she decided to have a meeting and get Dr Bob to admit what his real problems were he’ been going to these meetings for two and a half years and never admitted that he was an alcoholic so they all admitted some very embarrassing things about themselves well finally when it got to Dr Bob he said well you folks have been honest with me and I’ll be honest with you I’m a secret Drinker well of course it wasn’t a secret to anybody that he had this problem but he lived in fear that his drinking would be discovered and he’d be kicked out of his Pro profession he was a surgeon uh he was a proctologist that’s a person who operates on a part of the body that gets very little sunlight and I got to know Dr Bob’s son very well by the way and he told me that his father just loved his profession can you imagine loving looking at that all day long uh well anyway uh he made this admission well Bill had come out to akan and he was staying at the Mayflower Hotel there which was the leading hotel in the city and his attempt to take over this little tool machine company fell through uh the stockholders voted and they voted for the other side and Bill lost out and he was there that weekend in 1935 6 months sober maybe $10 in his pocket maybe and a whole weekend facing him and he even thought about going into the bar just to have a soft drink and strike up a conversation well you know that’s a very dangerous thing and he had developed the honesty by this time to know that he couldn’t do that that he wouldn’t come out of that bar sober so he he decided he had to talk to somebody and he went over and called a member or a minister who was a member of the Oxford Group and by gosh the guy gave him 10 names of people who could might help him and he called all 10 of these people but none of them could help him however one of them gave him the name of Henrietta cyberline now this is the very woman who three weeks earlier had gotten had flushed Dr Bob out gotten him to admit his problems and so she called Dr Bob’s wife and this was the day before Mother’s Day in 1935 and Bob had come home with a potted plant for his wife Anne but he was more potted than the plant and now he was upstairs sleeping it off so Henryetta got her to agree to get Bob to come to her home the next day for dinner and because she had this man from New York who had called her and he had said he was a rum Hound from New York who had gotten sober and a member of the Oxford Group and he he wanted to talk to somebody who had a drinking problem and when this call came she said this is Mana from Heaven this was guidance this was one of those Miracles you know three weeks before Dr Bob had admitted that he had a problem now you see what was so important there was that he had made this admission which gave her a right to call his home and say she had somebody there to help him if he hadn’t made that admission he could have just denied it no I don’t need any help and so on it wouldn’t have worked and we know that from our AA experience so Bill or Bob shows up the next day and he said he would talk to this mug for 15 minutes and they had dinner B Bob couldn’t eat anything and then Henrietta shed them into an adjoining room she was living in what was called The Gate House of Stan hewit Stan heit was the big 55 room mansion that had belonged in the cyberline family for 40 40 year that belonged in to the cyberline family for 40 years Stan heit means stone is found here and of course later on Bill would call Dr Bob a rock so that’s where he found him to it Stan heit but anyway Bill starts talking to Bob and instead of the 15 minutes they talk for five hours because Bob said that this was the first living human being he’d ever talked to who knew what he was talking about and in in terms of actual experience well an Bob’s wife was so excited about this that after a couple of weeks she invited Bill to come live with them in their home this home that is now the uh the uh Shrine there in in akan and uh a couple weeks later Bob has to go on a medical convention trip down to Atlantic City and he comes back drunk well Smitty Dr Bob’s son told me that as soon as Bill knew that Dr Bob was drunk he packed his bags and was going to go back to New York it was just another one of the failures he had been working with people for five or six months and nobody was getting sober he was the only person staying sober but Anne talked him into stain to give it one more try and so he agreed now I’m sure he felt pretty bad about that here’s the man of the house who’s drunk and he’s staying there and everything he must have almost felt like a trespasser or something but he said he would and so for the next three days he and Bob were in one room together bedroom and adjoining Cs and on the third day now Dr Bob was supposed to perform surgery and he depended on other doctors for his referrals and of course so much information had gone out in the at medical community that he wasn’t getting many referrals uh the story was that if you sent your patient to Dr Bob you risk his ass and I I shouldn’t have said that apologize but uh anyway the day he was supposed to perform the surgery Dr Bob woke up and he and he turned looked over to Bill and he says I’m going to go through with it and Bill said the surgery and Bob says no I’m going to follow your program do whatever it takes to get sober and stay that way well Bill takes him to the hospital gives him a bottle of beer on the way to the hospital and that was the last drunk he ever had then bill goes back home and the whole day they don’t hear from him and they wonder what has happened well what happen he finished the surgery and then he started going around akan seeing all the people he was on the outs with see working what we call the ninth step and he came home a very happy man and he never had another drink and then he really became a Powerhouse uh he got that group going in in akan akan had 80 members when New York only had 20 he was a much better 12 stepper than bill ever was and Bill would have been the first to admit it uh well Bill always dramatized things he talked about that that Bob came home very happy and then he also talked about the operation bill says the patient lived well who in the hell ever died of a hemorrhoid operation you know but uh anyway that’s where AA got started over there from that event and it just it it just always takes me away when I go over there and think about that and a lot of thousands of other people feel the same way now when I went there in 1952 and I spent the day with Bill doson who was AA number three and uh bill was a kind of a folksy type of guy that that if you were going down south and you went into a a general store and there’s a guy sitting there on a Cracker Barrel you might think of that kind of a guy that always had lots of stories and everything very handsome guy had wavy white hair thick white hair gosh I’d love to have a head of hair like that and uh just talked in a kind of a draw he had come up from Kentucky and he’d worked in the tire factories and then gone to law school and he was a lawyer and his wife whose name by the way was also Henrietta she was a matron in the akan city jail in the women’s section of the akan city jail well Bill and I we drove all over akan and he showed me where they held this soap box deres and where they had built the zeppelins in the 1920s and 30s they built durables there in akan and everything and we went up to St Thomas Hospital which is where Dr Bob and sister IGN had treated thousands of Alcoholics sister ignatia by this time was in was in Cleveland but I had a good conversation with her successor a sister mered but while I was talking to Bill doson I I mentioned that term that I’d heard from these people out in Ventura the guinea pig and boy I saw his face darken you know when I said that he didn’t like being called the guinea pig and I asked him how he got got that term and he said they were having a big meeting and Bill Wilson was talking and Bill doson and some of the others were back there in a row and when Bill got to mentioning to the point of mentioning uh Bill doson he turned around and gestured and said the guinea pig and you know I think Bill dson had a resentment about that for the rest of his life well would you like to be called the guinea pig uh and anyway uh I I met Bill doson a couple of times after that and even stopped once in 1958 to visit his wife his Widow by that time at the akan city jail in the women’s section where she was a matron just a very kindly woman just wonderful warm uhhe hearted person and I thought in the in the 1970s that she had passed on I used to see her at the founders day in akan and I went there about 1980 and somebody said that no she was still living with her son over in Firestone Park so I called her up and this book Dr Bob and the old-timers had just come out and I took a copy over well by this time she was blind and uh I read the parts that pertained to her well anyway uh time went on and I continued to be a a writer and working for this company and so on and uh the company was acquired by Libby owns Ford and they transferred me to Toledo Ohio where I’ve lived for the last 33 years and um I’d always wanted to write about Bill Wilson in 1975 a biography came out about Bill and then I heard that the fellow who wrote Dr Bob’s biography was also working on bills well then a few months later I heard that the man had died well now here’s another one of those coincidences in 1973 I’d gone to New York for a meeting representing the company for the Council of Better Business bureaus and the guy running the meeting was a vice president of this Council and so uh it was at the University Club in New York City and as we got towards noon he turned and he said said well uh here’s the bar you can all have a drink and we’ll have lunch shortly and he told me that I could go have a drink and I said well I don’t drink and he said well neither do I and so he compared Mo notes and we’re both AA members and this is Bob Pearson but what do you know a few years later he becomes the general manager of the general service offices in New York so when I heard that uh there was nobody there to write Bill’s biography I got in touch with him when down to New York and so and they gave me the assignment of working on it this book I pass it on and I worked on it for the next two years and after I delivered two wonderful manuscripts to them they hired a couple of other writers who screwed it up and uh it finally came out in 1984 as pass it on and I had wanted to call it Bill W and his friends and I even saw a handshake on the cover as being symbolic of Bill he was a guy that was always had his hand out to help people but in the process of working on that manuscript I spent some time a couple of weekends up at Stepping Stones interviewing Lois Bill’s wife you know she was 5 years older than bill so I suppose when I interviewed her she was about 89 years old but just a wonderful person and the first time I went up there now this is in 1980 uh I got up there on a Friday and there was a woman staying there with her uh and the woman just looked like she’d been terribly ill or something I don’t think she weighed more than 80 pounds and her name was Edna and she just fluttered around seemed anxious to do anything she could to help and when I would interview Lois and or read something to her uh Edna would listen listen in and I thought maybe she was an alanon or something like that and anyway on Monday a man came in an old car to take Edna to a hospice now what I didn’t know and I only learned afterwards was that Edna was a housekeeper who had worked for Lois some years before and she was now working for some family some affluent family as a housekeeper and she got sick and went to the hospital hospital and then she couldn’t stay in the hospital for any longer I don’t know what for what reason and the family wouldn’t let her come back and stay in her room until she could go to a hospice well after all she was no longer of any use to them and in desperation she remembered Lois and called up Lois told her she had no place to stay Lois said come on over and she went over and was there until she uh went to the hospice and about 2 months later later she died thank you for listening to sober Sunrise if you enjoyed today’s episode please give it a thumbs up as it will help share the message until next time have a great day