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We hope that you enjoy today's speaker. >> I'm a drunk. My name is Bill Duncan.

>> I I want to thank the committee for inviting me here uh to speak to share with you tonight. I'd also like them to thank them for making this room so much like my old home group used to be in New Jersey. We had a very small room with no cross ventilation and it was a smoking meeting and one night I happened to be the first one out of the room and I opened the door and three in Indians answered back.

Uh there was one thing I didn't tell the committee when I accepted the assignment. And so I I better warn you that uh the one thing I get criticized about the most is being too enthusiastic about this program. People say you act like you're trying to sell something, you know.

And uh one guy came up to me and said that was the most beautiful sermon I ever heard. I could have killed him. Uh, but I I do I'm I'm a little like the Catholic priest who was assigned to a post that nobody wanted.

They had this rundown parish in the ghetto and they had this young enthusiastic priest. So, they sent him in there. Uh, they were going to close it down anyway.

And they figured we'll see how long he lasts. And sure enough, two months later, he was asking to see the bishop. And the bishop figured he'd had it.

And when the young priest came in, the bishop said, "Well, father, how do you like that parish we sent you to?" And the young priest said, "Oh, your grace." He said, "It's wonderful. I love it. I love everything about it.

I'm having a wonderful time down there. There just one thing that's bothering me, and that is the young people are not attending the church. And I was here to ask your permission to take out some of the front pews and install bucket seats so we could get the young people to come." The bishop looked at him, said, "Well, all right, father.

You go ahead. Don't expect too much, but go ahead, try it if you want to." Two months later, the young priest is back and the bishop figured, "Well, I guess those didn't work." And he asked him, "Well, how's everything going, father?" And the priest said, "Well, your grace is it's wonderful." He said, "I want to thank you for letting me put in the bucket seats because the young people are now attending church. In fact, we've got a very good congregation.

It's going very well. But one thing still bothers me. These young people are not practicing their religion.

and I was here to ask your permission to install a drive-in confessional. The bishop, the bish, what? He shook his head, but he said, "All right, father." He said, "As long as you don't go over over your budget, go ahead and stall it." Two months later, the young priest is back.

He has been summoned by the bishop. And as he walks in, the bishop says, "Father, first of all, we want to tell you how delighted we are at the wonderful job you've done in that parish. We've just about given up on it." He says, "You've got a going concern down there.

You've got a church that's full and lively and it's it's a community church and it's doing beautifully. He said, "You worked miracles there. I I don't know how you did it." He said, "I thought your ideas were pretty far out." He said, "Those bucket seats you put in, you can keep them.

That's all right." He said, "That drive-in confessional, I thought that idea was too much, but you can keep that, too. There's just one thing. That neon sign you put over it, the one that reads toot and teller, go to hell." That's got to go.

But I'd like to tell you a few of the reasons why I'm so enthusiastic about this program. I I go back to the day that I got out of the alcoholic ward of Nickerbacher Hospital. And while I was spending 5 days in that ward being detoxified, they called it dried out in those days.

Uh I had I had had the principle of honesty drummed into me pretty well. At least that's the one thing I had grabbed on to. So as soon as I got in the car with my sponsor, I told him, "Look, Tom," I said, "I know I can't make 90 days." And in New Jersey, we had a different system.

We didn't have the chip system, but after 90 days of sobriety, they give you a little triangular bronze pin with a G on the top, an AA on the bottom, and a little dot in the middle, which stood for you. I said, "I can't get the pen, but I'm going to give this my best try and do the best I can." Well, in an easy desert live and let live sort of way, he came down on me like a ton of breaks. And he explained, "We don't stay sober for 90 days.

We don't stay sober for 9 days. We do this one day at a time." And he he spent the next hour and a half, which it took us to get to my home in North Brunswick, drilling this into my rum dum skull. And when we got to my house, I opened the front door and we lived in a salt box.

And when you opened the front door, you were in the living room. There was no entryway or anything. I'm in the living room.

And there's my wife sitting on a sofa facing the front door. And the first thing I heard was, "I want you to understand one thing." And I froze. I knew she was wound up to say something.

I thought I better let her say it. And the next thing she said was, "If you ever take another drink," and she went on to outline what was going to happen. That it was the end of the marriage.

She was leaving me forever. There was no possibility of any reconciliation. I don't remember the whole thing, but that was the general tenor of it.

And when she got all through and was finished, I gave her my sweetest smile and I got I was honest. I said, "Honey, I'm sorry. I can't promise you that.

All I can promise you is I'm not going to take a drink today." It was then 6:30 in the evening. We had spent $85 that I had to go out and borrow for me to go through Nickerbacher. And if looks could have killed, I would not be your speaker tonight.

But the beautiful ending of this story is that was the only promise I ever made to my wife about my drinking and I kept it. I didn't take a drink that day, but I have not found it necessary to take a drink or any chemical substitute since that day. And that day was May 29th, 1953.

You got a dinosaur here. I want you to be very clear about who and what you are applauding. You are applauding yourselves and thousands of people like you and a power greater than all of you put together because by myself I could do nothing.

I could not achieve that. I couldn't achieve one day of sobriety by myself. but with the help of thousands of people and as I say a power greater than all of you put together.

I'm here tonight speaking to you as a reasonably sober alcoholic at this point. Uh I' I'd like to tell you a little story with malice of forethought. You know, I was born on Manhattan Island in New York City and I grew up in New York and Chicago as a big city kid.

I was real street wise and I did real fine except one summer. This was all the time I spent in big cities except one summer I was in a little tiny farm town and it was at one in the same time the most interesting and the most frustrating summer of my life up to that point. Uh, for one thing, everything was new and different, and that was nice.

But the bad side was that the kids around there kind of, I think, resented the fact that I was a city slicker. Found out that the simplest things, simplest things they knew about, I knew nothing about. So, they're constantly putting me down and making fun of me because I didn't know these things that they knew all about.

And it made it, you know, both both interesting and frustrating. And there was I had I was under strict orders. I was a very little kid.

I was small. I was under strict orders to be home every evening before dark. And I stuck to this except one day and I worked out all the shortcuts from different people's houses.

So I knew how to get home in a hurry. And one day it was raining and I went inside the house to play with this guy. And by the rain stopped and all of a sudden I looked outside and it is already dark and I am in deep trouble.

So I said goodbye out of the house and shot for home. and the route home from this guy's house, there was a path across the corner of the local cemetery and I went flying along that path and I got about halfway along and all of a sudden my feet were in midair and couple and I I had learned something about playing ringolivio and sitting and jumping six feet on the concrete. I'd learned about falling so I fell loose and I didn't get hurt.

I landed in the bottom of a grave that somebody had dug in this path and and uh I pick myself up and I have got to get out of here. I've got to get home. So I go to the end of the thing and I try to climb out and I can't get a grip.

The pebbles in the dirt keep coming down. I can't get a grip on anything. And I thought, how am I going to get out of here?

And then I remembered I'd seen a movie the week before and a mountain climber had been in a narrow pass and he got his back against one side and his legs against the other and he went up that way. So I I I couldn't see a thing. It's pitch black in here, but I could feel and I could feel the grave was narrow, you know, and I got my back against one side, my feet against the other, and I grunted an awful lot, but I didn't get any progress.

So that didn't work. So then I got a bright idea. I went to the far end and I paced off.

patch based off 10 steps. And then I turned around and I counted and I ran and I jumped and I grabbed at the top, you know, and well, the rain had made the grass wet and it was slippery and I slipped off and fell back down in and boy I was really desperate now. I know I'm going to and all of a sudden I heard running feet.

I thought, "Ah, help us at hand." And I backed off to the far end and a couple of seconds later I hear bump right in front of me. And I was all ready to ask this guy, "How do I get out of here?" And suddenly real probably some simple way out of this thing. And if I ever let him know that I didn't know it, I'll never hear the end of it.

So, I'll wait and listen to what he does. And I'll do the same thing. Well, I heard him go down to the other end and I heard the dirt and pebbles coming down.

Didn't work for him either. And then I heard some awful grunting sounds and I realized he'd seen the same movie. And then I heard him.

He went to the other end and I could hear him. He was counting them off out loud as he paid 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10. And he stopped right in front of me and turned around.

And I could feel that he was getting ready to take off. So at that point, I reached up and touched him on the shoulder and he made it. tell you why I told you that story.

I am praying that tonight something I say will touch one of you people on the shoulder and you'll make it because that's what I like to see in AA and and I've got good credentials to do it. Let me tell I came to the alcoholic ward of Nickerbacher very honestly. I started drinking in my own home at the ripe old age of 13 because of a brilliant idea which was theoretically correct which my stepfather had.

He knew that I was soon to leave the parental nest and he knew that I would be doing what all the smart young people in that day and age were doing and that was break the law. I told you you had a dinosaur. He knew I would be going out and drinking.

At the time the law of the land was prohibition. And he he was right, you know, but the thing was he was going to teach me like how to drink like a gentleman before I did this. Well, he succeeded beyond his wildest dreams because unfortunately or fortunately I had one of the primary symptoms of this disease of alkalism.

And I did not know this anything about the disease or the symptom. But what I had was what the doctors call a high degree of tissue tolerance to alcohol. My friends used to call it a hollow leg.

Said, "Where do you put it all?" I used to go with my parents to an Italian speak easy where they served musketell and coffee cups. This musketel, you will not be able to buy anything remotely approaching it today. This was prohibition.

And this musketel had extra alcohol in it. You could get a beautiful buzz about that stuff, believe thee me. And I used to drink cup for cup with my folks and walk out of there walking a straight line.

My speech was not slurred. I drank like a gentleman. I could hold my liquor.

And two years later, I went away to college at the ripe old age of 15. And I was physically and mentally I was able to compete within reason. But socially, psychologically, uh, emotionally, I was like a fish out of water.

I was way out of my depth until I discovered that there was one area in which I excelled. For instance, I went out on a triple date with three gals and three guys. And uh before the evening was over, I had to take the other two guys home and put them to bed.

And then the girls and I went to a 24-hour restaurant called the Purple Parrot and had hamburgers and French fries. And everybody was saying, "Gee, you sure can't hold your liquor. You know, you sure drink like a man." And all this kind of nonsense.

And my ego went up to hm, you know, I felt great. And I progressed. I I had a real alcoholic college career, by the way.

I metriculated at Northwestern University in 1931. Two years later, I stepped out for a drink. And 20 years after that, I graduated from Rutgers University.

And between the time that I took my last final exam at Ruters and the time that I picked up my sheepkin in Ruters Stadium, I spent five days in the alcoholic ward at Nickerbacher Hospital being dried out because my last and worst two years of my drinking were the last two years I spent in college. And you know I the last year starting in September of that last year I started going to AA started attending AA meetings because along about that time my wife came up with an ultimatum something to the order of you've got to quote do something about your drinking or I'm going to leave and I didn't want her to leave. I loved her and do something had a nasty sound like quit.

And I was wondering how do I get out of this one? And she mentioned aa and this I grabbed it like a drowning man grabs her for a straw. And uh she got me to she ukered me into calling myself because she knew it wouldn't do any good if she called.

And that morning she I didn't even get a chance to have a drink that morning and that was part of my regular routine. So, I'm shaken apart when I called up the office and they told me there was a meeting one town down from me that night in the next town and did I want somebody to come to the house and I said no, I would go to the meeting and I went to the meeting after fortifying myself because at that point after 23 years of drinking I had progressed from being a heavy occasional drinker to being a heavy daily drinker to being a heavy continuous addictive drinker. I was completely addicted to alcohol and had not admitted it to myself yet, but I was.

And the one thing as a result, the one thing I was terrified of was that somehow you people were going to stop me from drinking. So I went to my first meeting full of fear and you know it was almost a tragedy at that meeting for me. I walked in the door and there was a group of about four or five guys standing there talking and they looked up, took one good look at me and went right back to talking.

And I thought, "Oh my god, they don't want me here either." Because by that time, I was persona non grat almost anywhere you care to name. People were saying Duncan is a nice guy, but and you know what the butt meant. And then another fellow came over and he wasn't even a member of that group and he stuck out his hand, you know, he saw me there.

He spotted me clear across the room and he came rushing across and he stuck out his hand said, "Hi, my name is Tom Anderson and I'm an alcoholic and I waited for the snapper and it didn't come." He said, "And if you have a problem with drinking, you're in the right place." And I told him, "Well, I was there to find out if I did or not." I I still can't I still can't imagine what possessed me to say that, but the truth was I had a horrendous problem drinking, but I I hadn't faced it. I was denying it even to myself. And so, I stuck around in that meeting and I heard two things that gave me hope.

The first was a lot of laughter. Now I didn't hear I didn't think anything I didn't get any thing that made me laugh but everybody there laughed and that was good because I saw these people enjoyed themselves and the other thing was somebody in that meeting I think there was a leader in three speakers they had uh anyway one of them was bigger up in the air like this he said there are no musts in AA and I said whoa that was what I was waiting for because if he was telling the truth and I had a feeling that these people were telling the truth. That meant that I could go on drinking and be a member of AA.

Right. Yeah, that's right. I became a drinking member of AA.

Now, if you're new or if you're a guest, I must tell you that we have two kinds of members basically. Drinking members and non-drinking members. I prefer to call them the learners and the teachers.

Today, thank God I am one of the learners and the people who have tried it, who continued to drink or tried it again after varying lengths of sobriety have taught me what'll happen to me beyond any shadow of a doubt. And I I am very grateful to them for uh the lessons they taught me. But in the beginning, I was a teacher and I didn't know, you know, it was funny.

It it was wonderful the way they treated me and I didn't understand it and I understood some more later on after I got sober. Uh, nobody ever called me a phony. Nobody ever told me I had to stop drinking.

I used to sit there, you know, I I was quiet. They were all open speaker meetings and I would go and sit. All I would do was breathe on you.

And if you sat next to me during the whole meeting, I counted as a slip for you. And and uh I I never made any noise or anything. You didn't speak up or, you know, I I just behaved myself like a gentleman.

Uh but I was obviously, you know, in I wasn't in good spirits. The good spirits were in me. But I was miserable, actually.

And uh no, they they didn't push me. They didn't say I had to do anything. Nobody pushed me to stop drinking.

Uh they asked me, "How are you doing?" And I would say, "Not so hot." And they would say, "That's all right. Keep coming back. You know, either you'll get it or it'll get you." I thought, "It better get me.

I'm sure not getting it." And this this went on for a good nine months. And that there was the one fellow that that really spent time with me and talked to me and that was this Tom Anderson, the guy that greeted me originally. And people were, you know, people loved him.

He was a beautiful man. A lot of people loved him and were grateful to him. And they would go to him and say, "What do you want to waste time with that bum for?

He's never going to get sober." And this is one of the reasons why I carry a brief with a drinking member in AA. By the way, your slogan is our primary purpose. And I know that according to the preamble, our primary purpose is to stay sober and to help other alcoholics achieve sobriety.

See, there's a tradition that that that comes from. And the tradition reads, "An aa group has but one primary purpose, to carry its message to whom?" To the alcoholic who still suffers, the drinking alcoholic. And so I I advocate tender loving care for the drinking alcoholic.

Keep them coming to these meetings because if you keep the body coming the mind will follow. It takes varying lengths of time. With me it took about 9 months which I think is a good gestation period.

But uh it it uh it finally got through to me as as I sat and listened to these people up here. I realized that everything I looked for when I drank these people had and they weren't drinking. They were happy.

They were relaxed. They enjoyed life. They had a good time.

They laughed a lot. And I was miserable and tense and couldn't enjoy anything. And I realized I was not going to have what they had until I started doing what they were doing.

And this horrified me because I knew at that point that I could not stop drinking without medical help. I had tried it once. I will not describe it tonight.

It's there are people in here have too tender years to listen to it. But I went through almost all but death. the symptoms of withdrawal from alcoholism in an extreme case.

I had peripheral nitis. I had DTS. I had a convulsion.

I had the whole bit. I don't recommend it for anyone who hasn't gone through it. It's not it's what you get when the disease progresses that far.

And it had progressed as far with me as it could without killing me. In fact, I was darn close to death when I got here. And so, I finally made an agreement with a sponsor.

I said, I I'm going to try to stay sober for 24 hours, but I don't think I can. So, as soon as I have to take a drink, I will call you. You make a reservation for me in the hospital in an alcoholic ward and then I will go.

I will sign myself in. And that's how I got to Nickerbacher because I could not make 6 hours without a drink. If I could have slept that long, I could have, but I couldn't.

I couldn't make six hours without a drink of alcohol. And that was my situation when I went into Nicabbaka Hospital. And then I came out of Nicabbaka Hospital and I wasn't drinking.

I came home and I ran into that ultimatum. But I I stayed away from one drink one day at a time and I started doing the easier softer way that they talk about in the big book that doesn't work. And the easier softer way for those of you who want to try it for a while is don't drink and go to meetings.

that works for a time and I I was unaware. I started to learn things about this disease but very slowly. One thing that used to bother me in the beginning was that uh when once I got out of Nickerbacher I wanted to know how to stay sober.

I knew how to get drunk and these people would get up and tell me all about how they got drunk and and you know and all the things that happened and all the crazy things they did and then they'd wind up to talk saying then I came to AA and that was two years ago and these have been the happiest two years of my life. Boom. They'd sit down and I didn't want to hear about their drinking.

I wanted to hear about how they got sober and nobody told me. And it was a long while before I realized that uh the truth of something that a great man in AA was to tell me a little later on. He said, "You know, Bill, you can always tell another alcoholic, but you can't tell him very much." And they weren't telling me because you can't tell an alcoholic very much.

They were showing me how they stayed sober. They were showing me by their example. And so I started to follow their examples.

Um, I have I've indicated that I was one of the least likely to succeed. And that was by all the people who knew me then. There aren't many of them around now, alas.

But any of these people who are still around will tell you that whatever worked for me ought to work for anybody, no matter how desperate the case is. Because I was I was really I was voted the least likely to succeed in what was submitted each year. And as you see, I'm still here.

So, whatever I did, I must have done something right. And I believe in keeping things as simple as possible. And so, I boiled down uh my recipe for staying sober to a seven-word formula, which takes into account the fact that this is physical disease.

It's a mental disease. It's a spiritual disease. It's a disease of the total personality.

And you're going to hear some startling revelations here. And the first one is this. There is a two-word formula which I absolutely guarantee with no reservations.

If you will follow it, you need never suffer the fa the effects of acute alcoholism again. Or you need never suffer them if you haven't suffered them already. Very simple two-word formula.

I guarantee results. You have to do it. Don't drink.

Thank you. Genius. Genius.

Genius. Any idiot knows that. I know it.

The trouble is that this is not just a physical disease. Now, when something makes you physically sick that you ingest by mouth, you stop ingesting it. Right?

That's the logical thing to do. I I take my own case. I have not only an allergy for alcohol, I have one for eggplant.

I found this out when I was a little kid. Every night when we had eggplant for dinner, I would sometime later that night, I would toss my cookies violently. And it didn't take me long to figure out what's doing it and quit eating eggplant.

You know, kids aren't dumb. Adults sometimes are. Some years later, I was in an Armenian restaurant in New York City.

I think it's the national dish. They fix it delicious. And I figured, uh, I'm a grown man now.

I can handle this stuff. And went in Rome, you know, and I had some. And it was delicious.

And that night I was afraid I was going to die. And the next morning I was afraid I wasn't going to die. And from that day to this, I have not had a bite of eggplant in any form.

I did not go to a doctor to tell me I was allergic to eggplant and shouldn't eat it. I didn't go to a psychiatrist to straighten out my thinking so I wouldn't eat eggplant. I didn't go to a clergyman to pray over me so I wouldn't eat eggplant.

I did not join Eggplant Anonymous simply quit eating the darn stuff. Now there's a big difference big difference between eggplant and whiskey in my mind. For example, I can never recall having kept any eggplant in the glove compartment of the car for emergencies.

And many alcoholics will get up here and tell you in all sincerity and let them believe it if they want to, but don't you believe it. They'll tell you the crazy things they did while they were drinking and they'll say, "But that's the insanity of this disease of alcoholism." Don't believe it because it ain't so. I have a friend who tells me it isn't the things you don't know that gets you in trouble.

It's the things you think you know that just ain't so. He's right. If if you will get a non-al give me a guaranteed non-alcoholic, you pick them out.

Find somebody who man, woman, child, monkey. I am not particular. Let me get enough ethyl alcohol into that sucker in some form or another and he, she or it will do crazy things because alcohol lowers the inhibitions.

You don't need to have this disease for that to happen. Watch what the amateurs do on New Year's Eve. Okay.

The real insanity of this disease of alcoholism, and I'm citing my own case now, comes after you stop drinking. And in my case, if you had picked me up at any point after I left Nicerbacha Hospital, taken a complete cross-section of my life and looked at every bit of it, every bit of it was immeasurably better than it had been before I went in. And at that point, for me to think seriously, for even for a split second about going back to that insane, agonizingly painful rat race of alcoholic addiction that I'd been in, that's insanity.

I didn't think about it for split seconds. I used to go through white knuckle days saying I'm not going to take a drink today like that and I I had it was such an obsession to drink until one day I realized and this this took a while among among other things one of the things that helped me that the only thing I cannot do because I'm an alcoholic there's only one thing I can't do I'm not talking about drinking Because lots of alcoholics do drink. So obviously I can drink.

But because I'm an alcoholic, there's one thing I can't do. I can't take one drink. And being real honest and looking back over my entire drinking case history, I never really wanted one drink.

One drink would never have satisfied me from the very beginning. So that made that a lot easier to accept when I got around to accepting it. But in the meantime, I was desperate to do something about this.

And you know, uh there's a good way. They say stick with the winners, and that's right. But I tried to do what the winners were doing, at least what I saw them doing.

And I was, it was kind of like these two Frenchmen that were say that an excursion steamer went down way upshore and everybody got it. It was a terrible tragedy. Everybody on the steamer was drowned except these two Frenchmen.

And the reporter went to review them, interview them, and he thought he had a couple of Olympic swimming champions. And the first question he asked him, he found out neither Frenchman could swim a stroke, you know, said, "What in the heck?" He said, "How do you explain that you're the only ones that made it in from the boat?" And this one, I don't know if you ever saw one of these characters talk when they get excited, but he says, "Mushie," he says, "when Jack and I found ourselves in the water, we started talking about what a terrible fix we're in, and we kept on talking and talking and we came to shore." Excuse me. Now, neither of the Frenchmen knew how to swim or stroke, but they went through the motions, and it saved their lives.

I didn't know anything about staying sober, but I went through the motions and it saved my life. I started taking alcoholics to meetings. That was my function for a long while.

I took alcoholics to meetings. Kept taking them all the time. And uh I was like my my sponsor was one of these guys.

Always had new people at meetings. And sure enough, uh, after a while, I found that the obsession had slowly been lifted from me. And it's never come back since because I'm still working with new alcoholics.

And and there's a three-word formula. And again, I give you my unreserved guarantee that this will work. And no ifs, ands, or buts.

If you don't want to suffer the physical effects of alcoholism, don't drink. That's simple. If you want to get rid of the mental obsession which remains once you stop drinking physically work with others specifically other alcoholics who are sicker than you are.

And we get back to our primary purpose. You know it's very interesting. I was I was sitting in a meeting this afternoon and my good friend Larry came and got me out of the meeting and I was gone for most of the meeting and when I came back my wife asked me what took you out of the meeting and I said our primary purpose.

Larry had a young lad with him who would have had 30 days today. 30 days. But he took a drink last night.

And he was he was in pain. And I talk with him. I hope it did him some good.

I hope it relieved some of the pain. I don't know. But whenever I have a sick alcoholic, whenever I see a sick alcoholic, I don't know whether I help him or not.

He helps me. And I got help this afternoon. And that that reminds me of something.

You know, when you did that countdown, I lied. You asked anybody who has 39 years or 40 years or something, sit down. 39 years, sit down.

And I sat down. I don't have 39 years of sobriety. If you Where's the guy with one day?

You You and then to a gal with one day. You two have just as much sobriety as I have. In the three most important things about this disease, we're all equal.

Number one, we all had to get the same disease to get here. And when you're talking about an incurable, progressive, fatal disease like alcoholism, I will respectively submit that that or cancer, there's no such thing as a mild case. You may catch it early.

I hope you catch it earlier than I did. But there's no such thing as a mild case of an incurable progressive fatal disease. And two, we're all the same distance away from a drunk one drink.

And three, we all have the same amount of sobriety. A lot of people make this mistake of thinking I have 10 years, I have 20 years, I have 30 years and they lean on it and they fall flat on their faces because we don't. We have one day.

The book is very clear about this. The book is very clear. It says what we have here is a daily reprieve contingent upon what?

The maintenance of our spiritual condition. Very clear. And I got to be honest with you, you know, the the way I like to put it is that some days my spiritual condition is a lot better than other days.

But what does that say about the other days? You know, uh this is a cutting, baffling, and powerful disease. And we you you can't play around with it.

You have to you have to take it seriously. You don't I don't take myself seriously, but I sure do take my alcoholism seriously. And I take this program seriously.

Although I have a lot of fun with it. I enjoy it. I I I love the program.

I love everything about it. I didn't love everything about it because this is also a spiritual disease. And that's why I ran into real trouble.

Now, when I say spiritual, I want you to understand that for many, many years, I was not a member of any sect, denomination, church, religious organization. I simply didn't believe in in churches and organized religion. And when I first came in here, for the first 6 months that I was dry, not after I after I stopped drinking, if you mentioned God in your talk, I turned off my hearing aid.

I wouldn't listen to anything else you had to say. Real tolerant, no real open mind. No way.

And so when I talk about a spiritual disease, I want to put in a frame of reference that everybody here can understand. Keep it real simple. When you drink the way I do, particularly when you get into addictive drinking, there comes a time when you are faced with a nice clear-cut choice.

Here's a drink. Here's a piece of your own integrity. One of them has to be sacrifice.

So, you break a promise or you tell a lie or you do something you know is dishonest because you got to have this. And you rationalize it. We're great at rationalizing things, but sooner or later you realize, as I did, that in a terrifyingly short period of time, everything that was good and everything that was decent, every dream and ideal I ever had, every bit of honesty, character, integrity, anything that was good about me was gone because I had had this.

And I've said that I love my wife and children more than anything else in the world. And that was true. And that was true while I was drinking alcoholically.

But to show what this disease does to you spiritually, I was unable either to give them the love that I felt for them or to receive their unquestioning love in return because this always had to come first. That wasn't the bad part. The bad part comes after you stop drinking.

Came I'm talking about myself now. The shoe fits. better listen and put it on and start walking along this path.

After I stopped drinking, I became very active in AA. I would go anywhere. I would go into a gin mill and try to drag a drunk out because somebody had told me to.

Idiot. But I I would do anything. I would work with any drunk under any circumstances.

And at the end of my first year of continuous sobriety in AA, if you had come up to me and asked me who the best AA member in the state of New Jersey was, I had learned just enough about humility that I wouldn't have come right out and told you it was me. Some years later, the individual who was in by far the best position to observe me at that point in my progress said, "You know, dear, at the end of your first year of continuous sobriety in AA, there was only one observable change in you. You smell different." It's uh I hate to tell you this, but the last part of my formula has to do with a spiritual disease.

And it's a rough part because here I was uh doing all the right things. I wasn't drinking. I was working with other alcoholics.

I'm going to AA meetings all the time, you know, and I'm not drinking and not drinking. This goes on. This went on, I'm ashamed to say, for how many years?

And uh there was no basic change in me. And I'll tell you right now, the individual that I used to be when I came in here eventually will drink. I had to change myself.

And that's the that's the third part of my formula. Change yourself. If you want to repair the spiritual damage this disease does, change yourself.

Your blueprint for doing that is in the 12 steps, which are our suggested program of recovery. And remember what it says, half measures avail from the very start completely followed this program. This is what it asks for.

Well, I tell you, I I am bone lazy to start with. The toughest job I ever tackled in my life was trying to change myself. And I didn't want to do it.

As bad as I was, I I was me. And I didn't want to I didn't want to change me. And I was a little like the captain of a ship who was sailing over the ocean.

And he saw a light in the distance. And he calculated his course. And he uh radioed ahead.

He said, "Uh, change, uh, collision possible. Change your course 15° east." And the answer came back, "Agre, collision possible. Change your course 15° west." So he got a little irritated and he sent another way.

He said, "Collision probable. Change your course 45° east. This is a captain." The answer came back.

Agreed. Collision probable. Change your course 45° west.

This is a seaman third class. Captain had had it. He finally sent a final wire.

He said, "Collision imminent. Change your course 90° east. This is a battleship." The answer came back, "Agreed.

Collision imminent. Change your course 90° west. This is a lighthouse.

Sometimes you have to change whether you like it or not. Sometimes you don't have any choice but to change. And when I finally sat down and wrote an inventory like it suggests in the big book, I wrote an inventory of myself.

Not back when I was drinking it that day. I was sober around 7 years at the time. I had been dry for 7 years at the time.

I shouldn't say I was sober. I would I had I had been without a drink for seven years. And I don't recommend anybody go that long without doing this.

This is dangerous stuff. But again, I will cite in extenduation Dr. Ruth Fox's uh observation about us alcoholics.

She says, "It takes you two years to get your brains out of hawk and three more to get them unscrambled." And in my case, that was an underestimate. But in any case, I finally did this. And when I looked at that inventory, I realized that I could not stay sober with a knowledge that I was this kind of a person.

You reminded me of the lovely story. So I I heard a story once about this one guy who came to a sponsor and said, "I want this program in its simplest possible form." He said, "Don't give me the 12 steps. way too many words in there.

He said, "Don't give me the slogans. Those are too complicated for me. What's the simplest way you can give it to me?" The sponsor said, "Well," he said, "I can give it to you in two steps, six words.

How does that sound?" The guy says, "That sounds good." He said, "All right, I'll give you the first step now, and when you get that down, come back and I'll give you the second step." So the guy says, "Okay, that's about my speed." But I said, "First step, two words, don't drink." Guy goes away and comes back about four or five months later says all right I think I got the first one down what's the second one say you got the first one okay second step four words stop being a louse and that that was that was what I was up against I had to I had to change myself where I was going to drink so I started trying to put these 12 suggested steps into practice in my daily life this is the toughest job I ever tackled in my life uh it is not changing yourself and it's not easy putting these things into actual practice but I felt as if I had a gun pointing at my head saying buster you do this or you die I was motivated I was motivated and so I started trying to do this and as a result of this all the things that they never promised me in AA started to come true because all they promised me in AA was that if I followed this program I would sober and stay sober and I would get better. They didn't tell me things would get better, but of course things did. And I got uh I got a beautiful job where I I lost a job I'd had for 17 years and got a much better job as a result.

And that's a long story I won't go into. But uh our marriage, which had been on the rocks, especially about 6 and 1/2 years after I was into the program, uh came back to be a a wonderful thing, a beautiful thing. And after our kids grew up, uh, we we we were having a honeymoon every year.

When we took our vacation, just the two of us took it together. It was like a honeymoon. And every honeymoon was better than the last in all respects.

And 10 years ago, we were going to we we had it all laid out. We had our itinerary laid out. We're going up to Nova Scotia and meet some AA friends up there and who are also rock hounds and we were going on a camping trip and then on the way back we were going to Case Montreal for the international convention which was coming up in a few years.

And uh we had the whole thing laid out. Two weeks before we were due to leave on her birthday, my wife uh went to pick up her father who lived in the town about 20 mi away. And I never saw her alive again.

She was killed in the head-on crash with an impaired driver. Those of you who heard my wife's story this afternoon will will have known that. And the bottom dropped out of my world.

But I did have one thing. I had a job which was tremendously satisfying to me in a spiritual way because in that job I was able to help literally thousands of alcoholics in total anonymity. They didn't even know I existed.

But the work I was doing was helping thousands of people get to this program much earlier than they otherwise would have and with much success. And one year after my wife was killed, the executive director of our organization called me and it was a nonprofit organization called me into the office and into his office and uh told me that due to a severe budget crunch over twothirds of the national staff were being dropped, including my entire department. And I went home that day.

I'll tell you I I I really I was really in a depression. I had this program. I had this program of of recovery which I was still trying to work.

I was going to a meetings. Uh I was trying to practice this daily. I prayed daily only I let I let my higher power know exactly what I thought of his judgment.

And I I'm not kidding you. I I uh I give you an example. Uh I I was one of my daughter one of our daughters.

We had five daughters by the way and uh one of them was married to a guy and they were going to uh take a an airplane trip to South Africa and then up to England and then back to the United States. Some kind of a church sponsored trip. And in my daily prayers, which I said walking down the street, which I often did, I said, "And by the way, uh take real good care of Linda and Leo on their trip abroad." And I stopped and looked up.

I said, "But for Christ's sake, do a better job than you did for June and me, will you?" That's the way I felt. I mean, full of boiling with resentment. All the things that an alcoholic isn't supposed to have, I had self-pity up to here.

Resentment, I was I was boiling with it. But I had this program and I had the habit by then of sobriety. I didn't even think about drinking during this time.

And there's there's another reason maybe why I didn't. Uh back when we were first married, my wife and I had a little girl, beautiful little girl named Betty. And at that time, I was still drinking.

And when she was 3 years old, she came down with a case of what was diagnosed with monucleiosis. And then one day, my wife called me a couple of weeks later and told me to come home early. So I did.

When I got there, the doctor was there with her. He was waiting till I got home. woman.

When I got home, he told us that he had done some blood tests and that she had acute lymphatic leukemia. And from that day until 6 months later, two months, two weeks after she had died, I never drank less than two quarts of whiskey in any given day. Not to get drunk, just to keep functioning, just to keep going.

I had a successful business in New York which I was running and and I continued to run it. I continued to take her to and from the hospital and whatever. But uh uh and and the thing I remember from that period and I still remember was no matter how much I drank, it did not kill the pain.

I was able to eat, I was able to sleep, but it did not kill the pain. And so I guess that's one of the reasons why I never even thought about drinking when my wife was killed. Although it meant me made me miserable.

And uh I I got to tell you the Alanon members who were here. This is a little story I got to tell you which my wife didn't tell and she sometimes does and she sometimes forgets but the thing is that she had my wife had been her Alanon sponsor and she had gotten away from Alanon and I knew this and uh as she said I joined the choir in my wife's memory and I used to go every Thursday night to rehearsal and the reason she got back to Alanon was I dragged her back to Alanon because she was the only person I saw weekly who looked more miserable than I felt. She was married to an active alcoholic.

Uh I another thing I learned, you know, I I thought I had learned how to live one day at a time. I I learned how to stay away from one drink one day at a time. I'd never learned how to live one day at a time until I my wife was killed.

And then I suddenly realized I started living one day at a time. And I also out of my bitterness and resentment evolved a slogan. A slogan, not a slogan.

It was a description that fitted my idea of one day at a time. And uh when I finally got myself straightened out, got my thinking straightened out a little again with the help of this program and came to the conclusion that the only thing I could do at that point was to start life all over again from scratch. And I didn't feel like doing that because I was 66 years old, 65 when my wife was killed and 66 when I lost my job.

But I did. I once I came to that conclusion, I started it all over from scratch. And I went and got another job.

And my boss on that job liked this saying of mine so well. He had it printed up and framed for me in loose sight. And I have it on my piano at home.

And it goes like this, one day at a time, but it's a little different. It reads, "Yesterday is a treasured memory of loveliness. Tomorrow is a glorious vision of hope.

Today is a bitch." And uh was even in that frame of mind. You see this this program won out over that. Uh, one thing that helped me more than anything else, I must get in a plug here for something that has been when when I was four and a half years in AA, I started working in correctional institutions because I was told to by my higher power and if there's anything I didn't want to do, that was it.

But because the the message was so clear, I did it. And uh, since that time, I have averaged around two meetings a week in correctional institutions. Right now I'm down to one because that's that's the only one that's anywhere near me is it requires an 80 mm mile round trip once a week and I make it.

But at that time I was working with the uh correctional institution in New Jersey, maximum security institution for sex offenders. It was a group that I had helped to start 16 years before because they were afraid to come into the big prison population. And I used to go there every Tuesday night.

And I almost lived from one Tuesday meeting to the next because this was the one place that I could not leave feeling sorry for myself. These guys told me how much I helped them. I told them, "You guys don't know it, but you've helped me so much more than I could ever possibly help any of you that it isn't even funny.

They helped me to keep my sanity. They helped to keep me on an even keel when staying on any kind of a keel was difficult." But this program has the answer for anything, any problem. I don't care what it is.

The answer is here in this program if you will follow the suggested steps which is what >> we have an emergency >> emergency excuse me >> I'm sorry we have an emergency message here for Mckenley James please call home immediately Mckenley James Okay, I I am grateful that I am an alcoholic. The first time I heard that I thought that guy is nuts. Who can be grateful because he has an incurable progressive fatal disease?

I will say only this that if I had not had this disease, I would not have discovered a way of life which is more beautiful than anything I knew existed, let alone better than anything I ever had before. I didn't know that it was possible to try to live the way I'm trying to live today and to feel the way I feel about myself and everybody else. You know, the the uh commandment is to love your neighbor as yourself.

Well, I couldn't love my neighbor because I hated myself. Today, I love myself. I love my neighbor.

And and I have a world that is got such wider spiritual horizons than I dreamed existed simply because of this program. And if I hadn't had the disease, I never would have found that. I never would have found that.

I would have gone through life as a as a drunken slob if I hadn't had the disease or maybe even as a sober slob. So what you know I I I just never would have had it. And so I'm grateful for that.

I'm grateful for the fact that it has taken me through good times as well as bad. Um I am living today. I did start life all over again.

I not only got another job, I got another wife. And uh I'm living a very very happy life. It is totally different from anything I had before.

I never had a beard before I married my present wife. Never wore rings before I married my present wife. I those are cosmetic.

But there are other basic changes in my life which uh uh I I am I'm different. I'm a different person today from what I was back then. And and I'm a very different person from what I was when I was drinking or or when I first came in here and stopped drinking cuz I didn't change that much.

I, you know, a lot of people come in here and think that just because they stay dry or I was one who thought just because I was staying dry and working with other alcoholics that I I was one of the good guys and put on the white hat and ride off into the sunset. What I didn't realize was that I had matured from being a self-centered, arrogant, drunken louse to being a self-centered, arrogant, sober louse. And that's all I'd done.

And uh see I got yeah I got time for two. I'd like to tell you two stories to wind up. Um one is apocryphal but I love it.

It has to do with one of our brethren who never made this program. He died in an alcoholic convulsion on the Bowery and he came to and he was on a on some golden stairs standing on some golden stairs just outside a pair of pearly gates and he took one look through the gates and shook his head and turned around and started walking down the stairs. And the voice behind him said, "Where are you going?" And he said, "I don't belong in there.

I was nothing but a drunken bum all my life." And the voice said, "What's your name?" He said, "Joe Lushwell." Boy said, "Well, your name's in the book here. You can come in if you want to." Why not? He's there.

So, he turns around and walks back up, walks through the gates, and starts down the Golden Street. Hasn't gotten very far when he sees a neon sign. Bar.

Wow. You know how it is. He shoots over to that door and he opens it and it's like a magnet draws him.

He's this huge, dimly lit cocktail lounge. longest bar he's ever seen and rows and rows of beautiful bottles behind the bar. And the only soul in the joint is an angel polishing the bar with a rag.

And this magnet draws him across the floor up to that bar. And as he going, he realizes halfway across, hey butter bu Buster, you're in heaven now. You can't operate the way you operated on earth.

You can't do it. So he gets up to the bar and the angel beams him and says, yes, sir. What do you have?

And he swallows real hard and he says, I'm sorry. I haven't got any money at all. He does the honest thing and the angel just smiles again and says, "Oh, you must be new here.

We don't use money. You just tell me what you want and I give it to you. It's heaven." Well, you know what he does?

He has a double bourbon. And the double bourbon makes him feel like a new man. Guess what the new man wants?

A double bourbon. To make a long sad story short, he closes the joint that night and opens it the next morning. And to make a much longer and much sadder story even shorter, 3 weeks later, early in the morning, he is sitting on the golden curb, dry heaving into the golden gutter, sicker and more miserable and in more pain than he's been in his entire existence.

And he looks up and the bar is over there. And he looks up and the gate is over there. And the gate looks a little bit closer.

So he crawls over to the gate. He can't walk. And as he gets there, figure comes and stands over him and says, "Yes, son.

Is there anything I can do for you?" He says, "Yeah." "You got to help me." Said, "I can't take this any longer." He says, "I've figured out what you got to do." He said, "I want you to send me the other place for a few days or whatever, whatever it takes." He says, "So I get off this. I It should be pretty quick cuz from what I hear, they'll sweat it out of me pretty quick and I won't get anything to drink down there." He says, "I I but I've got to you got to do something because I can't go on like this. I can't stand it." There's a long pause and finally the boy says, "Geez, son, I don't know how to tell you this, but there isn't any other place.

This is the only place there is. As far as that story is concerned, this is the only place there is. Yours is the only life you can lead.

And right now, this minute is the only time you can live it. And whether that life is a heaven or a hell on earth is entirely up to you and what you do. Story number two happened about 20 years ago.

And in New Jersey, we had a lot of speaker meetings and we used to have a booker who would go out and book other groups to come into our group and then we would go out to their groups. And this particular uh year, our booker made what we call a tactical error. He booked an outgoing meeting on Christmas Eve, reasoning that well, I used to go out and drink on Christmas Eve.

You know, I go out and speak. Well, it was an unfortunate slip there. Uh what happened was that our group met on a Monday, Christmas Eve that year was on a Sunday.

And on the Monday before Christmas Eve, he wasn't there at the meeting. And the chairman went around to try to get somebody to keep this commitment. And we had we had a big group.

So we had a lot of eligible speakers. And finally the chairman came up to me and said, "Bill," she said, "I couldn't get anybody to keep that Morristown commitment. Would you mind calling up those folks and telling them we won't be able to make it?" Cuz she knew I knew the folks in Morristown.

And I said, "Sure, I'll be glad to do it." I had every intention of doing it. But when I got home late that night, I figured it's too late to call now. I might get somebody out of bed.

I'll call them tomorrow when I get home from work and they've still got, you know, from Tuesday to Sunday to set up something else. I had every intention of calling them that Tuesday. And that uh Tuesday, while I was at work, I got a phone call to tell me that my sponsor, who was then in his 26th year of continuous sobriety, had succumbed to another incurable progressive fatal disease, cancer.

And I knew I'd been visiting him at Sloan Kettering and at his home and he was at home now. I knew and I hadn't expected it. I I knew he was, you know, going along, but I hadn't expected anything like that quickly.

In a way, it may have been a very merciful thing that had happened that fast. But it started me thinking. It started me thinking.

And you must remember that at that time I was while not totally anti-religious I was certainly anti-clerical and I did not belong to any church or anything like that although I had studied the basic works of all the religions and I could give you parallels in some of the other religions of what I'm going to give you now but I won't I'll stick to the one that most people are familiar with and I thought about my sponsor and what he meant to me and what I as a sober alcoholic celebrated at Christmas time and what I as a sober alcoholic celebrated at Christmas and still celebrate is the birth of a man who like my sponsor taught a new and completely different way of life so new and different that he told a Pharisee by the name of Nicodemus except a man be born again he shall not enter into the new way of life which he called the kingdom of God. And I can remember my sponsor pointing out to me how necessary a complete spiritual rebirth was to us as alcoholics if we wish to maintain our sobriety. The putting into practice of those 12 steps, the changing yourself that I referred to before.

This man taught the same slogans my sponsor taught. He taught easy does it. He said, "Consider the liies of the field, how they grow.

They toil not, neither do they spin. And yet I say unto you that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these." And he taught first things first. He said, "Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added unto you." My sponsor, I I went to him.

I was complaining. I didn't have a job. My wife wasn't treating me right.

And so forth. He said, "First you get your sobriety, then these things will come." I went away growling. But uh he taught uh one day at a time like my sponsor did.

He said, "Take therefore no thought for tomorrow. Sufficient under the day is the evil of thereof." And how more beautifully could you teach live and let live than he did in the golden rule. And like my sponsor, he and and this is amazing to me because this man came from uh a a tradition of a thousand years of the lexalonus.

Some people are familiar with this. This is best if I I tell you if you want to if you want to get the shock of your life, read the book of Leviticus. Threequarters of people in this room tonight could be put to death for something you've done so far in your life.

According to the law expressed in that book, this law was couched in terms of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. and thou shalt not or thou wilt get clobbered. And coming from that kind of a background, a thousand years of that kind of a background like my sponsor did, he taught a law a way of life in which there were no musts.

He didn't say thou shalt not. He didn't say thou hast. He said you would be blessed if you did.

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. But more important than all those things put together, like my sponsor, he did not just teach and preach this new way of life.

He lived it. And by so doing, we are told he was able to heal sick individuals. And when his followers came to and asked him how he could do these things, he had the honesty, the humility, the grace to say that he could not, that it was a power greater than himself.

He said, "I can of mine own self do nothing. It is the father that dwelleth in me. He doeth the works." But when I got in, I had a very interesting relationship with my sponsor.

We we didn't always see eye to eye, but I tried to do the things he did. And uh I I remember one time we got in a big argument, and this is a little struck, the kind of guy he was. We got we got in this real big argument.

Voices were raised, mine anyway. And I finally I blew up. He never blew up.

And I said, 'You know, I don't know, but I think you must be the worst sponsor in AA. And he thought a minute, he looked at me a minute. He said, "Bill," he said, "you you may be right." He said, "But to be honest with you, I don't see how it could be possible.

It would simply be too great a coincidence." Anyway, anyway, I went to him and I I said to him, you know, I I knew where to go. I was working with alcoholics and having no success at all. They were going out and getting drunk in droves or they weren't staying sober at all.

I was carrying the message, but you know, I hadn't read the part of the book that says the only thing we have to offer is ourselves as examples. And looking back, I don't blame them for not following my example. But I knew who to go to.

So I went to my sponsor and I said, "Tom, what is the secret of your success with alcoholics?" And he looked at me very sadly and shook his head and he said, "Bill, I hate to tell you this." He said, "But I have yet to get one alcoholic sober and I have yet to keep one alcoholic sober." And I caught him in his false modesty. That was I had a terrible attitude in those days, but I I watched what he did. And he always had new people with him at meetings.

And I thought, you know, by having new people with me at meetings, I was doing the same thing. I didn't realize that he was living these steps and I wasn't and that was a big difference. I didn't realize that till many many years later.

But by doing going through the motions and again that saved my life of doing what he was doing, I kept coming to meetings and you know what I saw? I saw a power greater than all of us put together working through our examples as sober and drinking alcoholics. healing people who had an incurable progressive fatal disease, bringing the living dead back to life.

I've seen them come through the doors that I didn't think could make it into the meeting and stay alive. And I've seen them come back to being normal, happy human beings. And while I was around watching this happening to other people, one day I suddenly realized that the same beautiful healing process was working on me.

I see people who old-timers and and unfortunately we lose a lot of old-timers and some of them are bored. they get bored with the meetings and I can understand that because but I but I can't I can't relate to it because to me I can't imagine anyone getting bored as long as you realize that just by sitting there just by being here tonight each one of you is being a part of that beautiful healing process a higher power may be working through your example to heal some other sick alcoholic you won't know about it a lot of times. You may not find out till years later, but that's what's happening in these meetings.

And to be a part of that process, I don't see how anybody could get bored by that. I have a dear friend out in California who has 45 years in this program. And uh everybody loves him out there.

And one person was very concerned for him and he said, "Uh, Bob, uh, how come you're still going to seven meetings a week? You got 45 years in this program. do you really need seven meetings a week?

And Bob said, "No." He said, "Uh, I I sat down and figured it out just the other day, and I only need two meetings a week. That's all I need." The guy said, "Well, then why are you still going to seven meetings a week?" And Bob said, "Well, tell you the truth, I haven't been able to figure out which two they are." I like that attitude. I like that attitude.

And you know, I had been asked to be a a pawbearer at my sponsor's funeral. And I was talking with his daughter, a lovely gal by the name of Mary, uh had to wake and I found I had found out that five of us who were being pawbearers were people he had sponsored. And the other pawbearer was the husband of one of the female members of the group of which he was a member.

No particular relationship to at all. And and and I was just telling her how honored I felt to be named asked to be a Paul bearer. And then we got into the discussion of the makeup of the six.

And she said, "You know, Bill, with all the hundreds of people that he helped, you'd think there would have been more than five." And I looked at her and I because of what I'd been thinking about all week, I I said something that I think gave her comfort. I said, "You know, Mary, I I think of another man who helped 10 people who had an incurable progressive fatal disease, leprosy, and only one came back to thank him." And that Saturday, it was a it was a miserable, rainy, cold day, very uncristlike. We buried my sponsor in a little cemetery in Perth Amboy.

And the next day, I told my wife what I was going to do and I got in the car and I drove up to Morristown and I did a little tentstep work. I got up in front of that group and I told them in much the same words I have told you tonight how what had happened the previous Monday in our group in Matuchen. And I told them that uh I had promised the the chairman that I would call up and tell him that we were unable to keep the commitment.

And I also told him that as a sober alcoholic on Christmas Eve, I had found it absolutely impossible to make that phone call. Thank you. 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.