Aa history Lovers 2004 moderators Nancy Olson and Glenn F. Chesnut page
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"reason" she
drank. But one day she realized that it wasn't him. "What happened to me in 1977 was the most amazing grace," she said. "I saw myself for what I really was, and I remember thinking, 'It's not his fault.' I uttered, 'God
help me.'" Some time after receiving help at a treatment center, she met with a woman from
an AA group.
bright and
shining and they danced ... and they were full of life." What hooked her on AA were the people, she said. "I was enamored and enthralled with you," she said to the crowd. "You hooked my soul, and I didn't know you hooked my soul." Despite her jokes, she said "being forced to your knees is a blessing" and warned
about thinking of ways to avoid doing what you know you need to do. "Alcoholism is just beneath the skin," she said. "Don't think it ever goes away."
Those listening to the speakers had their own stories as well. Demetrius J., an AA district committee member, has been sober for more than nine
years. He first came to AA, he said, to save his marriage and his job. "After being in here a couple of days, I began to stop trying to save my marriage and stop trying to save my job and started trying to save my life," Demetrius said.
had he not
found help. "I believe if it wasn't for Alcoholics Anonymous, I'd been in jail or an institution or I'd be dead," he said. "Alcoholics Anonymous guided me back to my God."
"for the
confidence" he believed it gave him. "It would make me 10-foot-tall and bulletproof," he said. "It would make me sauve and debonair. It would also make the life of the party. It would also make me Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I drank 20 years trying to escape who I was." He swore off drinking time and time again during those 20 years, but when he saw
that he was hurting other people, that he might lose his children and his job, he knew something had to change. "When I realized I had to drink to live and lived to drink, then and only then
did I realize I had to do something about my drinking." And while contemplating suicide when he was "all alone" in his house, he said,
"three words came into my mouth, 'God help me.'" GAYLE For Gayle, the drinking began after the birth of her second child in 1965, and
it became a "security blanket" for her, she said. "I had denied being an alcoholic," she said. "I blamed my husband." But, like Maryann, one day she realized she couldn't shift the blame anymore.
p.m. every night. "I couldn't blame it on him anymore," she said. The hardest part about dealing with the problem was admitting she had one, she said.
"It gave me an opportunity to see that I was not a bad person trying to get good,"
she said. "I was a sick person trying to get well." And she said AA is important because of the people there who can relate to each
other and help each other. "Another alcoholic can help an alcoholic when no one else in the world can," Gayle
said. "They can help them where professionals might not be able to." She has remained sober since 1980. To say that she has been sober for 24 years, "to me, it sounds wonderful," she
said. "It's not to brag by any means. I never thought I would live to be 24 years sober and have a wonderful, fruitful ... life. My life is just so full now." But she must stay on her toes, she said, and be vigilant and diligent. "You can't be careless about your sobriety," she said. "It (alcoholism) is always
beneath the surface." Gayle and Demetrius advised those battling a drinking problem to find an AA meeting
to attend. "Look in the phone book under Alcoholics Anonymous, call and find out where a meeting is," Gayle said. "Take some action. You can't sit at home ... and expect to get
any better."
Office at (903) 597-1796. Megan Middleton covers Gregg and Anderson counties. She can be reached at 903.596.6287. e-mail: news@tylerpaper.com ©Tyler Morning Telegraph 2004 IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII ++++Message 1631. . . . . . . . . . . . Stepping Into History -Westchester Journal News Jan04 From: t . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/31/2004 7:42:00 PM
THE JOURNAL NEWS of Westchester County NY (Original publication: January 20, 2004)
up if Bill and Lois Wilson had stayed homeless in 1941. Bill Wilson's only work then was with alcoholics, and his 1939 book about the AA
fellowship had not gotten the acclaim that the group's early members expected. Lois was finding scattered jobs as a decorator, but her real work was keeping
the couple off the street. The Wilsons slept at 51 places in two years. Then 1941 brought what Bill Wilson called a godsend -- a chocolate brown cottage
in Bedford Hills with French doors that Lois adored and a fieldstone fireplace that reminded Bill of the East Dorset, Vt., home where he was born. The house belonged to actress Helen Griffith, whose husband drank himself to death
and whose alcoholic friend had been "revived" by an AA group in New Jersey. She
knew the Wilsons were destitute and offered them what Bill Wilson later called "unbelievably easy terms."
they
named Stepping Stones is still being lived out today. Yet the contributions they made to
recovery and
the need for families of alcoholics to have their own support are so substantial that the National Park Service is preparing to crown the contemporary couple's home as historic. "The Wilsons' influence on 20th-century society is immeasurable," reads the nominating statement, prepared by Margaret Gaertner, a preservation specialist with
the Dobbs Ferry architectural firm Stephen Tilly. "AA enabled, and continues to enable, millions of people around the world to achieve and sustain permanent sobriety." Although it may seem contradictory to call a 20th-century home historic in a region
where historic properties often have 200-year pasts, the nominating form says
the Wilsons are legends who make it easy to forget that as recently as 1940, alcoholism was considered one of society's great unsolved public health enigmas. Bill Wilson proclaimed that alcoholism was a disease three decades before the
American Medical Association did in 1956. The 12-step solution that Wilson and
AA co-founder Dr. Bob Smith created to treat the physical, mental and spiritual dimensions of alcoholism has become the standard for U.S. hospitals and clinics.
recovering alcoholics shared their experiences, strength and hope to help others find the inspiration and power to stop drinking. "Wilson realized that only another alcoholic could truly understand the tangled
emotions evoked by his debilitating ordeal," reads the nominating form. The Wilsons' cozy Dutch Colonial, with its barn-like gambrel roof and cement-block studio where Bill Wilson wrote, could be added to the state's Register of Historic
Places in the spring. Stepping Stones could then join the National Register of Historic Places by summer. Managed by a foundation that Lois Wilson formed in 1979, eight years after Bill's
death at 71, Stepping Stones is a sacred site for Alcoholics Anonymous and Al-Anon,
the 12-step program co-founded by Lois Wilson for the spouses and children of alcoholics. Yet, Stepping Stones is not mobbed with pilgrims. A mere 1,000 visitors stop by each year -- and up to half of those come for the annual picnic in June. "We could increase our visitors by 100 percent, and we could handle it," said
Eileen Giuliani, Stepping Stones' executive director. Of course, she means that theoretically. For one thing, Stepping Stones is surrounded by single-family homes and wants to keep the peace. The other matter is that not
all recovering alcoholics and Al-Anons know that Stepping Stones is the Wilson home, much
less that it is in Bedford Hills. The historical designation is sure to raise awareness among AA's 2.2 million members
in 100,000 groups worldwide, and among the 29,000 Al-Anon groups with some 387,000
members in 115 countries, according to the organizations' estimates. Giuliani said federal recognition will advance Stepping Stones' mission to protect
the Wilson museum and archives, and promote the tenets of the AA experience. Neighbors -- for once in Westchester -- seem ready to yield to the prospect of more cars in the neighborhood. "It's fine with me, and I've been here seven years," said Kim Cassone, a mother
of two who lives near Stepping Stones on Oak Street. "They were out there to help people
who had problems, and that is a good thing." Once at Stepping Stones, visitors often feel an unmistakable presence: The air
seems sweet, as though bread has been baking, but no one has lived here since Lois died at age 97 in 1988. The house is as Lois Wilson left it -- wall lengths of books stacked five shelves
high, scores of grandmotherly collections, a gallery's worth of photos and framed
proclamations by dignitaries ranging from Pope Paul VI to President Eisenhower. Susan Cheever, a Manhattan resident, will publish a biography, "My Name is Bill:
Bill Wilson -- His Life and the Creation of Alcoholics Anonymous," this month. Cheever, who grew up in Ossining, is the daughter of Pulitzer Prize-winning short-story writer
John Cheever, whose own battle with alcohol she documented in her 1984 memoir,
"Home Before Dark." "It is a very powerful place," Cheever said of Stepping Stones. "The ghosts are
still there."
where Bill Wilson had a spiritual breakthrough with his childhood friend Ebby Thatcher, one month before Bill got sober in December 1934. Ignoble as the little white table seems, it is venerated at Stepping Stones, sometimes drawing tears from those in recovery. "I was overwhelmed," said Mark W., 51, of Topeka, Kan., a businessman who has
been sober 10 years and is obliged under AA's 12 Traditions to be anonymous when speaking to the media. He has made three pilgrimages to Stepping Stones in the past three years. It was
his second visit with his wife when he dropped his composure and cried. "I already knew how much I lost drinking," he said. "But sitting there made me realize how much I gained by staying sober." Other relics nearly as special to visitors are the desk in Bill's backyard studio and the desk in the home's upstairs library, where in 1951 Lois Wilson organized the
first Al-Anon groups. It was on Bill Wilson's desk, which he brought to Stepping Stones from New Jersey,
that he wrote the important opening 11 chapters to "Alcoholics Anonymous" -- the
575-page AA textbook that has sold 20 million copies. "I don't want to call Stepping Stones a shrine, but it is pretty close," said
Mark. W. "If it hadn't been for those people, I wouldn't be sane." IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII ++++Message 1633. . . . . . . . . . . . AA Group, Member, Growth and Recovery Statistics From: Arthur . . . . . . . . . . . . 2/1/2004 4:28:00 PM IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII Hi History Lovers Below is a table of group and membership data reported by GSO. The figures come from Conference reports except where cited. The numbers must be interpreted very carefully, very skeptically and in proper context. Group counts include only those asking GSO to be listed (thousands do not). Groups may or may not report membership estimates or update estimates over time. Members can be counted in multiple group estimates and the composition of the numbers has changed at various times from “reported” to “estimated.” In 1994, a major revision occurred in the GSO’s counting methods. The number of groups reported by GSO no longer included those described as "meetings" which chose not to be considered "groups." Such "meetings" (typically special interest) are included in prior year’s data. The 1994 revision can erroneously be interpreted as a steep drop from 1993 to 1994 when, in fact, it simply reflects a procedural change in counting methods. AA is in about 150 countries (with 51 GSOs overseas). Each year, the NY office attempts to contact overseas GSOs and groups requesting to be listed in their records. Where current data are lacking, the NY GSO uses earlier year's figures. An estimate of membership of non-reporting groups is arrived at by taking an average of reporting groups. From the beginning, the numbers are, at best, "fuzzy" and do need to be interpreted prudently to avoid drawing erroneous conclusions. The table data are not an accurate measure of a specific year’s increase or decrease. However, trends over the decades are indicative (but not exact) of AA groups reaching more places and more AA members achieving recovery. Average (mean) annual growth in groups and members is 6% and 7% respectively. 
(Message over 64 K, truncated.) IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII
Journal, IA, Thursday, Jan. 8, 2004 From: NMOlson@aol.com . . . . . . . . . . . . 2/2/2004 2:46:00 AM
rather than a moral failing might move its revered treatment center to a different floor.
but Ignatia Hall would lose its fifth-floor home. The hospital wants to use that space as a psychiatric unit for Alzheimer's and dementia patients; the unit would be the first of its kind in Akron. The rearrangements probably wouldn't attract much attention at most hospitals, but to recovering alcoholics worldwide, Ignatia Hall is a sacred site. Named after Alcoholics Anonymous pioneer Sister Ignatia, it became the first alcohol treatment center in the world in 1939. It's a history that the 75-year-old hospital, now part of Summa Health System, proudly claims. But tinkering with the past to accommodate the future is a tricky business.
become a shrine for the thousands of pilgrims who visit Akron each summer to commemorate the birthplace of A.A.
months. Some have talked about trying to make Ignatia Hall an official historical landmark to ensure the hospital doesn't mess with it.
Alcoholics Anonymous, which does not publicize the last names or titles of its staffers.
and it's strictly the bottom line. (The hospital) doesn't care about the history," he said, speaking for himself as a recovering alcoholic.
the Akron area and oversees the annual Founders Day events. As a matter of policy, A.A. doesn't take a position.
Robert A. Liebelt, the treatment center's medical director. "We're not going to get rid of Ignatia Hall."
typically requires three days' stay, probably would be moved to a medical surgical floor. Liebelt said they would have to be kept together, separated from other patients, to ensure confidentiality. "It will be a designated area and have the same ambience that Ignatia Hall as it stands today has," Liebelt said. "It's just that it will be in another part of the hospital."
treatment, which can include talk therapy, group meetings and other counseling.
and were then scattered in classrooms throughout the hospital. More recently, those services have had a permanent home on the third floor in the former medical library. Summa spokeswoman Carrie Massucci said the changes are still tentative and the hospital has no timeline for the proposed transition. But should plans go through, the hospital would want that space for elderly psychiatric patients because it would be near other psychiatric services. "Summa Health System now has the only dedicated senior services program in Akron," she said. "This is just another way that we can continue to serve that population."
founding, "we've relocated those services at least six times," she said. "They stayed in St. Thomas Hospital, but they've moved around."
walled in, so the patients could participate in Mass, Liebelt said. But for the last 20 years, visitors to Ignatia Hall have always found it on the fifth floor. So have the former patients who return to the place they say saved their lives.
Founders Day celebration, which now attracts 10,000 visitors from around the world.
Darrah, the Fairlawn author of Sister Ignatia: Angel of Alcoholics Anonymous. "Over the years, people have become more and more interested in the founding places of A.A. It's like a family. They want to go back to their family roots."
Smith's house, another pilgrimage site, and rebuilding it somewhere else. Physical locations matter.
Darrah said. "That's a major piece of history that belongs to the community. And the community should at least, in my opinion, have input."
the pilgrims will still have a place to visit. The center was already on the fifth floor when Liebelt began in 1982. He stopped counting about three years ago, but he figures he's treated 15,000 patients and cares as much about the history of the place as anyone else.
viable and will continue to do well and be viable," Liebelt said. IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII ++++Message 1635. . . . . . . . . . . . 12 step prayers--a prayer for each step From: buickmackane0830 . . . . . . . . . . . . 2/3/2004 5:03:00 AM IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII Good morning, I just been granted the privilege of working on the archives for my local intergroup. We have a newsletter which does a good job of putting information for our groups. We have been printing prayers for each step. I questioned this and was told A.A. at one time used these prayers. I have searched on my own and could not find 12 step prayers for each step connected to A.A. Does anyone know of such prayers connected to A.A. (except 3rd, 7th step) In the big book and then there is the 11th step in the 12+12. What really bothered me was the relious implication of the prayers so if any one is aware of these prayers connected to AA or know where I can find their connection to AA please email. Note: I found 12th step prayers. Thank you IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII ++++Message 1636. . . . . . . . . . . . RE: Stepping Into History -Westchester Journal News Jan04 From: Lash, William (Bill) . . . . . . . . . . . . 2/3/2004 1:02:00 PM IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII Download 4.17 Mb. Share with your friends:
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