Aa history Lovers 2006 moderators Nancy Olson and Glenn F. Chesnut page
Download 13.83 Mb.
|
|
From: Bill Lash . . . . . . . . . . . . 9/3/2006 11:39:00 PM
too. If anyone wants a copy of the two CD set of the introduction of the 12 Traditions at the 1st International Conference of AA in Cleveland OH in 1950 (includes commentary from founding AA members), I have then for $14 plus $2 shipping. I specialized in recordings of early AA members and have over 200 talks by people who came in to AA in the 1930s and 1940s. Go with God.
From: AAHistoryLovers@yahoogroups.com [mailto:AAHistoryLovers@yahoogroups.com]On Behalf Of abigapple2002 Sent: Tuesday, August 29, 2006 1:16 PM To: AAHistoryLovers@yahoogroups.com Subject: [AAHistoryLovers] First World Conference transcripts I know that when the Traditions were accepted by the fellowship, Bill had one speaker talk about two traditions in each talk. I was wondering if anyone might know how to find transcripts or tapes of those talks. Thank you very much. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII ++++Message 3673. . . . . . . . . . . . AA Bulletin #1 (11/14/40) From: Bill Lash . . . . . . . . . . . . 9/4/2006 9:52:00 PM IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII THE ALCOHOLIC FOUNDATION NATIONAL HEADQUARTERS - ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS Box 658, Church Street Annex, New York City
for their cooperation in keeping the national headquarters informed of developments in the various groups. It is through such a central exchange that vital information and contact points can be brought to the attention of those who seek the solution to alcoholism which means so much to us.
establish a closer feeling of friendship between A.A. groups from the east coast to the west, and we hope it will prevent secession from the A.A. ranks of our San Francisco group who threatened to call themselves "Dipsomaniacs Incognito" unless they heard from us more frequently. A bulletin has been contemplated for some time but delayed due to lack of sufficient personnel and office facilities. We now have at least the equipment and hope to be able to make this bulletin a periodic spree (not alcoholic). This office has in the last year handled over 2000 inquiries answering each by personal letter. In addition, correspondence is maintained with about 50 centers where A.A. work is in operation, varying from the solitary efforts of single isolated A.A. members to groups of 150. In view of the fact that in April 1939 there were only about 100 A.A. members, and the fact that there is now a total of approximately 1400, your efforts and ours have been exceptionally worth while. Continued A.A. activity will mean a great deal not only to each of us as individuals, but also to the many who are still unaware of the fact that there is an answer to the alcoholic problem which is practicable on a large scale. Our correspondence reaches not only the four corners of the U.S. but also touches Alaska, Africa, England, France and Australia. Although nothing of consequence has developed as yet in these distant places, nevertheless it is indicative of the widespread interest in Alcoholics Anonymous, of the far reaching results already obtained, and the possibilities for the future.
where there are isolated A.A. members who have recovered either through the book alone or through brief contact with established centers.
Buffalo, N.Y. Denver, Colorado Shelby, North Carolina Greensboro, North Carolina Aiken, South Carolina Bellingham, Washington Bismarck, North Dakota Burlington, Vermont Bennington, Vermont Norfolk, Virginia Kansas City, Missouri St. Louis, Missouri Knoxville, Tennessee Eau Clare, Wisconsin Phoenix, Arizona There are several "working" A.A. members in each of the following cities where meetings are in a get together stage.
Boston, Mass. Wallingford, Vermont San Diego, California Indianapolis, Ind.
weekly meetings are held: New York City, N.Y. South Orange, N.J. Washington, D.C. Richmond, VA. Detroit, Michigan Jackson, Michigan Coldwater, Michigan Chicago, Illinois Houston, Texas Los Angeles, Calif. San Francisco, Calif. Evansville, Indiana Little Rock, Arkansas Philadelphia, PA. Baltimore, MD. Waunakee, Wisconsin Greenwich, Conn. Cleveland, Ohio Akron, Ohio Toledo, Ohio Dayton, Ohio Youngstown, Ohio The secretary or correspondent of each group has the name and address of at least one member in each of the established groups for the use of traveling or visiting members. However, at the request of many of these groups may we ask that the New York office be used as a clearing house for all correspondence since but few local groups are equipped to handle the correspondence now coming to them from so many different directions. We shall gladly give full particulars about any of the listed communities upon request.
honesty and sincerity so we sympathize with the new prospect who said he certainly DID want to stop drinking but after listening a few minutes to our A.A. story said "Oh that!! - I tried it for two weeks and it doesn't work". We shall appreciate receiving ideas, suggestions, criticisms, etc. of general interest for the purpose of this bulletin is to relate the many A.A. groups in a friendly spirit.
Secretary P.S. Since it is not possible at the present time for us to furnish enough copies for distribution to every A.A. member, perhaps you will feel it advisable to read this copy aloud at a meeting. IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII ++++Message 3674. . . . . . . . . . . . Re: Re: Richard Peabody died drunk? Documentation? From: michael oates . . . . . . . . . . . . 9/4/2006 7:25:00 PM
died drunk to prove only AA founders died sober, what is the point, because earlier on the site it has been documented that not many of the first 100 the Big Book refers to made it to their deaths sober, i thought this was an intellectual site not a shrill for AA. If the purpose is anything other than AA History then discontinue me. ______________________________
Bill Wilson, someone commented that the Peabody method did not in fact work very well (something with which everyone agrees), and went on to say that Peabody himself in fact died drunk.
of "buck yourself up, and quit acting like a spoiled child, and learn how to be a REAL MAN, and start exercising some control over your drinking, and start using some will power like REAL MEN do, and quit being such a whimpering little sissy." It was the spirit of Jack London novels and some of the other "be a REAL RUGGED HE MAN and stop being molly coddled by your over protective Mommy" popular American literature and pop psychology of that period.
literature, there was a fad for blaming men's mothers for everything that was wrong with them after they grew up. My father certainly read the Jack London novels and the Zane Grey westerns and all that, and believed all of that! (I was born in 1939, so you can place this in history.)
time, to understand that popular fad better, and read some of the cheap pulp literature of that period.
in northern Indiana, Kenneth G. Merrill, "Drunks Are a Mess" ( http://hindsfoot.org/nsbend2.html ). Most of what he says is very good, and has things we can learn from today. In fact it is one of the best short introductions to the psychological aspects of the AA program ever written. But even Ken Merrill was a man of his times, and he slips in one paragraph that shows the influence of the "rugged he man" fad on the American psyche at that period: "But of all other causes put together, none equals the sinister potency, in creating future alcoholics, of a harsh, cruel, disciplinarian type of father, coupled with an over-soft, over-affectionate, over-possessive mother. A mom who conspires with sonny to evade papa's wrath, who carries her protectiveness into fields beyond the home, and attempts ceaselessly, and usually successfully, to insulate the child from the normal, wholesome buffets of ordinary childhood experience. It becomes a hideous circle. The more impossible rules the father lays down for the child to follow, the more failures accumulate, the more bitter the father's persecution, the more maudlin and sentimental the mother's attempts to protect and compensate. Between them, believe me they do a job."
the Jacoby Club (which is very important for AA history) says that Peabody renounced some of the principles which the EM and the JC were using (because the EM and JC called upon the power of God's grace to help us do what we could never do alone), and that this was what made Peabody's system so weak and ineffective in practice. The early AA people were wiser, Rich says, and picked up the good points of the EM and JC system, and insisted that we had to call upon God's grace for help, and ignored Peabody's attempt to change that vital part of the EM and JC system ( http://hindsfoot.org/kDub1.html and http://hindsfoot.org/kDub2.html ).
involved in AA history (including those who were not AA members, but with whom we were in contact, like Ebby Thacher and Rowland Hazard, and the people involved in the Jacoby Club, which heavily influenced early Boston AA) were able to find a solution to their drinking problem, either IN or OUT of AA. It's fair game to ask how well early AA worked in fact, and also how well some of the other systems worked in fact (like the Oxford Group, the Emmanuel Movement and Jacoby Club, and Peabody's method) to see why the early AA people decided to discard some of the principles involved in those other groups.
would in fact be running a shill for AA. At that point, someone else wrote in and said, don't say things like that about Peabody if you can't prove it, otherwise it's the worst kind of malicious gossip mongering. And the person who originally wrote that, who is an honest historian, had to admit that he was stating something that he did not know for a one hundred per cent guaranteed fact, although there was some significant supporting evidence.
question out, simply to establish what the facts were here. And the answer at this point seems to be that we cannot know all of the facts surrounding Peabody's last days for sure, and that there may in fact have even been ameliorating circumstances (medical doctors sometimes prescribed small amounts of alcohol for heart patients in that period of history, as they did for my grandfather, who was not an alcoholic, during his last years, which was during the 1950's).
come up with a one hundred percent guaranteed answer to this particular question, but that is the nature of all real historical research. Not all historical questions can be answered with one hundred percent certainty. A good professional historian has to know, not only what we DO know for a fact, but what we do NOT know for an absolute fact.
(if any) reliable data supporting the assertion that the Peabody method was a very workable method of dealing with alcoholism. And we can say that, in spite of the popularity of his book among the general public at that time, it wasn't going to be a real winner when it came to effectively dealing with the problem of alcoholism in the United States (where it was then, and still is, the third leading cause of death). That's why nobody tries to use the Peabody method any more.
all the alcoholics whom I have known who obtained a five year survival rate (five years of unbroken sobriety), around 1% did that by will power alone (essentially the Peabody method), around 1% did that by going to a conservative evangelical church and reading the Bible and praying to Jesus as their Lord and Savior, and the other 98% get sober in AA. More alcoholics by far get sober in AA than by any other way, but I know of no sensible observer (including all of the people who regularly contribute to this web group) who would deny that the other two methods also sometimes work.
that Peabody's book, in spite of the fact that it was very widely read and very popular for a while, stopped being read and used because it simply didn't work very well, if at all. And the evidence surrounding Peabody's drinking during his own last years gives us at least no unambiguous evidence that the system worked for him either. On the basic issue, the fact is that almost nothing in the AA program was totally invented by the early AA people themselves. Almost everything in the AA program originally came from somewhere else, and had been said by somebody else before. So a decent history of early AA will be forced to write about the earlier attempts to deal with alcoholism in the United States from which the early AA people learned either (a) good ideas which they could borrow or (b) bad ideas which they needed to leave out of their new AA program if they wanted it to be as successful as possible. So we have no choice, when writing a full account of early AA history, but to write at least a little about things like the Oxford Group; the Emmanuel Movement and the Jacoby Club; Rowland Hazard and Carl Jung; Peabody's book; neo-Freudian psychiatrists like Adler; representatives of the New Thought movement like Emmet Fox and James Allen ( http://hindsfoot.org/kML3rc1.html ); and other ideas and movements of the early twentieth century.
it is clear that they had an effect on the way early AA people thought and believed.
interested in these things, and who want to focus solely on working out the dates and facts surrounding the lives of early AA members and early AA publications, should just delete these messages about the background to early AA. That's the advantage of being in a web group, as opposed to having to sit through a long conference, when one of the speakers spends a half hour ranting about something you aren't the slightest bit interested in (and anyway, you don't LIKE the jerk, he's obnoxious). Hit the delete button! But there is NO WAY that anyone could post messages for a group of over 1400 people all around the world, and guarantee that each individual member will NEVER see a message posted that he or she finds uninteresting (grin). Heck, I've seen strings of messages posted on this web site on certain occasions on things that I personally thought were unbelievably pedantic and boring, but some of the other members of the group found that topic fascinating, and since they are members of the group in good standing, they have their rights too. In the list of topics at the beginning of my heavily used and well worn copy of "As Bill Sees It: The A.A. Way of Life ... selected writings of A.A.'s cofounder" (23rd printing, 1989) there is a long list of reading on the topic of "tolerance" for other members of the program, warts and all (grin).
A.A. History From: Bristol Fashion . . . . . . . . . . . . 9/5/2006 2:52:00 AM
Sally Cousins Archivist ______________________________ Note from the moderator: Yes, please, AA is a movement for the whole world. The annual Bristol Convention has become the central gathering place for AA historians and archivists, not just in the British Isles (England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales) but drawing many participants from the continent of Europe.
of European countries including Germany, France, Belgium, the Scandinavian countries, Finland, etc.
Mexico, India, Israel, Australia, New Zealand, and so on, all over the globe. Significant dates and historical figures and events from all over the world are welcome and heartily encouraged in this forum.
From: "chesbayman56" To: Sent: Saturday, September 02, 2006 4:55 AM Subject: [AAHistoryLovers] Significant September dates in A.A. History
> Sept 1930 - Bill wrote 4th (last) promise in family Bible to quit > drinking. > Sept 1939 - group started by Earl T in Chicago. > Sept 1940 - AA group started in Toledo by Duke P and others. > Sept 1940 - Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases gives Big Book > unfavorable review. > Sept 1946 - Bill and Dr. Bob both publicly endorsed National Committee > Education Alcoholism founded by Marty M. > Sept 1946 - 1st A.A. group in Mexico. > Sept 1948 - Bob writes article for Grapevine on AA "Fundamentals - > In Retrospect". > Sept 1949 - 1st issue of Grapevine published in "pocketbook" size. > Sept 1, 1939 - 1st AA group founded in Chicago. > Sept 11, 2001 - 30 Vesey St, New York. Location of AA's first office > is destroyed during the World Trade Center attack. > Sept 12, 1942 - U.S. Assist. Surgeon General Kolb speaks at dinner > for Bill and Dr Bob. > Sept 13, 1937 - Florence R, 1st female in AA in NY. > Sept 13, 1941 - WHJP in Jacksonville, FL airs Spotlight on AA. > Sept 17, 1954 - Bill D, AA #3 dies. > Sept 18, 1947 - Dallas Central Office opens its doors. > Sept 19, 1965 - The Saturday Evening Post publishes > article "Alcoholics Can Be Cured - Despite AA" > Sept 19, 1975 - Jack Alexander, author of original Saturday Evening > Post article, dies. > Sept 21, 1938 - Bill W and Hank P form Works Publishing Co. > Sept 24, 1940 - Bill 12th steps Bobbie V, who later replaced Ruth > Hock as his secretary in NY. > Sept 30, 1939 - article in Liberty magazine, "Alcoholics and God" > by Morris Markey.
++++Message 3676. . . . . . . . . . . . RE: First World Conference transcripts From: ArtSheehan . . . . . . . . . . . . 9/4/2006 2:31:00 PM
which the Traditions were approved was called an "International Conference." From the 2nd one on in 1955 (in St Louis, MO) they started getting called an "International Convention" (probably to not confuse them with the General Service Conference). A recap of the 1950 Cleveland, OH proceedings is in a September 1950 Grapevine article by Bill W titled "We Come of Age." The "Language of the Heart" (pgs 102-121) gives the title of the article as "We Came of Age." I've been using the erroneous title of the article for some time. A full transcription of the article by Fiona Dodd (who specifies the correct title) can be found in AAHL message #3595. An extract: "Several thousand of us crowded into the Cleveland Music Hall for the Tradition meeting, which was thought by most AAs to be the high point of our Conference. Six old-time stalwarts, coming from places far flung as Boston and San Diego, beautifully reviewed the years of AA experience which had led to the writing of our Tradition."
the short or long form. He paraphrased a version which is an amalgam of both forms:
should come first; that AA has no human authority - only God as he may speak in our Group Conscience; that our leaders are but trusted servants, they do not govern; that any alcoholic may become an AA Download 13.83 Mb. Share with your friends:
|