Aa history Lovers 2004 moderators Nancy Olson and Glenn F. Chesnut page
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(the Daytona Beach groups sponsored Twenty-Four Hours a Day and the Nicollet Group in Minneapolis sponsored The Little Red Book) was automatically considered O.K. for any other A.A. groups to read from and use in their meetings, if they chose to do so. The question of exactly why New York refused to take over the responsibility for keeping the former book in print in 1953-4 is not in fact an important issue. People today who want us to stop reading these books are trying to cut A.A. off from its historical roots in a way which will ultimately be very dangerous to the program -- like trying to go to sea on a sailing ship without enough ballast in the bottom -- the first high wind will capsize the vessel for it has no weight of tradition to keep it upright in the face of the stormy blasts. That is what is important about the Archival Movement which sprang up in the 1990's -- a grassroots realization among A.A. people all over the world -- which saw that it was necessary to keep the traditions of good old-time A.A. alive if we were to be a vital force in the present. The AAHistoryLovers, the National Archives Workshops (the ninth one is going to be held in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, next month), the annual conference in Bristol, England, and so on, were the product of this new awareness which began developing all over the world, an awareness that we have to keep A.A. firmly grounded in its foundational period, the era of the Good Old-Timers, in order to keep it healthy in our own period. Glenn C. (South Bend, Indiana) IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII ++++Message 2000. . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Questions From: Jim Blair . . . . . . . . . . . . 8/27/2004 9:02:00 AM IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII Here is an email posted some time ago by an archivist in Northern CA. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- Juliet from our local Intergroup has come up with some interesting facts about the 20 questions. Below is a snippet from an e-mail I received from a contact from Johns Hopkins' media relations department: This is from a faculty member in our Psychiatry dept. "The Johns Hopkins Twenty Questions: Are You An Alcoholic? was developed in the 1930s by Dr. Robert Seliger, who at that time was a faculty member in the Department of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. It was intended for use as a self-assessment questionnaire to determine the extent of one's alcohol use. It was not intended to be used by professionals as a screening tool to help them formulate a diagnosis of alcoholism in their patients. We do not use this questionnaire at any of the Johns Hopkins substance abuse treatment programs. To the best of my knowledge, there have never been any reliable or validated studies conducted using the Hopkins Twenty Questions. I advise you to consider using other instruments such as the Michigan Alcoholism Screening Test or the CAGE -- both of which have proven reliability and validity as reported in the scientific literature." So, the questions should be attributed to Dr.Robert Seliger of Johns Hopkins (in the 1930s), not to Johns Hopkins itself as they no longer advocate their use. I note as well that the e-mail I sent to you all earlier from the Literature Desk at GSO stated that the hospital had requested that GSO not attribute those questions to their institution in the pamphlet "Memo to an Inmate Who May Be an Alcoholic." If you know anyone who would like permission to reprint this piece, I have a contact at Johns Hopkins to whom I can refer them. I have been in contact with the faculty member who knew the history of this document and who recommended that we not use it. She was very adamant about it--in a second e-mail to me, she said that she'd grant permission to any AA group who wanted to use it, but that she really recommended that we don't. IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII ++++Message 2001. . . . . . . . . . . . Rule 62 From: Jack Frost . . . . . . . . . . . . 8/27/2004 7:10:00 AM IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII Anyone know in what literature are there references to Rule 62, and when it was originally used? Thanx! IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII ++++Message 2002. . . . . . . . . . . . Re: Dates on the 20 questions From: Dean @ e-AA . . . . . . . . . . . . 8/27/2004 10:18:00 AM IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII butterfly2479 sited and used ... Can anyone verify the ORIGINAL date on the JOHN HOPKINS TEST FOR ALCOHOLISM. And what are your sources please? Somewhere, and I can't put my finger on it now, there was a post about this. It could have been on another list. However, the substance was that there was correspondence between GSO and Johns Hopkins University about this questionnaire. The university replied that a faculty member had developed the questionnaire but it was not approved or used by the university -- and the university doesn't/didn't use it. (Additionally, they suggested using something other than the questionnaire.) I'll try to find that email. I know I still have it ... somewhere. -- Dean Collins Monterey Peninsula, California IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII ++++Message 2003. . . . . . . . . . . . RE: Rule 62 From: Russ S . . . . . . . . . . . . 8/28/2004 9:31:00 AM IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII "When A.A. was still young, lots of eager groups were forming. In a town we'll call Middleton, a real crackerjack had started up. The townspeople were as hot as firecrackers about it. Stargazing, the elders dreamed of innovations. They figured the town needed a great big alcoholic center, a kind of pilot plant A.A. groups could duplicate everywhere. Beginning on the ground floor there would be a club; in the second story they would sober up drunks and hand them currency for their back debts; the third deck would house an educational project - quite noncontroversial, of course. In imagination the gleaming center was to go up several stories more, but three would do for a start. This would all take a lot of money - other people's money. Believe it or not, wealthy townsfolk bought the idea. There were, though, a few conservative dissenters among the alcoholics. They wrote the Foundation * , A.A.'s headquarters in New York, wanting to know about this sort of streamlining. They understood that the elders, just to nail things down good, were about to apply to the Foundation for a charter. These few were disturbed and skeptical. Of course, there was a promoter in the deal - a super-promoter. By his eloquence he allayed all fears, despite advice from the Foundation that it could issue no charter, and that ventures which mixed an A.A. group with medication and education had come to sticky ends elsewhere. To make things safer, the promoter organized three corporations and became president of them all. Freshly painted, the new center shone. The warmth of it all spread through the town. Soon things began to hum. To insure foolproof, continuous operation, sixty-one rules and regulations were adopted. But alas, this bright scene was not long in darkening. Confusion replaced serenity. It was found that some drunks yearned for education, but doubted if they were alcoholics. The personality defects of others could be cured maybe with a loan. Some were club-minded, but it was just a question of taking care of the lonely heart. Sometimes the swarming applicants would go for all three floors. Some would start at the top and come through to the bottom, becoming club members; others started in the club, pitched a binge, were hospitalized, then graduated to education on the third floor. It was a beehive of activity, all right, but unlike a beehive, it was confusion compounded. An A.A. group, as such, simply couldn't handle this sort of project. All too late that was discovered. Then came the inevitable explosion - something like that day the boiler burst in Wombley's Clapboard Factory. A chill chokedamp of fear and frustration fell over the group. When that lifted, a wonderful thing had happened. The head promoter wrote the Foundation office. He said he wished he'd paid some attention to A.A. experience. Then he did something else that was to become an A.A. classic. It all went on a little card about golf-score size. The cover read: "Middleton Group #1. Rule #62." Once the card was unfolded, a single pungent sentence leaped to the eye: "Don't take yourself too damn seriously." Thus it was that under Tradition Four an A.A. group had exercised its right to be wrong. Moreover, it had performed a great service for Alcoholics Anonymous, because it had been humbly willing to apply the lessons it learned. It had picked itself up with a laugh and gone on to better things. Even the chief architect, standing in the ruins of his dream, could laugh at himself - and that is the very acme of humility." * In 1954, the name of the Alcoholic Foundation, Inc., was changed to the General Service Board of Alcoholics Anonymous, Inc., and the Foundation office is now the General Service Office. pgs 147-149 Twelve Steps & Twelve Traditions of Alcoholics Anonymous ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ From: Jack Frost [mailto:jfrostburien@yahoo.com] Sent: Friday, August 27, 2004 8:11 AM To: AAHistoryLovers@yahoogroups.com Subject: [AAHistoryLovers] Rule 62 Anyone know in what literature are there references to Rule 62, and when it was originally used? Thanx! IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII ++++Message 2004. . . . . . . . . . . . Re: 20 Questions From: Mel Barger . . . . . . . . . . . . 8/28/2004 8:11:00 PM IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII Since the 20 questions were used for years and atrributed to Johns Hopkins, it's rather embarrassing to learnh that they didn't really have backing from the Johns Hopkins Hospital. But we no longer need them. AA has 12 questions in the pamphlet "Is AA for You?" which should suffice very well. Just walk a newcomer through those 12 questions and it should be immediately clear whether there's a serious drinking problem there. Mel Barger ~~~~~~~~
Mel Barger melb@accesstoledo.com ----- Original Message ----- From: Jim Blair To: AA History Lovers Sent: Friday, August 27, 2004 10:02 AM Subject: [AAHistoryLovers] 20 Questions Here is an email posted some time ago by an archivist in Northern CA. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----
Juliet from our local Intergroup has come up with some interesting facts about the 20 questions. Below is a snippet from an e-mail I received from a contact from Johns Hopkins' media relations department: This is from a faculty member in our Psychiatry dept. "The Johns Hopkins Twenty Questions: Are You An Alcoholic? was developed in the 1930s by Dr. Robert Seliger, who at that time was a faculty member in the Department of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. It was intended for use as a self-assessment questionnaire to determine the extent of one's alcohol use. It was not intended to be used by professionals as a screening tool to help them formulate a diagnosis of alcoholism in their patients. We do not use this questionnaire at any of the Johns Hopkins substance abuse treatment programs. To the best of my knowledge, there have never been any reliable or validated studies conducted using the Hopkins Twenty Questions. I advise you to consider using other instruments such as the Michigan Alcoholism Screening Test or the CAGE -- both of which have proven reliability and validity as reported in the scientific literature." So, the questions should be attributed to Dr.Robert Seliger of Johns Hopkins (in the 1930s), not to Johns Hopkins itself as they no longer advocate their use. I note as well that the e-mail I sent to you all earlier from the Literature Desk at GSO stated that the hospital had requested that GSO not attribute those questions to their institution in the pamphlet "Memo to an Inmate Who May Be an Alcoholic." If you know anyone who would like permission to reprint this piece, I have a contact at Johns Hopkins to whom I can refer them. I have been in contact with the faculty member who knew the history of this document and who recommended that we not use it. She was very adamant about it--in a second e-mail to me, she said that she'd grant permission to any AA group who wanted to use it, but that she really recommended that we don't. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This message was scanned by GatewayDefender [4] 9:55:16 AM ET - 8/28/2004 IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII ++++Message 2005. . . . . . . . . . . . 1940 AA/mexicanMemberCleveland From: Gilbert Gamboa . . . . . . . . . . . . 8/29/2004 9:04:00 PM IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII This question is for anyone who can direct me in the direction of info on Dick P the
mexican AA member who joined in 1940 in Cleveland I believe..Mel B you might recall all this,but I believe him to be the key figure in the translation of the Big Book into spanish words???..all info on this would be greatly appreciated,and although the hard work has been done in translating this book to spanish,there is yet a harder piece Ive encountered and that is to pronounce the words correctly and put an exact definition to the meaning in spanish.... seek,Trust,and serve Gilbert G.-Dallas,TX. Mel Barger Since the 20 questions were used for years and atrributed to Johns Hopkins, it's rather embarrassing to learnh that they didn't really have backing from the Johns Hopkins Hospital. But we no longer need them. AA has 12 questions in the pamphlet "Is AA for You?" which should suffice very well. Just walk a newcomer through those 12 questions and it should be immediately clear whether there's a serious drinking problem there. Mel Barger ~~~~~~~~ Mel Barger melb@accesstoledo.com ----- Original Message ----- From: Jim Blair To: AA History Lovers Sent: Friday, August 27, 2004 10:02 AM Subject: [AAHistoryLovers] 20 Questions Here is an email posted some time ago by an archivist in Northern CA. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------ Juliet from our local Intergroup has come up with some interesting facts about the 20 questions. Below is a snippet from an e-mail I received from a contact from Johns Hopkins' media relations department: This is from a faculty member in our Psychiatry dept. "The Johns Hopkins Twenty Questions: Are You An Alcoholic? was developed in the 1930s by Dr. Robert Seliger, who at that time was a faculty member in the Department of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. It was intended for use as a self-assessment questionnaire to determine the extent of one's alcohol use. It was not intended to be used by professionals as a screening tool to help them formulate a diagnosis of alcoholism in their patients. We do not use this questionnaire at any of the Johns Hopkins substance abuse treatment programs. To the best of my knowledge, there have never been any reliable or validated studies conducted using the Hopkins Twenty Questions. I advise you to consider using other instruments such as the Michigan Alcoholism Screening Test or the CAGE -- both of which have proven reliability and validity as reported in the scientific literature." So, the questions should be attributed to Dr.Robert Seliger of Johns Hopkins (in the 1930s), not to Johns Hopkins itself as they no longer advocate their use. I note as well that the e-mail I sent to you all earlier from the Literature Desk at GSO stated that the hospital had requested that GSO not attribute those questions to their institution in the pamphlet "Memo to an Inmate Who May Be an Alcoholic." If you know anyone who would like permission to reprint this piece, I have a contact at Johns Hopkins to whom I can refer them. I have been in contact with the faculty member who knew the history of this document and who recommended that we not use it. She was very adamant about it--in a second e-mail to me, she said that she'd grant permission to any AA group who wanted to use it, but that she really recommended that we don't. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This message was scanned by GatewayDefender [108] 9:55:16 AM ET - 8/28/2004 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Do you Yahoo!? Win 1 of 4,000 free domain names from Yahoo! Enter now [106] . IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII ++++Message 2006. . . . . . . . . . . . Re: 1940 AA/mexicanMemberCleveland From: Mel Barger . . . . . . . . . . . . 8/30/2004 1:16:00 PM IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII Hi Gilbert, I called the Cleveland Central Office re your request. The gentleman was Dick Perez and he and his wife both translated materials into Spanish. Dick passed away in 1988, about seven years after retiring from the Central Office. His wife is also deceased. My source for this information is Elvira A., who has worked at the central office in Cleveland for 28 years. She is getting together information about Dick. You may call her at (216) 241-7387. I do recall talking by phone with Dick in 1980, a short time before he retired. I was trying to interview Cleveland oldtimers for "Pass It On," and he gave me some leads. Mel Barger ~~~~~~~~
Mel Barger melb@accesstoledo.com ----- Original Message ----- From: Gilbert Gamboa To: AAHistoryLovers@yahoogroups.com Sent: Sunday, August 29, 2004 10:04 PM Subject: [AAHistoryLovers] 1940 AA/mexicanMemberCleveland This question is for anyone who can direct me in the direction of info on Dick P the mexican AA member who joined in 1940 in Cleveland I believe..Mel B you might recall all this,but I believe him to be the key figure in the translation of the Big Book into spanish words???..all info on this would be greatly appreciated,and although the hard work has been done in translating this book to spanish,there is yet a harder piece Ive encountered and that is to pronounce the words correctly and put an exact definition to the meaning in spanish.... seek,Trust,and serve Gilbert G.-Dallas,TX. Mel Barger Since the 20 questions were used for years and atrributed to Johns Hopkins, it's rather embarrassing to learnh that they didn't really have backing from the Johns Hopkins Hospital. But we no longer need them. AA has 12 questions in the pamphlet "Is AA for You?" which should suffice very well. Just walk a newcomer through those 12 questions and it should be immediately clear whether there's a serious drinking problem there. Mel Barger ~~~~~~~~
Mel Barger melb@accesstoledo.com ----- Original Message ----- From: Jim Blair To: AA History Lovers Sent: Friday, August 27, 2004 10:02 AM Subject: [AAHistoryLovers] 20 Questions Here is an email posted some time ago by an archivist in Northern CA. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------
Juliet from our local Intergroup has come up with some interesting facts about the 20 questions. Below is a snippet from an e-mail I received from a contact from Johns Hopkins' media relations department: This is from a faculty member in our Psychiatry dept. "The Johns Hopkins Twenty Questions: Are You An Alcoholic? was developed in the 1930s by Dr. Robert Seliger, who at that time was a faculty member in the Department of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. It was intended for use as a self-assessment questionnaire to determine the extent of one's alcohol use. It was not intended to be used by professionals as a screening tool to help them formulate a diagnosis of alcoholism in their patients. We do not use this questionnaire at any of the Johns Hopkins substance abuse treatment programs. To the best of my knowledge, there have never been any reliable or validated studies conducted using the Hopkins Twenty Questions. I advise you to consider using other instruments such as the Michigan Alcoholism Screening Test or the CAGE -- both of which have proven reliability and validity as reported in the scientific literature." So, the questions should be attributed to Dr.Robert Seliger of Johns Hopkins (in the 1930s), not to Johns Hopkins itself as they no longer advocate their use. I note as well that the e-mail I sent to you all earlier from the Literature Desk at GSO stated that the hospital had requested that GSO not attribute those questions to their institution in the pamphlet "Memo to an Inmate Who May Be an Alcoholic." If you know anyone who would like permission to reprint this piece, I have a contact at Johns Hopkins to whom I can refer them. I have been in contact with the faculty member who knew the history of this document and who recommended that we not use it. She was very adamant about it--in a second e-mail to me, she said that she'd grant permission to any AA group who wanted to use it, but that she really recommended that we don't. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This message was scanned by GatewayDefender [108] 9:55:16 AM ET - 8/28/2004 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download 4.17 Mb. Share with your friends:
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