May 2 in A.A. History

In 1856, Matt Talbot [left: only known photo] was born in Dublin, Ireland.

In 1935, in the wake of Prohibition’s failure, Everett Colby [right] hosted a dinner in New York City to seek funding from the “drys” for his educational program promoting temperate drinking, called “The Council for Moderation.” In his book Alcoholics Anonymous and the Rockefeller Connection, Jay D. Moore says,

    The dinner was… educa­tional in nature, luminaries made presentations… and the invitees included a who’s who of American power… In fact, perusing the list of those who attended the dinner one finds many of the names that at­tended the dinner for Alcoholics Anonymous.

    According to Moore, the refusal of John D. Rockefeller, Jr [left] to fund this project, proposed by his college roommate at Brown University, illustrates…

    that his self-imposed philanthropic limits were invio­late… The Colby dinner draws a parallel to the 1940 AA Rockefeller dinner that cannot be brushed off. The similarities are unmistakable…

In 1943, in New Orleans, Louisiana, The Times-Picayune reported that the first A.A. group in the city was being formed:

    Organization of a New Orleans chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous [is] underway with a nucleus of more than a dozen members, part of a unique group of more than 8000 men and women in the United States that have banded together to fight the disease of alcoholism.