August 10 in A.A. History

In 1940, with the outbreak of World War II, Cmdr. Junious C. [left] was recalled to the Navy to serve as the First Executive Officer in charge of the Aviation Trades Schools at the soon-to-be-commissioned Naval Air Station in Jacksonville, Florida [right, 1943].

    An Annapolis graduate from the Class of 1918 and a native of McComb, Mississippi, he had retired to Pasadena, California. One reason for his early retirement had been his excessive drinking. In Pasadena, his wife, Marie, had learned about a new organization called Alcoholics Anonymous and reached out to the Alcoholic Foundation in New York City for assistance. Ruth Hock provided her with the address of the Los Angeles Group, where Marie bought a copy of the Big Book. Junious found sobriety in the Los Angeles group and maintained it for several months, eventually becoming a key figure in the establishment of A.A. in Florida.

In 2015, to commemorate the 125th anniversary of the birth of E. M. “Bunky” Jellinek [left], Judit Hajnal Ward posted an editorial in the Jellinek Special Anniversary issue of the Center of Alcohol Studies (CAS) Information Services Newsletter. Co-authored by Judit H. Ward and William Bejarano, the piece was posted to the “Secrets from the Past” blog within the Rutgers University Alcohol Studies Archive. It included the following reflection:

    In remembrance of Jellinek, the first questions should be, as suggested by Thelma Pierce Anderson, Jellinek’s ex-wife, 

    Which Jellinek are we talking about? Bunky, the man? Bunky, the scientist? Bunky, the humanitarian? Bunky, the screwball? Bunky, the kind? the ruthless? the genius? (Anderson to Keller, August 22, 1984)

    This special issue of the Center of Alcohol Studies Information Services Newsletter aims to present Jellinek’s colorful personality through his own words, deeds, and scholarship, coupled with thoughts and opinions from some leaders of the field. Our goal is to show that Jellinek was everything but the average researcher. Letters, memories, and articles (by him and about him) outline a controversial scholar. He might have been scorned by many and idolized by others, but no one could just ignore him and what he did, whether as a charming gambler in Hungary or an alcohol scientist in the United States.
E. M. Jellinek more than others, saw “the big picture” regarding what was necessary to establish a beachhead for mainstream science’s cultural “ownership” of the nation’s alcohol-related concerns in the post-Repeal period. (Roizen, 2014, p. 78)

[Below: two illustrations from the article—left: timeline of Jellinek's life; right: highlights Jellinek’s work from the 2014th [sic] SALIS conference]