22 October 2025

October 22 in A.A. History

In 1939
, the first public meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous in New Jersey took place at the South Orange Community Center [right]. Gordon MacD., a newcomer with only five months of sobriety, along with Herb D., had arranged for the meeting space to accommodate the growing New Jersey Group, which then had between twenty-five and thirty members attending its meetings. The meeting was held on a Sunday evening at 5:30 PM and marked the beginning of regular Sunday night meetings at the Community Center. This group, the New Jersey Group, would eventually become the “mother group” for all of New Jersey and later be known as the South Orange Sunday Night Group.

In 1963
, alcoholism educator and friend of Alcoholics Anonymous, Elvin Morton “Bunky” Jellinek [left], better known as E. M. Jellinek, died of a heart attack at his desk at Stanford University at the age of 72. Jellinek coined the phrase “disease concept of alcoholism” and significantly advanced the movement towards the medicalization of drunkenness and alcohol habituation. His initial study in 1946 was funded by A.A. members Marty M. and R. Brinkley S.

    
According to a 1998 study by Mariana Valverde
[right], Jellinek’s study was based on a narrow, selective study of a hand-picked group of AA members who had returned a self-reporting questionnaire. Valverde noted that the study’s findings were only relevant to “the experience of white, male, middle-class alcoholics in the 1940s.” Valverde also opined that a biostatistician of Jellinek’s eminence would have been well aware of the “unscientific status” of the “dubiously scientific data that had been collected by A.A. members.”

No comments: