October 24 in A.A. History

In 1939, the Cleveland Plain Dealer (Ohio) published the third article [right] in Elrick B. Davis's five-part series, “Alcoholics Anonymous Makes Its Stand Here.” It read, in part,

    The ex-drunks cured of their medically incurable alcoholism by membership in Alcoholic Anonymous, know that the way to keep themselves from backsliding is to find another pathological alcoholic to help. Or to start a new man toward cure. That is the way that the Akron chapter of the society, and from that, the Cleveland fellowship was begun.
    One of the earliest of the cured rummies had talked a New York securities house into taking a chance that he was really through with liquor. He was commissioned to do a stock promotion chore in Akron. If he should succeed, his economic troubles also would be cured. Years of alcoholism had left him bankrupt as well as a physical and social wreck before Alcoholics Anonymous had saved him.
    His Akron project failed. Here he was on a Saturday afternoon in a strange hotel in a town where he did not know a soul, business hopes blasted, and with scarcely money enough to get him back to New York with a report that would leave him without the last job he knew of for him in the world. If ever disappointment deserved drowning, that seemed the time. 

	In 1943, Bill and Lois W. [left] left home for their first major A.A. tour. Bill called it their “trip to the coast” and they stopped in at least three places: Los Angeles, California; Portland, Oregon, where they “looked in on Doc H., an Oregon chiropractor who was struggling with the alkies in Portland;” and Seattle, Washington, where they “first met businessman Dale A. [right], who with real valor was trying hard to hold a small band together.”

    Bill and Lois returned home 87 days later, on January 19.

In 1973, the newly created Trustee’s Archives Committee held its first meeting. The committee consisted of alcoholic (Class B) General Service Trustee George G. as chair, two non-alcoholic (Class A) Trustees—Rev. Lee Archer Belford and Dr. Milton A. Maxwell—and Archivist Nell Wing, who had been appointed A.A.’s first Archivist in the year before.