1945: The New Republic published “Blueplate Gospel,” a review by Dr.
Leslie H. Farber
[left, c. 1981]
of September Remember [right:
cover]
, a novel by Eliot Taintor.*
A chapter from the book had been serialized in the March and April 1945
issues of the A.A. Grapevine. The review stated, in part,
The advantage of the present 300-page
pamphlet (disguised as a pulp-style novel) over the shorter booklets
distributed by AA, lies in its detailed revelations of group activity.
While the formal weekly meetings are devoted to inspirational talks by
ex-alcoholics, coffee is drunk in no blue-nose spirit; good fellowship
abounds (“You can get that sense of abandon without liquor”). AA members
feel a natural solidarity: the way they would “get up and talk at meetings,
really let their hair down, made other contacts seem thin and superficial.
Other people shadowy.”
*“Eliot Taintor” was the pseudonym used by the married couple Ruth F. and
Gregory M., one of whom was an A.A. member.
1960: The Saturday Evening Post
[right: cover]
published “I Always Have Help” anonymously. An introductory note
read:
A man who has had more than his share of
trouble—alcoholism, shattered marriage, tragic losses—tells anonymously how
he manages to face life, one day at a time.
The anonymous author wrote,
As I write this I’m in as warty a financial
pickle as a small businessman could contrive—broke, no property, heavy
family responsibilities, head of a small concern which is also broke, with
creditors expecting in a few months to be paid $20,000 [about $225,000 in
2026] it hasn’t got. Less than this has driven highly strung people to
breakdown and even suicide, and I confess I am a little uneasy. But because
of a limited grasp of a philosophy which members of a celebrated secret
society call The 24-Hour Plan, I’m fairly confident of pulling through.… I
took up with some people who were supposed to know how to lay hold of a
situation of this kind. They gave me a book called Alcoholics Anonymous, and
my eye fell on a remarkable passage. Before I tell you what it said, let me
assure the reader that he doesn’t have to be an alcoholic to proceed with
this article; everyone concerned with open-minded living may find something
of interest.
May in A.A. History—day unknown
1954: The A.A. Grapevine [left: cover] published a brief item titled “Calling All AA ‘Hams’: A Meeting in the
Ether,” stating:
Several AAs around the country who are
amateur radio operators would like to contact each other via the air waves.
Send us your signal, if you’re a “ham,” and we’ll print it.
1954: [Early;
Pass It On wrongly says 1956]
Bill W. received a letter from the notorious robber, kidnapper, and rapist
Caryl Chessman
[right, 1953],
popularly known as “The Red Light Bandit.” In May 1948, Chessman was
convicted on 17 of 18 counts for crimes committed during the first three
weeks of January 1948. He was sentenced to death under California’s “Little
Lindbergh Law”* and, at the time he wrote to Bill, Chessman was on death row
at San Quentin Prison
[left: inside view, c. 1950s]
, awaiting execution on May 14. (He was granted a stay. Over nearly twelve
years on death row, Chessman filed dozens of appeals, acting as his own
attorney. He avoided eight execution dates, often by only a few
hours.) Later, in 1954, Prentice-Hall published
Chessman’s autobiography, Cell 2455, Death Row: A Condemned Man’s Own Story
[right: cover].† In it, Chessman drew a comparison between psychopaths and
alcoholics. This prompted Jack Alexander, who likely saw a prepublication
copy, to encourage him to write to Bill. Alexander wondered whether
criminals could “recover” through a surrender similar to that of A.A.
members, writing to Bill:
There is a close resemblance between the
criminal psychopath and the alcoholic mind. Both are grandiose, resentful,
defiant, and hating of authority; both unconsciously destroy themselves
trying to destroy others.
On 9 February 1954, Chessman wrote to Bill, saying in part:
I woke up to the fact I’d been nothing more than a cynically clever,
aggressively destructive and sometimes violent damn fool. The question of
guilt or innocence aside, it dawned on me that my condemnation was a public
proclamation of spectacular failure. As I saw it then, two courses were open
to me. I could spend my time figuratively or literally whining and indulging
in a narrow self-pity or I could see—perhaps a more appropriate word is
envision—myself and all that a death sentence implied in terms larger than
my own predicament.… I could tell my story and plead, not my personal cause,
but society’s cause and the cause of those who—in my opinion, needlessly—are
criminally damned and doomed.… I am most hopeful it will make a very useful
contribution to a most vexing social problem.
On 31 March, Bill replied, including a copy
of Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. On 25 May, he wrote to Father Ed
Dowling, enclosing copies of Chessman’s letter to him, his own reply to
Chessman, and his reply to Jack Alexander’s letter noted above. A postscript
added,
P.S. Brother Chessman got another stay—maybe 60 days. Have a most
interesting letter from him in response to my last. Will send it on.
*This law had been repealed by the time Chessman’s trial began
but was in effect at the time of his crimes, and the repeal was not
retroactive.
†Chessman began writing this memoir after San
Quentin Prison Warden Harley Teets encouraged him to do something with his
life. With Teets’s support, he chronicled his descent into what he called
criminally insane behavior. When the book was published, it became a
bestseller and was adapted into a movie of the same name in 1955. Its success
led Teets to try to prevent Chessman from writing any more; however, three
additional books by Chessman were later smuggled out of prison and published.
In 1957, Teets died while serving as warden.
Clinton T. Duffy, the first
warden to introduce the A.A. program into prisons and a prominent opponent of
the death penalty, was warden when Chessman first arrived. Duffy described him
as one of the most dangerous men he had ever met: tough, mean, contemptuous,
arrogant, deviant, a troublemaker, and a constant threat—“Chessman represented
nothing.”
1925: Bill and Lois W. were five and a half weeks into a motorcycle trip
investigating publicly held companies across the eastern U.S. They were
staying at “The Camp,” as the Burnham family called it, located at Lake
Emerald outside North Dorset, Vermont [left: Lois's father sitting on steps at "The Camp"]. In her Diary of Two Motorcycle Hobos,
Lois recorded how “Two tragedies occurred in the insect and bird life
today.” She watched with “astonishment” as a dragonfly emerged from the
“ugly brown beetle shell” she had found. As it flew away, a phoebe bird
“darted down and gobbled it up!” Lois “sat down and cried. Later [that]
afternoon, one of the babies of the same phoebe bird fell out of its nest
and was killed instantly”
[right: phoebe eating a dragonfly].
1902: Howard Alfred “Al” S. [left]
was born in Charleston, Pennsylvania, the son of Emmett Fox’s secretary.
After working in advertising and film, he would join A.A. in 1944. Within
the Fellowship, he would serve as Director of the New York Intergroup
Association, Grapevine Editor (1948–?), a Grapevine Director, and a Class B
(alcoholic) Trustee from 1958 to 1961. He would author the Responsibility
Pledge, which would be introduced to the Fellowship at the 1965
International Convention in Toronto, Ontario. He would also write the
biographical book Bert D.: Hardhat, Inebriate, Scholar, published by
Harbor House in the 1960s.
