May 21 in A.A. History

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.”

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^*“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.

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^*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.”