August 20 in A.A. History

1940: Clarence and Dorothy W. S. [right, respectively], two strong personalities, both active in Alcoholics Anonymous, were divorced.

Clarence wrote to Ruth Hock [left]:

Oh well, it is about in line with about everything else I hear about myself, including being engaged to seven different girls, secretly married to four, drunk and disorderly, married to an heiress and engaged to two others, and a wife beater. So what the hell. On the contrary, I am doing fine, officially single, sober (3 years) don’t ever expect to slip, don’t beat anyone’s wife, no heiress’ [sic] have proposed to me, but just going along. Have been fired out of the finance business and am now selling Fords… Have had a lot of interesting experiences in the past 3 years and have since listened to some screwy ideas. Which convinces me that all the nuts aren’t alkies... All in all it’s a great world.

Dorothy wrote to Ruth as well:

Dear Sugar-Puss, Tell Bill that Prince Blue-Flame is getting a divorce from his “100% I Am” wife—said that a man needed a woman—I gather that spir­itual mysticism wasn't enough.

A.A. History—month & day unknown

1959: Alcoholics Anonymous came to Austria.

Two A.A. members from Bad Reichenhall, Germany, decided to carry the A.A. message across the border into Salzburg, Austria. With the help of their first contact—a doctor at a local clinic for nervous diseases—they helped a small number of alcoholics form a group.

Meanwhile, to the east in Vienna, two alcoholic women undergoing treatment at Dr. Rotter’s psychiatric clinic learned about A.A. and started a group of their own. Joined by a man from Linz, they began meeting in private homes. Both groups, working independently, sought guidance from German A.A. groups and received German-language A.A. literature [right: map showing the location of Bad Reichenhall, Germany; and Salzburg, Linz, and Vienna in Austria].

1959: The third printing of the second edition of Alcoholics Anonymous—the Big Book—was published with a dust jacket that incorrectly labeled it “The Third Edition”—an error made in two separate places on the jacket [left].

Additionally, this printing was the first to append the misattributed* Herbert Spencer quote to the end of Appendix II, “Spiritual Experience.” Ray C. had opened his story, “An Artist’s Concept,” in the first edition of the Big Book with this quote:

There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance—that principle is contempt prior to investigation.

Ray’s story was dropped from the second edition, and this quote was added to Appendix II, but not until this print­ing.

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^*Scholars assert that Herbet Spencer [right] (1820–1903) would never have written such a statement. The correct attribution belongs to William Paley [left] (1743–1805), an English clergyman, author, and college lecturer. In his work A View of the Evidences of Christianity (1794), he wrote, “The infidelity of the Gentile world, and that more especially of men of rank and learning in it, is resolved into a principle which, in my judgment, will account for the inefficacy of any argument, or any evidence whatever, viz. contempt prior to examination.” Rev. William H. Poole [right] (1820–1896) may have been the first to render the quotation in its more familiar form, in Anglo-Israel or, The British Nation: The lost [sic] Tribes of Israel (1879): “There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all argument, and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance. This principle is, contempt prior to examination.”