August 29 in A.A. History

1886: T. Henry Williams was born in South Woodstock, Connecticut. In the 1930s, he and his wife, Clarace [right], hosted meetings of the Oxford Group in their Akron, Ohio home [left]. The home became a weekly gathering place for early members of Alcoholics Anonymous, who called themselves the Alcoholic Squad of the Oxford Group. By the end of 1939, this group had begun meeting separately as an independent A.A. group.

1956: Bill W. first took LSD in California under the guidance of Gerald Heard, a British-born American historian, science writer, public lecturer, educator, and philosopher. Heard had introduced Bill to Aldous Huxley, the English writer and philosopher, as well as to British psychiatrists Drs. Humphry Osmond^* and Abram Hoffer, who were then working with schizophrenic and alcoholic patients in Canada. At the time, LSD was believed to hold psychotherapeutic potential, and research into it was being funded by the NIH and the National Academy of Sciences. Osmond and Hoffer sought to induce an experience resembling delirium tremens (DTs), hoping to shock alcoholics away from drinking. Bill took LSD with Heard and Huxley.

Among those Bill later invited to experiment with LSD—and who accepted—were Nell Wing, Father Ed Dowling, Sam Shoemaker, Lois W. (a reluctant participant), Marty M., and Helen W. These sessions took place in New York under the medical supervision of a psychiatrist from Roosevelt Hospital. The experiments would go on to have significant repercussions within Alcoholics Anonymous, yet Bill continued his own LSD experiments into 1959, and possibly into the 1960s [below: all persons named herein].

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^*Osmond coined the term psychedelic in a reply to a letter from Huxley [right], who had proposed his own coinage, phanerothyme, in a short rhyme: “To make this mundane world sublime, just half a gram of phanerothyme.” Osmond countered with a couplet of his own: “To fall in Hell or soar Angelic, you'll need a pinch of psychedelic”—from the Greek ψυχή (psyche, meaning “mind”) and δῆλος (delos, meaning “manifest”). The exchange took place in April 1956; Osmond went on to formally propose the term to the New York Academy of Sciences the following year.

Today in A.A. History—August 29–September 1

1991: The 34th International Conference of Young People in Alcoholics Anonymous (ICYPAA) took place at the Hilton San Francisco [right: c. 1971–73] in San Francisco, California [far left: registration form; near left: one bit of swag from the event].

A.A. History—month & day unknown

1966: Bill W. wrote to Herbert “Herb” M., General Manager of the General Service Office from 1960 to 1968, expressing his feelings after the General Service Conference finally agreed in April to change the ratio of Class A (alcoholic) to Class B (non‑alcoholic) Trustees on the General Service Board from 7–8 to 14–7, which marked Bill’s “last official business with the Fellowship.… Bill’s A.A. work was finished.” He wrote:

You cannot imagine how happy and grateful I am that the decision was taken that A.A. should try to go on its own at the level of the board. Chief among my sources of happiness at this outcome is the remembrance that without your good offices, nothing might have been accomplished for years, if ever.

At the January 1958 Board meeting, Herb.—then a Class B (alcoholic) trustee moved that the Board could function with more alcoholic than non-alcoholic trustees and would act on it if the Conference asked. That vote split three in favor, three opposed, and three abstaining—it didn’t pass, but it opened the debate formally within the Board.