November 1 in A.A. History

1934: Edwin “Ebby” T. [left] made his “surrender,” presumably to Jesus Christ, at an Oxford Group meeting at the Calvary Church Rescue Mission [right, c. 1930s], located at 246 E. 23rd St. in New York City.

1941: Oklahoma’s Oklahoma City Times published an article titled “For Drunks: A Real Cure Comes to City” [right], which reported, in part:

Seven guys who can’t take their liquor without becoming “175 pounds each of roaring hell” met in an office in the Ramsey Tower Friday night to work over the eighth guy who was roaring drunk.

It was the first mass meeting here of Alcoholics Anonymous, an organization of former drunks formed by a drunk in New York six years ago, for the purpose of curing and keeping cured the sort of drinkers who are “alergic” [sic] to alcohol.

1947: A.A. “Group #1” was started in Anchorage [left, 1945], Alaska, with Herman C. as its leader. It would be the first lasting group in Alaska. Jack Alexander would write in his article “The Drunkard’s Best Friend,” published in The Saturday Evening Post in April 1950:

The group at Anchorage, Alaska, which started in a blizzard, has a dozen members, including one slightly puzzled Eskimo.

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^*Eskimo has been criticized as an offensive term. In Canada, Eskimo is especially frowned on; the only acceptable term is Inuit, and many Americans have come to prefer this name. Inuit is a more specific term than Eskimo, but properly applying to the traditionally Inuit-speaking peoples of Arctic Canada and parts of Greenland. In southwest Alaska and Arctic Siberia, where Inuit is not spoken, the comparable term is Yupik, which has not gained as wide a currency as Inuit. Use of these more specific terms is preferable when speaking of the appropriate ethnic group. For lack of a universally accepted general term, Eskimo is still often used in the U.S. for speaking of the Yupik and Inuit peoples collectively.

1951: The San Francisco Group, the first Alcoholics Anonymous group on the North American West Coast, had been arranged for 21 November 1939 by Ray W., a New York member, who had gone there to attend a sales course. Some of those on the list of contacts he had brought provided the attendees for that meeting. After a few days, having completed his sales training, Ray left for home. Bill later recalled that after that, “there was plenty of slipping and backsliding.” Early on, the Alcoholic Foundation, in New York City, “began writing letters to San Francisco, but the replies were sketchy and uncertain.” Two non-alcoholics—Mrs. Gordon Oram and Dr. Percy Poliak—struggled to keep the group going. At the end of 1940, a San Francisco member appeared at the Alcoholic Foundation. According to Bill, “She was a little tight, and crying.… [S]he said, ‘Bill, we’ve been going a whole year in San Francisco and do you know that at Christmas time we were all drunk.’”

But the A.A.s in San Francisco somehow turned around. In the early- to mid-1950s, Bill described his recognition of this fact:

Only a few years later, in 1951, the Lasker Award was given to A.A. in the San Francisco Opera House. On the night following the award presentation there was an A.A. meeting, and the huge place was packed. Sober alcoholics were practically hanging from the rafters. What once looked like a mighty poor acorn had produced a great oak.

1963: The first all-Swiss A.A. meeting, a two-day event that began on this date, brought together French- and German-speaking members. Following this gathering, the all-Swiss Bulletin would be published in both languages [left: “Latest News from Abroad,” Box 4-5-9, Dec 1963, p. 2].

2001: The fourth edition of Alcoholics Anonymous (the “Big Book”) [right: cover] was published; it included 24 new personal stories.

2001: JP Miller, the pen name of James Pinckney “Pappy” Miller [left, c. early 1980s], 81, died of pneumonia in Flemington, New Jersey. He wrote the screenplay for the film Days of Wine and Roses, which starred Jack Lemmon, Lee Remick, Charles Bickford, and Jack Klugman.

2022: JAMA Network Open published an open-access article by Marissa B. Esser, PhD; Gregory Leung, PhD; Adam Sherk, PhD; et al., titled “Estimated Deaths Attributable to Excessive Alcohol Use Among US Adults Aged 20 to 64 Years, 2015 to 2019” [right: p. 1]. The article concluded that an estimated…

694,660 mean deaths per year between 2015 and 2019 suggest that excessive alcohol consumption accounted for 12.9% of total deaths among adults aged 20 to 64 years and 20.3% of deaths among adults aged 20 to 49 years.

2024: A.A.W.S., Inc. first published the Conference-approved soft-cover Plain Language Big Book: A Tool for Reading “Alcoholics Anonymous” [left: cover].