AA - Alcoholics Anonymous
May 20, 2024
(0:07 – 0:31)
What do you say after that? My name is Arbutus O’Neill and it is by the grace of God that
I belong to the All-Knowing Family Groups. I am powerless over people, places, and
things. And because of the program, I can make this admission today without feeling
guilty.
(0:33 – 1:20)
My life continues to be unmanageable when I fail to practice principles that were given
to us by a bunch of ex-drunks who found sobriety and alcoholics anonymous. I like to
believe that the families of the early members of AA were convinced by the miracle of
sobriety that this program would work for everyone. And it was out of this conviction that
the Al-Anon Family Groups grew to reach all over the world and have shown astounding
results.
(1:21 – 1:54)
We subscribe to the concept that alcoholism is a family illness and then we get so
carried away telling people how sick we got that we forget to say, we have a program for
family recovery. And that’s what this weekend is all about. You’ll listen to the speakers
and you’ll go to the workshops and in some instances we have alateens present and we
see whole families working together in recovery.
(1:55 – 2:14)
And this is an absolutely joyous and wonderful thing to be involved in a celebration like
this. And the AA people just delight me. When they get together they are so pleased to
see each other and I think it’s more evident in the big international things.
(2:14 – 2:39)
They charge across the room and beat each other on the back and everybody is, as
Chuck Chamberlain used to say, everybody’s talking, nobody’s listening. And then
someone comes in that back door back there and they stop right in the middle of a
sentence and they say, oh look, there comes old George and he’s still sober. They don’t
even expect each other to stay sober.
(2:43 – 2:58)
Love without expectancy I think it’s called. And again I want to say how pleased I am to
be here this weekend and I bring you greetings from my Bill. He doesn’t travel with me
anymore but he insists that I keep my commitments.
(2:59 – 3:12)
He gets weaker every day it seems to me. He weighs 120 pounds now and he’s almost
six foot tall. And he’s gradually losing his eyesight so he’s more and more restricted all
the time.
(3:12 – 3:27)
And I haven’t quite worked through the guilt feeling that I have when I leave him behind.
But he tells me that I’m easier to live with if I take a break. So I’m taking a break so I’ll be
easier to live with.
(3:28 – 3:54)
I talked to our daughter last night and they’re getting along fine. Peggy comes up from
San Angelo weekends when I’m away and she gives him a manicure and a massage and
pets him to death and then I have to live up to that when I get home. I’m called a long
timer in the Al-Anon family groups and this doesn’t mean very much until you get to be a
long timer.
(3:56 – 4:07)
And it isn’t hard to do. All you have to do is keep coming to meetings and stay alive. One
of our friends out in Midland, Texas says don’t drink and don’t die.
(4:09 – 4:22)
But it’s been my great privilege to be around for a long, long time. It’s been my privilege
and great joy to talk to a lot of people in a lot of places. And I’ve learned about people.
(4:23 – 4:37)
People are all alike. Every one of you who are here today are here for exactly the same
reason that I’m here. We were driven here under the cruel lash of alcoholism because we
had nowhere else to go.
(4:39 – 4:59)
Nowhere else to go. And I once said that, I once thought that alcoholism was a product of
my generation but this isn’t true. Alcoholism is an insidious, progressive, fatal illness that
prompts the unthinking to make jokes about drunks.
(4:59 – 5:14)
But it can leave a family homeless and penniless. Alcoholism is a public cancer that can
turn a man or a woman against themselves. Alcoholism is a blight on the history of
mankind.
(5:15 – 5:39)
The Bible warns against it, Shakespeare diagnosed it, Tennessee Williams built a prizewinning play around it. But no one as far as I have been able to learn seemed to do very
much about alcoholism until the advent of AA. Priests and ministers were baffled at their
inability to cope with this insidious habit, this dreadful malady, if you please.
(5:40 – 5:56)
They preached to alcoholics, prayed over you, had you to sign pledges. And when these
things failed, they damned your soul to hell. Men of science and other generations
wanted to find a cure for alcoholism.
(5:56 – 6:09)
They wanted to find a pill or a vaccine that would stop compulsive drinking. And failing to
do this, they said to the medical students, don’t waste your time on these people.
They’re hopeless.
(6:11 – 6:19)
Preachments failed and there was no cure. So there was only one other thing to do with
alcoholics. You must be punished.
(6:21 – 6:31)
So we locked you up in jail. The more you drank, the longer we kept you in jail. And the
longer we kept you in jail, the drunker you got when you were released.
(6:31 – 6:40)
It became a vicious cycle. We tried to change the body chemistry of sick people with
punishment. And society allowed this to happen.
(6:41 – 6:54)
Nay, we insisted on it to our everlasting shame. We’ll never know, I’m sure, how many
sick alcoholics have died in the jails around our country at the hands of sadistic jailers.
We’ll have no way of knowing.
(6:56 – 7:14)
But there was one group of people, one group of people who never gave up on the
alcoholic. That was the families of alcoholics, the people who loved you. We took jobs to
feed the children that you were too sick to be responsible for.
(7:15 – 7:29)
We doctored your hangovers, some of us bought your liquor. We picked up your hot
checks, bailed you out of jails. We pled with judges, we said, John’s a good man when
he’s sober.
(7:30 – 7:50)
And to complete this ridiculous paradox, we gave you hell every time you got drunk. And
society was puzzled at the behavior of the families of alcoholics. They could not
understand us.
(7:51 – 8:11)
They seemed to feel that we were endowed with some special quality that made us
better than other people, that we were willing to continue to love and care for the
alcoholic. Some of them thought we were plain damn fools to live under such
circumstances. My mother came in this group.
(8:12 – 8:22)
She used to say, God looks after fools and drunks, and that takes care of our abuse and
bill. And mother was right. Mother was right.
(8:23 – 8:44)
God did look after us when we didn’t have sense enough to look after ourselves. And
then a little later along, of course, the professionals got involved. They were the ones
that put the labels on us, such things as aggravating influences, disturbing factors.
(8:44 – 9:22)
I just love that one. And all during this time, we were just trying to do what we could to
follow the direction of the AA people that loved us to try to get well again. And all of
these research projects that they were going, I remember one time the government
spent an awful lot of money, and a lady who shall remain nameless was in charge of that
project, and their object was to find out what kind of women marry alcoholics.
(9:23 – 9:32)
And they spent all that money and didn’t find out a thing that they didn’t know to start
with. Women don’t marry alcoholics. Women marry men that they love, and some of
them are alcoholic.
(9:33 – 9:44)
But this is the kind of thing that went on. They spent thousands and thousands of dollars
for the rehabilitation of the alcoholics. We had treatment centers on every corner of
every town in the whole United States, I think.
(9:45 – 10:12)
And not one nickel was directed to the rehabilitation of the families of alcoholics who, by
Will Wilson’s own admission, were a lot sicker than the drunks. And so I got all caught up
in this, and I decided I’d do some research. You know, it’s time about spare play, don’t
you think? So I started me a research project, and I learned during this research that
Alexander the Great was an alcoholic.
(10:13 – 10:31)
He had conquered the whole known civilized world when he was only 33 years old, and
he wept because there were no more rules to conquer. But he couldn’t conquer his
desire to drink, and he died in an alcoholic convulsion. I learned that Stephen Foster was
an alcoholic.
(10:31 – 10:58)
He gave the world its most beautiful folk music, but he could not overcome his
compulsive drinking. Stephen Foster loved his wife, his genie with the light brown hair,
but the love of his wife couldn’t keep him sober. And he died on a New York gallery,
buried in an unmarked grave, because he was an alcoholic.
(10:59 – 11:13)
Robert Louis Stevenson was an alcoholic. He could weave the magic of children’s stories,
and he all but destroyed himself with the magic that he found in a bottle. It could have
been a fifth of gin or a quart of bourbon.
(11:13 – 11:40)
And he describes the personality change of the alcoholic in the story, Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde. And I watched this personality change right in my own living room, just like a lot of
you did. You saw the bottle change the man you love, change him into a babbling idiot,
into a degenerate animal, into a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
(11:41 – 12:12)
Now, history said very little about the families of these men and others like them, but I
believe with all my heart that I know the loneliness and the fear that Jeannie knew when
she waited for her restless, talented husband to come home from a spree. And I believe
that I know the homesickness that Fanny Stevenson knew when she left her home in
California to go to a South Sea island with her husband in hopes that he might regain his
health. Robert Louis Stevenson had a dual problem.
(12:12 – 12:25)
He also had tuberculosis. And I believe that I know the joy that they knew when he did
regain his health. And I believe I know to some degree the serenity that they both knew
when he found sobriety.
(12:26 – 12:42)
And my friends in Al-Anon give me a hard time about my history lesson. They say, why
on earth do you feel it necessary every time you get a hold of a microphone to give us a
history lesson? And of course I have a good reason. I can’t tell jokes.
(12:44 – 12:53)
I always forget the punchline. No, that isn’t it at all. I tell you these things to point out
something that I feel is very significant.
(12:56 – 13:17)
The disease of alcoholism is a universal thing. And with all the effort that is being made,
and there is tremendous effort being made in the professional field, and I appreciate
this, and I never want to put down our friends in the professions. Bill Wilson said we
should be friendly with our friends in their profession.
(13:18 – 13:36)
And with all the effort that they’re making, and it’s a tremendous amount. It’s almost
impossible anymore to pick up a magazine or a newspaper and not find an article on
alcoholism. I was absolutely amazed last year to find an article on alcoholism in the
Atlantic Monthly.
(13:36 – 13:52)
You know, that’s a prestigious manuscript, and they’re very selective with the things
they publish. But there it was, big as life and twice as natural. And it seems to me that
currently, it’s the end thing to have an alcoholic in your home.
(13:53 – 14:03)
Now if you don’t have one, I strongly suggest that you go out and get one. Wait a
minute. Don’t marry them.
(14:04 – 14:11)
Just borrow them. They’re the handiest things you can have. They’re as handy as a
pocket on the shirt.
(14:11 – 14:31)
Everything that goes wrong, you can blame the alcoholic. So every family should have
one. But with all the effort that’s being made, it’s not possible, as you all know, to get an
alcoholic in the treatment center when their problem becomes critical.
(14:32 – 14:48)
County sheriffs no longer put alcoholics in jail simply for drunkenness. They send them to
treatment centers. Ministers send alcoholics to AA meetings so they can get well, and
they send their families to us so they can get well too.
(14:48 – 15:08)
But with all the effort in all the areas that is being made at this point in time, these
people are just not getting the job done. Have you noticed that? They are not getting the
job done. And the reason they’re not getting the job done is because they don’t know all
there is to know about alcoholism.
(15:09 – 15:28)
So in my opinion, this moment, I am looking at a room full of experts. You’re the people
who know about alcoholism because you have lived with it. So in my opinion, this is a job
for you to do, a job for you and for me.
(15:29 – 15:44)
And I learned this a long, long time ago. I came here. When I came here, there were 50
groups in the world, 50 Al-Anon family groups in the whole world.
(15:45 – 16:03)
That’s all. I haven’t heard a recent delegates report, but the last report that I had, we
now have over 40,000 Al-Anon family groups. When we went to the International out in
Salt Lake City, there were representatives there from 122 countries.
(16:04 – 16:15)
There were two countries that were not represented, and so the staff members stood in
for those two. It was absolutely fantastic. It’s unbelievable.
(16:15 – 16:27)
And it’s been my privilege and great joy to watch this fellowship evolve through the
years. It’s been the most fascinating thing that I’ve ever done in my life. I wouldn’t take a
million dollars for it.
(16:27 – 16:51)
But I’ll tell you, the second chapter, I wouldn’t do it again for another million. When I
came here, as I said, there was only 50 groups in the world, and we did not have a
program. We did not have a program to live by, but worse than that, we did not have a
purpose to live for.
(16:52 – 17:23)
All we really had in those early days was the awareness of a great need for help and the
dubious permission of some people who were very new in AA to come to their meeting
places while they had a meeting, and that’s what we did. Anywhere we could put a few
chairs, dirty little kitchens and wide hallways around the country, we sat together and
we talked. Now, you know very well what we talked about.
(17:23 – 17:39)
It was kind of a morbid competition to determine which one of us lived with the sorriest
man. And I wasn’t comfortable in those meetings because I did not live with a sorry man.
I lived with a fine young man who drank too much.
(17:40 – 18:11)
But the dear people who put the life-changing program together for Alcoholics
Anonymous were aware of the fact that in time the families of alcoholics would become
aware of this need for help. Al-Anon is a kissin’ cousin to Invention, you know. They were
both born of necessity, and very gradually over a long period of time we did indeed
become aware of this necessity to get some help.
(18:12 – 18:27)
And when they wrote the book Alcoholics Anonymous, they made provisions for us
because they included in that book two chapters for the families of alcoholics. And you
very well know what they are. One of these chapters is entitled Two Wives.
(18:27 – 18:46)
Now, that is not intended to be a put-down for the fine men who are members of the AlAnon family groups. The fact of the matter is that when that book was written there were
no women in AA, so they addressed that chapter Two Wives. The early groups in Canada
called their groups the Wives Groups.
(18:47 – 19:06)
And the other chapter, of course, is entitled To the Family Afterwards. And down in my
part of the country where I grew up in Al-Anon, we took a paragraph from this chapter
and we made of it a preamble that we used to open our meetings. And this is what the
paragraph says.
(19:07 – 19:29)
The past is the principal asset of the alcoholic’s family, and frequently it is almost the
only one. This painful past can be of infinite value to families still struggling with their
problems. We feel that each member of it should be only too willing to bring former
mistakes, no matter how grievous, out of their hiding places.
(19:30 – 19:48)
Cling to the thought that in God’s hands your dark past is the greatest possession you
have, the key to life and happiness for others. With it you can evict death or misery for
them. My friends, that’s heavy stuff.
(19:49 – 20:17)
That is heavy stuff. And that’s what we’ve tried to do over the years in the part of the
country that I come from. And I was extremely fortunate when I got here because I was
exposed to the spiritual giants in this program, the Chuck Chamberlains and the Al
Badgers and the horse sports and oh so many.
(20:18 – 20:31)
And I was scared to death. I was 1,700 miles from my family right in the big middle of
Texas. And that’s a very exclusive part of the country, I guess you know.
(20:31 – 20:39)
You have to be born there to be a Texan. I’m a Texan by marriage. And I was scared out
of my ever-loving mind.
(20:39 – 20:54)
And I went to these dear people and I said to them, I don’t understand Bill. I just do not
understand the man I’m married to. Bill hates a liar, but he can’t tell the truth.
(20:54 – 21:02)
And he’s irresponsible. I don’t know if he’s coming home or when he’s coming home. I
just do not understand.
(21:03 – 21:15)
And they said to me, Read this book, Arbutus. Read this book. It will describe the illness
of alcoholism for you.
(21:16 – 21:37)
It will teach you the philosophy that you’re going to need for your recovery. And I can
think of no better reason to read the big book. And I require the people that I sponsor to
study the first 164 pages of the big book or get themselves another sponsor.
(21:38 – 21:59)
It doesn’t matter to me at all. But if you’re not willing to find out the nature of the illness
that troubles your life and learn the philosophy that you’re going to need for your
recovery, I quite frankly don’t have time for you. I get in a lot of trouble in the L.A. 9
family groups because they don’t like me to say those things, but I continue to say them
because I have been here longer than they have.
(22:01 – 22:16)
And there’s nobody around that can dispute me. I try to tell you the truth, but I want you
to remember that this is my perspective. It may or may not be the truth, but it’s all I’ve
got and you’ll have to accept it.
(22:17 – 22:44)
I attended my first open AA meeting in Amarillo, Texas in 1948, and I did not want to go
to that meeting. The only reason that I went to that meeting is because I had put myself
under obligation to a very beautiful woman who was married to a member of Alcoholics
Anonymous. And if you haven’t picked up on the accent yet, I’m a hillbilly.
(22:45 – 22:57)
I grew up in the hills of North Carolina, and hillbillies do not like to be obliged. And that’s
the only reason that I went to that meeting. As I said, it was an open meeting.
(22:57 – 23:24)
There was about 150 people there, and you probably noticed this weekend that I drink a
lot of coffee. And I’m sure I had been many times to the coffee bar, and after we were
seated in the meeting, a beautiful lady leaned across Marguerite and whispered to me.
And what she said was, How long has it been since you had a drink, honey? And I wasn’t
embarrassed by her question, but Marguerite was.
(23:25 – 23:37)
She was absolutely embarrassed to death, and she answered the question for me. She
said, Mrs. O’Neill is not an alcoholic. Mrs. O’Neill is not an alcoholic, but she knows about
alcoholism.
(23:39 – 24:01)
I grew up in a house with two men, both of whom was my father. My father was a twofisted construction man who worked hard, who played hard, and who drank hard. Dad
was a gray-eyed Irishman who taught me to love poetry.
(24:02 – 24:14)
He taught me to sing Irish folk songs. He had the patience to teach me to work my
geometry problems with his framing square. But on Saturday night, my dad turned into a
devil.
(24:17 – 24:34)
My father’s alcoholism destroyed both my parents. My father’s alcoholism changed my
beautiful mother into an old, ugly, bitter woman who hated him. She hated him as long
as she lived.
(24:35 – 24:54)
She hated him long after he was dead and in his grave. And the last four years of her life,
which she spent in total darkness, she hated anybody that had ever loved John Martin,
and that included me. Mrs. O’Neill is not an alcoholic, but she knows about alcoholism.
(24:59 – 25:31)
I think the most horrible thing that happens to those of us who love alcoholic is the
ingrown fear that never leaves us that you will die drunk. And for many, many years
after I found the courage in this program to ask the God of my understanding for special
favors, I closed every day of my life with one prayer. God, don’t let my dad die drunk.
(25:31 – 25:40)
I cannot tell you why that is so horrible to us. I can only tell you that it is. God, don’t let
my dad die drunk.
(25:41 – 25:51)
My father died in 1965. He did not die drunk. My father had throat cancer.
(25:52 – 26:01)
He couldn’t even swallow water. Now, you know very well that I didn’t want that filthy
stuff to destroy that beautiful baritone voice. You know I didn’t.
(26:02 – 26:12)
You know I didn’t want to be impossible for my dad to even have a drink of water. You
know I didn’t. But I prayed, God, don’t let my dad die drunk.
(26:14 – 26:25)
I do not tell you these things about my dad or about my mother that you may weep for
them. My dad’s all right. My dad doesn’t have to drink anymore.
(26:27 – 26:40)
And mother doesn’t hate him any longer. I tell you these things that you may know that I
have always loved an alcoholic. And because I love alcoholics, I want to restore their
families.
(26:42 – 27:03)
I’d like you to know that when I married this tall Texan that became the father of my
children, I was not concerned with Bill’s drinking. Father Martin says the only way you
can identify an alcoholic is by the one that you know, and Bill did not drink like that. Bill
was not a hallucinating drunk who saw creeping, crawling things.
(27:04 – 27:19)
Bill was a life-of-the-party type drink. He’d crash debutantes parties and taught the
sponsors how to put your little foot. And I was not concerned in one little bit.
(27:19 – 27:29)
I would drink with Bill. We worked for a company that sent us all over the United States,
and we got drunk everywhere we went. My, Lord have mercy, we’ve been drunk in
Chicago.
(27:29 – 27:43)
Whew, Lordy. That was one of Bill’s favorite watering places, Chicago, Illinois. But in
1940, two things happened that should have made Bill and me grow up.
(27:44 – 27:53)
We became parents, and the world became involved in a war. And I quit drinking with
Bill. Things were too serious.
(27:53 – 28:03)
I was watching the casualty list. Both my brothers were in the military, and Bill had
family members in service. And I didn’t drink with Bill anymore.
(28:04 – 28:22)
I was watching the troop movements in Europe and later in the South Pacific, and Bill
had lost his drinking partner. We had our second child the next year, and Bill was not
there when Nancy was born. She came on Wednesday, and she didn’t meet her father till
Sunday.
(28:23 – 28:42)
And when Bill came to the hospital in Cincinnati, Ohio, he caused a great deal of
confusion. He wanted to teach the Catholic nun who was in charge of the maternity ward
the Texas stomp, and the dear sister didn’t want to dance. And one day, two big burly
orderers took Bill out of the hospital.
(28:43 – 28:59)
He sat down on the streetcar track in full view of my window, forced the motorman to
stop so he could tell him about our new baby girl. You see, Bill was still having fun with
his drinking. And then the next year we had our little boy.
(29:01 – 29:27)
Don’t get too nervous. There’s not that many children involved, and the fact of the
matter is my brothers were in the military, my mother and my sisters went into defense
plants, and I stayed home and kept up production. But I knew that Bill wanted a little
boy, and I couldn’t talk about that for a long time because of the guilt feeling I had.
(29:27 – 29:46)
I manipulated that pregnancy and gave Bill O’Neill his son. And when Luther was born,
he was born with a birth defect, and the doctors told us he would never walk. And then I
was absolutely overwhelmed with guilt because I knew, I knew that I was responsible.
(29:49 – 30:28)
Teresa was born in 1943, bless her heart, and she was one of those beautifully healthy
babies that thrived on loving neglect, and that’s all she got because I toured these
United States, one crippled children’s hospital after another, to find a doctor that would
make my son walk. I didn’t pray for Luther to walk because I didn’t have anything to pray
to, and I had infinite trust and belief in medical doctors, and this is how I spent my time. I
sometimes forget to say that Luther did learn to walk.
(30:28 – 30:52)
When he weighed into the Navy, when he was not quite 18 years old, he weighed in at
189 pounds, and he walked beautifully. I used to watch him run across a parking lot or
jump a fence and get a lump in my throat because this was the little boy that wasn’t
supposed to walk. Mrs. O’Neill is not an alcoholic, but she knows about alcoholism.
(30:52 – 31:11)
And I want you to know that when I came to Texas in 1944, I had never heard the term
alcoholism in reference to my young husband’s drinking. I had never heard the term. But
I watched this boy lose everything that he had that he wanted to keep.
(31:12 – 31:24)
I watched him lose job after job after job. I saw him lose the respect of the people he
worked for. I saw him lose the affection of his own family.
(31:25 – 31:47)
And finally, finally, I saw him lose his own self-respect. And I never shall forget the day
when Bill was physically and psychologically incapable of getting out of bed to go to
work. And he looked up at me and said, Why don’t you take the children and leave,
honey? I’m no damn good.
(31:47 – 31:59)
As far as I’m concerned, that was the most melancholy day of my life. Bill paid a large
price to booze. My Bill lost his left eye in a drunken accident.
(32:01 – 32:15)
And he couldn’t stop drinking. Six weeks after we were married, my Bill lost his left arm
in a drunken accident. And he could not stop drinking.
(32:16 – 32:26)
And I watched this happen. I watched this happen, and I wanted to help Bill. With every
fiber of being, I wanted to help my Bill.
(32:28 – 32:39)
And I couldn’t help him. And I’m going to say something directly to you alcoholics. I’ve
heard some of you stand at podiums like this and say, Non-alcoholics don’t know what
they’re talking about.
(32:40 – 32:59)
And I want you to know that I know what I’m talking about. I’ve held drunken women in
my arms when they were in convulsions. Walked them up and down, fed them black
coffee to get them sober, and gone home to send my own children to school.
(32:59 – 33:17)
Grateful in the knowledge that, but for the grace of God, that somebody might be
walking me up and down and feeding me black coffee. And I’ve held my Bill in his arms
when he was in convulsions. When I didn’t know which one of those eyes was the
artificial eye, I watched the sanity leave his eyes.
(33:17 – 33:24)
Scared to death that he wouldn’t live till morning. Scared to death that if he did live, he
wouldn’t have any sanity left. I know what I’m talking about.
(33:25 – 33:41)
We wanted to help you, but you wouldn’t let us. I think the feeling I’m trying to describe
to you so poorly is the feeling that those of you who are parents will recognize. It’s the
feeling you have when you tend a sick baby.
(33:42 – 33:57)
The baby cries, it’s burned up with fever, and you want to help the baby. But you can’t
help the baby because the baby can’t tell you where it hurts. And the alcoholic couldn’t
tell us where they hurt, and we couldn’t help you.
(33:57 – 34:06)
But I want you to remember that we wanted to. We wanted to help you. And I hope you’ll
remember that the next time you poke fun at an Al-Anon member.
(34:07 – 34:17)
I’d like you to remember that. We wanted to help you. And there’s a strong possibility in
my mind that some of you are here today that wouldn’t be here if it hadn’t been for
somebody like me.
(34:18 – 34:28)
And we have a rule in Al-Anon that you may not know about. It’s absolutely a no-no to
criticize an alcoholic. We don’t poke fun at drunks.
(34:29 – 34:49)
We don’t make fun of sick people in Al-Anon, and maybe you didn’t know that. If I should
write a very clever article for our newsletter called The Forum and criticize an alcoholic,
they would return it and very likely with a red pencil they’d write in their margin just
what I said. We don’t make fun of sick people.
(34:56 – 35:16)
When I came to Texas, it was an experience. I went there with expectations, unreal
expectations. I thought if Bill got back to his part of the country with the people who
loved him, that I’d have a support group.
(35:16 – 35:26)
And this didn’t happen. They readily understood, his family did, and Bill’s one of 11
children. They understood readily why Bill O’Neill drank.
(35:27 – 35:47)
It’s because he was married to that Yankee from North Carolina where they make all that
bourbon liquor and all those nasty cigarettes that’s killing all of you folks. So they didn’t
have any problem figuring out why Bill drank. And going back to mother, O’Neill, mother
was only 12 years older.
(35:47 – 35:54)
Well, mother was only 18 years older than me. And she hated my Bill. She hated him
with a purple passion.
(35:54 – 36:12)
After he got in AA, she thought she hatched him. Gradually, gradually, of course, Bill’s
family realized that there really was a problem that they needed to recognize. And we
kind of maintained an armed truce through the years.
(36:13 – 36:25)
I think they gradually got some respect for me, but it was hard earned. I’ll tell you that
for sure. Like I said a while ago, if you’re not born in Texas, you’re a second-grade citizen
as far as they’re concerned.
(36:25 – 36:54)
And so the best I can do is to tell you that I’m a Texan by marriage. But when we came
to Texas, as I said, no one had ever made reference to alcoholism. When I talked to
clergymen and lawyers and anybody that would talk to me about our problem, no one
had ever identified Bill as being an alcoholic.
(36:55 – 37:14)
And then when we got to Texas, we met a new group of people. This was a weird group
of people who called themselves AA members, and they understood what was the matter
with Bill. They also understood what was the matter with me because then I met another
group of people.
(37:14 – 37:35)
Now, if I thought the AA people was weird, that was this other group of non-alcoholics.
They were doubly weird. These people, though, had found it vitally necessary to use the
principles of the AA program to restore their sanity and to preserve their stability.
(37:36 – 37:55)
And they didn’t know what to do with me. But I had a gray-eyed sponsor, a gray-eyed
Texas gal who was my sponsor. And back in the 40s, they were writing lots of articles
about alcoholism and in the field of mental health.
(37:55 – 38:26)
And so I thought an Al-Anon meeting was like a therapy group, and you know, in a way,
it is. And so I went off to this group meeting expecting to be fixed right away, and those
people put my nose down in those 12 steps, and I had the distinct feeling that if I didn’t
work those steps, they wouldn’t let me come up for air. And so I made up my mind that
I’d work those blasty steps better than anybody else had ever worked them, and I was
going to get an A-plus up in the corner of my paper.
(38:26 – 38:41)
I’d never seen anything else on one of my papers. And I was going to slap that paper
down in front of that gray-eyed sponsor and say, I took these damn steps and they didn’t
work. And they did.
(38:43 – 38:54)
Now, the primary reason that I wanted to change my life was the very fact that my four
children were afraid of me. Now, don’t misunderstand me. I am not a child abuser.
(38:55 – 39:14)
My children were afraid of my disapproval. If one of my children was in a school play, I
had to watch it from the wings because if I sat out in the audience, they forgot their
lines. And I can recall one time when Peggy made a C in an algebra class, and when she
got her grade card, she was afraid to bring it home.
(39:15 – 39:42)
And the principal called me, and he said, I found Peggy outside my office door, Mrs.
O’Neil, and she was crying, and I asked her why she was crying, and she said she was
afraid to come home. And I said, in the name of conscience, why is she afraid to come
home? It’s only a half a block. And he said, Mrs. O’Neil, Peggy made C in her algebra
class, and she’s afraid to bring her grade card home.
(39:42 – 39:55)
And I don’t want you to say one word to that child. She did the best she could. You may
have made an A in algebra, but the best that she could do was a C, and I don’t want you
to open your mouth.
(39:55 – 40:17)
That’s the principal of the high school talking to me like that. But I didn’t say anything
about her failure to make an A in algebra. I put her in summer school so she could bring
up her grade before she started away to college, but I didn’t scold her for one minute
because that principal really read me the riot act.
(40:17 – 40:44)
And my bill was ashamed of me. I know that boy was dreaded to come home on the
weekends because we lived in a 12-room house, and I worked for 52 hours every week,
and I maintained a household that would stand a white-glove inspection, especially on
weekends when Daddy was coming home. I cooked up food and put it in the freezer so
we didn’t have to spend all the time in the kitchen.
(40:44 – 41:01)
Everything was alphabetized in my spice cabinet. It was weird. I didn’t want my children
to be afraid of me, and I didn’t want Bill to be ashamed of me, and that’s why I came to
Al-Anon, because I wanted to change.
(41:01 – 41:31)
And that’s what the Al-Anon program is all about, how to change your life. Some of these
people had lived, had terrible, terrible experiences that I had never had, but they
seemed to understand me, and I made friends, and that was a new experience. I knew
lots of people, but I couldn’t name a half a dozen people that I could claim for friends
because I was, I wouldn’t try to make friends with people.
(41:31 – 41:50)
I didn’t want them to know what went on within the walls of my home, and when you do
that, you don’t make very many friends. But I made friends first right in my own little
group, and then I was elected delegate for the whole state of Texas. That’s a pretty good
piece of real estate.
(41:52 – 42:23)
One member of my group thought I should not have been delegate because I’m not a
Texan, and so the next day we had two groups, and that’s what causes new groups, you
know, a coffee pot and a resentment. But this time Peggy was married, and Nancy and
Teresa were still in school, and Luther was in the Navy, and I had an opportunity to fly on
my first jet airplane. I wrote to Luther, and I told him I had to make a decision.
(42:23 – 42:56)
I had to fly from Dallas to New York City on a jet airplane or admit I was a coward, and
you know very well I was not going to admit that I was a coward. But I went to the first
conference meetings, and there was 11 other people there from different parts of the
country, and I realized then that I had friends all over the world, if I would identify myself
as a member of the Illinois Family Group. And some of you told me that you liked me,
and then I could belong to the human race.
(42:57 – 43:17)
Mrs. O’Neil is not an alcoholic, but she knows about alcoholism. And we took the
principles of this program and reared those four children. And there was a time that I
stood behind microphones like this and said out loud that I would put my four up against
any four in the whole United States, and I’m in it.
(43:17 – 43:36)
When Teresa was graduating magna cum laude from the university, I said, that ain’t bad
for a drunks kid. When Luther came home from the Navy, he started a little business
with his dad’s help, and he had 25 men older than he was working for him. And again, I
said, that ain’t bad for a drunks kid.
(43:37 – 43:56)
And time went by, of course, as it always does, and I started getting some very upsetting
telephone calls. I got calls from Austin taxis, and my AA friends would say to me, You can
go to sleep now, Arbus. We followed Luther home, and he turned in his own driveway.
(43:58 – 44:16)
And then I would get a call from the other side of the taxis to tell me that Nancy had
fallen in the restroom at the country club and cut her eye on one of the fixtures, but she
was going to be all right. They had to take some stitches, but she’s going to be all right.
Now, of course, you understand the floor was wet.
(44:17 – 44:38)
But I’d been in Al-Anon a long time. Nancy was married to a young psychiatrist who
referred Loyal Mercy knows how many people to the program of AA and Al-Anon, but he
couldn’t live with his wife’s sobriety. He didn’t see nothing falling down drunk, but when
she got in AA, he was very uncomfortable.
(44:39 – 45:03)
He went to Al-Anon meetings and describes the effect of alcohol on the human body, and
I’m sure the group appreciated it. But he couldn’t handle it, and it was a very, very
messy divorce. Jack had every intentions of institutionalizing our daughter, and there
was no way on earth that we could have prevented it because he was, quote, next of kin.
(45:04 – 45:12)
So Nancy fled the country. She went to Mexico, and she lived down there for five years.
And here I am in Al-Anon.
(45:13 – 45:26)
I have two members of my family that need the program, and fortunately, I used a little
common sense. I did not try to help them. I did not try to help them.
(45:27 – 45:45)
And when Nancy was in Mexico, I’d heard terrible stories about what happens to AA
ladies, how they were exploited, and I’d heard horrible stories about the Mexican jails,
and I put my own daughter in my imagination. I put her on Skid Row. I couldn’t even
repeat the serenity prayer.
(45:46 – 46:11)
I was so distraught over the fact that Nancy couldn’t even live in her own country
because she had alcoholism. I can report to you today that Nancy celebrated 17 years of
sobriety the fourth day of September. And Luther had stocked up 15 years before he
died last March.
(46:12 – 46:50)
Mrs. O’Neill is not an alcoholic, but she knows about alcoholism. I always talk too long
and probably don’t say anything that’s worth remembering, but I always try to close my
meeting the same way, and I’ve been doing this for a large number of years, as some of
you know. And I want to remind all of you who are here today that this program of ours
carries a message that the whole world needs to know.
(46:51 – 47:32)
And you, you are the only people on earth that are so uniquely qualified to carry this
message because you have lived with the problem. If we fail to carry this message, right
here in this pretty little town of yours and down in Brownwood, Texas, yes, out at Laguna
Beach, John, there are drunken men and women who will die never knowing that they’re
alcoholic, as did Stephen Foster, if you fail to carry this message. And there’s kids.
(47:33 – 47:54)
The kids are the ones that always get to me. There are kids down in Brownwood, Texas,
here in your pretty town and every town that I can think of, kids who never heard of the
Alateen meetings, kids who are afraid for their dad to come home tonight. This is
Saturday, and Saturday nights were the worst of all.
(47:55 – 48:09)
These kids will grow up with deformed personalities if we fail to carry this message. And
if we fail to carry this message, may God have mercy on these people, and may God
have mercy on us.
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