On the Side Lines

Before there was a Tradition Six, New York members learned the hard way to keep a club's business apart from the group. In 1940 they rented the first clubhouse, an old stable on West Twenty-fourth Street. Bill W. remembered (A.A. pamphlet P-17, p. 18): "A couple of older members signed the lease. We painted and we scrubbed. We had a home." The lease company was named "Alcoholics Anonymous of New York, Inc." Bill wrote in 1947 (P-17, p. 19): "Only later did we realize we had incorporated the whole of New York State, a mistake recently rectified." To incorporate is to form a company in law. A company holding one lease had taken A.A.'s name for a whole state. They learned something bigger (A.A. Comes of Age): "the club had to be on the side lines and could not be managed by the A.A. groups as such." The Long Form wrote the lesson down (Big Book, p. 564): property of real use to A.A. "should be separately incorporated and managed, thus dividing the material from the spiritual." The material is rent, leases and money. The spiritual is the message, carried free. Today a group often meets under someone else's lease, and the landlord's rules come with the room. Test it tonight: ask whose name is on the lease for your group's room, and what that name can decide.