Our First Failure

Before there was a Tradition Five, the first sober drunks in Akron spent their days on the hardest drinkers they could find, and failure did not stop them. Bill W. wrote of the summer of 1935 (A.A. Comes of Age): "Dr. Bob and Bill D. and I went frantically to work with more of those alcoholic characters at the City Hospital. We had a long string of failures." Frantically means with everything they had. One of the failures was Eddie. "Every time Eddie got drunk he wanted to jump off the Cleveland docks." Years later Bill could report: "He finally did make the grade and recently wrote me that he has been sober for seven wonderful years." Nobody screened Eddie for promise. Nobody waited until he was ready, polite or referred by someone. Three men, all newly sober, kept walking back into a hospital ward for the man still drinking. That habit, kept by a handful before anyone wrote a rule, is what the Long Form later asked of every group (Big Book, p. 563): "carrying its message to the alcoholic who still suffers." Today a group can quietly decide some drunks aren't worth the trouble: too many slips, too much chaos, too many tries already. Test it tonight: ask whether there is a drinker your group has stopped going after because he failed before.