Officials

New York's first clubhouse was a rented building on West 24th Street, and holding a lease meant signing something. So a corporation was formed to hold it. Bill's account of what that produced (A.A. pamphlet P-17) is one sentence, and it is the entire problem. "A corporation was formed to take over the clubroom lease so we then had" — and then the word he set in quotation marks himself, because A.A. had never had any: officials. Should those directors run the club, or should the A.A. rotating committee? Overnight there were two authorities where there had been one, and nobody had intended a second. They only needed a signature on a lease. What followed was what follows. Bill describes dictators running amuck, and steering committees trying to nominate their friends as successors, and finding that even sober drunks could not be steered. The lesson A.A. drew was not that you should never sign anything. It was that property and business have to be held separately from the group, by people who answer for the property — so that the group never has to decide which of its two authorities is the real one.