Bill Sheinberg is the author of the book Writing the Big Book. It took Bill Sheinberg seven years to research and write the book. And arguably, it's the most complete history of the process of writing the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous and the early history of A.A.. We're talking 1937, 1938, 1939. And it is an absolute honor to have Bill Sheinberg on our podcast. We talked to Bill this week about what really happened at the kitchen table when Abby Thatcher visited Bill Wilson, as
told in Bill's story. The problem Bill Sheinberg sees and most A.A. history. The multiple stories Bill Wilson told over time on how the steps were written and how they conflict over time, the urban legends around the authorship of two wives and even more on Hank Parkhurst, arguably the most important person in the writing of the big book besides Bill Wilson. Here's part two of our interview with Bill Sheinberg.
his message works. It took me a long time to get through that in the book because I started to have a dim view of Bill. I didn't I didn't feel good about Bill for some of that stuff because I felt like he was taking some liberties and I had to get around to the fact that in some ways he's a salesman. He's trying to show his number one concern is I don't want to do anything that could possibly rock the boat to prevent you
from getting sober. And if that means I'm going to take some liberties and condense the story and do like what they do for books to movie, where we're going to maybe punch some characters together for the purpose of the story. I'm going to do that because in the End Story doesn't matter if you get something out of it that's going to help you stay sober. It seems like he was just was laser focused on that.
He was laser focused on that. He was just the the man was just obsessed with having a solution to an age old problem that nobody had ever had a solution to. And he really, really thought he had it had a cure for this. By the way, the last thing I just want to just say about the Abby story, and he was so great when he told the story. He always said, Now I know that the story I just told you isn't the same story as you
read in the book. But you got to remember, he said one of us was sober that day and one of us was drunk. So whose version you going to believe anyhow? But yeah, Wilson. Wilson. Wilson wasn't trying to tell a historically accurate story. He was trying to help you see a point so you could get sober. And that was that wasn't just true of the kitchen table story that happened over and over again where stories got simplified down and, uh, and for a variety of different reasons.
I mean, let's face it, if I, if I went back and listened to someone's story when they were three months sober, their 90 day talk and then their five day talk, you know, things things are radically different. I'm talking about their drinking
time. You know, the some of that some of those things that that show up in your story early, all those messy details, they get paired down so that it sounds like a little bit different story completely and and that's that's I mean we're we're a storytelling organization. That's all we do. We tell stories. It's it's not like I'm pontificating and say, you've got to do this. I, I, I sit there and I say, you know, and this happened to me. And then I did that and this happened to me,
and then I did that. And you know what? That didn't work. I tried that and that did. But then when I tried this own way more, but that that actually worked for me.
I know this old timer, Chip, who's been sober. He's got to be pushing 40 years and he had a sponsor who at the time I think was pushing 35 years. So they've been together like decades. And his sponsor, he would tell all these stories about his sponsor with a sponsor in the room at every meeting. And this guy who's like a you're more sober than him both of them decades. So return to me goes, I don't ever remember that
happening. I don't remember going that way so I can identify a little bit all these stories I hear from one side and the other guy's rolling is I didn't happen. Yeah, I remember my one of my first open talks I gave I was in West Hartford, which is a very well-to-do town, and I'm talking through and thinking, I don't have these bottoms that other people do. I know the same old timer got sober because he landed and literally walked in the door. The emergency room fell down. He was bleeding from
every opening in his body. He couldn't see, he couldn't hear. That came back. But I look at that. I'm like, that's a pretty low bottom that you're you're next to death. And I'm telling the story. And some woman comes over a typical West Hartford woman, well-dressed Louis Vuitton bag and she comes over, she's like, Dear, I am so sorry to hear the pain you went through. And I'm thinking through like, what did I talk about with that? I go, You have to tell me what you're speaking
up. She goes, That mental anguish that you told me about, about whether you're going to drink or not drink. It must have been horrible. And I realized there I wasn't even trying to bring that about. But I'm thinking like, you know, you're right. Maybe I didn't have the physical ailments, but that mental obsession that I had, yeah, there was gymnastics going on in my mind. And if I were to start one or two years sober, I wouldn't have seen that. I would have told a different story.
That conversation with that woman has totally changed how I tell my story, because now I recognize, yeah, there was that pain. It was a low bottom from that standpoint.
I can remember on that how our stories change. I can remember I was about five years sober and I was in a Sunday meeting with my sponsor and I said something like, And I did everything that I was told to do in the first year and And my sponsor damn near fell off his chair laughing. That's how I remembered. It wasn't how he remembered it at all.
we're going through are Joe and Charlie now, and we just got through the part where they talk about how the first 100 wanted a book and they appointed bill to do this. And I after reading your book, I had to kind of bite my tongue when it came around to share because everybody's talking about the first 100. There weren't a hundred people at that time, nor did somebody appoint Bill.
Not even close. Not even close. You know, the problem with most a quote unquote history is that people have not done primary document research. They haven't gone down to the archives of stepping archive, the GSO Archive, Brown University, the Akron Archive. There's all kinds of resources here. The Rockefeller Archives got fabulous materials that are relevant to Alcoholics Anonymous early history, but people
haven't done that. I was shocked when I started going through this stuff to find all this material that had virtually been untouched. As I said earlier, Ernie KURTZ, who wrote Not God, certainly did archival work, but Ernie did an entire history of Alcoholics Anonymous kind of thing. So he didn't he didn't delve this deeply into the 1937, 1938, 1939 stuff, as I did. I mean, I touched every single piece of paper I could find from
that time. And when I did that, it was very, very clear that, A, there wasn't a hundred people and B, nobody, nobody appointed Bill. I mean, Bill had Bill tells a story that they finally decided that we needed a referee. for reasons He says, I got a so they they they they they they they said I could be the referee as long as I paid attention to their suggestions kind of thing. And that really, really is not the case. Wilson wrote the book. He he really
didn't like to change stuff. He wrote I can identify with that My my wife, the lady, Sarah, you know, she gets out of her red pen and tells me I got to start rewriting this stuff. And I'm like, Oh, I hate I hate doing that. I just hate having to do that. Wilson did, too. And he would I mean, he was dragged kicking and screaming to a bunch of changes that were made to that book. But but Bill Wilson wrote that book and Bill Wilson wrote about basically his
experience in getting sober. I mean, it was tempered and informed by all the other people who had gotten sober since he got sober in December of 1934. But let's face it, that wasn't a long time. Bill Wilson wrote the steps in December of 1938. He was four years sober. He was the most sober man in the organization, in the fellowship. He was four years. It was one week short maybe of being four
years sober. I mean, I've been in meetings where they won't let people make coffee until they got five years.
Yeah, I've been to those meeting. There's one meeting I know of that they have the strict restrictions of what you can do. I was allowed to be the door greeter when I started early on because I didn't have a year sober. You could make coffee. I think in a year you could be a chairman at like two
or three years. But I think about that of imagine walking into a meeting, the new guy, newer when you have four years and say, Hey, I'm going to I'm going to create a program or I'm going to do all this research, the 20 year people will laugh. I'm out of there. That's that's inappropriate for you. You're only four years sober yet the guys who are four years or three months sober, these were the old timers. Who else is going to do this? now?
Well, people talk about the book being a miracle. And when Bill Wilson talked about the book and the process that led to the creation of the book and the actual things that went into the creation of the book, he tells these wonderful stories that really, really are underlining the fact that it was a it was a miracle. It was a miracle. Personally, I think that if you read my book, it's even more miraculous.
yeah, I mean, over and over and over when I looked at the primary documents, I could see we could have gone completely off the tracks here, completely off the tracks. Are we going to go completely off the tracks there? There was I got to tell you, on the day I was I was into Lois's 1938 diary and I stumbled across the thing. So he writes he writes the first two chapters in late May and early June. They send it out on June 17th of 1938. The first pitch they're making to a New
York banker. And it's like, I don't know, five or six days later, I'd have to go look at the exact thing. I'm terrible on the exact dates. That's why we write things down so we can reference them. And five or six days later, he and Lois have a big fight. And she talks about in her diary and she says, We had this big fight and Bill stormed out to go have a drink. Bill Wilson getting drunk in June of 1938. Talk about going
off the rails. We would have been that would have been the end of of any future Alcoholics Anonymous in my opinion. Just just never, never, never would have happened. Instead, Bill went over to New Jersey and spent spent the afternoon or evening of the day with Hank Parker and I always say, Boy, I'd love to know. I'd love to be a fly on the wall for that
particular conversation. Hank was going to be in divorce court a year from then, so I was wondering what kind of marital advice he might be given to Bill Wilson. But also here, Bill Wilson's the guy who got him. Silver So Bill's like his quote unquote, sponsor. They didn't they didn't call it they called them proteges in those days, rather than
Oh,
sponsors.
I didn't know that.
Yeah. It's it's in the big book of when you speak with your protege, blah, blah, blah, tell him this. It's been working with others a couple of times.
Gosh, I didn't realize that that because I've talked a lot in our big book meeting is there's no mention of a sponsor or sponsor. But it turns out there is. We just didn't know what we were looking for.
Yeah, yeah, it was right there. But so what? What did what did Hank Parker say that kept Bill Silver that day? I'm God, I'd love to hear that conversation that
Well,
Roger.
maybe Hank knew enough because he was such a rotten husband don't that don't do do what it. I'm doing. You're going down my path.
could be. Could be. Could be. But the point was the point was that there's all these all these places where we could have gone completely off the tracks. And the fact that we ended up publishing the book that was published on April 10th, 1939, is miraculous in the extreme, and I think even more extreme than those those stories that Bill Wilson tells are kind of padded stories, you know, or they're pared down stories.
They're just and we get into the whole divine inspiration thing, you know, it's just like, I've got a quote at the beginning of my book from not only from Bill saying, you know, people think we were so saintly and, you know, we just got inspired. And let me tell you, it's not like that at all. And then there's a wonderful quote from Dorothy Schneider, Clarence Schneider's wife, who was around from the
very beginning. And she basically says, you know, people think that that, you know, Bill just sat down and he just channeled it. You know, it just came out, you know, and like, no, it wasn't like she said. It wasn't like anything like that at all. And as I say, immediately after that in my book, no, it wasn't like anything like that at all.
No. Writing the Steps is one of those examples that the way Joe and Charlie say it, he sat down like 35 minutes on yellow paper. He's written them all out and then he goes down stairs and everybody goes nuts. And you talk about in the book, I think there's one story where they're on the train where not quite took a lot longer than that.
Yeah, and we don't really know. We don't have any details on on exactly when it was written. I mean, I like the story about Bill sitting down with a a pad having one of his imaginary ulcers because he's under stress. He knows he's got to come up with. He's got to kind to put down on paper what these people have to do to stay sober. Got to put it down. Can't just be dancing around. It needs to put it down in concrete,
concrete form. But yeah, there was I'm showing the archive I get this, I find this letter from a guy from 1948 saying that he's on a train with Bill and Lois and they're going to Washington, D.C. for a little fits Mayo memorial kind of thing. And and this guy's going to be a speaker there. He's a lawyer, and he says the bill, he said, you know, I've never heard how the steps got written. Nobody's ever told me how you wrote the steps, how to write the steps.
And Wilson tells a story that's completely different from the story he started telling a year and a half later. This whole thing about there being, well, we had six steps, you know, and I took the six steps and I just broke them down and blew them up a little bit. And, you know, and that's where we got the 12 steps. The first the first mention I can find of that story being told is May of 1949, when Bill Wilson spoke in Montreal to a group of psychiatrists and
psychologists. And I would love to find a story about the six steps sooner than that. But but, but there wasn't any. So I bill basically said in this in this 1948 train trip. And the guy wrote it down and sent it to Bill and said, Is this love this little? The 12 steps thing came by and Bill came back and said, Yeah, that's how it was. He basically said there was there was four things that that he had done and it was what he had done to get sober.
He he said literally says to this guy, What I did was I thought about my own experience and I realized that it was these four things. So those were the four things. And then I took them and kind of blew them out. And that's what we ended up with, the 12 steps. Much more credible story than than the six step story. I really struggle with the second story more than
anything else. Chapter 23 in my book is writing that writing the 12 Steps, and that that chapter took me longer to write than or any other four chapters put together. It was just it was just painful trying to. I mean, it's one thing for him to take the kitchen table story and modify it so it bhengu makes a point and you want a good story to make a point. That's what you want it to do. So that's what he did. But this whole idea of taking and saying there were six steps, you know, I went back
there. There's there's 28 stories in the back of the first edition of the book. I read the 28 stories. Does anybody mention the six steps? No. No. Does any mention anything like the six steps? No. There's any if you pull out what these guys said, this is this is this is where the magic happened. You know, this is what. This is what I did. You end up with, like, three things. You know, I surrender to God, and I. And I. And I stop trying. You know, it's just it's a very, very simple sort of
thing. There's no six steps in there. Nobody's talking about the six steps. Only What the devil was Wilson doing coming up with the six step story in May of 1949, ten plus years after he actually wrote the steps in December of 37, 38. I just one of the things you don't want to say. Well, what I did was I wrote down I wrote down what I got sober. And if you do what I did, then you're going to get sober. That's not a good story. It's not a good
sales pitch. Oh, I looked at what the hundred guys did and the hundred guys and I sat down and wrote what we had done, and that's what we put in that book. That's a much better story. That's a much better sales pitch. That's got that's got credibility with 100 men's experience and 100 men's input. So that's what he did. It sounds like he was also trying to keep himself humble, too, that he knew his own urges and his own delusions of
grandeur. I think through what you talked about, what his idea for the original name of Alcoholics Anonymous was. The BW movement Yeah. could imagine. I just love it. I love I love thinking about him being in a meeting and suggesting that with Hank Parker's in the room, that would have been just wonderful. But could see Hank throwing yeah, a chair. but he. He most certainly had a problem, you know? In his story, he talks about wanting to be the number one man, the number one
guy. You know, he's got to be the head of the orchestra. He's got to be the head of the baseball team. He's got to know all that stuff when he's growing up and that that runs through. He really had had a had a an ego problem and he knew he had an ego problem. So one of the one of the reasons that a lot of the stories get morphed and get changed is to take the spotlight off Bill Wilson in his contribution. You know, I I'm really strong on the fact that Bill Wilson was the founder of
Alcoholics Anonymous. There was a whole bunch of other people involved in a whole bunch of things that never would have happened without other people's involvement and contributions and and insights coming into the whole thing. But Bill Wilson is the guy I mean, he is the guy and nobody else can touch him in terms of his importance and his prominence and his centrality in the production of that book. And the 12 steps that are in that
book. Other people other people were players in the whole deal. Dr. Bob was a player out in Ohio in the Clarence. I mean, you know. Well, Clarence too. Yeah. Also in Cleveland, but also you know Hank and fits in New York City. But that book is Bill Wilson. That book is Bill Wilson from start to finish.
Feels like whatever you believe in higher power, God, master of the universe, it feels this is definitely a case of whatever you view a higher power in is plucking the one guy alive at the time who could put this together and thread the needle the right way. I don't think Hank could have because. Hank. No. Well, Hank ended up drinking Dr. Bob at no interest. He was the right and he's the right person in a lot of ways, that he
has the right connections. My group, the group of people I hang out with who keep me sober have talked a lot about when you start talking about the Rockefellers in Towns Hospital and you had to be wealthy to have a connection for rehab at that time, he had to have had some money or or Doctor Strong. He has to have the right connections with the right people to help him line up all of these things. Otherwise, it
doesn't happen. It's a miracle for all of those things to happen in a row all at the right time. Right. In 1938, five, 15 years after Prohibition. Yeah. That's the thing you got to think about as well. Prohibition had just happened. So he's got to he's got to he's got to dial down the prettiness because when we're talking about I forgot how he wrote about it in the big book, but he's talking about getting on your high horse.
Don't don't preach. He's really talking about the temperance movement, which people would have understood and that would have been looked at as, Oh my God, this is a guy who's trying to bring prohibition back. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, alcohol and legislation around the abuses of alcohol have been going on since the late 1800s. And of course, yes, you're right.
The prohibition amendment was passed then and from 1920 or whatever until 1932, when it was repealed, there was supposedly no booze in the I can imagine there's no alcohol in the United States of America. I mean, the rest of the world thought we were absolutely crazy. Absolutely crazy. But it was it was one of those political movements that that had that had started after the Civil War. And built and built and built and
built. You know, John D Rockefeller Jr, his mother, the wife of John de Rockefeller, the richest man in the country, used to work with the Women's Christian Temperance movement. She would she was one of the women that would go into bars and fall on her knees and pray for the drunks. I mean, it was a big, big, big deal. And it it ended it ended with with with with Al Capone and all the all the really bad stuff that came out of prohibition and trying to
do that. But, yeah, I mean, this is like Wilson gets sober in 34 and booze is an illegal in the United States. I don't think until there was 3.2 beer, I think in 1932, but I think it was 1933 before you could actually drink a glass of scotch legally. So it was like brand new. But yeah, yeah, they did not want to be preaching the way people have been preaching at drunks or drinkers for decades, Just for decades before that, he was looking for a different
solution. And when he when he talks about in in working with others, you know, he comes back over and over and over. You don't preach to him, don't preach, don't don't preached on the don't try and tell him about your idea about God, because he may not well know more about God than you do. You know, Wilson was really, really clear about the fact that that it was a God's solution. You know, we've morphed certainly in in the AA in my particular area where we're much more liberal about
that. The the our understanding of, as we understand them is much broader than it was ever intended or that it actually says in our book, if you read we agnostics, I always had a little trouble trying to and I have friends who tried to trouble making sense out of we agnostics. He's saying you know well it can be anything you want. Well, no, it can't be anything you want because because the verbiage in that chapter makes it very clear that it's it's it's something other than just anything you
want. And it took me a while going through that chapter to realize that there's two basic presuppositions in we agnostics that Bill Wilson makes, because that was Bill Wilson's belief system. And that is this. The first supposition is that there's an equation Spirituality equals God and God equals spirituality. So you need to get a spiritual awakening to stand between you and the first drink that your insanity is going to
make you pick up. You need a spiritual awakening, but spiritual equals God and God equals spirituality. So the only spirituality Bill Wilson is acknowledging in that chapter is one that's based on a belief in God. Oh, and by the way, God, as we understand him, doesn't mean
any God. The second presumption that is unstated, but was definitely clear in Wilson's mind as he wrote that thing was the God we're talking about here has to be a providential God to be any kind of providential God, but it's got to be a providential God. What's a providential good? A providential God is a personal God to you, one that you can pray to for help. And he's actually out there and he's going to give you help if you ask him for help. Those are the
two basic presumptions. Now, once once you realize that spirituality equals God guided your spirituality on the God we're talking about as any kind of God you want, as long as it's a providential God you can pray to and get help from, All of a sudden the chapter makes perfect sense. Perfect sense? No, my own personal sobriety is not based on a providential God. I'm more of a group of drunks kind of guy. I'm a Jimmy Burwell kind of dog, but I haven't had a
drink in 41 years. So something's working. you're doing something right? I think the one time that I felt bad about not praying is I went to this one meeting. I saw this guy twice in a year and he mentioned I've been sober ten years. I never pray. And I always missed drinking. And I thought, I do not want to get to ten years. Always missing drinking. Maybe I need to do something different. So he came and I'm sorry that he's suffering, but he came into my
life where he helped me. I think about the chapter about two wives. And there's an urban legend. That's a Lois chapter. She wrote it. Not true. not true. And it seems like it's a very flippant reason that he just didn't want that the style to be different. Styles got to be different. So therefore, I have to pretend to be a woman. Yeah, well, Bill wrote a chapter and he did pretend to be a woman. And the style is in fact uniform with the rest of the book, except for possibly there is of
the two employers. But I think there's a lot of reasons, and I talk about this in the book, I don't think there's just a simple reason. First of all, there's an urban legend in AA that Bill offered that Chapter two and SMITH That is not true. He never offered that chapter to Ed Smith. He offered her a chapter in the back of the book. One of the story things, an alcoholic wife and is in fact, in the first edition, a story in the back called an Alcoholic's wife. But it's but and didn't
want to write that chapter. And it was written by a woman named Marie Bray. But Lois always claimed that she did want to write two wives. But I think there was a bunch of a bunch of good reasons why Bill Wilson didn't want her doing that. And one of the things is, first of all, his understanding of alcoholism and the alcoholic and what the alcoholic needed was he was worried, I think she was going to write something completely different from from what he wanted in that chapter.
And if you read that chapter, that's very, very understandable. Lois would never have written the chapter that way. I am absolutely sure of that. He really, really coddles and favors the alcoholic Yeah, in that chapter over so. So I don't think he wanted to get into an argument with Lois about what she was writing in the chapter. If he let her try to write the chapter, then they would start arguing over paragraphs and blah, blah, blah. So I think he wasn't didn't like
to argue. Lois liked to argue with Bill Wilson, didn't like to argue. And so I think he thought the easiest way to settle this is just to say, No, no, you can't write that. So that's one argument with one solution to it. And now we're moving on from that. Although Lois, even in interview and in her very late eighties, at least, she was still complaining over the fact that she couldn't understand why a bill and let her write that chapter. All right. I thought so.
How's that Al-Anon program working for your resentments there, lady? Well, we're not perfect. No, No, none of us is. Amen to that. you mentioned coddling. There are some places and I think there's a woman I know who goes to our Monday night meeting, and every time we get to two wives, she groans. She goes, This is not my chapter, but I'm going to I'm going to share. I do not like this. And he does. He's he's very it's easy to look back and say, well, it's 1938. Maybe
it's different. But he's coddling a lot of these men and telling women, you know, even though they've done these all these bad behaviors, you know, you really need to go easy on him. What was his motivation to take that tact? Well, I don't know that it was so much motivation is the right word. You're mad. I think it's more about the cultural realities of 1938. You know, men know men and women were women in those days, you know, And it and it was it was a completely different social and cultural
situation. I mean, you got to realize that women didn't get the vote until 1918. So, you know, we just I think they didn't actually get the vote until 20 or 21, to tell you the truth. So, you know, this is the position and the understanding of women's position in our society and in our culture and in our marriages is was it was radically different in 1938 than what it is today in 2023, radically different. And, um, and my wife, the lady said, I. talk about this with some
regularity. We get into the two chapters. She goes of she does women's meetings and, and you know, she said, we always complain about the chapter when we get to it, but we always have these great meetings often. So I mean, there's some wonderful stuff in there, but there's also some dreadful, terrible stuff in there. And I really do think it's it's it's he's really again, he's bending over backwards and he's telling the wife she needs to bend over backwards to do anything to help her husband
gets and then stay sober. You know, you can't be bitching at him about his coffee drinking, for instance, you know, or the fact that he's going out to meetings all the time, that he's paying attention to those people more than he's paying attention to his own kids. And but you got you got to lighten up and just don't let them let's let them get sober. Let's let them get sober. I think he's got good intent. I see where he's coming from. Totally. Good intention. Totally.
I mean, Bill Wilson was a that was his mission in life. I mean, he was he really he never let go of that. He never let go of that. He was he was a man on fire. He was he was almost messianic in relation to his desire to get people sober and in his belief that he had a he had a pathway for those people to get sober. And if they could just just sit down long enough, sit still long enough and open, their eyes are open, their ears. And, you know, Dr. Paul says, you know,
alcoholism is a disease. You get through your ears. I got to the end of the book and I feel like I have the same reaction I did watching The Empire Strikes Back. I was depressed at the end because the end did that to the spoiler, because this is where for me, the book diverges from history and onto the story of these characters. This ensemble cast, it felt like a depressing end because everything falls apart for the main characters. Doctor Bob is chasing these people back
to Cleveland. Bill loses his house and Hank gets drunk, and because of that, we never hear of Hank again. And Hank becomes really bitter of of the success of Bill Wilson, of going in. You told the story of he goes into a meeting drunk as a skunk, looking at the picture and makes somebody explain who that is and that resentment. He didn't have a huge resentment and poor Hank Hank's life after after he started drinking again,
it all fell apart. He wrote some really nasty letters to Bill Wilson, called him the Grand Poobah of AA at one point, you know, and. And said, We don't really need a grand puba. Um, I just went up to Brown University a couple of months ago and looked at a cache of letters I hadn't seen before that Hank wrote in the 1940s. And, uh, fortunately, Brown University lets you take pictures of those things, and I write. brought them back and I I just just
recently transcribed them. We got a, we've got a website you may not know about called Hank Parker's dot com. And uh, it isn't fully populated yet with all the information that could be put up there. But I transcribed those letters in a PDF documents and we posted them just, just yesterday. And Oh, wow. uh, so there's some 1946, 47 and 48 letters from Hank to Clarence. Clyde Schneider was his business partner at this time, and, uh, it was a rocky relationship, to say the least, which is in those
letters. So, yeah, you're right. Bill gets thrown out of his house, book, comes out on the 10th, and I think it's the 24th. And literally two weeks afterwards, the bank forecloses and throws them out on the street. And they don't. They don't have a place to live for two and a half years until they get the stepping stones, two and a half years that they're living on people's couches. And then people's summer houses and just, just amazing. And yeah, Hank Hank starts drinking in in
August. Certainly he was drunk in August after the book came out in April. And, uh, and by a year later, he's divorced. He Kathleen divorces him, and he thinks she's going to hook up with Ruth Hock, But that doesn't happen because Ruth doesn't want to hook up with him now that he's drinking. And you're right, Clarence. Clarence. Clarence starts the meeting up in Cleveland and a whole, whole Ohio contingent. It's not real clear if Dr. Bob was in that can Nobody says Bob was in. They got
Henry. They had a sibling was certainly in that contention. But they went up and literally almost got into a fistfight trying to break up the meeting in Cleveland because it was heretical to have another meeting and certainly it was heretical to have a meeting without a group of people. I got to imagine that they're not going to go up there without Dr. Bob's blessing. Even tacit, it almost seems like he's the godfather out there.
Yeah, most certainly he is. I just don't want to say that he was there because I don't have any evidence that he was there. I suspect he was there, but maybe he wasn't. I'm I'm okay with him. Maybe not having that visceral reaction to this heretical thing going on up in Cleveland. But I can't say I read a lot of the footnotes I went through reading every footnote on there is going
to be difficult. But I'll tell you, the one footnote I read is the one near the end where it said Hank Parker's doesn't even have a Wikipedia page, which I went and checked. And I think that said it all for the tenor of this book, that this really feels like the subchapter this. The subtitle should be A love Letter to Hank. Yeah, well, Hank is after Bill Wilson. He's the hero of the book, and he's the hero of the book. I mean, and again, no,
Hank, no big book. We just would not have that book that we have today if it wasn't for Hank Barker's. But yeah, he's he's just just an amazing person and one of the one on one of the guys came to me afterwards and said I'd be happy to do a Wikipedia page for you. And I was like, I didn't. I actually didn't respond to him for two weeks because I didn't know what
I thought about that. And he wrote me back and the other thing and he said, Listen, Wikipedia pages and a good idea because anybody can go in and edit the whole thing and we won't have any kind of control. Maybe. How about if I did a Web site and I was like, Well, put something together and let me take a look at. And the guy did a really, really nice job and I've given him stuff to put up there. It needs more material.
And there are people who are, because of my book, there are people who are doing primary document research on Hank Parker's. That has never been done before. And I'm hoping those people are going to contribute that we've got it. We've got a thing on the website that if you've got some some documented information, you can contribute it to the website. And that my friend John, who's who's who built it and who's who's in charge of that, he's he'll he'll he'll take care of
that. So if you haven't seen Hank Parker's sitcom, it's worth a visit. Yeah, I agree. There's there's not a lot of people who know about them, but the people who do know are pretty passionate about this and want others to know. So if you're a student of AA, this is going to be perfect for you. What are some of the pluggable? I know you have a YouTube page which a lot of the stuff we talked about. You're giving speeches. They're given a history lesson. I I've got a YouTube channel.
You know, if you go to YouTube and put in Bill Shaver go, the channel comes up. I think I've done eight or nine talks in there at the moment. Again, I'm not a technological guidebook, but this fella John, who helped build this website said, Listen, you know, I could capture the PowerPoints and your face and your talk and we could then put this up on YouTube. So we started I mean, I've been given talks for almost three years now.
I do a lot of Zoom presentations, but in the last several months, we, we, we captured things that way and put them up. And someone asked me to do a string of presentations on the each chapter of the big book. And I was doing that. I did. I did. He wanted to start with the first two forward, so I did the first two forwards the back story and what's in them. And then I did the doctor's opinion and then Bill story and then there is a solution. And I and I did more
about alcoholism. I did not. The next one was supposed to be diagnostics. And I just I had taken on way more than I could handle. And I was I was in a little bit of a meltdown. I had promised to do four brand new PowerPoint presentations in five weeks. And and when I got finished with them, I said, okay, I've got to stop. I just I need some time out. I'm an old guy, you know, and I need some time out. So but we've got we've got eight or nine of those up there.
And I will get back to doing one each on each one chapter of the big book on I'm looking forward to, to doing that. But I need to get get the table cleared a little bit first before because. I I get can my head identify cleared. that's part of my my alcoholism is taking on more than I can do. And then freaking out when I realized, Oh my God, I can't do this.
Yeah. Now the problem with saying you're going to do a presentation on February 17th at 10:00 in the morning is you've got to be there at February seven, at 10:00 in the morning with 100 slides. Yeah. And and I was just I was overpromising. I mean, I met all the deadlines and the stuff I did. I was I was I was happy with. But I was just I was so burned out after I had the last presentation that I did in that particular cycle was the Friday before Thanksgiving. And I was just like, I was wiped.
Bill, thank you so much for doing this. This is an honor to do this. And when I got the book and saw that you were close to here, I have to tell you, I'm like, I got a podcast. I think I have a shot at talking to this guy. If nothing, nothing more of, you know, it's an excuse to go talk to somebody who knows a lot, who could tell some great stories. So I am so grateful. And I think people listening to this are going to get a lot out of it. Well, thank you, man. I appreciate the opportunity to
chat with you. Have a good time here today. Yeah, Yeah. I've enjoyed this. This is fantastic. All right. We'll see everybody soon by everybody.