A New Generation of Old-timers

Concern about alcoholism in young people existed in the very beginning of Alcoholics Anonymous and has continued to the present day. The Big Book, published in 1939, refers to young people when it states, "Several of our crowd, men of thirty or less, had been drinking only a few years, but they found themselves as helpless as those who had been drinking twenty years." So Twelfth Step work with young people was occurring in the 1930s. In an article entitled "Bridging the Age Gap" in the July 1950 Grapevine, the author states, "In the last three or four years, groups whose specific aim is to reach the younger alcoholic have mushroomed throughout the country," giving us a glimpse of AA's interest in young people in the 1940s. In the 1950s, young people were sufficiently organized to address their own concerns, and the First International Conference of Young People in AA was held in 1958 in Niagara Falls, New York.