Early AA: Still Active After All These Years

My sobriety date is March 23, 1960. I was 33 years old when I got sober--a veritable youngster at that time and one of the few women in AA on the San Francisco Peninsula. I worked with a woman, Kay, who had just moved from Iowa and whose husband had three years of sobriety. She wanted me as an excuse to get her husband to go to a meeting because he hadn't been going and she was afraid he was going to get drunk. Kay took me first to an Al-Anon meeting and that was a disaster. I was drunk and they kept telling me that I belonged next door in the AA meeting. Although I'd been a daily drinker for the past five years and sometimes taught Sunday school drunk, I didn't understand why I would need AA. Kay and I would drink together after work and she kept saying that I should go to AA. I kept asking, "What is it? What is AA?" I had never heard of it. She'd just tell me that it was a program and wouldn't tell me anything else.