An editorial and graphic history

In the spring of 1944, six members of AA--four women and two men--got together in an apartment in New York City and considered the idea of publishing a local AA newsletter. A newsletter was exactly what was needed in those early days of AA, when the Fellowship was only nine years old and still finding its way. There was plenty of news to report. There had been a dramatic increase in membership from 2,000 to 8,000 after Jack Alexander's article about AA appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in 1941. New groups were being formed, new meeting formats were being tried out, and new ways of twelfth-stepping were being debated. AAs were talking about how to practice the Steps (the book Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions hadn't been written yet), groups were struggling to stay in existence, and recovering drunks were struggling to stay sober: