more of these early people and early stories came flooding back to mind as we in St. Louis continued to review the history of A.A.’s growth. We remembered the excitement of the formation of the first A.A. group solely by mail in Little Rock, Arkansas; the first Canadian group in Toronto and soon after those in Windsor and Vancouver, B.C.; the first beginning in Australia and Hawaii, creating a pattern later followed in some seventy foreign lands and U.S. possessions; the affecting tale of the little Norwegian from Greenwich, Connecticut, who had sold all he had to go to Oslo to help his brother and thus started the group there; the Alaskan group that had taken shape because a prospector out in the wilds found an A.A. book in an old oil drum; the Utah alkies who dried up in A.A. and struck uranium in the process; the spread of A.A. to South Africa, Mexico, Puerto Rico, South America, England, Scotland, Ireland, France, and Holland, and then to Japan and even Greenland and Iceland; the story of Captain Jack in a Standard Oil tanker, spreading A.A. as he sailed. In such happy reminiscences we at St. Louis reviewed A.A.’s crossing of the barriers of distance, race, creed, and tongue and saw our fellowship reaching to the four corners of the earth.
These tales brought Lois and me wonderful recollections of our six weeks’ journey abroad in 1950.
We could remember the heated arguments between the Swedes of Stockholm and the Swedes of Göteborg over whether A.A. should be based on Stockholm’s “Seven Steps” or America’s “Twelve.” We recalled meeting the founder of the wonderful group in Helsinki, Finland. We could still see the Danes at Copenhagen as their “Ring i Ring” wondered whether A.A. or antabuse was their answer. We remembered Henk Krauweel, in whose home we were guests while in Holland. Henk, a social worker and nonalcoholic, was engaged by the city of Amsterdam to see what he could do for the drunks there. He had been able to do very little until one day he ran across A.A.’s Twelve Steps. Translating them into Dutch, he handed them to some of his charges. To his astonishment, several tough cases went dry. And by the time we arrived he could show us plenty more. A.A. was solid in the Netherlands and well on its way. Our great friend Henk Krauweel has since become one of Europe’s leading authorities on the total alcohol problem.
In Paris we found several scattered American A.A.’s who acted mostly as a reception committee for A.A. travelers, some dry and some in deep trouble. The Frenchmen at Paris were still pretty shy about A.A. and they were possessed of the wonderful rationalization that wine was not liquor at all and was therefore quite harmless!
In London and Liverpool we met many very anonymous Englishmen. In those days their meetings had a definite parliamentary atmosphere, including a gavel which was struck at appropriate moments. Of course the Irish A.A. was everything we expected and more. The South-of-Ireland A.A.’s at Dublin were on a most genial basis with the North Irelanders at Belfast, despite an occasional burst of rock throwing among their compatriots in the streets. We watched as the seeds of A.A. pushed up their sprouts in Scotland, and when we encountered Scottish hospitality we knew for sure that the Scotsman A.A. is neither penurious nor dour.
To Lois and me this overseas experience was like turning the clock back to early times at home. Depending on their stage of progress, the foreign groups of that day were either flying blind, were hopefully pioneering, or had reached the fearsome and sometimes quarrelsome state of adolescence. They were re-enacting all of our American experiences of fifteen, ten, and five years before. We returned home with the sure conviction that nothing could stop their progress, that they could surmount all barriers of social caste or language. In the seven years since our 1950 visit, the A.A. achievement overseas has far exceeded our highest hopes.
I have saved our Norwegian impression for the final part of this foreign account, because the story of the beginning there is a classic. It all started in Greenwich, Connecticut, in a coffee shop owned by a quiet little Norwegian and his devoted wife. The Greenwich group had lifted him to sobriety and his shop had become a popular rendezvous for them.
The little Norwegian had not written and had not heard from home in the twenty years he had been a virtual derelict. But now, feeling sure of himself, he sent a letter bringing the folks back there up to date and telling them all about himself and his escape from alcoholic oblivion via A.A.
He soon received an excited and pleading letter, telling him of the awful plight of his brother, a typesetter on an Oslo newspaper. The brother, his relatives said, was not long for his job and maybe not long for this world. What could be done?
The little Norwegian in Greenwich took counsel with his wife. They sold their coffee shop, all they had in the world, and bought a round-trip to Oslo, with only a little to spare. A few days later they saw their homeland. From the airfield they hurried down the east bank of Oslo fjord to the stricken brother’s house. It was just as they had been told; the brother was close to the jumping-off place.
But Brother was obstinate. The man from Greenwich told his A.A. story and retold it. He translated the Twelve Steps of A.A. and a small pamphlet he had brought along. But it was no use; Brother would have none of it. Said the travelers, “Have we come all the way to Oslo just for this? Our money will soon run out and we shall have to go back.” Brother said nothing.
So the Norwegian from Greenwich began to canvass the clergymen and some of the doctors in Oslo. They were polite but not interested. Much cast-down, the A.A. and his wife made their plans to return to America.
Then the impossible happened. Brother suddenly called out and said, “Tell me more about those anonymous alcoholics in America. Explain again their Twelve Steps to me.” He sobered up almost at once and was able to watch his brother’s plane take to the air for New York. He had got the message all right, but he was alone now. What could he do?
The instant he got back to work he started modest ads in his own newspaper, one every day for a month. Nothing happened until the very last day. Then the wife of one of Oslo’s sidewalk florists wrote him a letter asking help for her husband. When the florist heard the story and studied the Twelve Steps he too dried up. The two-man group continued the newspaper notices that A.A. had come to town. Soon they had a third sober member. Among others who followed was a patient of Dr. Gordon Johnson’s, Oslo’s leading psychiatrist. Dr. Johnson, a deeply religious man, at once saw the implications of A.A.’s Twelve Steps and immediately threw the whole weight of his reputation behind the uncertain little group.
Three years later Lois and I looked through the customs gate at Oslo Airport upon a large welcoming delegation. Very few words of English could they speak, but they didn’t have to. We could see and feel what they had. On the way to the hotel we learned that Norway already had hundreds of A.A.’s now spread into many groups. It was unbelievable, yet there they were.
What happened to the little Norwegian from Greenwich? He came home and somehow started another coffee shop. Four years later he suffered a heart attack and died. But not before he had seen A.A. grow great in Norway.
One more word about Norway. Quite unknown to the rest of that country, a group had sprung up in Bergen at about the same time that Oslo got underway. Hans H., a Scandinavian-American, had returned to his home town with an A.A. book. Having perfect command of English, he could translate it into Norwegian as he read aloud to a tiny band of alcoholics that he had somehow gathered about him. With the benefit of this auspicious beginning several laid hold of sobriety and thereafter spread the message in this city to such good effect that Bergen today can point to sixteen A.A. groups as the remarkable result.
At many another Convention meeting the panorama of A.A. in action today was unfolded. A.A. clubs, now numbered by the hundreds, had their problems aired and their assets and liabilities weighed. There was a lively swapping of experience on how best we could give brother and sister sufferers in mental hospitals and prisons a still better break while they were in these places and when they left them. Great numbers of these folks were already making good and had become our fast friends and co-workers on the outside, and we realized how foolish
