AL W., Seattle Intergroup´s executive secretary until his retirement in 1982, has been enjoying life in Hemet, California, for the past 10 years.

Now 84 and suffering from emphysema, he still plays a round of golf now and then and cheerfully accepts his declining health.

"Breathing is my worst problem," he said. "I quit smoking in 1973, but it wasn´t soon enough. When I started going to AA, all the meetings were smoking meetings, even in the churches. We told ´em it would be harmful to our members not to be able to smoke, so they said go ahead and smoke. But we finally got wise to ourselves and made most of the meetings non-smoking."

Al´s AA birthday is July 28, 1964. " Had a year´s sobriety before that. I went to one meeting a week, and when the year was up, I got drunk and drank for the next three-and-a-half years. I hadn´t read any of the literature, just went to that one meeting and listened to those old guys talk. My reaction was they were so old they SHOULD stop drinking. It never occurred to me that my hair was getting gray too. We never think of ourselves as getting old while we´re drinking--except in the mornings sometimes."

Al came to Seattle from Alaska in the 40s, he told the group, loaded with "more money than I had ever seen before. It was about $3000, and it kept me drunk for a month-and-a-half. At the end, all I got out of it was a new shirt, a new tie and new underwear. But it never occurred to me I had any kind of a problem. It was just that I was running around with the wrong people. So I left here and went to Portland. Guess what? It was the same people down there, only different names.

"I wound up playing piano in strip joints and hopping bells (bellhop). When I came back to the program, my sponsor, Smitty, was standing in the door at the Rainier Valley meeting. ´Well, you had enough?´ he asked me, and told me I owed him 35 cents for the birthday card he´d bought and never got to give me."

It was tougher the second time around. "I went back out after about a month, came back, then went out again on a 16-day drunk. But that was the end. When I came back after that, I had no trouble staying sober. Thanks to my Higher Power, I haven´t had any compulsion to drink since that time.

Reminiscing about an old friend from the Renton group, Bob G., Al talked about his wry sense of humor. "It was what I needed at that time. He would hear some oldtimer say ´Sobriety begins at the end of a broom,´ but Bob would say, ´Not true. I swept floors before I came to AA and it never kept me sober. Sobriety begins when you stop drinking.´ Another common saying was ´five per cent of AA does all the work.´ Bob´s retort was ´I´d like to see ´em get by without the other 95 per cent.´ He never joined in the Serenity Prayer because, he said, ´When you already have serenity, you don´t need to pray for it.´ He had an answer for everything, whether you agreed or not. If it worked for him, who´s going to knock it?"

That latter remark was typical of Al´s tenure as executive secretary. He told of a time when a feud erupted between members of the professional community and an Intergroup committee. The alcohol counselors wanted AA members to call their clients who were interested in the program, and AA took the position (editor: as it still does) that the drunks should make the calls for help. Finally, a deal was struck under which, when the drunk was in the counselor´s office, one or the other would make the call. But one of the professionals balked.

"He would call and give me the number and ask me to make the call. I did that because it seemed to me that it was easier for ME to change in that one instance than it was to try to get the professional to change. It worked out okay. I have since wondered if I did the wrong thing. Maybe I should have let them do for themselves. But most of the strife ended.

"You grow fast in the secretary´s job because things happen fast. Trouble comes in bunches and I went through some trying periods. There were a lot of new things happening. For instance, when I was asked to list the gay groups in the schedule. I wasn´t sure what to do, but after consulting with the General Service Office, I took the issue to the Intergroup Board. I had to deal with the red necks. There were a few of them around then, and there still are.

"But I had done my homework. I´d run it by a couple of advisers, Eric B. and Everett K., and I´d been phoning people on both sides. We must have made the right decision, to include the gay groups in the directory, because there are a lot of them now, and they´re flourishing."

Al was big on coffee making in his early time in AA. He went on to bigger things, but he said if he ever gets bored in retirement, "I know what I can do. That´s be a coffee maker for a group. It´s a job that will keep you out of mischief and give you the proper amount of humility."

Interviewed and written by Dick S.