Andy begins by telling us how he sobered up in Southern California in 1972, and often looked there for his Alcoholics Anonymous role model. He´d done much of his drinking in Seattle, though, and came up here to make amends "to some of the people I had harmed." One of them, in a forgiving mood, talked him into moving back to Seattle and set him up in the carpet business.

"The first meeting I went to up here was Empire Way. After the meeting, everyone went home and I was left standing in the parking lot in a drizzling rain. That wasn´t what I was used to. Where I´d come from, we´d have coffee and cake and a chance to talk to our fellow alcoholics. But here I was, standing out in the parking lot all by myself.

"There was a Wednesday night meeting at Old Renton, and I started going there. I stayed with those two groups for a few months and got to know the people a little bit. They probably thought I was a high roller from Southern California, and I probably did throw a little authority on them. But I was looking for something to do. I´d been involved in Southern California, and I was looking for some involvement up here.

"So I started a Monday night meeting at Cedar Hills (King County´s treatment center). We were going through the steps there, and it was nice, but there was still something lacking. One night, I was at a dance at the old Big Hall at 915 E. Pike Street, and got to talking to a couple of young ladies, asking them why we didn´t have a place like we had in Southern California where people could congregate in the morning and get their day started, or stay as long as they wanted or needed to, and be with sober friends.

"So this one young lady said, ´Why don´t you start one of those places?´ Kind of put me on the spot. The next day, I started driving the streets of Renton looking for a building to rent.

"I found one, (upstairs at 3rd and Wells in downtown Renton) and made an agreement with the owner for $200 a month rent plus whatever the water cost. So I had a building but no people.

"A friend from Empire Way took me to a GSR meeting in Kent, and there I met many people. One of them was a beautiful young girl named Jackie F. I told these people I would like to have a business meeting at the new location on Dec. 8, 1975, to decide whether to go ahead or drop the idea. Meanwhile, I kept talking it up, and Mike C. from Empire Way said he would make a donation for six months to get us started, and two others said they would too.

"I asked Mary B. at Old Renton what she thought. ´Sounds like a good idea to me,´ she said. ´I´ll give you $25.´ Then I explained the idea to Vic S. He handed me a hundred dollars and said, ´Go for it.´ Mary was standing right next to Vic, and she said, ´Well, I guess I can increase my contribution,´ and she did. Remember that, Mary?"

There were other contributions, and then came time for Andy to fly to California for his AA birthday on Thanksgiving. "I went to see Jess B. and asked him for help.

` "´Well,´ he told me, ´why don´t we wait ´til you come back from California?´ [Laughter from the audience] It never entered my mind that I had all these people´s money and here I was taking off for California. When I got back, Jess said, ´Andy, you get this thing going and I´ll cover for any money you´re short.´ So it all came together and we had our first business meeting Dec. 8, 1975."

The second floor had been dentists´ offices, and they were hard on the plumbing. It all leaked, "so we packed in five-gallon cans of water to make coffee, and if anybody had to go to the bathroom, they had to bring their own coffee can."

One man volunteered to lower the ceiling, and Jackie F. said she would be the housekeeper for the first six months. "That woman was in here at 6 or 7 o´clock in the morning," Andy remembered, "and she didn´t leave ´til 10 or 11 at night, every day for six months."

Another woman said she wanted to start a daytime meeting, to meet every day. "I thought she was nuts. No way in the world that could work. Down where I came from (the California model again!) the fellowship halls had just one daytime meeting a week, so as far as I was concerned, that was the way it was suppose to be. I thought it was a terrible idea, but we were up against the deadline to get our meetings into the Intergroup schedule, so five daytime meetings is what went in.

"It didn´t take her any time at all before she started getting other chairmen. Within two weeks, she had five chairmen for an 11 o´clock meeting every day. These have proved to be the most popular meetings in the south end."

Andy named many others who contributed in those early days, with money, supplies and labor. He himself laid the carpet after someone else donated it. Then there was George F., who wanted to start a Hoot Owl meeting. "He sat in that front room by himself for three weeks. He just sat there with the Big Book. And then people started coming."

Where did the name come from? Why, Southern California, of course. "A man I knew, his home group was a place called Serenity Hall in Whittier. When I moved up here, he stuck a bunch of "Serenity Hall" signs in my van and told me I was gonna need ´em. Sure enough, I did. That was one of the things I insisted on, that we name our hall Serenity Hall. I´ve been known to insist on things at times. There were a couple of other opinions on names, but I pushed it through."

Things were shaping up, all but the plumbing. "Every time we turned on the water, it leaked on the clothing store downstairs. The store manager down there was a great big redheaded guy named Mike. God, he was about 6 feet four. He came charging up the stairs, yelling for us to turn it off. Man, we ruined more clothes down there!" (The problem was never really solved, according to a longtime member, Mike R., and Serenity Hall finally moved to its present location at 12536 Renton Ave. S. in the early Nineties.)

So they were forced to hire a non-alcoholic plumber "off the street." He ran up a bill of $363, big money then; so Serenity Hall staged its first potluck and paid him off.

Andy rotated out of his leadership role after four years and saw the hall spawn the founding of several others. He had rotated back at the time this tape was made, in 1986.

Another pioneer he cited was Al W., who started the hall´s social functions: campouts, fishing trips and dances at the VFW hall. "And once a year, on New Year´s morning, we´d have a free brunch from the money we made at the dances.

"God, I almost forgot about Cedar River. We´d been open a few months when some guy told me there was a piece of property for sale on the Cedar River. Now, what did I want with a piece of property on the Cedar River? But I bought it anyway, and Al W. liked it so well he started campouts there. There was a Filipino guy named Gene M. who started barbecuing pigs for us, and it became a semi-annual event, on July 4 and Labor Day. We´d have three or four hundred people there. When I left six years ago, I tried to sell it to an AA person, but I never could."

As he was winding down, Andy told the crowd, "I´m gonna get a little personal now. Before I got sober, I used to live under bridges, and there was always a little plaque with the bridge designer´s name on it. When I sobered up, I wanted to be a civil engineer and design bridges and get my name on one of them.

"But I would have been 50 by the time I had my training, so I never went ahead with it. But my sister said we built a bridge with Serenity Hall, that thousands of people have walked over our bridge to recovery. So I got my bridge after all."

Research by Angus L. Written by Dick S.