If we ever need a poster boy for the miracle of Alcoholics Anonymous, my nominee is Floyd C. of Redmond.

Floyd, now 76, has been sober since June 15, 1956, when he reluctantly got into the AA program in a California prison forestry camp in Oak Glen.

"I worked in the kitchen scrubbin´ floors and serving and all that sort of thing. I was still psycho. I was still nuts. I still gave ´em a hell of a hard time for a long time. But I ended up as secretary of the group."

Here´s what life was like for Floyd before that: As a kid in Oregon, I skipped school for three days. I was declared incorrigible and put in the Oregon State Reformatory for five years. I stayed there till I was 16. That was one of the toughest reform schools in the United States. They would put a steel boot on you, lock it on, and make you work in the fields. They had these long straps and they´d whip you if you ran away. Then you´d get put in a hole in the ground, sort of like a manhole. There was a mattress and a jug of water and a pot, and it was pitch dark. I went 30 days at a time down there.

"They´d make you go to church on Sunday, hallelujah type of church, but I raised so much hell. There couldn´t be a God if I was being treated the way I was. So every Sunday, instead of me going to church with all the other kids, they´d lock me in solitary confinement. I didn´t mind, though. I was never allowed to be alone excepting solitary confinement, and I liked that."

That was only the beginning. Floyd drifted down to California and went to prison twice, the first time for burglary and the second time for robbery. In between, he bummed around the country.

"My whole life was mixed up. I ran into a fella I´d been in reform school with, and we came up to Seattle together. I got into heroin for a little while. We were boosters, you know, shoplifters, and the police told us to get out of town or they´d kill us. I was in my 20s then. They caught me down on Jackson Street, took my money, took my knife and broke it, and then gut-punched me till I couldn´t see straight. That was going on all over the United States at that time.

"So I left town as quick as I could, hitchhiking. In Montana, I stayed in a bush three days and started to kick [the habit]. I made it back to the road and a guy picked me up and bought me a bottle of wine. That helped a lot. But I didn´t know how to get drugs anywhere but in Seattle, so I went East to Philadelphia, sobered up and went to work.

"I stayed for over a year in the early ´50s, ran a restaurant there, and then I got drunk. The police took me home the first time ´cause, you know, we used to give them free food. The second time, I woke up in Washington, D.C. with the boss´s car and all the receipts for that night. So I kept goin´. A couple weeks later, I was in Miami, Florida, sleeping in the park, completely broke. And the police told me to get out of there, so I went to New Orleans. I really went down at that point. I slept in a car in a used car lot, and made a little money robbing church boxes.

"That ended when the police told me they had a road gang they could put me on if they saw me around town anymore. So I hitchhiked out to Los Angeles. It took a long time ´cause people´d smell me and kick me out of their cars. Most of the way, I rode on the back of cattle trucks and in pickups.

"When I got there, I was almost dead. But I remembered an old buddy in Portland who had told me about Central Avenue. I worked my way down there, and my Higher Power must have been working for me ´cause I ran into this one buddy. He took me to an empty house they all called The Pit. We had cold water and gas, was all. They undressed me and put me in a tub of cold water that damn near killed me. They had to change the water about three times, I was so filthy. One of ´em took my clothes and threw ´em in an alley about three blocks away. They didn´t want ´em any closer.

"Well, they nursed me back to health, and I felt I really owed ´em somethin´ for saving my life. I did some petty thieving around there, until I got hold of a double barreled, sawed-off 12-gauge shotgun. Me and a buddy got hold of an old car and went down to Culver City. I held up a bar there, but unbeknownst to me, Red, who was waiting in the car, was suckin´ on a bottle to keep up his courage. We went down the road a couple of blocks and he turned against a ´no left turn´ sign with a couple of cops watching across the street. I told him to step on it, but when the cop yelled to pull over, he did and we were on our way back to jail.

"I´d been drinkin´ steady every day for four years, and the Lincoln Park jail wouldn´t give me even an aspirin to calm me down. I went insane. When I woke up three months later, I was in San Quentin again, in the psych ward. I stayed in one cell there, 8 by 5. I was nuts. I cussed the toilet. I thought the warden was shootin´ sparks up to make me gag. I thought I was on Death Row. When they came in to take me to the doctor, I fought ´em every time, so they´d come in with a mattress, get me up against the wall, then down on the floor and choke me till I passed out and they could get the straps on me.

"I did some hard time, San Quentin, Folsom, Chino. The first time I was in San Quentin, I killed a couple of guys with a baseball bat who tried to molest me. Those guys had a knife on me. I was only 21. They deserved it. I wasn´t prosecuted. They didn´t do that in those days. Instead, they sent me to Folsom."

Amazingly, Floyd was released to the forestry camp at Oak Glen. "I was still nutty as hell. The other inmates were afraid of me. Even after I found Alcoholics Anonymous, I gave the jailers a hard time for a long time. But after I became secretary of the group in there, the Parole Board noticed a radical change in me and let me out after five years where I would usually have got 10.

"You had to have a job to get parole. My family had dropped me completely. I wrote probably a hundred letters, and never got one back. It was the Salvation Army that sponsored me so I could get out. I think the world of them.

"Back in L.A., I moved into a halfway house called New Horizons. It was while I was there that I met Bill W. on two different occasions. Bill would spend the evening, no, the night talking to us guys. I wasn´t too impressed till the second time he came and remembered my name and everything I´d said before. He gave me a silver dollar, flipped it over to me and told me I could make a couple of phone calls or get a couple of drinks with it, my choice. I still have that silver dollar. I´ll probably leave it to my son someday. Bill signed my Big Book, too. The first edition that had a red cover, but I lost it."

Floyd married shortly after leaving prison. "She was an addict, pure and simple. She wasn´t an alcoholic, but she´d go to meetings with me and they´d kick her out. A friend of ours who was an alcoholic invited six of us over to his house, and out of that meeting came Narcotics Anonymous. That was about 1960.

"NA won´t ever be as big as AA. Drug addicts are not the same as alcoholics, and most don´t live that long anyway."

The couple moved briefly to Joplin, Missouri "´modern´ in a rental ad meant it had an inside toilet"´ and then came to Seattle, where they were active both in Alcoholics Anonymous and in starting Narcotics Anonymous programs. "My wife and I were talking in all the schools and churches, mainly about pot. That was in the 70s. We started a methadone program, and helped start Sea-Dru-Nar. The only thing I didn´t like about SeaDru-Nar was the attack therapy I thought a better approach was love and understanding."

Tragically, his wife was hit by a drunk driver and suffered brain damage. She became addicted to drugs again and two years later died of an overdose.

Floyd clung to his sobriety through all these events, helping to start Hilltop, now the Alano Club of the Eastside. It is there and the 23rd & Cherry Fellowship that he attends most of his meetings. He used to be a regular at the old Fremont Hall in Fremont, too.

´I used to get into a fight a year. At the old Fremont, where I went for a long time, guys were crowding across the table punchin´ each other till I made an announcement that the next guy that turns on somebody would have to fight me. And you know, it stopped.

"We had problems with bikers there. One of ´em came up to me with a chain one time, and I threw him down the stairs. He took the door off. Then we went across the street and had a talk with those bikers about yelling at our girls. They never bothered them again.

"I still go to seven or eight meetings a week. I have been to well over 20,000 in my lifetime. For the first 20 years I was in the program, I went to at least one or two meetings a day, and on the weekends I´d go to three or four a day. AA was my life. That´s all I did.

"My health is good; I´m still working at the plumbing trade that I first learned in reform school."

It took a lot of years, but Floyd finally came to believe in God. "I had a Higher Power, but I didn´t believe in God. Then one day, a guy said to me, ´It´s easy as hell. God is love.´ So after 25 years in AA, I finally had my awakening. And I had more help from a fantastic lady who told me, ´Just remember one thing. Floyd is no big deal.´ Once I accepted that, my whole life changed. And you know, now I do not have a bad day."

Interviewed and written by Dick S.