By Dick S.

We´ve talked about dual abusers in these pages many times, but not this kind of dual abuser.

George H. of Auburn, 35 years sober, is also a longtime member of Overeaters Anonymous. "Weight has always been a problem for me," he said. "I used to weigh 350. Now I´m down to 235, and I´ve maintained that weight since 1975. Weight loss and keeping weight off is much harder than dealing with alcohol. How´d you like to be trying to quit drinking and have a beer at your table three times a day?"

By contrast, quitting booze was relatively easy, once he decided that was the way to go. He´d been thinking about destructive drinking for awhile before he quit. Six months before his sobriety date of May 3, 1969, George read Chapter 3 of the Big Book, "More About Drinking." "Everything they talked about in there, I´d done. I tried to moderate my drinking first. That didn´t work, of course.

"I was living in Alameda (California) at the time, and made a trip back to Washington D.C. to deal with my brother´s problem. All five of us brothers got together there to talk about this one brother who was having trouble. I guess it was an early form of intervention." The brother eventually died of alcoholism.

George returned to Alameda, determined to make it work for himself. He contacted a former tenant who he´d evicted for destructive boozing and who had since sobered up. "I need your help," George told him. The man was surprised in view of their previous problem, but he wanted to make an amend.

For the next 120 days, his friend took him to meetings all over the Bay Area and as far away as Santa Cruz. George spent his afternoons at a fellowship hall to replace the time he used to spend in bars. Three months into sobriety, he was running a meeting and traveling the state with his sponsor to every A.A. conference and convention they could find-provided there was dancing.

"We´d take our ´babies´ with us (editor: Mary Ball´s word for her sponsees) and get ´em so damn tired dancing that they´d break down and tell us what was really going on in their lives. We got the idea from an oldtime sponsor´s handbook, passed down to us by word of mouth.

"In those days, we used all kinds of material that was outside the A.A. canon. My first group in Alameda was a bunch of rebels who told Intergroup to take a hike because we were going to do what we wanted to. My sponsor ran a meeting that wasn´t listed. She refused to follow the dogma that said a meeting had to be run in a certain way. For 10 years, we weren´t listed, but I´d talk up our group wherever we went."

This same woman, who must have been a remarkable person, took a year off to tour the country and visit the surviving contributors to the Big Book. "She wanted to find out how those oldtimers worked, and what kind of written materials they used. Back then, there were all sorts of aides that we no longer use. Ever heard of A.P.O.A.R.? Applied Principles of Alcoholic Recovery. It was used extensively on the East Coast. They also used Hazelden materials, and one called Stools and Bottles. That one goes into further explanation of feelings," George said. "It talks about the monkey on your shoulder that says you can drink after you´ve been sober for 15 years, and that says you don´t have to go to that meeting tonight. If you listen to the monkey long enough, you will get drunk because we have a disease that doesn´t go away."

George waited longer than most of us to start drinking. Born and raised in Chicago, he had a bet with his father that he wouldn´t drink, smoke or chew tobacco until he was 21. Well, he was an enlisted man in the U.S.Army in Bucharest, Romania, in 1946, assigned to the Allied Control Commission, when that birthday arrived. That night, he went out on the town with his Thompson submachine gun and shot out street lights.

"I have no memory of that," he said. I was in a blackout, and I was in a blackout every time I drank after that. As a new drunk, I could put down eight glasses of vodka, but I didn´t remember drinking the last four. Or that I´d go into the park and shoot frogs."

George is a gun lover from way back. It´s only recently that he gave up "carrying heat," as he put in Chicagoese. "I did an inventory and figured out I didn´t want to be controlled by my guns, so I put ´em away." He hasn´t given up his love for them, though. He has a 4-H group of kids he´s teaching how to shoot rifles. "Had 10 kids out for a five-hour shoot last Sunday." He´s a lifetime member of the National Rifle Association.

According to George, his guns have stood him in good stead more than once. He always carried shoulder automatics in Bucharest. He says that fact, and the fact he was from Chicago, kept the occupying Russians and the local gangsters from shooting him. Americans were never shot, he said, because they had a reputation for carrying guns. The British, on the other hand, were the Russians´ clay pigeons because they were not armed.

The stories from Bucharest go on and on. George says he was once assigned to guard the hotel lobby against marauding Russians who wanted to arrest some pro-American partisans who were holed up on the top floor. He and another soldier were stationed with submachine guns and orders to shoot to kill if the Russians came in. The interpreter passed this information along to the Soviets, including the fact he was from Chicago. The Soviets decided to come back some other day. "I had an educated trigger finger," George said.

George might have gotten married in Bucharest, except that he was already engaged. American enlisted men were paid $5000 to marry the daughters of Romanian generals to get them safely out of the country. He did help with high finance, though, transferring King Michael´s gold to a bank in Manhattan to ease the king´s life in exile.

When the Control Commission ended in 1947, George came home to Chicago and got married for the first time. He was working as a rent collector for his family when the Korean War started in 1950 and he found himself back in the army. He served a year in Korea.

Back home as a "rent man" in South Chicago, George made sure the janitors knew he was carrying two automatics and had a shotgun in his car. "Janitors talk. The word got around to everybody, so I never had any trouble."

In 1967, he moved to Alameda to help his brother manage an apartment complex. Two years later, he joined A.A. In the next 10 years, he divorced and remarried. His new wife was a teacher and a hippy, a lifestyle that George soon decided was for him too. They did the Haight-Ashbury and Telegraph Avenue scenes before packing up their beads and tie-dyes and moving to Federal Way in 1978.

A full blown middle aged hippy, "I was in a full beard and chains. We sat around on cushions, with carpets on the wall." In spite of their lifestyle, his wife got a job teaching high school in Federal Way and he became a "para-educator," also known as a classroom assistant. The marriage ended when his wife wanted to move into a commune.

He married for the third time in 1983, and stayed with his para-educator career until retiring this year. His home group is Camelot Square in Federal Way, where he´s currently the zone representative, and served as GSR for a long time. George also sponsors three people now; over the years, he´s had 50 sponsees.

With 35 years under his belt, what does A.A. mean to George?

:"Fellowship, a way of life, peace of mind, a way to handle stress successfully, and lots of friends. That´s what it means," George said.

Interviewed and written by Dick S.