How honest can you get? Glen F. pushed the envelope when he was 12 years sober. Glen, who had his last drink in 1972, doesn´t count that year as the start of his new life.

"Twelve years into my sobriety, my sponsor went out and got drunk and shot himself," Glen said. "That´s when I changed my birthday and got honest." It seems that six years earlier, though he was going to meetings every day, he´d started hanging out with non-A.A. folks and smoked a joint. "That´s all. No booze," Glen said.

He said nothing about this transgression until the tragedy of his sponsor´s death. That triggered some heavy thinking. He wrote off those first six years and moved his sobriety date ahead to May 15, 1979. Then he went "Into Action."

"His suicide changed my life," Glen said. "It made me examine what I was doing in this program. One of the first things I did was to go back to the company that had fired me for drinking. On my last day, I stole some expensive equipment before I went out the door. Well, now I bought new stuff and took it back to the owner. He didn´t seem to understand, but I was doing the right thing.

"I´d been stealing the signal from our cable company. I went to the manager and paid back all the stolen service. The manager asked me if I wanted to have cable legitimately. Me? An admitted thief? ´Anybody that honest is going to be a good customer,´" he told Glen.

His toughest ninth step was admitting to all his sponsees that he had smoked marijuana six years earlier. "I´d never told anybody till then. Half of ´em fired me. It hurt a lot, but you have to be honest with yourself and ´fess up. You can´t say one thing and do another. I can´t tell you to clean up your side of the street and not take care of my side. But it was a real heavy time.

"Lots of people still blame me for lying, but it ain´t about them. It´s what you think about yourself."

From then on, Glen was "heavy into service." He and his wife, Diane, who´s also in the program, drove a van to Riverton Hospital for nine years. They went to Purdy, the state´s women´s prison, and the Federal Detention Center for four years. He´s been going to King County Detox for 10 or 12 years, with a van load of fellow A.A. members from his home group, Our Primary Purpose. He and Diane started Pass It On, a club at 17801 1st Ave. S. that has many meetings throughout the week. He makes five meetings a week, with a speaker´s meeting on Saturday.

Diane has 27 years of sobriety, a year more than Glen. "That´s good for my ego," he says. Unlike many A.A. couples, they go to meetings together. "We haven´t got anything to hide. She´s the best thing that ever happened to me." They met in the program 23 years ago.

Glen was abashed at running down these happenings. "I don´t like to toot my own horn," he said. "But I´m an A.A. person. A.A. is my life. There´s nothing I´d rather do than help other people. I´m sponsoring 20 or 25 people. That´s not as demanding as it might sound. Some guys have 15 years or more, so they´re more like friends than sponsees."

He eschews hardnosed sponsorship. "I don´t believe in giving orders. I want ´em to trust me, to know that I care about them."

Life´s good now, but that wasn´t always true. He was placed in foster homes when his brawling, drunken family couldn´t care for him. Somehow, they got him back when he was 11 and moved from Tacoma to Pasco. In school, he became the class clown to get attention, but he could never bring friends home because of his parents.

His own drinking started in high school. He got into the T-Birds, a tough gang of teenagers who wore their name on their jackets to intimidate their fellow students. And not just students. "We used to wait outside the bars and fight the customers when they came out. I was angry, mean, pissed off. My parents were beating the hell out of each other. When there´s a crisis all the time, you start looking for crisis."

Glen made it through Columbia Basin Community College to emerge with the skill that carried him through his adult life, machinist. "A machinist can get a job anywhere in the world. I worked in the air industry, fishing, lumber, you name it." Boeing hired him right out of college, but his drinking got him fired in six months. There were many short term jobs after that, but Boeing took him back after he was sober. He retired from the company with 15 years of service.

Shortly after leaving college, Glen married for the first time. He was working at a gas station when the boss fired him for showing up late. Booze then took over the story. His wife was pregnant, he needed money for Christmas gifts, and what to do? Why, rob the station, and that´s what he and a friend did. He netted about $40. That was his one serious crime, but his friend kept going till he was caught and named Glen as his accomplice. That ended his first marriage.

"Yep, he ratted me out. I did 90 days in the King County Jail waiting for trial. The judge gave me 20 years in Monroe because I´d had a gun. But the other guy had a good lawyer and got off with probation, so I was brought back to court and resentenced to probation on condition of good behavior."

Glen defined "good behavior" as becoming a drug running hippy. "We were running around naked, dropping acid, smoking dope. Everything a flower child does, right here in Seattle." He was a drug courier for a biker gang until he had to move to Portland to get away from the police.

Back in Seattle when the heat was off, he was living in flophouses and closing the bars when he began to realize he was turning into what his parents were "and I never wanted to be."

That´s when the system, a system that´s been largely destroyed since then, went to work for him. He went to an alcohol referral center in Pioneer Square that no longer exists and met a counselor.

"She asked me if I wanted to stop drinking. Who was she, all combed, neat, church-looking lady to ask me that? I wasn´t about to talk to her about drinking. Then she told me about these four-day drunks she used to have, never eating. And how she´d have to go home, but that alcoholic car would just pull her up to the bar.

"That hooked me right there. She knew what she was talking about. So I went to my first meeting that night." He stayed sober for three months before he got drunk again and signed into a treatment center. That was 1972, and he hasn´t had a drink since, but he did take that fatal toke of marijuana six years later.

A.A. is Glen´s life, but there´s also been room to fit in a fantastic hobby: collecting 45 rpm records. Remember those? He has 20,000 of them that he finds at swap meets and garage sales. Who´d want such an obsolete device? Well, he recently sold one that he paid 10 cents for to a London DJ for $200. He sells them regularly on eBay.

"They´re all good dancin´ stuff. I DJ lots of dances in the South End. Been doin´ it for years."

Looking back over all those years of sobriety, Glen says the most important thing is still meeting new people. "That´s why I go to treatment centers. I like to see that light go on in their eyes. When I can help, it makes me feel worthwhile for the first time in my life. I like to get new people laughing. Once you get ´em laughing, they have a chance. I remember how much that impressed me at first, to see a roomful of drunks who were happy and laughing.

A.A. has also helped him gain a spiritual life. "I hated God when I came in. I found my God here."

Interviewed and written by Dick S.