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A Special Notice of Historical Events Important to AAs
In St. Johnsbury, Vermont, August 9 and 12, 2008
Two events of importance to the A.A., Al-Anon, Recovery, substance abuse prevention, and treatment communities will take place in St. Johnsbury, Vermont in August of 2008. The first will occur during the St. Johnsbury, Vermont, Summerfest on Saturday, August 9. Vermont Governor Jim Douglas will launch the new Walking Tour of Historic St. Johnsbury, Vermont.
The second event will be held at the St. Johnsbury Welcome Center Grand Opening. And Senator Patrick Leahy will be at the ribbon-cutting ceremony which begins at 10:00 A.M.
Why important to recovery people? Because there is a renewed interest, effort, and research work going on in St. Johnsbury involving the training of A.A. Cofounder Robert Holbrook Smith, M.D., known in A.A. as Dr. Bob. While thousands have streamed to Akron, Ohio, in June each year, to visit Dr. Bob’s Home and celebrate A.A. Founders Day, scarcely a handful have known about, seen, or visited the equally important youthful surroundings of Bob in Vermont.
On August 9th, the Town of St. Johnsbury will, during its 4th Annual Summerfest, foster a walking tour of the St. Johnsbury Historic Districts, including the downtown area and Main Street, in order to promote their unique heritage. Stops along the way of particular significance to AAs will be Dr. Bob’s Birthplace and Boyhood Home on Summer Street, and the new Dr. Bob Core Library just established on Main Street at North Congregational Church, St. Johnsbury. But that’s not all for the recovery-minded. They will see, be able to visit, and study at North Congregational Church, the Athenaeum (town library), and St. Johnsbury Academy where Dr. Bob and his entire family were involved in the court, the schools, YMCA, Christian Endeavor Society, libraries, missions, Sunday school, and church. Almost none of these important training grounds have been the subject of recovery community visits.
The frosting on the cake will come with the trains, shops, Tea Time, Rock Around the Block, old-fashioned boxed supper social, music at the Academy, Shakespeare on Stowe Green, and the remarkable architectural splendor of St. Johnsbury buildings. And to demonstrate the ongoing importance of the St. Johnsbury scene, the August 12th St. Johnsbury Welcome Center will introduce visitors to Town resources, with a town BBQ, hamburgers, hot dogs, music, and entertainment.
For those of us in recovery fellowships, treatment work, counseling, correctional, non-profit information and prevention activity, this will be an unusual chance to see the lovely Green Mountain setting where Dr. Bob grew up, received his excellent spiritual training, and returned through his life’s end to the town of his youth, religious training, and educational successes.
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Philip Leon’s Philosophy of Courage is scanned and corrected. We expect to have it online sometime in August. In the meantime, here is another gem from the book, Leon’s thoughts on “dipsomania,” otherwise known as alcoholism.
What are the characteristics of a mania, say of dipsomania? The desire for drink which is called dipsomania is, in the first place, compulsive: the dipsomaniac is its victim; he cannot help himself, he feels; he must have his drink, or else—so it seems to him—something terrible will happen, the end of the world. Closely connected with the compulsiveness of the desire would seem to be what we may call its narrowness or rigidity or inelasticity or lack of plasticity. By this I mean that there is little or no variety in the modes of its satisfaction. Whereas ordinary thirst, for example, can be satisfied by water, tea, coffee, etc., the drunkard’s “thirst” can be satisfied by alcohol only. Being incapable of seeking for variety, as most desires do, it replaces variety by infinity of repetition …
It ends by infecting the whole of its victim’s life with its own characteristics, or rather by reducing the whole of his life to itself. Every activity becomes for him merely a means to satisfying his desire for drink; it becomes for him something which is not itself real living, real living being just drinking …
If we look more closely at the dipsomaniac, we shall see that it is also a rejection and running away—in short, unmistakable fear. For his secret is not that he makes for drink and takes delight in it as desirous people make for and take delight in that which they desire. Of delight there is very little in his life, and as his dipsomania grows he cannot be said even ordinarily to like drink, still less to delight in it. But as his dipsomania grows, there is something which does grow along with it and proportionately to it, and it is that something which explains it. It is his fear or even horror, of life without drink. That life is a wild beast which pursues him, and his dipsomania is just a running away from it. He desires or makes for drink only in the sense in which we make for a refuge; drink is for him a refuge from life. His repetition of the doses is the action not of a desirous lover but of a coward desperately defending a position with a repeating rifle against an oncoming foe.
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