As a child growing up in Paisley, Scotland, Jimmy K., widely recognized as the founder of Narcotics Anonymous, struck up an unusual friendship with a man named Mr. Crookshack:
“My very, very close friend was the town drunk. And he was a great guy, you know? He was so good to me in so many ways, and he was such a louse in so many others. He used to fall down the stairs and break himself open, break his head open, and blood would be running down two or three flights of stairs. When I was seven and a half, he fell down and I found him. I found him and went running in to get my mother. We got him into a hospital. I used to keep saying to her ‘When can we see Mr. Crookshack?’ and she said ‘Next week, next week’. This kept going on. Finally, I said ‘I have to see him’. So she took us up to a place called Crow Road. This was the nut house. And here he was sitting in a wheel chair, just staring straight ahead. I couldn’t understand why he couldn’t see me and wouldn’t talk to me. I said, ‘what’s wrong with him?’ She said ‘He drank too much and got hurt too much over the years’. I said, ‘When I grow up, I’m gonna help people like Mr. Crookshack’. I’ve never forgotten that. I had to become an alcoholic and addict to fulfill my destiny.”
Initial growth in Alcoholics Anonymous took place in Cleveland, Ohio. Clarence S. and the guys went out actively pursuing drunks and brought them off bar stools and street corners. We don’t do that today, but we were doing it back then [late 1930’s and 1940’s]. And it worked!
In early 1940, when there were about 1,000 members of AA, more than half were from Cleveland. The book ‘AA Comes of Age’ talks about it on pages 20 and 21: “It was soon evident that a scheme of personal sponsorship would have to be devised for the new people. Each prospect was assigned an older AA, who visited him at his home or in the hospital, instructed him on AA principles, and conducted him to his first meeting.” So even back in the early days the sponsor was taking the sponsee to meetings and getting together with him, rather than having the sponsee track the sponsor down. ‘AA Comes of Age’ continues by saying, “But in the face of many hundreds of pleas for help, the supply of elders could not possibly match the demand. Brand-new AA’s, sober only a month or even a week, had to sponsor alcoholics still drying up in hospitals.” Because of this rapid growth in Cleveland, the idea of formalized classes started. In the book ‘Dr. Bob and the Good Old-timers’ it states on page 261, “Yes, Cleveland’s results were the best. Their results were in fact so good that many a Clevelander really though AA had started there in the first place.” Over half of the fellowship was from Cleveland up and through the mid-1940s. Continue reading
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