dalin
02-20-2008, 05:06 PM
Chapter Three
TWO MEMBERS
Bo had been born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia. He was born into a family of business people with the diversification of wealthy and not so wealthy relations. The mix was ideal to allow him to emerge with a capacity to look at a thing from many angles. This ability helped him understand, get along with and work directly with a broad cross section of people.
He dropped out of high school in the eleventh grade and spent a year living on the road in the middle sixties. He exposed himself to the intellectualism of the beatniks and the recreational use of drugs. He got bored with the wild life and returned to his family to finish high school and enter a local college.
A motorcycle accident cut short his education and his increasing use of drugs diminished the value of his learning. The death of friends slowed his usage to the point where he could ask himself some basic questions.
These questions led to his working for about two years in community nonprofit organizations in downtown Atlanta. Like similar areas around the country that sprang up during the Viet Nam War, the area was called 'The Strip'.
At the end of this period in his life, he first sought help in N.A. He had come across the name in a book called The Beats. Through local A.A., he was able to locate one copy of the N.A. White Booklet and held meetings for six weeks before giving up and sending the treasury to the WSO address listed on the inside the White Booklet.
Another three years of progressive addiction made him seek recovery on any terms he could get it. He felt himself getting older and sadder, not wiser and gladder, so he went to A.A. He had been drinking in a way that reminded him more and more of the other drugs that required needles.
The years on the Strip had made him suspicious of self aggrandizement and he worked quietly to achieve the recovery offered by A.A. A month after he began to attend regular A.A. meetings, a single meeting of N.A. had begun at a local hospital. It continued to meet every Friday night for the next twelve years.
Though he also attended meetings of A.A., he shared as an addict and his desire for recovery gained him membership among the alcoholics. Some of the old-timers kept asking him what had he done for 'his people'. Their question was lost on him until he considered the time he had spent on the Strip working among addicts of all types and degree of sickness and the special aliveness of that part of his life. He realized he was finding something similar but much better in the meetings of Narcotics Anonymous.
His early experience among the beatniks had exposed him to a professional world of writers, musicians and artists. He knew well books were not necessarily that hard to produce. The increased number of meetings and members in and around Atlanta, along with the East Coast in general, led him to attend the 1977 World Convention in San Francisco.
*** *** *** ***
Greg had been born and raised in Los Angeles, California. He was raised by his mother who was working in special education. His early memories include a grandmother who died in the shower while under the effects of prescribed medication.
He attended California pop festivals, helped usher in and usher out the hippy movement and managed to attend UCLA and get a good job. He would get loaded on acid and go out to the hills of Topanga Canyon near Malibu and stare for hours at exposed fossils millions of years old.
In his using career, he had direct access to one of the great population centers for addicts of all types. In 1968 he married a lady named Lois. While very much in love and doing well at his work, his addiction was progressing to the point where he was ready to seek help. Unlike many of the early members, he came to the program in a business suit.
He immediately met every member of every known meeting in the world at the time and wound up on the N.A. Board of Trustees within a few years.
His extraordinary mind gave him the ability not only to see the need for a N.A. service structure but the ability to help get it started by writing and submitting what became the original service structure, the N.A. TREE. The structure allowed for a representative body, a primary service center and a board of trustees. While these service branches did not exist in 1975, they have evolved slowly into a dynamic reality.
*** *** *** ***
When Greg and Bo met at San Francisco, a very special chemistry emerged setting in motion the process that led to the Basic Text. Greg had been working to get an effort for the Basic Text started for years along with all the other members of world services. Bo at the other end of the Fellowship spectrum had heard everyone talk about an N.A. book but couldn't find anyone who knew anything about actual work on it.
Greg talked Bo into spending part of the week following the World Convention as his house guest in North Hollywood. Bo didn't take much selling.
He called his wife and gave her Greg's phone number and they left the Jack Tar Hotel Sunday afternoon for the eight hour drive to L.A. Traveling with them was another member named Henry S. The small red four door Fiat was packed.
On the way to L.A., Henry asked Bo what made him think he was the 'one' to do the Basic Text. Bo closed his eyes a moment and said, "I'm surprised at your question. I am willing. I thought God does the work and all He needs is willing instruments. Isn't that right?" Henry let it go at that.
The N.A. talk went on for the entirety of the eight hour drive including the brief stop over at the famous pea soup restaurant at the half way point. One of the things nonmembers would find amazing about N.A. is the amount and range of our private discussion. The imaginations and curiosity of addicts seeking recovery is absolutely without limit.
Arriving in Los Angeles, they dropped Henry off and went to a beautiful little home set in a quiet residential section of North Hollywood. Both the interior and the yard contained beautiful plants and curios. Greg was a compulsive rock collector and had built his own display cases that he filled with beautiful specimens of rocks and minerals.
The next day, Greg took Bo to work with him. He supervised the production of polyurethane for a manufacturer whose main products sold to telephone companies. Bo could see the office where Greg wrote the N.A. Tree over a two year period starting five years earlier. It amazed him to think of such a great work developed in such a plain setting. At the end of the day, they went to the WSO.
The N.A. World Service Office was located in the home of N.A.'s most famous member, Jimmy K. Jimmy had attended the formative meeting of N.A. in July of 1953 and was continuously involved since then. He remains one of the few addicts whose name in known throughout the Fellowship. His primary contribution beyond being an active member was to the N.A. 'White Booklet' and the establishment of the WSO as a base for the Fellowship's communications and distribution center.
From 1971 to 1981, the WSO operated from a side room added on to Jimmy's house across from a small airport in Sun Valley, California. He took the mail from P.O. Box 622 that remained in service for almost twenty years under the N.A. name.
Besides answering the mail, Jimmy personally answered the phone twenty-four hours a day and came to know members from all over. In time, he became the repository of information for the growing Fellowship because he had direct personal contact with so many members. These members ranged from his fellow members of the N.A Board of Trustees to the newest member in the newest meeting who called seeking information and literature.
Bo was warmly welcomed. Although the recovery story he had sent in July couldn't be located, Jimmy gave him one of the treasured coffee cups from the original N.A. meetings in the sixties that moved from location to location weekly to avoid surveillance.
He and Greg went to the oldest continuously meeting group in the world located in a small church in San Fernando Valley. There were about forty members in attendance and the members shared in 'participation style'. This is where members take turns sharing what it was like, what happened and what it was like today.
Before he flew home Wednesday, Greg and Bo had a fateful talk. They had been discussing the Basic Text as a basic dream. How material could be collected. How warm, quick responses to incoming material would likely encourage members to send in more. How members might gather together in working groups of increasing sizes to evaluate and compose the material, depersonalizing and tuning the work into the spoken tradition of N.A. recovery. Those things said at meetings were a verbal form of literature. All they had to do was faithfully write it down to the satisfaction of the clean addicts in N.A.
They hoped the Basic Text would pull the whole Fellowship together. All the members who showed up to help would be welcomed. Even though some would expect to be rigidly qualified and ranked according to clean time and ability, all members would be welcomed and allowed to participate to any extent they wished. Trust and the natural process would place them where they could best serve. Greg and Bo were experienced enough at working with ideas and people to know that there is never just one way. Flexibility was the key. Staying open to the membership and keying everything into their likes and dislikes on a feeling level would allow the work to bring to light the real principles of actual N.A. recovery. The work had to go beyond being a conglomeration of good ideas unsupported by members experience and real application.
Local working groups would be formed to originate and go over the material. Greg and Bo's technical and feeling minds were activated. The ideas came in rushes spilling over into other clearly defined sequences of likelihood. The spirit was with them. It took great restraint, discipline, faith, courage and trust to follow this inspiration with consistent action and not get sidetracked or bogged down in details.
When Bo left for home, the biggest question in his mind was will this turn out to be like the other great ideas I've wasted all my life seeking and talking about. He thought about his former girl friend Susan who was the first of his near and dears to die shooting dope. He thought of his own lost years. He thought of the faces of newcomers in his life and their chances for lasting recovery in N.A. He hoped this dream would come true for himself and many others.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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TWO MEMBERS
Bo had been born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia. He was born into a family of business people with the diversification of wealthy and not so wealthy relations. The mix was ideal to allow him to emerge with a capacity to look at a thing from many angles. This ability helped him understand, get along with and work directly with a broad cross section of people.
He dropped out of high school in the eleventh grade and spent a year living on the road in the middle sixties. He exposed himself to the intellectualism of the beatniks and the recreational use of drugs. He got bored with the wild life and returned to his family to finish high school and enter a local college.
A motorcycle accident cut short his education and his increasing use of drugs diminished the value of his learning. The death of friends slowed his usage to the point where he could ask himself some basic questions.
These questions led to his working for about two years in community nonprofit organizations in downtown Atlanta. Like similar areas around the country that sprang up during the Viet Nam War, the area was called 'The Strip'.
At the end of this period in his life, he first sought help in N.A. He had come across the name in a book called The Beats. Through local A.A., he was able to locate one copy of the N.A. White Booklet and held meetings for six weeks before giving up and sending the treasury to the WSO address listed on the inside the White Booklet.
Another three years of progressive addiction made him seek recovery on any terms he could get it. He felt himself getting older and sadder, not wiser and gladder, so he went to A.A. He had been drinking in a way that reminded him more and more of the other drugs that required needles.
The years on the Strip had made him suspicious of self aggrandizement and he worked quietly to achieve the recovery offered by A.A. A month after he began to attend regular A.A. meetings, a single meeting of N.A. had begun at a local hospital. It continued to meet every Friday night for the next twelve years.
Though he also attended meetings of A.A., he shared as an addict and his desire for recovery gained him membership among the alcoholics. Some of the old-timers kept asking him what had he done for 'his people'. Their question was lost on him until he considered the time he had spent on the Strip working among addicts of all types and degree of sickness and the special aliveness of that part of his life. He realized he was finding something similar but much better in the meetings of Narcotics Anonymous.
His early experience among the beatniks had exposed him to a professional world of writers, musicians and artists. He knew well books were not necessarily that hard to produce. The increased number of meetings and members in and around Atlanta, along with the East Coast in general, led him to attend the 1977 World Convention in San Francisco.
*** *** *** ***
Greg had been born and raised in Los Angeles, California. He was raised by his mother who was working in special education. His early memories include a grandmother who died in the shower while under the effects of prescribed medication.
He attended California pop festivals, helped usher in and usher out the hippy movement and managed to attend UCLA and get a good job. He would get loaded on acid and go out to the hills of Topanga Canyon near Malibu and stare for hours at exposed fossils millions of years old.
In his using career, he had direct access to one of the great population centers for addicts of all types. In 1968 he married a lady named Lois. While very much in love and doing well at his work, his addiction was progressing to the point where he was ready to seek help. Unlike many of the early members, he came to the program in a business suit.
He immediately met every member of every known meeting in the world at the time and wound up on the N.A. Board of Trustees within a few years.
His extraordinary mind gave him the ability not only to see the need for a N.A. service structure but the ability to help get it started by writing and submitting what became the original service structure, the N.A. TREE. The structure allowed for a representative body, a primary service center and a board of trustees. While these service branches did not exist in 1975, they have evolved slowly into a dynamic reality.
*** *** *** ***
When Greg and Bo met at San Francisco, a very special chemistry emerged setting in motion the process that led to the Basic Text. Greg had been working to get an effort for the Basic Text started for years along with all the other members of world services. Bo at the other end of the Fellowship spectrum had heard everyone talk about an N.A. book but couldn't find anyone who knew anything about actual work on it.
Greg talked Bo into spending part of the week following the World Convention as his house guest in North Hollywood. Bo didn't take much selling.
He called his wife and gave her Greg's phone number and they left the Jack Tar Hotel Sunday afternoon for the eight hour drive to L.A. Traveling with them was another member named Henry S. The small red four door Fiat was packed.
On the way to L.A., Henry asked Bo what made him think he was the 'one' to do the Basic Text. Bo closed his eyes a moment and said, "I'm surprised at your question. I am willing. I thought God does the work and all He needs is willing instruments. Isn't that right?" Henry let it go at that.
The N.A. talk went on for the entirety of the eight hour drive including the brief stop over at the famous pea soup restaurant at the half way point. One of the things nonmembers would find amazing about N.A. is the amount and range of our private discussion. The imaginations and curiosity of addicts seeking recovery is absolutely without limit.
Arriving in Los Angeles, they dropped Henry off and went to a beautiful little home set in a quiet residential section of North Hollywood. Both the interior and the yard contained beautiful plants and curios. Greg was a compulsive rock collector and had built his own display cases that he filled with beautiful specimens of rocks and minerals.
The next day, Greg took Bo to work with him. He supervised the production of polyurethane for a manufacturer whose main products sold to telephone companies. Bo could see the office where Greg wrote the N.A. Tree over a two year period starting five years earlier. It amazed him to think of such a great work developed in such a plain setting. At the end of the day, they went to the WSO.
The N.A. World Service Office was located in the home of N.A.'s most famous member, Jimmy K. Jimmy had attended the formative meeting of N.A. in July of 1953 and was continuously involved since then. He remains one of the few addicts whose name in known throughout the Fellowship. His primary contribution beyond being an active member was to the N.A. 'White Booklet' and the establishment of the WSO as a base for the Fellowship's communications and distribution center.
From 1971 to 1981, the WSO operated from a side room added on to Jimmy's house across from a small airport in Sun Valley, California. He took the mail from P.O. Box 622 that remained in service for almost twenty years under the N.A. name.
Besides answering the mail, Jimmy personally answered the phone twenty-four hours a day and came to know members from all over. In time, he became the repository of information for the growing Fellowship because he had direct personal contact with so many members. These members ranged from his fellow members of the N.A Board of Trustees to the newest member in the newest meeting who called seeking information and literature.
Bo was warmly welcomed. Although the recovery story he had sent in July couldn't be located, Jimmy gave him one of the treasured coffee cups from the original N.A. meetings in the sixties that moved from location to location weekly to avoid surveillance.
He and Greg went to the oldest continuously meeting group in the world located in a small church in San Fernando Valley. There were about forty members in attendance and the members shared in 'participation style'. This is where members take turns sharing what it was like, what happened and what it was like today.
Before he flew home Wednesday, Greg and Bo had a fateful talk. They had been discussing the Basic Text as a basic dream. How material could be collected. How warm, quick responses to incoming material would likely encourage members to send in more. How members might gather together in working groups of increasing sizes to evaluate and compose the material, depersonalizing and tuning the work into the spoken tradition of N.A. recovery. Those things said at meetings were a verbal form of literature. All they had to do was faithfully write it down to the satisfaction of the clean addicts in N.A.
They hoped the Basic Text would pull the whole Fellowship together. All the members who showed up to help would be welcomed. Even though some would expect to be rigidly qualified and ranked according to clean time and ability, all members would be welcomed and allowed to participate to any extent they wished. Trust and the natural process would place them where they could best serve. Greg and Bo were experienced enough at working with ideas and people to know that there is never just one way. Flexibility was the key. Staying open to the membership and keying everything into their likes and dislikes on a feeling level would allow the work to bring to light the real principles of actual N.A. recovery. The work had to go beyond being a conglomeration of good ideas unsupported by members experience and real application.
Local working groups would be formed to originate and go over the material. Greg and Bo's technical and feeling minds were activated. The ideas came in rushes spilling over into other clearly defined sequences of likelihood. The spirit was with them. It took great restraint, discipline, faith, courage and trust to follow this inspiration with consistent action and not get sidetracked or bogged down in details.
When Bo left for home, the biggest question in his mind was will this turn out to be like the other great ideas I've wasted all my life seeking and talking about. He thought about his former girl friend Susan who was the first of his near and dears to die shooting dope. He thought of his own lost years. He thought of the faces of newcomers in his life and their chances for lasting recovery in N.A. He hoped this dream would come true for himself and many others.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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