Ebby T. speaking in 1958 - AA History Speaker 12-Step Recovery

I'm going to introduce you stand here for a long long time. I've been fortunate in knowing Eddie for 17 years. That's the length of time I know Bill too. I met Ebie 17 years ago. Bill met him almost 24 years ago. Say, call it what you will. Grace of God. [Music] But it not for the man that you're about

to hear, you wouldn't be having this meeting tonight because he's the first guy that brought the message to our poor pill. If you've read the book Alcoholics Anonymous, and I know that most of you have, in there you'll hear in Bill's story, always referring to my friend. And then in the later book describing

Alcoholics Anonymous and other stories that just came out some short time ago, the name Ebie cames out. But always in the first book, you'll hear them referred to as my friend. Should you hear a lot of us at different times and in different parts of the comp country quoting us how Bill came in,

how the organization or the fellowship started. There's only one man in the world tonight who knows exactly how it started because he was sober and Bill was drunk. So I give you my friend and your friend, our founder, Ev.

Thank you, Dick. Dick soldier, my name is Ebie and I'm an alcoholic. I just had to start this off and Dick asked me over here. I was very glad to come because I wanted to meet some of you Memphis people, but I had an idea. I was one of two or three speakers and I didn't know I was going

to hold this thing down for 40 or 45 minutes. Back home in Dallas, I'm known as the world's shortest speaker. They use me back there on the different clothes for the 10 minute and 15 minute spots. So, I don't know how I'm going to go about holding down for 45 minutes, but I