Twelve Steps and the Older Member - Second Printing 1964

Twelve Steps and the Older Member. This book was published by “Older Member Press” and is a Second Printing from October 1964.

The author of the book wrote a series of articles that were published in the AA Grapevine between 1954-1956. These articles have been compiled and published in this book along with other pieces.

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Introduction

Back in the summer of 1954, after seven years of AA sobriety, I looked back over the road I'd come and discovered I'd had a somewhat different type of experience from those recorded from AA's early days. True, my personal crisis had been to me as terrible, the redemptive power of AA principles as inspiring to discover and as exciting to live, as to any of the pioneers. But the thrill of first exploration was not (I then thought) to be mine. I was a rank-and-file member, a plodder along well-beaten paths, an emptier of ash trays, folder of chairs, greeter of newcomers, maker of twelfth-step calls on drunks who had already heard of AA.

I was very grateful to be just that, since being it had saved my life and sanity. But was it not a different kind of experience? And shouldn't some kind of record be kept of what happens in the life of an ordinary dub who came along years after the Big Book had been published? The Grapevine staff told me to give it a try, and the result was the "Twelve Steps and the Older Member" series, which ran from 1954 into 1956. "As I enter my seventh year of consecutive 24-hour periods of sobriety in AA," I wrote in Step One of that series, published in August, 1954, "I am meeting more and more members who feel that the program-which to me is the Twelve Steps— comes, in time, to mean something a little different than it did during those first critical and uniquely exciting months. By this I certainly don't mean that we who have become a little older in AA can afford to relax. But the necessary vigilance can become such a habit that it maintains itself with little creative effort. We no longer have to think with the desperate intensity that was needed to hold our early sobriety. When we don't have to think very hard we tend to stop growing and start fossilizing.

"To me, and to a number of my AA friends, the Twelve Steps have remained a challenge and a goad to hard and systematic thought." Hard and systematic thought! Pup though I was in AA (only seven years dry in 1954) I had written something I don't have to retract today, seven years later. Step by step, as I wrote out my experiences, I began to make another and quite wonderful discovery:- each AA life is a new pioneering experience! The newest newcomer is just as authentically an explorer into the infinite as were Bill and Bob when they founded AA on June 10, 1935.

Nobody can take the Twelve Steps for anybody else. Each individual who sets his foot on the road suggested by the Steps finds himself on his own endlessly challenging, sometimes perilous journey into undiscovered territory.

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This book is in excellent condition with minimal wear to the cover. There is no writing or markings inside the book.

Please view all of the photos for the conditions.