Archivist Report - October 2024

Archivist Report, October 7, 2024, Hello everybody. Its great to see everyone again. Its been a year since Ive been here and I have missed it. Thank you for sending me to the National Alcoholics Anonymous Archives Workshop again this year. This completes the number of times that I am funded to attend during my 6 year term. Both of the workshops that I have attended have been delightful and educational.

Its hard to know where to start and how to report on the workshop without being too wordy. There was so much covered over a 4 day period. We began with a tour on Thursday that took us through the Iowa State Capitol bldg. We all got a workout there. I walked up at least 150 steps all together. It was a beautiful building with interesting history but when we were finished I didn’t have a lot of energy left for the tour of the White House.

The White House is a beautiful old house that has been housing AA meetings, weekly bingo games, and other sober events for 80 years. They had their 80^th Anniversary on the same weekend as the NAAAW. It’s a spacious and beautiful old place that was red brick originally but shortly after it was purchased, they painted it white. That combined with the fact that it is located on Pennsylvania Ave in Des Moines leads to it being called The White House.

Thursday evening I had the pleasure of seeing my old friend Charlie H(our Regional Trustee) give a talk. Its been a while since I’ve seen him, but he looks pretty good without any hair. He might be lacking in hair but he is not lacking in enthusiasm for the message of Alcoholics Anonymous. I enjoyed the information that he shared about his previous experience at General Service Conferences in the past and look forward to hearing more from him throughout his term as Trustee.

On Friday I attended a presentation about Henry P. Hank, as he was known was an important person in early AA as he actually helped Bill write the Big Book. Hank was born in Marion Iowa. He eloped in 1917 and moved to Minneapolis. In 1925 he took a job with Standard Oil and moved back to Iowa. His job took him many places geographically and he wound up in NY. He was a bit of a scoundrel and paid for hospitalization at Townes Hospital for numerous drunken playgirls. In 1935 he entered Townes himself. Bill came to see him there, and Hank became the first person that Bill sobered up in NY. Hank found a higher power with Bills help. Soon the writing of the Big Book began. Bill, Ruth H. and Hank had also started a corporation called the Honor Dealers which was a gasoline coop. The business eventually failed because Bill was spending so much time dictating the book to Ruth and Hank was busy writing and doing fund raising. As a fund raiser, Hank put together the “100 Men Prospectus” which sold subscriptions for .25 per share. Hank also wrote his story called “The Unbeliever” and he is given credit for writing “To the Employers”.

In 1939 things started going bad at home for Hank. He had started drinking again. His wife threw him out and he moved in with Bill. He had an affair with Ruth H. but she eventually changed her mind about him. Hank blamed Bill.

Bill made Hank sign a release of rights for Works Publishing which left Hank out of any royalties. Hank moved in with Clarence S. but that was a rocky relationship. Hank married Clarence’s sister-in-law. Hank had such a bad resentment that he claimed to be “ashamed to have ever had anything to do with AA”. Hank gets another divorce then marries an oil heiress. She died 2 years later. Hank starts having heart trouble but sends letters to his kids to get them set up with inheritance. He buys a chicken farm in NJ and remarries his second wife. The chicken farm burned down. He died shortly after in 1954. Sad story.

Later on Friday I sat in on a Archives Preservation session. Roy C, from Area 45 who plays a ukelele opened with a song. Then he goes into his talk about the things necessary for doing the job in Archives. He listed some of the necessary tools (laptop) and software (power point, email, windows) that he likes and the types of storage devices (SS Hard Drives). He talked about using Dropbox for cloud storage. He stated that it is free and gives a reasonable amount of storage. When I looked it up, I see a free plan that gives you 2 Gb of storage. I will need to do further research. He also talked about an HP Smart plan for printer ink that would be helpful if we had an HP printer, which we don’t. But this still makes me wonder if Epson doesn’t have a similar plan. Once again, I get to do more research. He mentioned an Acronym: LOSS meaning: Lots, Of, Copies keep things, Safe. And after that ole Roy finished by playing a John P. song on his ukelele. Because of that I went up to him later and made a new friend.

The next session was on Repositories and Storage. There were just a couple of things that got my attention here. First of all, the issue of pest control in the repository, especially related to bugs. More research again. The other things that I heard in this session was that Google Drive might be useful for storage and to NEVER put documents through a document feeder on a printer. Michelle from the GSO Archives did a great talk on Friday night. She is always so available and so prompt in meeting the needs of archivists around the country. I have a lot of respect for her and we are lucky to have her.

On Saturday I went to the Digitizing session. I got some ideas about software to experiment with and heard the dreaded term “AI” in there. That scares me. Also, an idea is to put our group history form on the website for groups and districts to capture and fill out. There were other ideas about organizing data that sounded helpful. They also went into storage devices, particularly the longevity of most devices and how often to replace them.

Because I attended the digitizing session I missed the Archives Trading Post which sounds fascinating and I will be checking into that soon. Later, on Saturday there was a great talk about the history of Women in AA. This session covered a lot of territory and I think it best that I write a separate report on that and send to everyone via email. I will also include the session on Bobbie B. who was a very important woman in our history who does not get talked about much.

There was a session on What its like to be an Archivist. My favorite quote from that session was this: It’s a spiritual exercise to be willing to do Archivist work in spite of depressing and suicidal thoughts of messing up”.

The last session of the Workshop was on Sunday morning and it was about the history of AA in Iowa. As you may know, our own old timer, Don F. was originally from Iowa. Not only was he important in the beginnings of AA in Omaha but it was him and a judge from Des Moines who started the first AA group in Iowa. When I read the last Area Newsletter, the archives report stated that the committee was talking about what items to bring to the NAAAW. After reading that and when nobody reached out to me for help, I assumed that Char would be attending and bringing her display. The only representation that Area 41 had in the display area was what Russ S brought from District 11. Russ had a lot of good stuff including a wonderful old manual for group Secretaries that GSO used to mail out. Even Michelle M from New York said that it was a very special piece of history. Thank you Russ for being such a great collector and historian. And thank you for attending the Workshop and sharing your items with the rest of the AA Archives world. If you would like more information on the women in AA or on Bobbie B., or if you would like to hear any of the presentations from the workshop, let me know. I purchased the entire workshop on a flash drive for storage in the Area 41 Archives and can make that available to anyone that would like to hear it.

Back at home I continue to organize district documents and digitize the group history forms that I have.

Eventually, I want to get all of the district files organized in numerical order and separated into folders for flyers, histories, minutes, newsletters, etc so that things are easier to find. I am making progress. I would like to complete this task before I start on the next task of digitizing the old newsletters. That is still on my list of things to do and I intend to get that task completed before the end of my term.

I have also given a little time to the Intergroup Archives in their effort to sort and digitize. They are a great resource for me and they have agreed to allow me to use their scanners. I try to attend their monthly meetings when I can as well. I attended the Old Timers Day in Omaha last month. It is always a fantastic time and the stories are so educational. The amount of long term sobriety in that room is staggering and the food is great.

This is a long report so I will end it here. I hope to send out some Archives information to everyone in the near future and will try to make it a point to do so regularly. One of the important parts of our mission in the Archives is to carry the message. And as Terry G says “I try to get the information out to the troops”.

Yours in grateful service, Colleen P., Area 41 Archivist