January 14

January 14 – AM          Page 2-3, Bill’s Story, Chapter 1

      By the time I had completed the course, I knew the law was not for me.  The inviting maelstrom of Wall Street had me in its grip.  Business and financial leaders were my heroes.  Out of this alloy of drink and speculation, I commenced to forge the weapon that one day would turn in its flight like a boomerang and all but cut me to ribbons.  Living modestly, my wife and I saved $1,000.  It went into certain securities, then cheap and rather unpopular. I rightly imagined that they would some day have a great rise.  I failed to persuade my broker friends to send me out looking over factories and managements, but my wife and I decided to go anyway.  I had developed a theory that most people lost money in stocks through ignorance of markets.  I discovered many more reasons later on.
We gave up our positions and off we roared on a motorcycle, the sidecar stuffed with tent, blankets, a change of clothes, and three huge volumes of a financial reference service.  Our friends thought a lunacy commission should be appointed.  Perhaps they were right.  I had had some success at speculation, so we had a little money, but we once worked on a farm for a month to avoid drawing on our small capital.  That was the last honest manual labor on my part for many a day.  We covered the whole eastern United States in a year.  At the end of it, my reports to Wall Street procured me a position there and the use of a large expense account.  The exercise of an option brought in more money, leaving us with a profit of several thousand dollars for that year.

January 14 – PM          Page 123-124, The Family Afterward, Chapter 9

      Now and then the family will be plagued by spectres from the past, for the drinking career of almost every alcoholic has been marked by escapades, funny, humiliating, shameful or tragic.  The first impulse will be to bury these skeletons in a dark closet and padlock the door.  The family may be possessed by the idea that future happiness can be based only upon forgetfulness of the past.  We think that such a view is self-centered and in direct conflict with the new way of living.
Henry Ford once made a wise remark to the effect that experience is the thing of supreme value in life.  That is true only if one is willing to turn the past to good account.  We grow by our willingness to face and rectify errors and convert them into assets.  The alcoholic’s past thus becomes the principal asset of the family and frequently it is almost the only one!