Billy R. AA Male

Bill Reinhardt (0:06)

Hello, everybody, my name is Bill, I'm an alcoholic. So, I'm on a Friday, February 8th, 1986, and because of that date, there's a lot of people in Arkansas and surrounding states that are very happy about that date. I don't know if I've ever been to Kentucky before, but I was a blackout drinker, so, and if I do owe amends to anyone here, I do require receipts now.

I need some proof that I was in your town, what I did. I'm a member of the Agreeable Group in Stedgard, Arkansas. Kind of explain how agreeable we are at that group. If you come down to our meeting, we meet on Monday nights at 8 o'clock, and it's an open meeting, open discussion meeting, and we have a unisex bathroom. And if you'll go into that bathroom, you will see two toilet paper dispensers. One goes over the top, and one goes underneath the bottom.

I swear to you, we had a discussion about which way it should roll, so being a agreeable group, we sat there and had a consensus and just put in another damn dispenser.

That is the group that helped me get sober. We have moved from different places, but that is where we're now. First of all, before I get into my story, I do want to thank the committee and whoever was responsible for asking Shirley and I to come up here and be a part of this convention. Are there any first-time convention goers in the audience? All right.

As they've been saying all weekend long so far, keep coming back. Please don't let me scare you off too far. But it is great that Shirley and I get to go, and especially it's wonderful when both of us are asked to speak, so we get to travel together. And she's my best traveling buddy and my best friend now. And so we have good times, and we consider these as part of many vacations for us. And it's always great to see new friends and ones that I haven't met before, but everyone in here. I'm always apprehensive about speaking at an Al-Anon convention day, all right? And then I got to thinking the other night, a lot of drunks don't get along. We just don't like another drunk, but all y'all love drunks. So hell, you know, hell, I ought to feel comfortable up here now. So, but, and I don't have one of those Jerry Springer type stories. Now, mine's more of a Montell Williams, Jerry Otto. It's, you know, I'm not quite the Jerry Springer type, but I'm getting close, or was close. Stettgart is a rice and duck capital of the world. And I'm a rice farmer, was. I retired a couple of years. And my wife Shirley is a retired English school teacher. Now, I've always pronounced it Stettgart. She says it's Stuttgart, or something. I don't know what she says it is, but being an English teacher, I'm sure she's probably right, you know. But Stettgart is spelled S-T-U-T-T-G-A-R-T, just like it is in Germany. Well, if you take all the T's out, you got sugar.

So to keep the conflict, again, being a grizzle, I come from sugar tail.

Now, when I was drinking, the population was approximately 10,000 people. We have that same population approximately today, is around 10,000 people. And there was 10 liquor stores in Sugar Town at that time. You can do the math. They now have three. And I don't know if I had anything to do with that. But I would sit there and rotate my drinking, because I didn't want anybody to know I had a problem, so I would go to a different liquor store every night. And that way, I could go 10 days before I would ever come back. You know, once every 10 days, he can't be an alcoholic that way.

Of course, growing up on the farm, beer was always out there on the farm. We kind of co-opted back in them days with smaller equipment. All the farmers got together and helped with the planting and harvest and stuff like that. So, there's always a coup d'etat for the beer. And I started driving a tractor when I was about 7 or 8 years old. The old D. John Dearsdale, I was too small to push the clutch in on them. So, my dad would get on the tractor and he'd push the clutch in. We'd slow it down and he'd jump off, because you're pulling every bit of a 6 foot or 8 foot disc. He'd jump off and I drove all day long. I couldn't get off, couldn't pull the clutch out. The only way I had to kill it was pull the choke out on it and kill it. And he'd come by at noon and I'd pull up by the pickup, pull the choke out and kill it. We'd open the pedcocks up on it and by the time we ate dinner and come back, he'd crank it back up and off we go. He had the perfect hired man. I had to do everything and use your imagination off the back of that tractor while it was still running.