Advertise on podcast: Oceanside Tape Project: Recovery Speaker Tapes

Everything will be free forever. But your donation will help us continue the work and perhaps hire help because 100.000 tapes is a lot of tapes and currently its just me doing the work when I can. The label says Don, and Don opens — but this is a two-voice talk, and the second voice is his wife. Don and Robin B. of Placentia took the Al-Anon open forum at the 17th Orange County convention on the topic that describes their whole marriage: the miracle of conventions and service. Don came into Al-Anon through a hospital outpatient program, strictly — he informed everyone — to support the alcoholic in his life. The alcoholic left; the program stayed. A friend volunteered him into a literature commitment he never offered to take, the commitment turned into a habit of service he never broke, and at an AFG convention closing meeting he looked across a crowded room at a woman he did not know. He turned fifty the year of this tape. She was sitting to his left when he told the story, wearing his ring. Robin’s half is the harder road. In Al-Anon since November of 1983 out of the Covina Group, she walked in from an abusive first marriage entered at eighteen, survived cancer, and — thirteen years into the program, looking fine on the outside — got as far as a locked bathroom and a saved bottle of pain pills before the phone rang. It was a friend made through convention service, who told her to flush them while she listened, then to tell three people at her home group that night. She did both. By the weekend of this talk she was the incoming chairman of the AFG convention where they met. Two people who kept signing up for service they did not want, and got a marriage, a family, and — in the plainest sense available — a life. The miracle of the topic, delivered as a demonstration. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe

Everything will be free forever. But your donation will help us continue the work and perhaps hire help because 100.000 tapes is a lot of tapes and currently its just me doing the work when I can. Chuck C. — Chuck Chamberlain of Laguna Beach, California — was one of the great old voices of Alcoholics Anonymous: sober in January 1946, widely recorded, widely quoted, and dangerous in the best possible way. His message did not flatter the alcoholic. It did not pat the disease on the head and call it misunderstood. Chuck spoke about surrender, vision, awakening, and the necessity of a new way of living with the authority of a man who had stopped negotiating with the bottle and found, to his own apparent surprise, that God had better terms. He became best known through the talks later circulated as A New Pair of Glasses, recorded at the Pala Mesa Men’s Retreat in 1975. The title is not ornamental. Chuck’s great subject was perception — the alcoholic’s poisoned little lens, the terrible private logic that makes ruin look reasonable, and the spiritual change required to see anything clearly at all. His tape trail reaches back into AA’s early recording history: Beverly Hills in 1953, St. Louis in 1955, state conventions, roundups, retreats, International Convention appearances, and late talks still circulating from the early 1980s. He also testified publicly in 1969 as a recovered alcoholic and AA member, speaking for recovery without turning anonymity into theater. Chuck C. belongs in the archive because he helped shape the language of AA spirituality for generations of listeners. Not soft spirituality. Not parlor spirituality. The kind with consequences. A new pair of glasses, yes. But first, darling, the old eyes had to surrender. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe

Everything will be free forever. But your donation will help us continue the work and perhaps hire help because 100.000 tapes is a lot of tapes and currently its just me doing the work when I can. Debbie Davis is an AA speaker from California, publicly tied to Concord, with a recovery-audio trail that reaches back to a 12 Step Workshop recorded in 1976 and forward into later AA conference work. Her name appears in the 2001 Desert Pow Wow Longtimers Meeting, which fits the shape of the record: not a single appearance, not a stray cassette, but a speaker with long AA mileage and a message built around the Steps themselves. Recovery.Audio preserves her as a longtime member of Alcoholics Anonymous with multiple recordings in circulation, including workshop material rather than only story talks. That distinction matters. A story can open the room. The Steps are where the alcoholic finds out whether they came for relief or for change. Debbie Davis’s public trail gives us a woman carrying AA across decades, from older workshop recordings to later convention invitations. The geography widens — California, Desert Pow Wow, South Australia — but the assignment stays the same: take the thing that saved your life and make it available to the next person. There is an old authority in that kind of speaker. Not performance. Not theater. Continuity. The voice of someone who has stayed long enough to know that recovery is not an event, not a feeling, not a weekend glow from a convention ballroom. It is practice. Steps. Service. Repetition. The small honest actions that keep an alcoholic from drifting back into the clever little prison of themselves. Debbie Davis carries that older AA current: long memory, practical structure, and the plain insistence that the program is not something to admire. It is something to do. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe

Everything will be free forever. But your donation will help us continue the work and perhaps hire help because 100.000 tapes is a lot of tapes and currently its just me doing the work when I can. The tape is credited to Kelly, and she opens it — but this is a full Shady Bunch II panel on practicing these principles in all our affairs, and four voices take the microphone in turn. Kelly, sober since September 26, 1984, came to AA through the back door: a Seattle newspaper reporter who visited meetings with a notepad to research a five-part series on alcoholism, and a year later was on her face. By her own count she then spent twelve years undrunk — sober in body, unsurrendered in everything else — until a sponsor put the Big Book between them and ended the negotiation. She carries the message from the Bellflower Big Book Group. Three more follow. Bob Christensen started drinking at twenty-two, drank for thirty-four years, and found the program at fifty-six, twelve-stepped out of the San Fernando Valley by two large men in a small pickup trThe tape is credited to Kelly, and she opens it — but this is a full Shady Bunch II panel on practicing these principles in all our affairs, and four voices take the microphone in turn. Kelly, sober since September 26, 1984, came to AA through the back door: a Seattle newspaper reporter who visited meetings with a notepad to research a five-part series on alcoholism, and a year later was on her face. By her own count she then spent twelve years undrunk — sober in body, unsurrendered in everything else — until a sponsor put the Big Book between them and ended the negotiation. She carries the message from the Bellflower Big Book Group. Three more follow. Bob Christensen started drinking at twenty-two, drank for thirty-four years, and found the program at fifty-six, twelve-stepped out of the San Fernando Valley by two large men in a small pickup truck. Steve Lopez of El Monte, sober since January 21, 1985, spent a quarter century in medical device marketing and once mistook Beacon Street martinis for belonging. And Marion Walleen of Claremont closes the hour with thirty-eight years of sobriety and a borrowed line she has adopted as a program: kindness is my religion. One session title — a full-time job — and four working demonstrations of what the job pays.uck. Steve Lopez of El Monte, sober since January 21, 1985, spent a quarter century in medical device marketing and once mistook Beacon Street martinis for belonging. And Marion Walleen of Claremont closes the hour with thirty-eight years of sobriety and a borrowed line she has adopted as a program: kindness is my religion. One session title — a full-time job — and four working demonstrations of what the job pays. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe

Everything will be free forever. But your donation will help us continue the work and perhaps hire help because 100.000 tapes is a lot of tapes and currently its just me doing the work when I can. A participation meeting is the convention handing the microphone to the room, and on the Saturday morning of the 2002 Desert Pow Wow the room turned out to be deep. The voices come fast: Sandy, sober since the 31st of August, 1968. Kathy, sober since the 3rd of January, 1982. Greg Dorst of Covina — the sobriety capital, he calls it. Speakers up from Long Beach and Cathedral City, down from Running Springs, names like Jackie Clark, Alan Rosencrantz, John Hirsch, Megan, Scott, Danny, Robin, Carol, and Kim surfacing for a few minutes apiece and giving way to the next hand. No single life story carries this tape. The sum does: a cross-section of Southern California sobriety on one hotel-ballroom morning — thirty-four years and nine years and everything between, stacked shoulder to shoulder in folding chairs. Conventions book their headliners for the evenings. The mornings are where you hear what the program actually sounds like at street level, and that is what this recording preserves. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe

Everything will be free forever. But your donation will help us continue the work and perhaps hire help because 100.000 tapes is a lot of tapes and currently its just me doing the work when I can. Ronald — Ron W.C. on the cassette label — is a Los Angeles story: he grew up in the city, and the drinking and the recovery both happened inside its geography. His talk at the 2003 Desert Pow Wow returns more than once to his first two years of sobriety, the stretch where the program either takes or does not. For him it took — he stood at an Indian Wells podium to say so, one more L.A. drunk who thought he would never make it and then did, a day at a time, until the days were worth recording. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe

Everything will be free forever. But your donation will help us continue the work and perhaps hire help because 100.000 tapes is a lot of tapes and currently its just me doing the work when I can. Coincidences, Inches & Seconds is a title only an old man can earn. When Clancy Imislund gave this talk at the AA Desert Pow Wow in June of 2006, he was seventy-eight years old and forty-eight years sober, and he had spent most of those years measuring how close a life comes to not happening at all. His own margins were famously thin. A blood bank on Skid Row turned him away in 1958 for not having enough iron to sell a pint — and sent him up the street to the Midnight Mission, where a meal came with a meeting attached. That referral, worth nothing on paper, produced sixty-two years of sobriety, forty-six years running the Mission itself, the founding of the Pacific Group in Brentwood, and a sponsorship lineage that reached from Skid Row cots to Hollywood. Inches and seconds, all the way down. By 2006 Clancy was the closest thing the desert convention had to a returning institution — this archive alone holds him at the Pow Wow in 2002 and again on this weekend, sharing the June program with speakers flown in from as far as Texas. He would keep at it nearly to the end, which came in 2020, at ninety-three. The talk on this tape is the veteran’s version of the story: not how bad it was, but how narrow the escape — and what a man owes the coincidences that let him live long enough to be useful. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe

Everything will be free forever. But your donation will help us continue the work and perhaps hire help because 100.000 tapes is a lot of tapes and currently its just me doing the work when I can. By the time Bob D. of Las Vegas took the podium at the Orange County AA Convention in April of 2010, he was one of the most listened-to AA speakers in the world — a man whose recorded voice has probably worked more Steps with more strangers than any sponsor alive. Sober since 1978, he made his name not as a storyteller but as a teacher. The recorded catalog is a working curriculum: Big Book seminars and multi-part studies — many taught jointly with Scott L., Kent D., Polly P., and others — alongside talks on sponsorship, We Agnostics, spiritual principles in relationships, and a power greater than ourselves. The archives that keep the classic voices, AMOT among them, file him on the same shelf as Chuck C. and Clancy I., and his workshops and retreats carried the material across the country and well beyond it. What made him rare was the combination: a genuinely dark drinking history, told with raw honesty, in service of precise instruction. Plenty of speakers can hold a ballroom with the wreckage. Bob D. held it with the repair manual. This tape catches him at Costa Mesa in 2010, thirty-two years sober, doing what the whole catalog does: taking the Big Book apart in front of an audience and handing the pieces back in working order. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe

Everything will be free forever. But your donation will help us continue the work and perhaps hire help because 100.000 tapes is a lot of tapes and currently its just me doing the work when I can. Al-Anon’s men have always been scarce at the podium; this tape seats three of them on one stage. David K., Fernando M., and Stuart N. worked the We Will Laugh More session at the 19th Orange County convention in April of 2004 — a promise-of-the-program title handed to a trio of men who had earned the right to test it. Fernando grew up in Artesia and carries his corner of Southern California into the story; each man takes his turn at the same subject from a different angle — the watching, the managing, the slow discovery that laughter comes back once the controlling stops. Three voices, one session, and the title kept its word. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe

Everything will be free forever. But your donation will help us continue the work and perhaps hire help because 100.000 tapes is a lot of tapes and currently its just me doing the work when I can. Jeff V. of Jamestown, North Dakota, was a long way from home when he spoke at the AA Desert Pow Wow in Indian Wells in June of 2006 — sixteen hundred miles, give or take, from the prairie towns where the rest of his recorded trail was laid down. That trail lives on Silkworth.net, the recovery-history archive, which holds him at the Northern Plains Group in Fargo in 2003 and again in 2005, and at the Aberdeen Wednesday Night Group’s Soberstock Roundup in South Dakota in 2008. It is the classic upper-Midwest circuit — church basements, roundup weekends, winter drives between small cities — and a speaker good enough to be recorded on it repeatedly is usually a speaker worth flying somewhere warmer. In 2006 the Desert Pow Wow did exactly that, and a Jamestown alcoholic told his story to a resort ballroom full of Californians. The message does not change with the zip code — which is, of course, the whole point of the program that produced him. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe

Everything will be free forever. But your donation will help us continue the work and perhaps hire help because 100.000 tapes is a lot of tapes and currently its just me doing the work when I can. Darlene M. came the longest way of anyone on the 2008 program — down from Mississauga, Ontario, to tell a Costa Mesa ballroom a story built around the hardest word in recovery: again. Hers is a relapse-and-return talk. She got sober, lost it, and got sober again — and the second climb is the one the tape preserves. AA has always needed its return voices as much as its unbroken ones; the newcomer eyeing the door needs to know the road back exists and has been walked. A Canadian woman flown twenty-five hundred miles to say so, to a room that had never met her, is the program’s postal system working exactly as designed. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe

Everything will be free forever. But your donation will help us continue the work and perhaps hire help because 100.000 tapes is a lot of tapes and currently its just me doing the work when I can. Hank Johnson of Charlotte, North Carolina, spoke at the AA Desert Pow Wow on the third of June, 2000. He was a long way from home — a Carolina voice booked into a California desert resort — and the tape is one of the reasons the Oceanside collection is worth digitizing at all. Two years later, and two cassettes over in this same archive, he turns up again — this time in the past tense. On a Shady Bunch II panel recorded at the June 2002 Pow Wow, Marion Walleen of Claremont mentions the memorial she had attended that Sunday for a very old, very dear friend named Hank Johnson, and says she had happened to put on one of his tapes that same morning. What she took from it was his plainest definition of the program: one alcoholic rubbing against another at a meeting, and helping a new guy out. That is a rare thing to hold in one collection: the man speaking, and then the room remembering him. Whatever else the record has lost about Hank Johnson, it kept the two facts that matter — he was worth flying across the country to hear, and when he died, people who had known him for decades reached for his tape before they reached for anything else. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe

Everything will be free forever. But your donation will help us continue the work and perhaps hire help because 100.000 tapes is a lot of tapes and currently its just me doing the work when I can. Johnnie H. of Long Beach drew the Twelve Traditions at the 2009 Desert Pow Wow — the assignment conventions hand to someone who has been around long enough to know why the Traditions exist. He had been around a very long time. The public record puts him at a Midwinter Conference in Midland, Texas in January of 1971, and the trail runs forward from there for four decades: a Long Beach anniversary meeting in 2001, Culver City in 2005, Stockholm in 2004, the Southern California convention in Bakersfield in 2012 speaking on sponsorship. This archive alone holds him three times — the Traditions again at the 2007 Pow Wow, sponsorship at the 2008 Pow Wow, and this 2009 session. The Steps keep the individual alcoholic sober; the Traditions keep the fellowship alive long enough to be there when the next one walks in. It is the less glamorous half of the program, and it is usually given to a speaker with enough mileage to have watched groups tear themselves apart over money, property and prestige. Johnnie H. had that mileage several times over, and the desert kept handing him the microphone. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe

Everything will be free forever. But your donation will help us continue the work and perhaps hire help because 100.000 tapes is a lot of tapes and currently its just me doing the work when I can. Sister Bea M. was born in Ireland, came to Southern California in 1964, and gave her life to God before she ever admitted she could not manage her drinking. That order of events is the whole joke, and she tells it better than anyone. She is a nun and an alcoholic, and her talks are famous on the circuit for being funny — the discovery of the margarita, the growing suspicion that she did not drink the way the other sisters drank, the slow arithmetic of a progression that does not care what you are wearing. Having already handed her life over once, she found she still had the Twelve Steps ahead of her, and she took them. The record has kept her: the Cornhusker Roundup in Omaha, a Dallas talk on the Promises, a listing at her own Harbor Area central office, and a published release of her story. This archive holds her twice — at the Antelope Valley convention in Lancaster in June of 1999, and here at the 21st Orange County convention in the spring of 2006, a woman from Brea explaining to a ballroom that a habit is no defense against a disease, and that grace does not exempt anybody from the work. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe

Everything will be free forever. But your donation will help us continue the work and perhaps hire help because 100.000 tapes is a lot of tapes and currently its just me doing the work when I can. The cassette label reads Karla D.; on the tape she introduces herself as Carla Downing, of Orange, California — an Al-Anon voice speaking at her home county’s convention in the spring of 2007. The Orange County convention has always run its Al-Anon track on local strength — members from the surrounding towns telling the family side of the disease to the people living inside it — and this recording is that tradition working: a woman from Orange, a few miles from the hotel, giving the 22nd convention what the program gave her. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe