(From the Markings Newsletter Vol. 26 No. 2 – Fall 2006)
Starting in February 1948, Bill and Lois took what turned out to be a three-month trip around the country to visit A.A. groups. Bill wrote that the purpose of the trip was to “help explain and consolidate the Traditional material I have been publishing in the Grapevine.”
During that trip A.A. members told Bill they backed his idea, but he was skeptical, as he indicates in his letter to Father Dowling: “On this trip I’ve been presenting a tentative plan for the selection of conference delegates. It seems to have met with almost 100 per cent approval. Approval seems almost too unanimous. I sometimes think the boys are ‘yessing me.’”
Opposition at New York Headquarters meanwhile had him stymied, and in a letter to Dr. Bob dated July 6, 1948, Bill writes: “Though for the time being I have quit pressing the Conference business, it did seem wise to set down on paper an outline of the material I have been presenting for groups and the Trustees.”
Bill knew that he needed the blessing of the co-founder of A.A. for his plan, and he had turned to him early on in his campaigning. Dr. Bob, though, at first failed to see the need for a conference.
In that letter to Dr. Bob, Bill refers to the “long and fruitless debate” at Headquarters. “At the moment, the situation seems quiet. Most of the alcoholics on the Board are due to get off at the year end. But… they will probably try to nominate as their successors people who think as they do — people who will keep the office well smacked down and see to it that we have no representative conference.… Unless, of course, the groups set up loud cries for one or you and I insist something be done.”
Bill sought to persuade Dr. Bob to go along and to do so on the record: “if we can both agree what sort of a program for a conference we wish to see some day inaugurated, I will then attach to this material [i.e., the proposal for a conference] a letter that such is our joint wish. … If the undertaker got both of us while our Trustees and friends are still thinking things over, there would exist a clean-cut record of how we felt the conference ought to be got underway.”
A short time before Dr. Bob died of the cancer he’d been suffering from (he passed away on Nov. 16, 1950), he and Bill met. It was then that Dr. Bob gave his blessing to the conference plan.